Wednesday, July 17, 2013
What he really wanted to do was be an actor
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of The Sydney Pollack Blogathon occurring through July 22 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
By Edward Copeland
For 40 years, from 1965 to 2005, Sydney Pollack directed 19 feature films. His last directing effort appeared as an installment of PBS' American Masters series on the architect Frank Gehry. Prior to that, he directed lots of episodic television. As Pollack reached the end of his life (and beyond it) he produced projects more than he directed and toward the end he also resumed the artistic endeavor where he started, acting more
and more often. When he ventured into show business, he aimed toward acting. His father hoped that Pollack would pursue a career in dentistry, but after catching the theater bug in high school in South Bend, Ind., he left for New York following graduation and studied with legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner at Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse (The same year he directed the American Masters special on Frank Gehry, he executive produce another episode of the series on Meisner). Eventually, he became an assistant to Meisner and even taught acting to others, though in a 2006 interview with Venice Magazine, Pollack resisted calling the technique he learned and passed on "The Method." "People call a lot of things 'The Method,' but there really isn’t one Method," Pollack said, "but it’s all derived from Stanislavsky. It’s all derived from Stanislavsky, but Stella Adler taught it different than Sandy Meisner and Strasberg taught it differently from both of them, and Harold Clurman taught it differently than the three of them, and Bobby Lewis took it in his own direction, as well. They each took The Moscow Art Theater of Stanislavsky and basic principles, and then developed their own approach. The goal was always the same: to find a way to analyze the construction of truthful behavior within imaginary circumstances."As he acted a lot in television of the 1950s, Pollack's interest turned to directing. While Pollack directed and produced some great and good films (my favorite being 1982's Tootsie, where he took his first substantial acting role since an episodic television appearance on a 1964 episode of the crime drama Brenner starring Edward Binns and James Broderick), after Tootsie, he acted or did voicework in more films and TV shows than his entire filmography. In many ways, I found Pollack more interesting at times as an actor than as a filmmaker, and that's where his career in the arts began, with his single Broadway role in 1955's The Dark Is Light Enough by Christopher Fry and starring Katharine Cornell, Tyrone Power and featuring Christopher Plummer.
Pollack began directing episodic television in 1961 and had ceased television acting in 1964 with that appearance on Brenner. As he jettisoned acting to concentrate on directing, he made a single movie: the 1962 Korean War drama War Hunt. The film starred John Saxon and Charles Aidman, but in addition to Pollack's supporting role, the movie offered appearances by Gavin MacLeod, Tom Skerritt and uncredited work by another future director, Francis Ford Coppola, as an Army truck driver. The biggest name among the ranks (at least he would be eventually) turned out to be a young Robert Redford. Pollack would direct Redford in seven films: This Property Is Condemned, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman, Out of Africa and Havana. Redford served as one of the producers of A Civil Action which featured Pollack in an acting role.
The headline at the top of this piece isn't quite true. Pollack return to acting in 1982's Tootsie (aside from a brief cameo in 1979's The Electric Horseman) proved to be quite a reluctant one. He already had cast Dabney Coleman to play George Fields, agent to prima donna/unemployed actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) but Hoffman pushed Pollack into taking the role himself, seeing the dynamic they had in their disagreements over the script. Pollack didn't want to leave Coleman in the cold so he cast him in the role of movie's fictional soap opera's director instead. Hoffman's instincts didn't fail him or the film as his scenes with Pollack provide many of the movie's comic highlights. You get that in the scene above, in the scene in the Russian Tea Room where Michael surprises George by showing up as his new alter ego Dorothy Michaels and, in perhaps my favorite scene between the two of them, when Michael shows up at George's home late one night to try to explain the romantic complications, including the fact that the father (Charles Durning) of the woman he loves (Jessica Lange) bought Dorothy an engagement ring. Forgetting for a moment what this all means, Pollack's reaction to news of the proposal comes off as priceless.
Following Tootsie, Pollack returned to the directing-producing track for a decade. During this decade he won his two Oscars for Out of Africa, but looking at the projects in that decade on which he worked solely as a producer or executive producer actually look more interesting than most of the movies he directed in that time. Some examples of his producing output from 1982 to 1991: Songwriter, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Presumed Innocent, White Palace, (surprisingly) King Ralph and Dead Again. With Tootsie, Pollack displayed a grounded, realistic comic side, but when 1992 arrived and he began to act up a storm, his range
widened, even if for the most part Pollack got pigeonholed as either a lawyer or a doctor, he played distinct members of each profession. Ten years after Tootsie, he managed roles in three films (and found time to executive produce two movies as well: HBO's A Private Matter and Leaving Normal, which had the misfortune of being too similar to Thelma & Louise and coming out a few months after the other film). The photo at the top of this post shows Pollack in his first 1992 role, Dick Mellon, business lawyer to besieged studio exec Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) in Robert Altman's The Player. As Mellon, Pollack plays a no-nonsense Hollywood figure who has seen it all and never changes his vocal tone, no matter how serious the situation becomes, and doles out truisms such as in this exchange with Mill. "Rumors are always true. You know that," Mellon tells Mill. "I'm always the last to hear about them," Griffin sighs. "No, you're always the last one to believe them," Dick corrects his client. Pollack, as in the case of his casting in Tootsie, hadn't been the first choice of the director. Of course, Pollack had helmed Tootsie and opposed casting himself as George Fields. With The Player, Altman tried to cast as many of the character parts with lesser-known faces because his film contained so many star cameos and he wanted to avoid as much audience
confusion as possible. Initially, Altman sought writer-director Blake Edwards, who also started his career as an actor, though he hadn't appeared on screen since 1948, for the part of Mellon, but it didn't work out and he went with Pollack, who only had that one role in Tootsie in 30 years. While The Player offers darker, satirical laughs than Tootsie did and Pollack doesn't get the laughs out of Dick Mellon that he did out of George Fields, he garnered more laughs in his most dramatic, deepest film role yet as Jack, the divorcing best friend of Gabe Roth (Woody Allen) in Husbands and Wives. I wasn't as crazy about the film as others, but Pollack delivered one of his greatest acting jobs, ranging from the at-ease midlife divorced man finding renewed vigor with a twentysomething aerobics instructor (Lysette Anthony) and then turning downright nasty on her at a party when she doesn't meet his standards for intellectual heft. He literally drags her from the soiree and tosses her toward his car, accusing her of being an "infant." It's a scary side of Pollack that we'll see more of in other roles. His third on-screen role of 1992 didn't receive a credit, but the cameo in Death Becomes Her provides what could be Pollack's funniest moments as an ER doctor examining Meryl Streep. The clip below leaves out his character's final punch line.Until his death from cancer in May 2008, seeing Pollack act became a much more common sight than spotting his directing credit. He turned up in legal entanglements again in films such as A Civil Action, Michael Clayton and Changing Lanes. He guided Tom Cruise into the sexual netherworld of the rich and powerful in Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut. He took roles in the last two films he directed, Random Hearts and The Interpreter. Pollack even provided the voice for the studio executive in The Majestic and the French film Avenue Montaigne. His final film role was in the romantic comedy Made of Honor where he played the father of the male maid of honor (Patrick Dempsey). On television, he did more voice work on comedies such as Frasier and King of the Hill. He also played a doctor on an episode of Mad About You and had a recurring role as Will's father on Will & Grace. He even played himself on an episode of Entourage, his last TV or movie appearance. Of all his late appearances though, the one that stands out to me also came in 2007 and put him in the role of another doctor. In the batch of the last nine episodes of The Sopranos, Pollack played jailed oncologist Warren Feldman, incarcerated with the dying Johnny Sac (Vincent Curatola) in the great episode "Stage 5." This scene I believe gives a great example of how talented Pollack truly could be as an actor.
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Labels: Altman, Blake Edwards, Coppola, Cruise, Dabney Coleman, Durning, Dustin Hoffman, J. Lange, Kubrick, Plummer, Redford, Streep, Sydney Pollack, The Sopranos, Tim Robbins, Woody
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Friday, August 03, 2012
Edward Copeland's Top 100 of 2012 (80-61)
People like to mock Frank Capra as simple-minded at times and this film especially, but it remains a rousing indictment of corruption in Washington that echoes to this very day. It's too bad that a filibuster doesn't still mean that a senator has to do what Jefferson Smith did and hold the floor for as long as he can instead of the procedural gimmick it's turned into today that prevents legislation from moving out of the Senate. Still, whenever I catch Mr. Smith, no matter how long it has been on, I have to watch until the end. It's the curse of being both a movie buff and a political junkie. In a way, with recent events, it seems to have a bit of timeliness beneath the treacle and idealistic love of how this country should work.
When people think Ingmar Bergman, they think heavy, but here flows one of his lightest and most enjoyable concoctions. In an introduction made for the Criterion edition of the film, Bergman remarks how Smiles changed everything for him. At the time, he was broke and living off the actress Bibi Andersson when his studio entered the film at Cannes and it won a prize (best poetic humor) and became an international success. Bergman says it was a turning point for both him and his studio, earning him free rein to go on and make even more of the greatest films of all time. The film contains obvious echoes of The Rules of the Game, though Smiles more than stands on its own with its tale of love and adultery, male vanity and female cunning, aging and youth. It's not only a delight as a film but inspired the great Stephen Sondheim to write one of his earliest great scores as composer and lyricist in A Little Night Music. Isn't it rich?
The Weinstein P.R. machine spun so much press off this film's twist that I think it takes away from how great a movie had developed before that plot turn even happens. I was fortunate enough to see it early, before the hype went into overdrive, so I thought another story turn was the "twist" and relaxed and the real twist took me by complete, wonderful surprise. I hope someday new viewers will be able to see the film without knowing what lies ahead. Even if they don’t though, they will see a great study in human nature as well as great performances from Stephen Rea, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson and Jaye Davidson.
While Spike Lee still has talent to spare, he has yet to come close to equaling the power of his third film and its study of one hot day in Bedford Stuy. His strongest work has flourished in his documentaries, especially his pair of post-Katrina films When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise and the feature Inside Man. Something tells me he’ll come back eventually. More than 20 years later, Do the Right Thing retains the power it unleashed in 1989 as that breed of film that has become rarer and rarer: the conversation starter.
The film marketed as Bergman's "last feature" truly is one of his best, painting a vast semiautobiographical canvas of two children from a large theatrical family who find their lives upended when their mother weds an authoritarian monster of a minister. Beyond the narrative, Sven Nykvist's photography, Anna Asp’s art direction, Susanne Lingheim’s sets and Marik Vos’ costumes present a sumptuous feast for the eyes. Its three-hour running time flies by and watching the 312-minute cut Bergman originally made for Swedish television proves even more rewarding.
Bogie got one of his best roles, John Huston made one of his greatest films (winning his only two Oscars for writing and directing) and his old man got a supporting actor Oscar in the deal as well. When you see Walter Huston do his mocking, triumphant little dance, you want to join in. Sierra Madre wasn’t John Huston’s only classic starring Humphrey Bogart released in 1948 either. The two also collaborated on Key Largo, While it’s good, it’s this film with its prospecting south of the border that’s the real keeper.
Here comes Howard Hawks again and Cary Grant (playing a nerd, believe it or not) as well. (I haven't added it up, but I suspect Grant appears in more movies on this list than any other actor). Katharine Hepburn's most inspired performance powers this screwiest of screwball comedies as her flighty socialite wreaks havoc on the world of Grant’s mild-mannered paleontologist. All of this and a leopard or two, too.
Salieri may consider himself the "patron saint of mediocrity," but little can be called mediocre about Forman's adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play. F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce were both brilliant and you can't really argue against its musical score. The unitiated might suspect slowgoing in a period costume drama such as this, but they haven't seen enough and certainly not Amadeus which overflows with humor and light as well as its darker elements.
There wouldn't be a Breakfast Club without a Virginia Woolf, but I don't hold that against Edward Albee or his great play turned into a superb movie by Mike Nichols. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were never better and while the truth games and verbal battles make you cringe, you can't avert your eyes from their power. Albee's play marks its 50th anniversary this year and it still packs a punch a half-century later.
To me, one of the crimes of both versions of the AFI list is that Psycho is the only representation of black-and-white Hitchcock, as if no one noticed him until he started working in color, but nothing is further from the truth and Notorious is one of the best examples of that. The kiss between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant remains one of the most sensual images ever put on celluloid and Claude Rains is superb as the conflicted heavy of the piece.
This film shouldn't work and it probably wouldn't if its stellar cast hadn't saved it. Kazan and Budd Schulberg's attempt to justify their actions during the McCarthy hearings doesn't quite work as an allegory, but the film itself works as a powerful story thanks to the indelible performances it contains. Brando earns the big kudos but the solid work of Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden and especially Lee J. Cobb shouldn't be forgotten.
As digital projection sounds the death knell for celluloid, I feel even more grateful that when I saw Lawrence of Arabia for the first time, I saw the restored, 70mm print in a theater released for its 25th anniversary. I never could watch the cropped, pan-and-scan versions on TV. It’s a shame that more classics fail to get re-released outside major markets, but with the digital future, it’s almost moot. As for the film itself, if it weren't for the weaker second half, this movie that almost defines epic would have landed higher on this list. Still, with its stunning cinematography, gorgeous score and great Peter O'Toole performance, it belongs on the list nonetheless.
When I made my 2007 list, I admitted being torn between including 8½ or Nights of Cabiria to represent Fellini and I ended up opting for 8½. In the intervening five years, I’ve watched both films again and my preference clearly leans to Cabiria. While Giulietta Masina's remarkable performance as the title character might break your heart at times, more often than not, she'll leave you smiling, even if it's a sad smile. While Masina initially wins you over when seeing the film the first few times, on later viewings I've found the movie itself richer. It's constructed almost as a perfect circle, a ring of hell if you will, from which Cabiria would like to escape. "Everyone has a secret agony," a character tells her at one point and as much as Cabiria might try to avoid it, she hopes to abandon her life. First, she sees fun in a brief sojourn with a celebrated movie star (Amedeo Narrazi) that in a way predicts Pretty Woman some 30 years down the road, though without the manufactured happy ending. Fellini grounds Nights of Cabiria in reality, a world where the poor are forced to live in caves and anyone can be a victim. In another incident, when Cabiria realizes that once again she's been gypped, it leads to an ending that manages to be touching, magical and inspiring, all at the same time, ending with one of film's greatest close-ups.
Kirk Douglas probably was miscast, but this early Kubrick doesn't get the kudos it deserves and it certainly bears up better over the years than some of his later works such as A Clockwork Orange. Paths of Glory centers on one particular battle between the French and the German, where the poor French troops are outmanned and outgunned, but that's no excuse for disobeying orders in the eyes of one general. Kubrick often tackled the futility of war and its inherent contradictions, but he really knocked it out of the park with this one.
Of the many collaborations between Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, this one remains my favorite, even though it's less heralded than many of his others. Gong and Ge You portray a married couple and we follow their lives in a kaleidoscopic tour of Chinese history, beginning with the civil war in the 1940s and passing through The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and a few years beyond. Epic while staying focused and personal in the telling, if you haven't seen To Live, you should. This might end up being Zhang’s masterpiece.
Another instance of the all-too-rare occurrence of a sequel that's better the film that spawned it. Whale's funny follow-up to his own Frankenstein contains most of the classic moments you probably associate with the story: the blind hermit, "She's alive!" and much more. It also adds some pure wackiness such as Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius, with madder plans than Colin Clive’s original Dr. Frankenstein himself. We also get to hear Boris Karloff speak his first words as the monster and Elsa Lanchester play a dual role: Mary Shelley in a funny prologue setting up the sequel and as the bride herself. It’s a hoot from start to finish — and even manages to toss in a scare or two amidst the laughs.
Just as McCabe & Mrs. Miller isn't exactly a Western, it's not strictly a character study either. First and foremost, it's a Robert Altman film, one of those times when the late director got a hold of financing, cameras, actors, a crew and the things he needed for what intrigued him at that moment and did his cinematic dance, part strictly thought out, much improvised and lots that came about by happy accident. That style didn't always work throughout his long career, but when it did, magic resulted. As Pauline Kael wrote in her July 3, 1971, review of the film in The New Yorker, "Though Altman's method is a step toward a new kind of movie naturalism, the technique may seem mannered to those who are put off by the violation of custom — as if he simply didn't want to be straightforward about his storytelling.…He can't be straightforward in the old way, because he's improvising meanings and connections, trying to find his movie in the course of making it…" It took me about three viewings to warm to McCabe. Now, it stands as one of my very favorite Altman films and I can see it climbing higher in the future the more I watch it.
Even with a distance of more than a decade, I find it difficult deciding where to place newer films amid the established classics, but Memento continues to excite me more than any other new movie I saw between 1998 and 2002. The film surpasses the accusations of detractors who see it as merely a gimmick. It also manages to be both funny and heartbreaking as it spins the tale of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a man suffering from short-term memory loss that prevents him from remembering anything after a single day. Not helpful when you’re trying to solve your wife’s murder. The film that put Nolan on the map remains my favorite of his works. Pearce gives a great performance as do Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss. It feels as if in the wake of Nolan’s Batman films and Inception, Memento has slipped from many long-term memories. It shouldn’t be forgotten.
When I first saw de Sica's masterpiece, English speakers knew it as The Bicycle Thief. It's only been recently that we've learned the more correct English translation. I guess his film still has things to teach us today. De Sica mastered the art of making films that plucked on a viewer’s heart strings without being so sentimental that it bred resentment. Shoeshine plays like a rough draft for Bicycle Thieves and he later made the great Umberto D., but I have to opt for the simple heartbreaking beauty of Bicycle Thieves and that unforgettable final shot.
A meditation on life, the universe and everything and, for a film whose story begins with a chess game between a knight back from the Crusades and Death for the knight's life as the Black Plague spreads chaos around them, it has a bit more humor than you'd expect. The film also marked the first teaming of Bergman with Max von Sydow, who portrays the knight. It sets the stage for many of the themes Bergman would return again and again throughout his career dealing with God, faith and so much more.
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Labels: Albee, Altman, Capra, Christopher Nolan, De Sica, Fellini, Hawks, Hitchcock, Huston, Ingmar Bergman, Kazan, Kubrick, Lean, Lists, Nichols, Sondheim, Spike Lee, Whale, Zhang Yimou
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Edward Copeland's Top 100 of 2012 (20-1)
Charlie Chaplin was audacious enough to continue making silent films (although he did allow for sound effects and an occasional song) all the way to 1936. In my opinion, he saved the Little Tramp's best for last in this hysterical tale of man vs. the modern age. The comedy is as funny as you'd expect and even more pointed than usual. Since Chaplin knew the Little Tramp was making his swan song, he even let him waddle off into the sunrise. Sound didn't stop Chaplin, who had two great sound efforts to come with The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux. Still, his early works are the most precious gifts. Truly, his silence was golden.
When compiling the 2007 list, I feared it was becoming too Hitchcock-centric, forcing the omission of other great filmmakers but dammit, he made so many films that mean so much to me, it would be dishonest to place a quota on him. In the intervening five years, seeing Strangers several more times only has lifted it in my extreme. Hitch's directing gifts come off at his most stylish and Robert Walker's wondrous performance as the sensitive sociopath Bruno who expects the wimpy Farley Granger to live up to his part of a hypothetical murder deal remains chilling (and darkly funny) to this day. One of the biggest leaps from the last list.
Buster Keaton always shares the title with Charlie Chaplin as one of the two great silent clowns and The General continues to be Keaton’s masterpiece 85 years later. However, while it doesn’t lack for laughs, the film more accurately could be called an adventure than a comedy. The realism of the film’s Civil War setting also proves quite striking and even though Keaton’s character Johnny Gray fights for the Confederacy against the Union, neither side comes off as particularly villainous and the film doesn’t contain the racist elements of something like Birth of a Nation. The film’s humor stems from Johnny’s two loves: his train and the woman he longs for who won’t love him until he joins the war effort, even though he’s been rejected as a fighter because of his skills as an engineer. The General never grows old.
When Mickey (Woody Allen), depressed and suicidal, wanders into a movie theater in Hannah and Her Sisters, it's this inspired mixture of lunacy that brings him back around. After all, who can sit through Duck Soup and not feel better afterward. The question as to which Marx Brothers vehicle was the best got settled a long time ago and Duck Soup won. With its classic mirror scene and the loosest of plots designed to make the insanity of war look even crazier, I never get tired of Duck Soup. Watch it if only for the great Margaret Dumont. Remember, you are fighting for her honor, which is more than she ever did.
As a journalist, His Girl Friday contains one of my favorite nonsequiturs in the history of film. Delivered with frantic panache by Cary Grant as unscrupulous newspaper editor Walter Burns: "Leave the rooster story alone. That's human interest." Oh yeah, this may also be one of the funniest films ever made with rapid fire dialogue, a great sparring partner for Grant in Rosalind Russell and a priceless supporting cast to boot. It's the best remake ever made (and the film it was based on, The Front Page, is pretty damn good too). Making Hildy Johnson a woman and Burns' ex-wife was a stroke of genius. Besides, when you watch any version of this story where Walter and Hildy are both men, it's clear this isn't a platonic working relationship. I don't advise any more remakes (forget Switching Channels, if you can), but I wonder how it would play if the leads were two gay men?
As I wrote when marking the 100th anniversary of Reed's birth (forgive my self-plagiarism, but it makes this enterprise go faster), "Rewatching The Third Man recently, it once again captivated me from the moment the great zither music by Anton Karas begins to play over the credits.…If you haven't seen The Third Man (and shame on you if you call yourself a film buff and you haven't), watching the Criterion DVD really is the way to go, not only for a crisp print but to be able to compare the different versions offered for British and U.S. audiences (though only the different openings are included — we don't see what 17 minutes David Selznick cut for American audiences). With its great scenes of Vienna, sly performances and perhaps the greatest entrance of any character in movie history, The Third Man stays near the top of all films ever made, even nearly 60 years after its release."
I don’t know what I was thinking ranking Seven Samurai so low on my 2007 list. Having seen it a couple more times since, I’ve rectified that error. All films this long should hold their length as well as this rollicking adventure does. Each time I see it, it transfixes me from beginning to end. Hacks like Michael Bay should look to a film such as Seven Samurai and discover how characters trump stunts, explosions and special effects in great action-adventure films. It's amazing that with such a large cast, not just of the title samurai but of the farmers they defend as well, the actors and Kurosawa develop so many distinct and worthy portraits. Granted, the running time helps, but they establish characters rather quickly from Takashi Shimura (unrecognizable from his role as the dying bureaucrat in Ikiru) as the lead samurai organizing the mission to the brilliant Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo, a reckless samurai haunted by his past as a farmer's son. Full of action, humor, sadness, a bit of romance and plenty of heart, its influence on so many films that have come since can’t be calculated.
Currently, we live in a time of a vicious circle: Movies inspire theatrical musicals which in turn become movie musicals (or in most cases, don't. Don't be looking for Leap of Faith: The Musical on the big screen anytime soon). Still, there was a time when musicals were created as motion pictures. Singin' in the Rain remains the very best example of one of those. The songs soar, the dance numbers inspire and the performances evoke joy. On top of that, it's even a Hollywood story, set in the awkward time between silent film and sound and milking plenty of laughs from the situation, especially through the spectacular performance of Jean Hagen as a silent superstar with a voice hardly made for sound and a personality barely suitable for Earth. Gene Kelly gives his best performance, a young Debbie Reynolds shines and Donald O'Connor makes us all laugh. Decades later, Singin' in the Rain got transformed (if that's the right word) a Broadway stage version. It wasn't very good. Stick with the movie.
When I wrote about this film for the Screenwriting Blog-a-Thon hosted by Mystery Man on Film in 2007, I said, "As far as I'm concerned, this film is Allen's masterpiece. Others will cite Annie Hall or Manhattan or some other titles and while I love Annie Hall and many others well, over time The Purple Rose of Cairo is the Allen screenplay that has reserved the fondest place in my heart. The screenplay isn't saddled with any extraneous scenes and no sequence falls flat as it builds toward its bittersweet ending. For me, it's Woody Allen's greatest screenplay and one of the best ever written as well." I've been pleasantly surprised at the number of people who have said to me since I wrote that how they agree, even among moviegoers who declare themselves not to like Woody Allen as a rule. It's the perfect blend of comedy, fantasy and realism and one of the greatest depictions of the magic of movies ever put on film. In The Purple Rose of Cairo, when Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) and his pith helmet step off the screen, the repercussions end up being both hilarious, touching and painfully real.
While for me Jules and Jim stands as the high watermark of the French New Wave films, when you look objectively at the story of Jules and Jim, it may employ many of that movement's techniques but many aspects of Truffaut's film set it apart from its cinematic brethren such as its period setting and a time span that covers more than two decades separates it from the movement as well. However, that doesn’t affect the film’s magnificence. In a funny way, the 1962 film forecast the free love movement to come later that decade except its source material happened to be a semiautobiographical novel set in the early part of the 20th century. The prurience though lies in the mind of the fuddy duddy because part of what makes Jules and Jim so special comes from Truffaut's refusal to pass any judgment, be it positive or negative, upon the behavior of his characters. Despite the director's own criticism many years down the road that the film isn't cruel enough when it comes to love, the three main characters do suffer by the end but he doesn't paint it as punishment for their sins. In a 1977 interview, Truffaut said he thought he was "too young" when he made Jules and Jim. If he'd made it at any other age, it wouldn't be the same movie and probably wouldn't hold the same appeal for so many. For Jules and Jim to grab you, really grab you, I think you need to be young when you see it the first time, and that's why Truffaut, not yet 30 but captivated by the novel since 25, had to be young as well.
Wilder’s screenplay with Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr. proves surprisingly malleable, never fitting easily into one genre and playing differently in each viewing. It can be the darkest of Hollywood satires or the tragedy of a woman driven insane by a world that’s passed her by. Gloria Swanson’s brilliant performance as Norma Desmond can come off as a vulnerable madwoman or a master manipulator. Similarly, William Holden’s down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis looks like a shallow opportunist in some scenes, an in-over-his-head dupe in others. The layers make Sunset Blvd. fresh and endlessly watchable. Wilder and his co-writers always produced great dialogue, but I believe Sunset Blvd. stands as Wilder’s greatest work as a director as well.
Hitchcock blessed us with so many classics, it’s hard to pick the best. This list contains seven Hitchcocks, but Rear Window stands tallest to me. I’ll allow two great directors to state my case. First, François Truffaut from The Films in My Life: “Rear Window is…a film about the impossibility of happiness, about dirty linen that gets washed in the courtyard; a film about moral solitude, an extraordinary symphony of daily life and ruined dreams." From David Lynch, as he wrote in Catching the Big Fish: “It's magical and everybody who sees it feels that. It's so nice to go back and visit that place." David, I couldn’t agree more.
Goodfellas rarely gets selected as the premier example of Scorsese’s brilliance as a filmmaker — and that’s a damn shame because, within its two hour and 20 minute running time, Goodfellas not only encapsulates Scorsese and filmmaking at their best but might be the director’s most personal film. If you wanted to demonstrate practically any aspect of moviemaking to a novice — editing, tracking shots, reverse pans, effective use of popular music — Scorsese disguised a film school in the form of this feature film about low-level gangsters. Goodfellas also happens to be the director’s most re-watchable film and, in a career stocked with masterpieces, it remains my favorite.
Every time I return to Paddy Chayefsky’s prescient screenplay, something new leaps out that I didn’t catch before. Most recently, it’s from one of Howard Beale’s monologues once he’s become the UBS network’s star. As part of the speech, delivered by the late, great Peter Finch, Beale tells his viewers, “Because you people, and 62 million other Americans, are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books! Because less than 15 percent of you read newspapers!” Chayefsky died long before the Web revolution so remember that the next time someone blames the newspaper industry's death on the Internet. Better yet, watch Network and revel in the delicious words, magnificent ensemble and Lumet’s fine direction.
Many prefer the Kubrick of 2001: a Space Odyssey or later works such as A Clockwork Orange or Barry Lyndon, but I’ve always found him best when satirical, especially when that sharp humor took aim at the futility of war as in the underrated Full Metal Jacket, the great Paths of Glory and the best of the bunch, the incomparable Dr. Strangelove. To take the prospect of nuclear apocalypse instigated by a general driven mad by his impotence and produce one of the wall-to-wall funniest films ever was no small achievement, but having Peter Sellers in his multiple roles, Sterling Hayden and, most of all, George C. Scott’s hyperbolic, acrobatic and energetic work as Gen. Buck Turgidson, sure helped. That's not to mention Slim Pickens and Keenan Wynn as well and the surreal beauty of that closing of multiple mushroom clouds backed by that wonderfully ironic song.
So rarely does the best picture Oscar go to the best film, it always amazes me that the Academy recognized Casablanca (though for 1943, since it didn’t open in L.A. until a few months after its New York premiere). Claude Rains’ irreplaceable Captain Renault may say, “The Germans have outlawed miracles,” but the most miraculous thing of all was that a screenplay without an ending and based on an unproduced play managed to coalesce into the finest movie the Hollywood studio system ever produced. With a superb ensemble of character actors and stars delivering dialogue with more memorable lines than nearly any other film ever, courtesy of screenwriters Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, play it forever, Sam.
It does worry me that we seem to lack a filmmaker as ballsy as Robert Altman was (first person to suggest Paul Thomas Anderson gets punched in the face). Thankfully, he left us his body of work (some dogs to be certain, but the ecstasies we receive from his great ones allow us to forgive). For me, Nashville never wavers from its spot at the top of the Altman charts. It’s a musical, but not really. It’s about politics, but not really. We get to watch 24 characters intersect (or not) as Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewksbury design a tapestry displaying a picture of America on the eve of its bicentennial. It also presents ideas that in their own way prove as prescient as those in Network.
Many of the greatest films turn out to be examples of triumph over adversity and that certainly proved to be the case with Children of Paradise, Carné’s two-part masterpiece made during the Nazi occupation of France. When I wrote at length about this deceptively simple tale of mimes and actors, criminals and the aristocracy, I said that if I revised my 2007 list, the film likely would rise higher than its 18th rank. As you see, it most definitely has. Better to experience its beauty and magic than attempt to briefly describe it.
One wonders what the total would be if we calculated the number of words written extolling the brilliance and significance of Orson Welles’ filmmaking debut. Granted, the curmudgeons and contrarians exist and while not a day goes by that I don’t remind someone that all opinions are subjective by definition, Citizen Kane looms as the behemoth that practically defies that statement. Its status as a cinematic masterpiece comes close to being an objective truth. I have nothing new to add about this wonder. The film speaks for itself.
After what I wrote about Citizen Kane, you’d think it would rest in my top spot, but Renoir’s exquisite tragicomedy grabbed a foothold in my Top 10 as soon as I saw it in college and it took only one or two more viewings for Rules to clinch the No. 1 perch where it’s remained for more than two decades. Something personal within the film (too much identification with Renoir’s character of Octave; the character of Christine, who seems to cast a spell over all men who cross her path) hooks me in above and beyond the film’s artistry. If that explanation seems skimpy, I defer to what Octave says, "The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons."
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Labels: Altman, Carné, Carol Reed, Chaplin, Curtiz, Gene Kelly, Hawks, Hitchcock, Keaton, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Lists, Lumet, Renoir, Scorsese, Truffaut, Welles, Wilder, Woody
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Thursday, March 29, 2012
Just when you thought you were out…
"If a team of assassins planned to ambush their target at a tollbooth, would it really be deemed necessary that the killers
wear their finest suits and fedoras while hiding before they perform the task? Did murder in the 1940s
require a dress code?" — Edward Copeland
By Edward Copeland
Some movies you love so much, have seen so many times in whole or in part, that when you stop to watch the film with a purpose (such as writing this post as well as the two previous ones, "America's first family" and "Merging art and commerce," to mark the 40th anniversary of The Godfather), you discover things you never noticed before and ideas occur to you for the first time. I still love The Godfather, but haven't watched it this closely in a long time — probably since viewing it in that Midtown Manhattan theater in 1997. When I saw it then, Goodfellas already existed in my life, but the sheer size of Coppola's images filtered through Gordon Willis' magnificent cinematography overwhelmed me so Martin Scorsese's masterpiece, albeit the greater film, didn't intrude on my thoughts then. This time though, I watched The Godfather on DVD on my TV — twice really, once for the movie, once for Coppola's commentary. This screening of rapt attention not only took place semi-horizontally at home, it also marked my first time observing The Godfather closely and in its entirety since The Sopranos entered the world. Because I have a lot to say, this will be a two-part post unlike the first two, which could stand alone. I plan, theoretically, for this final post to flow as a single piece even though I've divided it in half. To be a tease, I'm saving my new observations until the last section of this piece.
This reunion with the Corleones didn't change one aspect that amazed me the first time I viewed the film in a single, uncut setting: its miraculous pacing. Only a few minutes shy of three hours, The Godfather holds its length incredibly well. It never lags and you falsely sense that you've just settled in to the tale when, before you know it, the end credits roll. Coppola and his editing team of William
Reynolds and Peter Zinner accomplish this without making the movie seem rushed either. While I knew the film incredibly well before I watched it again, the obvious never stood out until I heard what Coppola said on the commentary that I quoted in the first Godfather-related post, "America's first family," when he talked about seeing The French Connection during editing and thinking, "Compared to that, The Godfather is going to be this dark, boring, long movie with a lot of guys sitting around in chairs talking." On the commentary, Coppola follows that with the quote I put at the top of this post. Of course, the director's stress coughed up the adjective boring, but the film indeed does contain many scenes involving men sitting around talking. When you think about The Godfather, what usually springs to mind involves the masterfully choreographed sequences of violence such as the ending baptism montage or other memorable scenes such as the opening "I believe in America" monologue by the undertaker Bonsasera (Salvatore Corsitto). Those scenes with men talking play perfectly well, but you don't think about it. Not when the film containz scenes such as James Caan's Sonny being assassinated at the tollbooth, which Coppola freely acknowledges as his homage to Arthur Penn's finale in Bonnie and Clyde. "Like my dad always said, 'Steal from the best,'" Coppola says. The reason all those "talking scenes" work corresponds with the reason all those stylized scenes of violence work: great dialogue. Coppola didn't invent this. From the beginning of the torch Hollywood (and moviegoers) carried for gangsters and the mob, the genre's best examples always brought with them some of the most memorable line in movie history stretching back almost to the beginning of film. Literally, the list extends too long to name all the precursors. Of course, as the years went by, the country allowed more freedom of content in its movies. The Godfather debuted early in the process of those changes, becoming the first gangster film to truly benefit. As you'd expect, the prudes whined about moral decay then — just as many do now. (Those who yell loudest about losing their freedom inevitably also want to take it away from anyone who doesn't believe as they do.) Coppola addresses the issue of violence on the DVD. "The thing about violence in a film like this is you have to try to make every moment be in some way eccentric or have some unusual or memorable aspect so it's not just a bludgeoning or just violence but…there is some sort of context that singles it out," Coppola says. Wwile the big names get the lion's share of praise (deservedly) for their acting in The Godfather, not enough gets said about those in the
smaller roles because on top of its other positive attributes, The Godfather, despite Coppola's fights with Paramount, turned out to be an exceptionally well-cast movie. Richard Conte not only performs well as the oily and duplicitous rival boss Barzini, his presence provides a crucial link to the history of the genre, as did several other actors, through films such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz's House of Strangers, The Brothers Rico and Jules Dassin's great Thieves' Highway, which includes a memorable truck crash whose shot of rolling apples echoes the strewn oranges when Marlon Brando's Don Vito gets shot in The Godfather. Another link to past noirs come through Sterling Hayden's turn as the crooked cop Capt. McCluskey after roles in classics such as John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. Leaving his mark, sadly an all too brief one, was Al
Lettieri as Sollozzo, the Sicilian who wanted to bring narcotics into the city. Lettieri's acting success came late, appearing first on TV in 1957 at 29 but not making a movie until 1965. 1972 truly turned out to be his breakout year, appearing not only in The Godfather but in Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway. He died of a heart attack three years later at 47. One final connection, in a way, to noirs and gangsters of old came in the brief but fun performance of John Marley as movie studio President Jack Woltz with the unfortunate horse. Marley worked since the 1940s, mostly on
television, but included uncredited work in Kiss of Death and The Naked City and a small credited role in 1951's The Mob. Still, Marley remained one of those familiar faces that no one could name. It wasn't until the 1960s that he began to gain notice with parts in films such as Cat Ballou, a well-received starring role in John Cassavetes' Faces and a 1970 supporting actor nomination as Ali MacGraw's father in Love Story. Woltz's role didn't take up much screentime, but Marley made the most of it, paired mostly with the sublime Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen. The dinner scene between the two men delights every time. Coppola says that Duvall usually only needed a couple of takes to nail a scene, but I don't know how he couldn't crack up since the meal consists mostly of Marley's monologue about why he
hates Johnny Fontane (Al Martino) and wants to run him out of the business How Duvall sat there and ate without cracking up constantly I can't fathom. His spite stems because Fontane stole a girl that Woltz had from him, so that's why the studio chief seems determined not to give the singer the part in the movie he desires. "She was the greatest piece of ass I ever had — and I've had 'en all over the world," Woltz yells at Tom. This leads to the famous scene of Woltz waking up the next morning to find the head of his prized $400,000 thoroughbred in his bed, That wasn't a fake head either. Part of the crew went to a dog food company and looked over the horses they planned to kill eventually to turn into Fido's fixings. They selected the horse they liked and had the company save the head in dry ice and send it to them when they slaughtered the animal. Needless to say, many people went ballistic, Coppola said. He always thought it was fascinating how upset people got that they used the head of an already dead horse but the film's many human killings didn't bug many. As for Marley, years later he appeared on SCTV Network when they did their spoof of The Godfather with Joe Flaherty's station owner Guy Caballero as the title character, only Marley played Leonard Bernstein.
Of the larger supporting roles in The Godfather, the actor and character I come away admiring and enjoying more each time I see the film in whole or in part continues to be Richard Castellano as Pete Clemenza, one of Don Corleone's capos and best killers. He also happens to be the funniest character in the movie. If any of the creations in The Godfather universe reminds me of someone who could turn up working on Tony Soprano's crew, Clemenza would be the one. Castellano gets so many classic bits, whether he's teasing Michael (Al Pacino) about not being able to tell Kay (Diane Keaton) he loves her on the phone in the kitchen full of Corleone soldiers. "Mikey, why don't you tell that nice girl you love her? I love you with all-a my heart, if I don't see-a you again soon, I'm-a gonna die," Clemenza needles him with a mock girl's voice while he makes a huge pot of "gravy." Among Clemenza's other duties, he teaches well. Not only does he try to pass on the recipe to Michael, he's the one who instructs him how to pull off the hit on Sollozzo and McCluskey. Castellano worked wonders grabbing a laugh before or after whacking someone. When Carlo (Gianni Russo), the no-good husband of Corleone sister Connie (Talia Shire), gets in a car, believing Michael when he says that he's only exiling him to Vegas and kicking him out of the family business as punishment for
setting up Sonny, Clemenza sounds perfectly friendly as he greets him with, "Hello Carlo" from the back seat before throttling him to death. According to Coppola, Castellano also improvised his most famous line (and one of the most repeated from the film as well). After a brief scene where Clemenza leaves his house to head to work, his wife (Adelle Sheridan) yells to him to remember to pick up cannolis. The top item on Clemenza's work schedule that day, by Sonny's orders, involvee killing Paulie (John Martino), the don's usual driver/bodyguard who conveniently was out ill the day before when Vito was ambushed. As Paulie drives Clemenza and Rocco (Tom Rosqui), one of
Clemenza's crew, Clemenza asks Paulie to pull over so he can take a piss. As Clemenza gets out of the car, Rocco kills Paulie. Clemenza returns and utters those immortal words that Castellano improvised, "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." Later, in that kitchen scene where Clemenza cooks and ribs Michael, Sonny comes in and asks him simply, "How's Paulie?" "Oh, Paulie…won't see him no more," Clemenza states matter-of-factly, never pausing in his stirring of the sauce. One thing I noticed this time that slipped by me before is that Clemenza actually supplied me with the origin of the phrase "going to the mattresses." It's so obvious in meaning I don't know how it escaped me, especially since Tony and his men did exactly that in the penultimate Sopranos episode. In the Godfather sequel, Bruno Kirby played the young Clemenza, but Castellano's presence was sorely missed. They couldn't reach a deal on a contract. In a rarity, the issue had nothing to do with pay. Castellano insisted that a friend of his had to be hired to write all his dialogue personally for The Godfather Part II. That request proved way too easy for Coppola to refuse and that's how Michael V. Gazzo's character of Frank Pentangeli got created for Part II, earning Gazzo a supporting actor Oscar nomination. Castellano received a supporting actor nomination, but not for The Godfather. His came for the 1970 comedy Lovers and Other Strangers. The actor died in 1988.
Another good supporting performance brings with it a great story. As I mentioned before, throughout his DVD commentary Coppola offers advice to new directors. One tip he gives repeatedly, actually he suggests it for directors at all levels of experience: Always hold at least a day or two of open auditions. He did this on The Godfather and filled several roles this way, but his best find (according to Coppola and I agree) turned out to be Abe Vigoda as Sal Tessio, Corleone's other main capo. Vigoda turned in a great performance, especially at the end when it's figured out that Tessio betrayed the Corleones and he knows he's being taken off to his death and makes a quiet plea to Duvall's Hagen to get him out of it "for old time's sake." Vigoda went on to become such a cult figure after playing Fish on Barney Miller and his short-lived spinoff Fish to getting much mileage out of premature reports of his death, especially through frequent appearances on Late Night With Conan O'Brien. Vigoda continues to work, having turned 91 in February and, according to the Inaccurate Movie Database, in pre-production for a feature comedy called The Mobster Movie co-starring Alice Cooper to be released next year. Vigoda's final moment in The Godfather should be a lesson to all directors to hold at least a day or two of open auditions because "you never know who is out there," Coppola said.
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Labels: 70s, Arthur Penn, Brando, Caan, Cassavetes, Coppola, Dassin, Diane Keaton, Duvall, Huston, Kubrick, Mankiewicz, Movie Tributes, Pacino, Peckinpah, Scorsese, The Sopranos
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Wednesday, March 07, 2012
No explanations for the inexplicable Why do we feel the need to force meaning upon magic?
By Edward Copeland
A sentence, once begun, hung suspended in the air, as if frozen by the frost,
and picked up, probably where it left off — or elsewhere.
probably with a significant other, but not necessarily,
that you have again and again for years?"
How did Alain Resnais pull it off? Most films that aim for the abstract and teeter toward pretension just bore me or piss me off. One need look no further than Lars von Trier's recent Melancholia for an example of the type of film of which I speak. Now, I stand by my belief that there is no right or wrong in film criticism since all opinions are subjective (even though when reading positive reviews for films such as Melancholia I often visualize the writer struggling to convince himself of the film's worth, as if daring to say otherwise could mean the loss of her membership privileges to the hip critic tree house). Knowing my tastes, that makes my affection for Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad all the more mystifying — even to me. I can't explain my love for this film, which marks the 50th anniversary of its U.S. premoere today, but I do. It's not that I'm an across-the-board disciple of the French New Wave — a lot of Godard's work leaves me cold (though I worship Truffaut). Then Resnais differed from the other New Wavers in that he wasn't a critic first. He started out as a documentary filmmaker. Each time I see Last Year, those black-and-white images and nameless characters in its essentially plotless universe mesmerize me more than the last time. I couldn't give you a coherent explanation as to what Last Year is about and, what's more, I don't care. I just know it's beautiful and infused with the magic that only great cinema can conjure.
As I pondered what to say in this tribute, since I lack the desire to force an interpretation onto the film that would bore me to write even more than it would any reader to read and any attempt at synopsis surely would reach the higher rungs on the ladder of Fools' Errands, my thoughts drifted to more general areas of film and criticism. I loved Pauline Kael, though I'm certain if added up, I probably disagreed with her more often than not. Kael was not a fan of Marienbad. She'd bring it up frequently in reviews of other films, such as when she reviewed Antonioni's Blow-Up for The New Republic in 1967. "It has some of the Marienbad appeal: A friend phones for your
opinion and when you tell him you didn't much care for it, he says, 'You'd better see it again. I was at a swinging party the other night and it's all anybody was talking about!' (Was there ever a good movie that everybody was talking about?" Kael wrote. Of course, that review was published more than two years before I was born and I haven't been to any swinging parties (or nonswinging, for that matter) of late and I sharply disagree with her about Resnais' film (I'm more mixed, leaning to positive, on Blow-Up, though it and L'Eclisse remain the only Antonionis I truly tolerate). Despite our differing opinions on Marienbad, how can I not laugh out loud at Kael's parenthetical punchline? As Fat Tony (voiced by Joe Mantegna) said once on The Simpsons, "It's funny 'cause it's true." So while I firmly live by what I said earlier about all criticism being subjective and you should avoid what Kael called "saphead objectivity," in this world we live in today the cruder saying, be it about movies or politics or religion or whatever, rings louder than ever: Opinions are like assholes: Everybody's got one. The question writing this tribute sparked in my mind is "Why does Marienbad work for me, but not for Kael or others" and continuing along those lines, "How can a director such as Lars von Trier have either fans who think he walks on water or people such as myself who mock him mercilessly but seemingly few who look at him dispassionately from the middle ground?" Does the magic reside in the movies or within ourselves? With these conundrums circulating in my head, I decided that two posts would be necessary, since a large portion wouldn't be dealing with Marienbad directly. Therefore, today the tribute to the film, Thursday (or maybe even Friday), the broader discussion. I decided two posts were required not only because of length and the larger issues bubbling in my brain but because I thought Last Year at Marienbad deserves separate words on its anniversary, especially after devouring its two-disc Criterion DVD. One of the most interesting special features is an audio interview with Resnais by François Thomas, author of the book The Workshop of Alain Resnais, recorded specifically for Criterion in 2008. (Resnais, who turns 90 in June, maintains an active filmmaking life, having made the great Wild Grass that opened in the U.S. in 2010. It also has little in common with Marienbad and should be accessible to most.) Resnais talks extensively about the process that led him to collaborate with highly regarded French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and produced Marienbad as a result. Two of the film's eventual producers, Raymond Froment and his friend Pierre Courau, suggested to Resnais the idea of a partnership with the novelist. "I'd never read a book of his, not a single line. I remember my first response was 'From what I've read in the press, he's a very difficult writer whose books are quite off-
putting. I really don't know if we could collaborate on a film,'" Resnais admits in the interview. The men asked if the director would at least meet the author and so Resnais did. "(T)he meeting with Robbe-Grillet was so pleasant and friendly that I believe we spent the whole afternoon together discussing life, cinema and the arts. We realized that we had similarities as to certain (things) and even works of literature. I hadn't hidden the fact that I hadn't read his works and I wanted to read his four published books. I was as won over by his writings as I was won over by Robbe-Grillet in person," Resnais says. That sounds like a stroke of luck, but it pales compared to the actual process that occurred that produced this landmark (if you like it) film. "…Robbe-Grillet offered to write four ideas for screenplays, each a page in length, and if I found one of the four interesting enough, we could move forward with that. A week later, (he) did in fact give me four ideas and I took another 24 hours to make a decision because those four pages could easily have made four films and it was hard to decide and it was hard to decide on the most enticing and most captivating. I decided on Last Year. The words 'at Marienbad' were added later," Resnais explains. The full screenplay was written in less than two months — an extremely detailed script that had visuals on the left-hand side while dialogue and even stage directions filled the right-hand column. In fact, Resnais told Thomas that what they produced had so much spelled out, anyone could have picked it up and made the same movie. When Resnais composed his usual shot breakdown, it barely differed from the screenplay. The way Resnais conceives images on all his films turns out to be fascinating by itself. He has his screenwriters record all of a film's dialogue on tape without identifying which characters are speaking. Resnais then lies on a couch and listens to the tapes until the images come to him. While I wouldn't try to slap a meaning on Marienbad, I know what appeals to me. Part of it is its fluid nature, something best shown by this YouTube clip.Resnais insisted on real sets because he needed shadows from the "molding in the decor, on doors, or even the actor's shadows to fall on
something three-dimensional," he also says in the interview whose existence practically ensures that a first-person account of the mechanics of making Last Year at Marienbad should outlast us all. Though even as a fan, I wouldn't label this as a film about acting (Hell, the characters aren't given names, just letters), yet Resnais wanted the performers to know the tone he had in mind so he screened for the cast and crew G.W. Pabst's silent classic Pandora's Box. He also claims to have been influenced by the Stanislavsky acting
method, even though his book hadn't been published in France yet, because the female lead A (Delphine Seyrig) had studied with Lee Strasberg in the United States. Seyrig did ruin one of Resnais' plans unexpectedly. He wanted her to have her hair cut similar to Louise Brooks' look in Pandora's Box, but she trimmed it after a break ruining any chance for that. The collaboration between Resnais and Robbe-Grillet only had one disagreement — over what did happen last year between A and X (Giorgio Albertazzi). The novelist scripted the encounter as a rape, but Resnais hated that idea, but everything in the movie plays with time and memory. "To me it was a simple love story, so I like to express the emotional love, precisely the opposite of the idea of a rape. I don't know how the film is interpreted, but I know my mind when I shot it," Resnais says. As I perused many reviews of the film for my larger question, I found a couple that connected the film to Hitchcock's Vertigo. Now, I don't know whether Resnais has mentioned this a lot, but he admits its influence in the DVD interview, even acknowledging that somewhere in the film you might spot a shadow of Hitch, though I couldn't spot it. "If you glimpse Hitchcock's profile in the film, it's an homage, a friendly wink of the eye, a way of saying to Hitch if he saw the film, 'We love you,'" Resnais tells Thomas. Those French New Wave filmmakers. (You know how much this film hypnotizes me? I decided to Google search for the Hitch image and discovered I had made a screenshot of it and NOT realized it. It will be in the second post.) As for the memory of what happened, it's as good as time as any for the other clip.Since he's prominent at the end of the second clip, I probably should point out the film's third main character (main as he received a letter designation). The tall, gaunt-looking man standing at the table playing a game has been given the moniker M and presumably is A's
husband. The actor Sacha Pitoëff portrays M. Last Year in Marienbad technically proved to be somewhat of a bridge between nuts-and-bolts moviemaking in France as well. While even detractors would find it hard to make a case against the beauty of Sacha Vierny's black-and-white cinematography, the actual camera operator, Philippe Brun, insisted on using the old-style hand-cranked camera, especially impressive considering the nearly constant movement of those shots. Brun wasn't an old timer either — Marienbad marked his third film as a camera operator, though he served as a cinematographer on two films in the 1950s. He's remained a camera operator through 1991's Impromptu and included such classics as Buñuel's Belle de Jour, Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows, Costa-Gavras' Missing and Bertrand Tavernier's A Sunday in the Country. Widescreen was a rarity in French films in 1960 and in order to get the look that Resnais wanted, they created their own lenses that were cut so both foreground and background stayed in focus
simultaneously. Their modifications also allowed them to shoot split screens within the camera itself. Two of the film's most famous sequences took amazing planning. The classic room of mirror sequence required two days of rehearsals before actual shooting. The long corridor sequence looks as if it were one continuous tracking shot but they filmed it in three separate sections and at three different locations months apart. Because Resnais wanted the baroque look for the hotel and not much of that style of architecture existed in France, Marienbad filmed largely "mostly at the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, with additional scenes at the Schleissheim Palace just outside the city," according to page five of press notes compiled by Rialto Pictures for a re-release of the film. Interesting enough, since much filming took place in Germany, one of the second assistant directors happened to be Volker Schlöndorff, who would go on to direct films such as The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The Tin Drum and The Handmaid's Tale. Though she took no credit, Coco
Chanel designed the film's costumes, the first film she had done that for since Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. When they finished the film and screened it for the first time, Resnais says in the interview, the first audience openly mocked it for nearly the first half (and at 93 minutes long, there wouldn't be much left), but he tells Thomas that eventually the audience grew quiet as the film won them over. At the end, it received a standing ovation. That seems perfectly understandable to me. As much as I adore the film, I also can appreciate the potshots. That's why it's such a puzzling film for me. They submitted it to the Cannes Film Festival but (and this I find utterly ridiculous), the festival refused to accept Marienbad unless they dubbed all the dialogue of Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi (X) with a French actor's voice. Resnais and his producers refused. The Venice Film Festival accepted it and it won the Golden Lion for 1961. It also received the best film prize that year from the French Syndicate of Critics. As it opened elsewhere in 1962, it joined 17 other nominees up for the BAFTA for best film from any source including Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Bergman's Through a Glass, Darkly, The Manchurian Candidate and West Side Story, though all lost to Lawrence of Arabia. The Oscars nominated it for best story and screenplay written directly for the screen and look at what kind of nominees joined Marienbad back then: Divorce — Italian Style, Freud, That Touch of Mink and Through a Glass Darkly. Three foreign films, a John Huston-directed biopic and one piece of fluff but no best picture nominees and certainly no piece of crap such as a Bridesmaids. Imagine that today. Unfortunately, Divorce — Italian Style, a fairly lame foreign comedy, won.It can't be an accident that Coco Chanel provides a concrete link between Last Year at Marienbad and my favorite film of all time, The Rules of the Game, because I'd thought that subconsciously, though the two films couldn't be more different, that part of the appeal of Marienbad for me came from the large gathering at its hotel reminding me of the weekend gathering at the Marquis' chateau for Andre in Rules. In a piece Kael wrote on Rules, which she loved, that I re-read while searching for her Marienbad references, that she speculated that Resnais used Rules subliminally and that's why so many embraced it. For my part, the eerie feel Resnais creates with those long trips down seemingly endless corridors couldn't help but put me in mind of David Lynch and the halls of the high school, the hospital, the sheriff's station, the Great Northern, etc., in Twin Peaks. Though by and large I'm a Lynch fan, I found it dispiriting to read this by Mark Harris in The New York Times ahead of a two-week engagement of Marienbad in January 2008:
The people who walked out (literally) of INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch’s Marienbad-influenced 2006 film, saying 'What was that all about?' will find similar though more elegantly concise cause for discomfort here.
What the hell? I scanned about the Web and found that Harris' words weren't isolated ones. I may be puzzled as to the hold that Marienbad has on me, but I'm not confused at all as to why I found INLAND EMPIRE to be an inexplicable mess. In comparison to Lynch's film, Marienbad plays as a rather conventional story about a love triangle. There lies why this post prompted my contemplation and, more
importantly, why these issues deserve a separate forum. The influence of Last Year at Marienbad has been acknowledged by some filmmakers, seen by even more people. In Bergman's works starting with The Silence and stretching through Persona and beyond, it's been spotted. Everyone recognizes the signs in Kubrick's take on The Shining. It's set in a hotel after all. I wonder if anyone has spotted signs in the film of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite. (I know — they're referring to Kubrick's hallway shots, not the fact it took place in a hotel. Can't a fella make a joke? You all are way too Malickserious.) Some also think Kubrick sneaked some homage into the later scenes of 2001. Peter Greenaway did go on the record admitting its influence on his work. If you want to believe the list on the Inaccurate Movie Database, it popped up in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie. I do recall Don Draper watching Marienbad in the second season of Mad Men. The list even claims it influenced a video game.Now that would be appropriate. I may not attempt to snap a lid on this movie with an all-encompassing theory as to its meaning as if I was sealing it in Tupperware, but games play a key part of Marienbad. That is obvious. The characters play all sorts of games, the kind you do for fun and the type you do to toy with people. "If you can't lose, it's not a game," X tells M when challenged to a game that M says
he always wins. Within the walls of that hotel, everyone plays and everything gets debated. In a way, perhaps I'm too quick to declare INLAND EMPIRE incompatible with Marienbad when the headline I posted on my review of Lynch's film was "Film as nonsequitur" and Marienbad really runs on nonsequiturs. Anyone who knows me personally realize that my entire life I've been a fan on nonsequiturs, though mine usually lean to the comical. Those loopy lines you would hear in an Airplane! or Police Squad! or even Twin Peaks, but Resnais wasn't going for laughs — was he? I took very few notes from the film itself, but most were just lines that struck my fancy such as "These silences to which you confine me are worse than death. These days we spend here side by side are worse than death. We're like coffins lying side by side in a frozen garden." Did I find that profound or funny? In Kael's brief mention of the film in 5,001 Nights at the Movies, she refers to that very line after calling the characters "a tony variant of the undead of vampire movies." There will be time for that in the next post. Today, I celebrate Last Year at Marienbad neither for its story nor its message, its acting nor its dialogue. I celebrate it simply for its pure cinematic beauty, its mystical power to transfix, its fluid imagery, its ability to be repetitive without becoming redundant and its unusual use of sounds. I never even brought up the organ.
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Labels: 60s, Antonioni, Criticism, Foreign, Godard, Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Kael, Kubrick, Lynch, Mad Men, Movie Tributes, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Resnais, Truffaut, Twin Peaks, von Trier
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