Monday, September 16, 2013
From the Vault: JFK
BLOGGER'S NOTE: I'm re-posting this review, originally written when JFK opened in 1991, as part of The Oliver Stone Blogathon occurring through Oct. 6 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
Seldom has reviewing a film proved as problematic as Oliver Stone's JFK. So much has been written about what is — and isn't — accurate in this film that I went in desperately trying to view solely on a cinematic basis, ignoring the fact that it concerns that fateful November day in Dallas in 1963. That sort of objectivity ends up being impossible because JFK demands evaluation and analysis and obliterates any chance of passive viewing with its strange hybrid of thriller, murder mystery and documentary.
Kevin Costner plays the lead in Stone's story as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who launched a full-fledged investigation into the conspiracy he believed left both John F. Kennedy and the country mortally wounded. "Fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth," Donald Sutherland's Deep Throat-type character tells Garrison at one point in the film. While it remains to be seen whether Stone's version contains more truth than the preposterous idea that Lee Harvey Oswald (played well by Gary Oldman, part of the film's gargantuan, excellent ensemble) acted alone, fascination with the assassination keeps this three-hour film compulsively watchable.
Problems plague the film other than the ones that spark so much debate. Despite allegations that the film comes off as homophobic (I see why that charge has been leveled) or exists as nothing more than propaganda (could be), it fares fairly well. Stone keeps the pace speeding along most of the time except for a middle section that lags. His editing and jump-cuts that mix real footage, re-creations and original material triumph, especially in the film's very good opening segments. The movie stumbles the most when it presents scenes of Garrison's domestic life with his wife Liz (a thankless task given to the usually reliable Sissy Spacek, saddled with dialogue along the lines of "I think you care more about John Kennedy than your own family!") It also doesn't help that Garrison's son (played by Stone's own 7-year-old son Sean) never ages though the film covers more than half a decade.
Other demerits include John Williams' score, which nearly overpowers important scenes such as Sutherland's magnetic spinning of key elements of the "conspiracy" so that it makes sense as he's sharing it, and, it should really go without saying, Costner himself. While he manages to be fairly consistent with his Southern accent, he still can't emote effectively. He's a star, not an actor. Much of the popular opinion about the real Garrison refers to him either as someone seeking publicity or a crackpot. Regardless, Costner can't convey his obsession or possibly unstable nature. In his overrated Dances With Wolves, his lack of acting skills presented a similar problem. Both JFK and Dances would have been better served if they'd cast a performer capable of portraying people losing control. Lt. Dunbar tries to commit suicide and then asks to be placed on the frontier, but Costner couldn't pull off that conflict any more convincingly than he pulls off Garrison's drive for the truth.
Thankfully, able supporting performers abound to pick up the slack, even if they appear for a single scene. Actors deserving particular praise include Ed Asner, Kevin Bacon, John Candy, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Joe Pesci, Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones, who gives a good performance despite the possible perception of his character as an offensive stereotype. Structurally, the film weakens in its final act by climaxing with Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw (Jones). While this conclusion comes naturally to a film focused on Garrison, it seems anticlimactic to the film's real subject — dealing with the demons of the past. Stone's obsession with the Vietnam era equals Garrison's with Kennedy's murder. Methods separate Garrison's obsession from Stone's. Stone uses cinema as his rosary to drag the audience kicking and screaming into his personal confessional. With JFK, that's not altogether inappropriate. Even people born since the assassination grew up with the myths and the facts of Nov. 22, 1963, as part of their lives, though for most of the younger of us, Jim Garrison and his actual prosecution of Clay Shaw was something few of us knew about until Stone's movie.
Growing up though with the history of the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations ingrained in our brains shortened our attention span of shock when John Lennon, Reagan and Pope John Paul II encountered bullets in a period of just a few months. The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger seemed to affect us for only an hour or two instead of the lifelong effect JFK's assassination had on an earlier generation.
Personally, I don't know if I buy the revamped Garrison theory that Stone offers. I don't see how anyone can believe Oswald acted alone or all the shots came from behind — watching the Zapruder film enlarged on the big screen makes the "back and to the left" motion of Kennedy's head unmistakable. However, Stone can't quite pull off the idea that the reason Kennedy was killed was so the Vietnam War could happen.
In that respect, JFK plays like a murder trial where only the prosecution presents its case. I'm certainly no apologist for Oliver Stone and I think most of his films grow weaker on subsequent viewings. Indeed, his tendency to pass off fabrication as fact can be troubling when most viewers can't tell the difference. Reservations aside, JFK holds one's attention firmly and deserves a look.
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Labels: 90s, Costner, D. Sutherland, John Williams, Kevin Bacon, Lemmon, Matthau, Oldman, Oliver Stone, Pesci, Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones
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Thursday, May 16, 2013
Leave the rooster story alone. That's human interest.
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared Jan. 18, 2010. I'm re-posting it as part of The Howard Hawks Blogathon occurring through May 31 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
By Edward Copeland
The list of remakes that exceed the original is a short one, especially when the original was a good one, but there never has been a better remake than Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, which took the brilliance of The Front Page and turned it to genius by making its high-energy farce of an editor determined by hook or by crook to hang on to his star reporter by turning the roles of the two men into ex-spouses. Icing this delicious cake, which marks its 70th anniversary today, comes from casting Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as the leads.
Words open His Girl Friday declaring that it takes place in the dark ages of journalism when getting that story justified anything short of murder, but insists that it bears no resemblance to the press of its day, 1940 in this case. What saddens me today is, despite the ethical lapses and underhandedness and downright lies
committed by the reporters in this version (and really all versions based on the original play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, themselves once Chicago journalists), their energetic devotion to capturing the story seems downright heroic compared to the herd mentality and lack of intellectual curiosity we see exhibited most of the time today by pack journalists such as the White House press corps. It's really why the first two film versions of the play are the only ones that work. The 1931 Lewis Milestone adaptation starring Adolphe Menjou definitely belonged to its time and Hawks' take with its inspired twist came along close enough to remain relevant. When Billy Wilder tried to remake the original in 1974 as a period piece with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, it fell flat because in the era of Vietnam and Watergate, journalists actually existed in a moment of heroism for their profession. The 1988 disaster Switching Channels returned to the His Girl Friday model with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner and tried to set it in the world of cable news but the only update they came up with was hiding the fugitive in a copy machine instead of a rolltop desk.Each time I write one of these anniversary tributes, no matter how many times I've seen the film in question (and I can't count that high when we're discussing Friday, I try to watch the movie again, in a quest for fresh thoughts and reminders of lines that may have slipped my mind. In nearly every, case I notice something new (and with the rapid-fire pace of Friday's dialogue, remembering them all borders on impossible). What stood out as I
started this salute wasn't just the work-a-day newshounds it depicts compared to the state of the industry today but the social subtext emerged more prominently this time. It's not that I've missed or ignored it before, but it's the light-speed comic hijinks that keeps me coming back. The story's main focus may concern Walter Burns (Grant), that sneaky editor of the Morning Post, trying to keep his ex-wife Hildy Johnson (Russell) from leaving the paper and his life to wed insurance agent Bruce Baldwin, who looks like that fellow in the movies, you know, Ralph Bellamy (who fortunately plays Bruce). However, the story Walter uses to keep his hooks into Hildy concerns that of Earl Williams (John Qualen), a man who killed a cop and received a ticket on a bullet train to the gallows by a politically hungry Republican mayor with an eye on unseating the Democratic, anti-death penalty governor, despite the fact the reporters and many others believe Earl's mental
illness should stop his hanging. Qualen, a solid character actor in many films, and Mollie Malloy (Helen Mack), a woman who befriended Earl prior to the slaying and who the tabloids misrepresent as his lover and a prostitute, stand apart as the only characters in this screwball farce who play it completely straight. (In an all-time bit of miscasting, in the Wilder remake, Carol Burnett got the Mollie Malloy role. Of course, the nearly 50-year-old Jack Lemmon also was engaged to the 28-year-old Susan Sarandon in that film.) His Girl Friday requires neither Qualen nor Mack to garner laughs like every other character. As the courthouse reporters behave particularly cruelly to Mollie at one point, only Hildy comforts her. "They ain't human," Mollie cries. "I know," Hildy sympathizes. "They're newspapermen." Hildy realizes the jobless Earl spent too much time listening to socialist speeches in the park and his fascination with the concept of "production for use" led to his fatal error.
Social message aside, it's the earth-shattering cosmic comic chemistry of Grant and Russell, aided by Bellamy's perfect innocent foil and countless supporting vets. (One of them, Billy Gilbert, plays Mr. Pettibone (Roz holds his tie in the photo above) and I wish I could have found a good closeup photo of him because I think it's hysterical how much 9/11 mastermind/terrorist asshole Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resembles Gilbert in KSM's arrest mugshot.) The lines come fast and furious. While many do come from the original Hecht-MacArthur play, Hawks gets the credit for the film's amazing speed (though screenwriter Charles Lederer deserves more kudos). Still, in the end, Cary and Roz make the dialogue sizzle and Grant's physical touches serve as a master class in comic movement on film. Watch every little bounce he makes as Hildy kicks him beneath the table when he's trying to get things past poor Bruce and you'll crack up every time. Originally, I was writing down all my favorite lines, planning to try to work them all into this tribute, but then I thought: Maybe not everyone has seen His Girl Friday, even after 70 years,
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Labels: 40s, Bellamy, Burt Reynolds, Cary, Hawks, Hecht, K. Turner, Lemmon, Matthau, Menjou, Milestone, Movie Tributes, Remakes, Roz Russell, Susan Sarandon, Wilder
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Thursday, January 05, 2012
Survival of the greediest
By Edward Copeland
If any Occupy gatherings want a movie to pass the sit-in time which also speaks to the group's issues, the protesters could make no better choice than the riveting Margin Call, a well-acted depiction of the callous way that a fictional Wall Street investment firm treats its employees, its clients and the U.S. economy — all for the sake of perpetuating executive lifestyles, everything else be damned.
Margin Call marks the feature writing-directing debut of J.C. Chandor and an impressive debut it turns out to be. It begins much like John Wells' wretched The Company Men, except that it's an investment firm laying off much of its work force and the movie's focus isn't trying to convince us to cry crocodile tears for the execs who no longer can afford country club fees.
One of the first to get his walking papers is Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a senior executive in risk management. His layoff shocks him but Dale seems more concerned about the data on his monitor when he receives the news. He tries to explain to the woman (Susan Blackwell) informing him of his fate about the importance of that in-progress project, but she stays on the severance script, letting him know what his exit package contains and how — for security reasons — his access to email, computer files, etc., has been severed. She sends him back to his office with a security guard to collect any "personal items" and escort him from the building.
As Dale grabs a few things, senior trader Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) sticks his head in to offer sympathies. Eric tries telling Emerson about his incomplete work, but Emerson tells him it isn't his problem anymore. As Dale takes his final walk to the elevator, box of belongings in his arms, one of his assistants, Pete Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), catches up to thank him for the chance to work with him. Eric again mentions his work — and he slips Sullivan a flash drive along with the warning, "Be careful." When Dale gets to the sidewalk, he attempts to make a call on his cell phone only to discover the firm shut that off as well, something that will bite the company in the ass.
Once the floor's layoffs have been completed, its top trading executive, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), comes out of his office to give the survivors a pep talk, explaining that it's been a difficult day but it's one that they may all go through again throughout their careers. On the bright side, with so many people gone, the rest should celebrate because they've all moved up several notches in the firm's hierarchy. Pretty much the entire floor takes the advice literally and heads out for drinks after work, including Dale's other assistant, Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley), who encourages Sullivan to go but Pete has immersed himself in flash drive's data and stays to work on it.
When Pete finally figures out what Dale had discovered, he can't believe the numbers and calls Seth to come look at them, followed by Will Emerson. With the projections, the trading firm has become so overleveraged that if its assets (made up mostly of those infamous mortgage-backed securities) should decrease by 25%, the company will owe more than it is worth. Emerson drags Rogers in and soon the firm's most important players have arrived to work through the night for possible solutions to the impending explosion including the head of risk management, Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore), a particularly cutthroat senior exec, Jared Cohen (Simon Baker), and the company's CEO, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons).
As complicated as the subject matter is, Chandor's script makes it digestible and understandable. As a director, Chandor turns the material into a truly suspenseful thriller where no one's physical life may be at stake but it feels as something much larger is. Chandor's screenplay and direction prove great, but he also has been blessed with an embarrassment of riches in the casting department.
Jack Lemmon's influence on Spacey shows in his portrayal of Rogers, the veteran trader who serves as the firm's conscience. Irons turns in a fine performance as the CEO who feels his decisions are based on pragmatism not greed or self-preservation. Baker makes all his scenes come alive simply by the mysterious nature of his character. Quinto (who also served as one of the film's many producers) and Badgley work as a kind of yin and yang of up-and-comers in the business world. Though Tucci's role is limited, he makes the most of his appearances. Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi even appears, playing it straight as a firm lawyer.
For me though, the film's standout ends up being Paul Bettany. He caught my attention first as Russell Crowe's roommate in A Beautiful Mind, but I've been waiting for him to break out ever since, but most of his roles I've missed or have failed to make an impression on me. As Emerson in Margin Call, Bettany creates a cool customer that you're never quite certain where his loyalties lie or whether he even has any. He's also wry and somewhat of a tour guide for the audience through the corporate maze.
Margin Call also boasts crisp editing by Pete Beaudreau and production design by John Paino with set decoration by Robert Covelman that makes the boardrooms and trading office look spot-on real, especially when seen through Frank G. DeMarco's wondrous cinematography. Office interiors don't get heralded enough when filmed this well.
Chandor has won and been nominated for several first feature and first screenplay awards and the Independent Spirit Awards has given this cast its Robert Altman Award for best ensemble, all very deserved accolades. I look forward to seeing where Chandor goes from here.
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Labels: 10s, Altman, Demi, Jeremy Irons, Lemmon, Russell Crowe, Spacey, Tucci
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Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Jules Dassin Part III
By Edward Copeland
Between the years 1949-54, any opportunity Jules Dassin had to make a movie anywhere failed to materialize. Following his work on Night and the City in London, he returned to the United States only to find that people he once considered friends did their best not to be seen with him. In 1951, while Dassin attended the Cannes Film Festival he learned that he had been named by a cooperating witness during the second round of hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Before he had been an unofficial blacklistee because he'd been called to testify and hadn't — being named by a friendly witness was another matter. This wasn't just any friendly witness who had named him either — it was director Edward Dmytryk, the only member of The Hollywood Ten, the 10 artists who had lost their court fight claiming that they had the constitutional right NOT to testify before HUAC. The 10 lost their appeals and received six- to 12-month jail
sentences. Dmytryk served six months in jail, but still turned friendly witness anyway so he could work again, something for which most of the other nine men never forgave him. Dmytryk, whose best known films include Crossfire, The Caine Mutiny and Raintree County, said in his defense, "I had long been convinced that the fight of the Ten was political…I believed that I was being forced to sacrifice my family and my career in defense of the Communist Party, from which I had long been separated and which I had grown to dislike and distrust.…I would have to name names, and I knew the problems this would cause…my decision was made easier by the fact that…I couldn't name anybody who hadn't already been identified as a Party member. Weighing everything — pro and con, I knew I had to testify.…I did not want to remain a martyr to something that I absolutely believed was immoral and wrong." The Criterion DVD for Rififi contains the 2000 interview with Dassin which discusses in the most detail what the blacklist did to him and how the atmosphere affected others as well, especially the pressure families could put on the artists. "Your wife would say, 'What do you want us to do? What about raising your children? We don't care about your principles — think of your family.' A lot of that happened," Dassin said. That's one thing I've always thought about when the subject comes up now. It's easy for people like us who are discussing that era in theoretical terms to say we'd act with principles and fight against the forces of evil, but we might behave differently if we actually were in the situation and had families to support. Look how few people raise their voices against governmental abuses now. The Occupy protests have been heartening, but they've still been rather small in number and struck down by the establishment rather easily while the majority getting screwed today, as always, keep quiet. If you missed either Part I or Part II of this tribute, click on the appropriate link. 
Dmytryk's main motivation was to keep working while other members of The Hollywood Ten went straight from jail to the blacklist though many, such as Dalton Trumbo, wrote screenplays using pseudonyms. Several Oscars during the 1950s went to people who either didn't exist or were fronts. In the 2000 interview, Dassin admitted that Darryl Zanuck would buy story ideas from him during this xperiod. Dassin also told, "one particular story that was really so painful." Dassin went on to discuss Robert Rossen, writer-director of All the King's Men and The Hustler and director of Body and Soul. Like so many in the creative community, Rossen found the witchhunt deplorable, the politicians behind it despicable and the studio chiefs who caved to them cowards. At first, Dassin said in the interview, Rossen declared, "You can't do this to people. I will not cooperate with these committees and questions." Dassin told of vandalism that occurred at the homes of people whose names were mentioned in passing during the hearings, a detail I'd never heard before. Rossen had kids at the time to worry about but, "He explained to them why it was wrong to name friends and betray people and made the kids understand that and they handled it well," Dassin said. Unfortunately, the pressure got to Rossen and he broke down and named names. Rossen "named all kinds of people. Now he had to explain that to his kids. Those kids — I don't know how they are now — but they were in bad shape for many years," Dassin shared with the interviewer.
For the many like him who were denied employment because in their youth, they joined a party they soon renounced and had had no part of for years, it was frustrating. Dassin said they always waited for some kind of hero who could stand against them and when the natural choices to fill that role such as Elia Kazan or Clifford Odets instead broke down and named names, "It was heartbreaking," Dassin said. The director also told of how people such as him got so use to old friends trying to avoid them that he would try to spare them the embarrassment by hiding if he saw them first. In the same 2000 interview, Dassin told of attending the Cannes Film Festival once, though he couldn't recall the year — he was 89 then; I think he'd earned the right to forget some Cannes Film Festivals — and spotting Gene Kelly, Dassin went and hid around the corner when he felt this strong grip on this arm. "What do you think you are doing?" Kelly asked and led Dassin into the party where most of the Americans were hanging out. Not everyone was as gracious as Kelly though — Dassin described one former friend who hid under a table to avoid being seen with him.
Moviemaking opportunities seemed closed to Dassin. An American producer had arranged for him to film a movie called Public Enemy No. 1 in France featuring Zsa Zsa Gabor as one of its stars. Gabor called Dassin in tears to tell him that she'd been warned that if she made a film with him, her career would be through so she was forced to back out. Soon after, the producer told him that unions had delivered
the message that if he made the film, no film of his would ever receive distribution again. The film fell apart, though the French got angry and declared him a member of the French Director’s Union. His U.S. passport was revoked, but the French gave him papers which allowed him to travel He went to Rome with plans to make a film of the novel Mastro-don Gesualdo by Giovanni Vergan but Italy asked him to leave the country, ruling that he was an "undesirable." Dassin went to the U.S. Embassy for help, but they wouldn't even receive him. The U.S. Ambassador to Italy at the time was Clare Booth Luce who refused to see him. Dassin returned to the states and Broadway. Theater didn't recognize the blacklist and he directed Two's Company: Charles Sherman's Musical Revue starring Bette Davis. During the show's pre-Broadway tour of many U.S. cities, Dassin again received notice to appear before HUAC, but he declined because of the show's tour. By the time it opened in New York, he received a telegram informing him that his hearings had been canceled. Sherman wrote the sketches with Peter DeVries while among the various contributors to the songs in the show were Vernon Duke, Ogden Nash, Sammy Cahn and Sheldon Harnick. The dances were staged by Jerome Robbins, another person caught up in HUAC who was forced to name names by Ed Sullivan who threatened to expose his homosexuality if he didn't. One of the other members of the cast was Tina Louise aka Ginger on Gilligan's Island. It opened Dec. 15, 1952 and ran through March 8, 1953 at The Alvin Theatre before going on a road tour. Hiram Sherman won the Tony for best featured actor in a musical. Despite the musical's success, enough was enough and an offer to make a movie there combined with the warm treatment her received from the country led Dassin to move his family to France in 1953 where he was about to make his other masterpiece, Rififi.The 2004 L.A. County Museum of Art interview on the Criterion Naked City DVD took place after a screening of Rififi, part of a retrospective on the films of Dassin, so the bulk of the conversation concerned that movie. The person asking the questions was Bruce Goldstein, founder of Rialto Pictures and repertory director at New York's Film Forum. This was four years after his long interview where he spoke about the blacklist in detail, but it did show that he still kept abreast of current issues involving civil liberties well into his 90s.
GOLDSTEIN: How did you come to make a film in France?
DASSIN: A man was producing a film called Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes and he told me I was the only man who could make this film. Now this was after five years of nada, no work at all, but he still couldn't say why he needed me. He said he had a problem with Rififi — "All the bad guys are North Africans and at this time, France is having such problems with Algerians, you can make the bad guys Americans. When I said to him, "Have you thought of making them French?", he hadn't. Well, anyhow, I got that job for the same reason I was blacklisted.
GOLDSTEIN: That's all you wish to say about the blacklist?
DASSIN: Enough. We've got other things to worry about these days. I was thinking about The Patriot Act.
In his book The Films in My Life, François Truffaut wrote about Rififi, "Out of the worst crime novels I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I've ever seen." I haven't read the Auguste Le Breton novel, but I don't doubt Truffaut's word. Many people have said one of the elements Dassin didn't transfer to the movie from the novel were acts of necrophilia, so I think Dassin made the right choices in his adaptation of what might be the greatest heist film ever made. Dassin structures the film like
a solid three-act play. Act I: Planning the heist. Act II: Carrying it out. Act III: The aftermath. As has been the case since Brute Force, the technical aspects reach the highest levels of excellence from Alexandre Trauner's production design to Auguste Capelier's set decoration, from Roger Dwyre's editing (he'd go on to edit most of Dassin's films and had cut Rene Clement's Forbidden Games) to the evocative cinematography of Philippe Agostini. Much credit for the look belongs to Dassin, who admits in the 2000 interview on the Rififi DVD that he drove the producer crazy by refusing to shoot in sunlight because he wanted the film to be gray. Truffaut also wrote in his book that "Dassin revealed Paris to Frenchmen just as he revealed London to the English (Night and the City) and New York to the Americans (The Naked City)." Bosley Crowther was The New York Times film critic for 27 years until 1968. He tended to be a stick-in-the-mud who got off on meanness and dumping as many 10-cent words into a single sentence until it could hold no more, but he even managed a nice turn of praise phrase for Rififi: It has a flavor of crooks and kept women and Montmartre "boites" that you can just about smell. As great looking as Rififi is, a limited budget hampered what Dassin could do in terms of casting so for the part of Cesar the Milanese, the safecracking expert from Italy ("There's not a safe that can resist Cesar and not a woman that Cesar can resist."), he had to employ the actor Perlo Vita, which was the screen name used by a man known as Jules Dassin. In many of his later films, Dassin would end up playing a role because he'd run out of money to hire an actor with more experience. 
Having "Perlo Vita" play Cesar play a significant role didn't really cause a problem because for the most part, none of the performers were known outside of France and the one who was best known there — Jean Servais, who played Tony, the leader of the jewel thieves — hadn't made a film in France in a couple of years. Servais gives the film's performance as the stoic Tony, newly released from prison after five years and mad as hell that his girlfriend Mado (Marie Sabouret) has taken up with Louis Grutter (Pierre Grasset), the sleazy owner of the night club L'Âge d'Or, named after the famous Buñuel film on which Trauner also served as production designer. When Tony first gets out, his old pals Jo (Carl Möhner) and Mario (Robert Manuel) try to talk Tony into cutting out the display window of the jeweler Mappin & Webb (a real jewelry store who agreed to let their name and store be used in the movie. Tony opts out until he learns about Mado's betrayal and sees all the gifts that Grutter lavishes on her, so he contacts Jo and Mario with plans to go for the safe instead. They enlist Cesar the safecracker for the heist which will net them about 240 million francs worth of jewels. Ahh, but nothing comes easy, does it? In a way, Servais delivers the only performance, but Dassin fine-tunes each of the film's element to the point that Rififi practically runs as a machine all its own, rendering the quality of the acting nearly irrelevant. The various characters behave more as chess pieces to be moved around as the story's game requires than as representatives of people.
Dassin holds on to this material tightly, yet he still allows for some flourishes. At the club, a singer named Viviane (Magali Noël) performs a dance and sings the song "La chanson 'Le Rififi'" while a silhouette of a man with a gun dances behind a screen behind her. Among the lyrics: "It's the lingo of the streetwise/the battle cry of real tough guys/Rififi" followed by the sound of a gun punctuating the beat. By the way, Rififi is French slang for tough guy posturing by criminal elements in Paris. (If you haven't seen Rififi — and shame on you if you haven't — spoilers will abound from here on out, so I'd look away for the rest of this paragraph.) Grutter realizes that Tony
and his cohorts were behind the robbery when Cesar pockets a ring from the loot and shows it off to one of the girls who works at his club. First, Grutter gets rough with Cesar to get the address of Mario out of him. When Mario refuses to tell Grutter and his men where the jewels are, they demand he call Tony. Mario refuses, but his wife gives in and does it, only she warns Tony on the phone and Grutter's men kill them both. When Tony discovers the scene, he finds Cesar tied up at L'Âge d'Or, Cesar apologizes for giving up the address. In a departure from the novel, Tony tells Cesar he knows the rules for turning in your friends and kills him. Dassin admits in one of the interviews he added that because he was thinking of all those who betrayed friends by naming them to HUAC. Later, Grutter's gang kidnaps Jo's son and demand the jewels. When two of Grutter's men grab the little boy while he's in a park with his mom and push him in a car, his balloon floating aimlessly away, a passenger on a bus who witnesses the abduction warns his child, "Hold your balloon tight — see what can happen."
One single sequence though makes Rififi a landmark both in films and particularly in heist movies: the robbery itself. The way Tony and the guys steal the gems from Mappin & Webb is by breaking in to the apartment above the store and going in from above to do the rest of the safecracking, etc. Dassin films this in a 32-minute long silent sequence. No one speaks. Keeping everything as quiet as possible becomes the thieves' No. 1 priority. It's absolutely riveting. You'll be holding your breath as if you were involved in the crime yourself. Composer Georges Auric wrote Rififi's musical score.
Auric provided music for films from around the world including, up to this point in his career, Roman Holiday, The Wages of Fear, The Lavender Hill Mob, Orpheus, Beauty and the Beast and Blood of a Poet (the last three for Jean Cocteau) and Auric's first film score, Rene Clair's À Nous la Liberté. When Auric heard that Dassin had a 32-minute robbery sequence planned, he got excited and told him he was going to compose a huge piece of music for it. Dassin told him he didn't need to do this because he wanted it to play in silence, but Auric insisted and wrote the music anyway. When both the sequence and Auric's composition were done, Dassin asked Auric to come watch it with him — once with music, once without. Auric did as Dassin asked. Afterward, Auric turned to Dassin and told him to play the heist in silence.
Before Rififi began to be screened for public or professional consumption, Dassin showed it to his friend director Lewis Milestone, who won the Oscar for comedy direction the only time it was ever given for Two Arabian Knights as well as a second prize for All Quiet on the Western Front, and happened to be in Paris. His other credits included 1931's The Front Page and 1939's Of Mice and Men. Rififi wowed Milestone who advised Dassin that he should "make this film all your life and you'll be like Hitchcock." With the exception of one film in about a decade that was more or less a comic takeoff on the heist genre, Dassin did not follow Milestone's advice, compiling a quite eclectic filmography. Once Rififi began to be seen, critics kept saying Dassin owed a debt to John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, a film that Dassin had never seen. Several years later, Dassin did see The Asphalt Jungle, but he failed to see specific comparisons except slightly in that an attractive woman becomes a character's undoing. One of the funniest revelations that Dassin made in one of the DVD interviews was that, though he is referred to as one of the masters of film
noir, he had never even heard the term until he moved to France. Rififi received such good word-of-mouth that it was accepted into the official competition at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. Dassin himself was so broke he could barely go. When one of the film's producers gambled at a casino, he begged for a little cash so he could play. He asked what date they started shooting the movie. "The eighteenth," he was told. Dassin put all he was given down on the number 18 on a roulette table and it hit, providing his family with funds to live on for awhile. As for the festival, the perceived front-runner was the film Stella directed by Mihalis Kakogiannis (who would soon change his name to Michael Cacoyannis before he got around to directing Zorba the Greek) and featuring the film debut of actress Melina Mercouri. The Palme d'Or ended up going to the American film Marty while best director was shared between Dassin and Sergei Vasilyev for Heroes of Shipka. Six actress from the Russian film Bolshaya semya (A Big Family) shared best actress, leaving Mercouri empty-handed but she and Dassin met and soon became lifelong collaborators in every sense of the word, though he didn't divorce his first wife until 1962 and wed Mercouri until 1966. Ironically, the 1955 Cannes jury also awarded a prize for best dramatic film to Elia Kazan for East of Eden. I don't know if he and Dassin ran into each other. Of course, Dassin couldn't avoid controversy. There were complaints that Rififi could be viewed as a how-to film for would-be thieves. Dassin said his response always was that, if anything, the film showed that the price was too high and usually ended badly for those who attempted such adventures. When they captured the culprits behind a robbery spree in Mexico, they cited the movie as an inspiration. Critics of the film accused Dassin of making the core group of thieves too sympathetic (never mind that when Tony learns that Mado took on a new lover while he was in prison, he removes his belt and beats her savagely, though offscreen). Dassin admitted in one of the interviews that he couldn't help himself. "It's what's left of the old rebel in me — I always want my guys to succeed," he said.
Dassin's next film went in an entirely different direction from anything he had made before. According to Truffaut's book, Dassin considered the movie, "'the film of my life,' the first film he really chose to make, and made with complete freedom, a film in which he succeeded in expressing totally." Based on Nikos Kazantzakis' 1948 novel The Greek Passion (which was published in England as Christ Recrucified) took place in Lycovrissi, a Greek village in the 1920s held under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Despite being Muslim, the Agha (Grégoire Aslan) who controls the village for the Turks allows the Greeks to stage the passion play they hold every seven years, even
though in private the Turks comment that "Allah is a cheerful artist, Jesus a melancholy god." Father Grigoris (Fernand Ledoux) picks who will play all the various roles and upsets some when he selects a stuttering shepherd named Manolios (Pierre Vaneck) to play Jesus. As you'd expect, the village's prostitute, Katerina, (Melina Mercouri, in her first film with her future husband) is cast as Mary Magdalene, An angry blacksmith Panagiotaros (Roger Hanin) who holds lots of grudges, including being passed over for the role of Christ, gets picked for the role of Judas. Outside the casting, there are other interesting characters such as the village's now figurehead of a leader, Archon Patriarcheas, who the Turks still allow to live well and for his own pleasure (played by Gert Frobe, who would go on to play Bond's best villain in the best 007 film, the title role of Goldfinger). The conflict comes when Greeks uprooted by Turks from another village arrive, starving and looking for shelter. They're led by their own priest, Father Fotis (Jean Servais from Rififi) but Father Grigoris suspects these new people aren't looking for charity but for land and spreads rumors of cholera about the newcomers, quarantining them to a mountainous area. It's all the reason the richer citizens of Lycovrissi need to ostracize them but, as you might expect, those involved in the passion play, start to take their roles seriously and Manolios dares to reach out to help the refugees. Georges Auric composed a boisterous score for the film and He Who Must Die contains many positive attributes, but I think Truffaut nailed the film's problems in his review in The Films in My Life:
"This time there is nothing but nobility, nobility, and more nobility — too much nobility for a film that displays an intellectual confusion seldom displayed in the history of cinema.…I must admit that this kind of subject, in which everyday people must transcend themselves by identifying with characters they personify, irritates me because it is so theatrical and so obvious. Knowing in advance that Judas will betray Christ, we pay attention only to how the blacksmith will betray the shepherd.…During the film, which I saw twice, I noted this sentence in the dialogue: 'The human brain is a fragile machine; one turn too many and it breaks down.' Jules Dassin gave one turn too many to his film; he has everything mixed up, tangled it all together, preaching and plasticity, reflections in mirrors, the lack of bread, rejected lovers, and children who die of cold."
He Who Must Die was in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, but lost to Friendly Persuasion. It did receive the OCIC (The International Catholic Organization for Cinema) Award — Special Mention.
Dassin went from the all-too-literal to the all-too-obscure with his next film, which didn't open in the U.S. until 1960 (and when it did, it was called Where the Hot Wind Blows!). Though Italy kicked Dassin out the last time he tried to make a movie there, the country allowed him to film there for his adaptation of French author Roger Vailland's 1957 La loi, which won France's highest literary prize, The Prix
Goncourt. Though the novel was written in French and Dassin would film the movie in French, it took place in a southern Italian fishing village on the Adriatic called Porto Manacore and starred Italian acting icons Gina Lollabrigida and Marcello Mastroianni and took its name from a game native to that part of Italy. Some non-Italians made the cast as well including French stars Yves Montand (The Wages of Fear) and Pierre Brasseur (Frédérick Lemaître in Children of Paradise) and, of course, Melina Mercouri. Brasseur plays Don Cesare, the aging, de facto leader of Porto Manacore. Lollabrigida is Marietta, one of the don's housekeepers, the object of lust for most of the village's men, and the object of scorn for others, especially Don Cesare's other
female servants who torture Marietta when they can since no one dreams of them. Montand, who gives the best performance of the film, plays Matteo Brigante, the local crime boss who loves to throw his weight around, but does it in a most charming way since he wants to assume Don Cesare's place of respect and wouldn't mind Marietta as well. He has his own personal problem in that his young son Franceso (Raf Mattioli, who died of a heart attack the next year at the young age of 24) has been having an affair with the judge's wife (Mercouri) and plans to run off with her. Mastroianni is Enrico Tosso, an agronomist from morthern Italy visiting the village who falls for Marietta (and she for him) but lacks the funds for a dowry. Marietta sets out to steal cash from a Swiss tourist so they can be together while Don Cesare advises that Enrico should go observe a session of The Law to see what it's all about, since it's such a regional phenomenon he's unfamiliar with the game. Almost nightly, men gather in a town tavern to play the game, but when Enrico shows up to be a spectator, Brigante forces him to participate even though he doesn't know the rules. Explaining The Law (the movie) proves less complicated than describing the game it's based on. Author Vailland appeared on the French talk show Lectures pour tous on Dec. 4, 1957, where host Michel Butor interviewed him about the game. The two-disc Oscilloscope DVD set of The Law includes the interview. VAILLAND: First off, it's a card game (that only exists) in southern Italy.
BUTOR: It's a card game that shows the feudal system still strong in this region…Let's say first the rules…and who plays…
VAILLAND: The rules are very simple. First, you need a winner, like in any game, but the game only starts when the winner has been designated by luck — by a card game or a dice roll — and The Law becomes an exciting and cruel game because the winner can impose The Law on the loser.
BUTOR: What does that mean?
VAILLAND: It means asking questions that they must answer which insult them in a more or less subtle way and they must endure it, even if it wounds their honor.
BUTOR: Is it the game of Truth?
VAILLAND: In the sense of honor, which is very strong in southern Italy. The same insult in real life would provoke a violent response, but in the game of Law, it's in the rules. The loser must lay his hands on the table and be subjected to The Law.
Did that clear things up? Didn't think so. It doesn't really match the movie's depictions of the game either. (He doesn't bring up the winner
being given the title of "the boss," picking a deputy boss, naming an idiot, etc.) In the end, it hardly matters. I imagine if you hail from southern Italy, it's conceivable that additional layers of meaning might be found in The Law that escapes viewers from the rest of the world. Since that includes the overwhelming majority of us, let's just forget about the game's relevance to the plot. They might as well be playing Quintet. In spite of The Law lacking a truly coherent story, Dassin does have a great, fluid sequence toward the opening of the film that begins with the release of a pigeon from the first scene landing on a building. From there, in seemingly one take, the camera moves along the windows of the building, catching the various goings-on in the apartments as if we're Jeff in Rear Window gazing through our telephoto lens as the people in the different rooms strain to see the source of a siren's song that turns out, of course, to be Marietta warbling while she washes the don's boots on a balcony of his nearby villa. Nearly the entire cast make the effort watchable, especially the great Montand who revels in Brigante's sleaze, even if you're unsure at the end what the hell you just watched.
I didn't get a chance to re-watch this one, but when I first saw this a few years back, I was underwhelmed, but it may be Dassin's most important post-blacklist film, not in terms of quality but in what it represented. First of all, it was a huge hit. Second, 1960 more or less brought an official end to the blacklist on several fronts. Kirk Douglas released Spartacus and defied the list by allowing screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's credit to appear. When the Oscar nominations came out, Dassin was nominated for both best director and best story and
screenplay for Never on Sunday, the only two Oscar nominations Dassin ever received. The movie as a whole received five nominations, including best actress for Melina Mercouri and won best original song for the title track. Mercouri had won best actress at Cannes, tying with Jeanne Moreau for her work in Peter Brook's Seven Days…Seven Nights (known as Moderato cantabile in France). Not everything was perfect: Nedrick Young who co-wrote Inherit the Wind was nominated under the pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas, though the Academy restored Young's name to the records in 1993. In one of the DVD interviews, Dassin told another funny anecdote. When he was making Never on Sunday, he ran short on financing and again had to cast himself, this time as the lead. Before the film had been released outside of Greece (where it was a huge hit anyway), Jack Lemmon happened to be Athens and Dassin showed it to him, hoping somehow that he could come up with money to re-shoot his scenes with Lemmon playing his part. After watching it, Lemmon told Dassin, "You're terrible in this film, but it's charming." He advised him to leave it the way it was. With Dassin's terrible performance intact, the movie was a hit everywhere, grossing an estimated $8 million as of January 1962 off a $151,000 budget. He returned to New York briefly in early 1962 to direct a new play on Broadway by Robert L. Joseph about a dying child called Isle of Children. It starred Patty Duke, the same year she would repeat her stage success as Helen Keller in movie of The Miracle Worker. The cast also included Bonnie Bedelia. The play got mixed reviews and ran for a mere 11 performances.
This attempt to do a modern twist on the ancient Greek myth of Phaedra falls into overheated melodrama and little else. Dassin manages some nice shots and the cinematography by Jacques Natteau and especially Max Douy's art direction are exceptional. Raf Vallone does what he can as the Greek shipping magnate and Melina Mercouri floats between good and bad as the title temptress, but Anthony Perkins at times almost goes as over-the-top as Vallone's son as he did as the weirdo priest in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion.
Sometimes it can be hysterical when someone satirizes one of their most famous roles or movies (Think Marlon Brando in The Freshman). Dassin should have been more than capable to do a comic riff on Rififi, but Topkapi is not that movie. It throws Maximilian Schell (who, by coincidence, would be hysterical in The Freshman), Melina Mercouri (as always), Robert Morley and Peter Ustinov, sweating up a storm and winning his second Oscar for supporting actor as the chase begins to abscond with a jeweled dagger from a museum in Istanbul. It's meant to be funny, but the jokes fall flat. What's most notable is that 22 years after Dassin directed his first feature film, Topkapi marked the first time he filmed in color. What always has bugged me is that, as much as I love Ustinov generally, how could he win the Oscar in 1964 for this? His official competition that he beat was John Gielgud in Becket, Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady, Edmond O'Brien in Seven Days in May and my choice of their nominees, Lee Tracy in The Best Man. This doesn't include people who didn't make the cut such as Sterling Hayden and George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, Gert Frobe in Goldfinger, Richard Attenborough (Seance on a Wet Afternoon) — that's just a handful that come to mind.
I haven't seen Dassin's next film, 1966's 10:30 P.M. Summer, based on Marguerite Duras' novel Dix heures et demie du soir en été. Duras and Dassin co-wrote the screenplay. I borrowed part of a post that Roderick Heath wrote at Ferdy on Films
10:30 P.M. Summer looks to me like a transitional film. Today, spare, cryptic portraits of the psychic and sexual life are more common; how to create psychologically and emotionally penetrating works of film was a major question for earlier directors. This film, like Losey and Pinter’s Accident (1967), which possibly had an easier time of it for centering more happily on male sexual transgressions, or Tony Richardson’s Mademoiselle (1966), stand somewhere between the stylistics of the “alienation” films of the early ’60s and the playfulness of the new wave, and the approaching full-bore works of Bertolucci, Breillat, Eustache and others.
…
Whilst no masterpiece, it’s far better than its reputation reflects, and it’s a film worth finding.
Dassin and Mercouri decided for their next project to return to the material that gave them their greatest success and they turned Never on Sunday into the Broadway musical Illya Darling. Mercouri repeated her role, but Dassin was glad to stick to directing and writing the musical's book. He let Orson Bean play his part from the movie. This might have been a sign that they were making a good move: the musical was booked into The Mark Hellinger Theatre, named after the independent producer of his first two great films, Brute Force and The Naked City, but who had a career as a New York theater critic and columnist prior to that. It no longer exists as a theater as the Nederlanders has leased the theater to the Times Square Church since 1989. The musical's cast also included Hal Linden and had music by Manos Hadjidakis and lyrics by Joe Darion (who wrote the lyrics for Man of La Mancha). Illya Darling received six Tony nominations (best musical, best composer & lyricist, best director, best choreography, best actress for Mercouri and best featured actor for Nikos Kourkoulos). Though it didn't win any Tonys, the show ran for 320 performances.
While Dassin and Mercouri were in New York with the musical, a military coup took place in Greece. The couple were vocal in their opposition and accused of helping to finance the opposition so they were banned from returning to Greece for seven years. At first, they toured with the musical. Later, Dassin decided to make a documentary about the six-day war in the Middle East, another film I haven't seen. Titled Survival '67, it was filmed in Israel, written by Irwin Shaw and released in 1968. Here is an excerpt of Renata Adler's New York Times review:
By Renata Adler for The New York Times
"describes itself as 'a paean to Israel.' What gets lost is the brave, tragic war itself. (There is hardly any documentary war footage at all.) The film, which keeps crossing what little moving footage it has — wounded men, monuments to Babi Yar and Buchenwald — by an inability to shut up, is poor and ineffective propaganda.
…
It is also poor reporting — it simply does not tell us anything that we did not know already, and what it does tell — in fuzzy interviews about, for example, the Arab refugee problem — it tells unclearly. Everything about it is off."
While Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri were exiled from their home in Greece, they lived in New York. For the first time since Thieves' Highway, Dassin contracted to make a feature for an American studio (Paramount). For the first time since He Who Must Die, he also was making a feature that didn't have Mercouri in the cast because Uptight had an all-black cast. Truly a film of the moment, Uptight takes place in Cleveland four days after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. In another respect, it wasn't of the moment since Dassin was remaking The Informer, the film the won John Ford his first directing Oscar in 1935 and changing the milieu from Irish revolutionaries to black militants. It starts with a hyperactive animated credit sequence set to music by Booker T. Jones. Dassin co-wrote the screenplay with Ruby Dee and Julian Mayfield, both of whom played roles in the film. As a time capsule film, Uptight remains an interesting experience and it contains some really good performances, especially by Raymond St. Jacques as a militant leader and Roscoe Lee Browne as a smooth operator who'll sell anyone out for the right price. Dassin takes a lot of flights of fancy, particularly in one drugged-out sequence involving crazy mirrors at an amusement park.
In 1970, he directed Mercouri in Promise at Dawn. Of the film, Roger Ebert wrote:
Jules Dassin's Promise at Dawn is a warmly drawn love poem in two parts, one dealing with style and the other with the story. Of the two, the first is more interesting: Dassin's treatment of his wife, Melina Mercouri, is a marriage of script, photography and performance designed to showcase her talent and beauty. The second love story — the love Melina's character has for her son — is rather static and even a little distracting in these decades after Freud.
In 1974. as described on the Melina Mercouri Foundation website, "On the occasion of the November 1974 Athens Polytechnic student revolt, Dassin, still exiled, filmed in New York The Rehearsal, a political documentary with the free participation of Olympia Dukakis, Lillian Hellman, Melina Mercouri, Sir Laurence Olivier, Manuella Pavlidou, Maximillian Schell, Mikis Theodorakis and others. Dassin considered this to have been one of his best films. It was due to be distributed on the day of the fall of the dictatorship and became untimely. Therefore it was never released. After the collapse of the junta, Jules Dassin and Melina Mercouri returned to Greece where they settled for the rest of their lives. Melina was actively involved in the establishment and promotion of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party."
Dassin's penultimate film, A Dream of Passion, came out in 1978 and told the story of an actress (Mercouri) preparing to play Medea who spends time with an imprisoned American woman (Ellen Burstyn) who, like Medea, killed her own children. I'm ashamed to admit that Dassin's final film happens to be the first film of his that I saw, It was 1981's A Circle of Two starring Tatum O'Neal as a college-age student obsessed with a famous artist played by Richard Burton. This was on either HBO or Showtime soon after we had it for the first time and I was in junior high. All I knew was the girl I had a crush on since The Bad News Bears and Little Darlings took off her top in it. I couldn't tell you anything about the movie and I didn't know who the hell Jules Dassin was. I certainly do now. Everyone should.
Dassin continued to direct plays once he stopped making movies and Mercouri turned to politics, becoming the longest-serving cultural minister in Greece's history. She made it a campaign to get the Parthenon or Elgin Marbles returned to Greece from the British Museum in England that had held them for more than 200 years. Unfortunately, the debate has continued past the deaths of both Dassin and Mercouri, though popular opinion in both countries side with returning the marbles to Greece.
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Labels: Bette, blacklist, Brando, Buñuel, Burstyn, Ebert, Harold Pinter, Huston, J. Robbins, John Ford, Julie Christie, K. Douglas, Kazan, Lemmon, Mastroianni, Milestone, Montand, Olivier, Oscars, Truffaut
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Tuesday, December 20, 2011
A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma
By Damian Arlyn
While some might be of the opinion that Oliver Stone’s most archetypal movie is Wall Street or Platoon, I happen to think the film which holds that particular distinction is JFK (which celebrates its 20th anniversary today). It is not necessarily his greatest movie, but it is his most significant in a number of ways. In a career littered with provocative, politically charged works, it has proved to be arguably his most controversial. It marked the beginning of a stylistic period in Stone’s filmmaking (a fast, in-your-face approach to storytelling which culminated in Stone’s outrageously anarchic Natural Born Killers). Finally, it was (and still seems to be) one of Stone’s most personal projects: the result of years of research, overwhelming passion and righteous indignation. Indeed, of all Stone’s protagonists, the man at the center of JFK (who is, somewhat ironically, not the titular character) serves as perhaps the best representative of the ideals and opinions of Oliver himself. In reality, the motives and actions of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (the only prosecutor ever to go to trial in the assassination of President Kennedy) are not entirely clear nor always seem purely honorable, but in the film, Garrison — wonderfully played by Kevin Costner — is a man on a crusade, a courageous hero of the highest intentions and noblest stature crying, “Let the truth be told though the heavens fall!” He is the director's alter ego, a lone wolf fighting the establishment in the name of truth, justice and, yes, the American way.
JFK was my first Oliver Stone picture. My dad took me to see it in the theater when I was a sophomore in high school and I was, as the expression goes, blown away by it. Incidentally, he was (and still is to some degree) a major expert on the Kennedy conspiracy, so he was able to lean over and tell me at various junctures "That's true" or "That's not true" which helped orient me in the somewhat overwhelming
deluge of faces, names, dates and theories with which I was being bludgeoned. My dad once owned the largest collection of books, magazines, videos and even vintage newspaper articles about that specific event which I have ever seen. After watching the film and concluding that there definitely was a conspiracy and a cover-up, I even read a few of them myself, including the screenplay to the film which contained a footnoted source for every piece of information that Stone wrote into the expository dialogue and/or imagery of the film. It gave me a whole new appreciation for a movie's potential to tell a story which, if not "true" or "historically accurate," is at least "factual." Eventually I became somewhat of an expert myself and years later, after getting married and moving to Dallas, I finally visited the sixth floor museum and Dealey Plaza (the latter of which, I was shocked to discover, is a very small, and intimately contained space). Now, however, having read multiple accounts from different writers arguing for both sides of the conspiracy debate — including this very compelling website run by Dave Reitzes, whose experience with the film is remarkably similar to my own — I have no idea what really happened on that day in Dallas (though I still think there is more to the story than we are being told). However, one thing that has not changed, is that JFK remains a seminal film in my development as a cinephile.
Much can be said about the movie's many stellar qualities, such as the performances from its immense cast (a dizzying collection of such familiar faces as Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Bacon, John Candy, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Gary Oldman, Donald Sutherland, etc). In a nice bit of subversive casting, Stone even got the real Jim Garrison to portray Judge Earl Warren of the Warren Commission. Much could also be said about John Williams' suspenseful and emotional Oscar-nominated music score, but the main element of the film which captivated me upon my first viewing (and which I studied very carefully upon numerous subsequent viewings) was its visual aesthetic. In order to make a film which was heavy on talk into an arresting experience, Stone deftly employed various cinematic techniques that until that time had never been employed with such enthusiastic exuberance nor wild abandon in a historical epic.
His approach to shooting and editing the film was considered confusing and indulgent by some and incredibly powerful and innovative by others. I personally fell into the latter camp. Jumping back and forth (sometimes in a seemingly random manner) from authentic to recreated footage, from color to black-and-white and from 35 to 16mm, JFK creates such an apparently chaotic product that people didn't know what to make of it. The more one delves deeper into it though, the more one discovers that there is indeed "method in the madness." Stone's is a stream-of-consciousness approach to examining history, a process that makes no distinction between past and present, between what has happened and what is happening and, perhaps most controversially, between theory and fact. To Stone, history is in the eye of the beholder and he presents so many different perspectives, ideas and judgments that he was essentially, as film critic Roger Ebert proposed, fighting the official establishment myth by "weaving a counter-myth." Not surprisingly, Stone's effort garnered a great deal of criticism from various esteemed news sources. It did not help their case that they were attacking the film well before it had come out and anyone, including them, had even seen it, their zeal and hostility seemingly inspired more by fear of losing their privileged authoritative status than by supposed journalistic integrity and objectivity.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) JFK's notoriety, it was very well-received upon its release in December 1991. The film grossed more than $50 million worldwide, which was impressive considering that the film was more than three hours long, and ended up receiving eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture, best director and best supporting actor for Tommy Lee Jones. It ended up winning two of those awards for the experimental cinematography and editing. It also, much to Stone's delight no doubt, incited a whole media discussion about the Kennedy assassination. Much like the media circus that surrounded the release of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, all you could see and hear on the news for several months was talk of what actually occurred on Nov. 22, 1963. In point of fact, we probably will never know what occurred. As Pesci's nervous David Ferrie quotes Winston Churchill in the film, "It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Still, perhaps whether we ever know the truth (or, to be more precise, know THAT we know the truth since we may already know it) isn't as important as that we never give up looking for it. Maybe the real message behind the film is that the pursuit of truth is more important then the possession of it.
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Labels: 90s, Costner, D. Sutherland, Ebert, John Williams, Kevin Bacon, Lemmon, Matthau, Mel Gibson, Movie Tributes, Oldman, Oliver Stone, Oscars, Pesci, Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones
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Monday, November 07, 2011
Walk on the Wild Side
By Phil
My, how times change. In 1986, Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild crackled with hip edginess. It was smart, sexy and subversive, a playful jab to family values in the Reagan era. But the passage of years hasn’t been particularly kind to the film, which saw its theatrical release 25 years ago today. While the picture still has its charms, enough to warrant the Criterion treatment earlier this year, nowadays Something Wild comes off as a bit more mild.
For Demme, the experience must have been a blast after the debacle of Swing Shift, a 1984 Goldie Hawn dramedy in which the director had lost control to the studio. Something Wild was an opportunity for the filmmaker — whose impressive oeuvre up to that point included Handle with Care and Melvin and Howard — to get back on track.
The story follows Charlie Driggs, played by Jeff Daniels, a mild-mannered banker in New York whose life is thrown for a loop after a chance encounter with a sexy free spirit named Lulu (Melanie Griffith). She catches him walking out on a bill at a corner restaurant, pegs him as a closet rebel and proceeds to pick him up in near-record time. The uptight Charlie goes along, albeit reluctantly (“I can’t just take the afternoon off! Are you nuts), but Lulu turns out to be more than he bargained for. She swipes money from a liquor store cash register, handcuffs him to a motel room bed for some raucous sex and makes a habit of testing Charlie’s ability to ditch restaurant tabs.
Eventually, she whisks Charlie away to Pennsylvania and she tells her homespun mom (Dana Preu) that they’ve been married for several months. It is there that Lulu dispenses with a brunette wig, takes off the gaudy jewelry and reveals to Charlie that her real name as Audrey Hankel.
Things quickly turn dangerous when the pair goes to Audrey’s 10th high school reunion. They run into the woman’s old flame, a disarmingly charismatic jailbird named Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta). Audrey clearly is terrified of the guy, but Charlie doesn’t clue in until it’s too late. Ray brutally robs a convenience store, clocks Charlie and all hell breaks loose.
The jarring tonal shift of Something Wild remains its most interesting aspect. Still, Demme’s breezy direction and E. Max Frye’s quirky screenplay do provide considerable charm. The periphery is especially appealing, from a knockout soundtrack — veering from reggae to post-punk — to the film’s comforting conceit that life on the road is populated with open-hearted folks eager to lend a helping hand. Small kindnesses abound here; the picture’s most emotionally resonant moments stem from the random cashier or motel guest who Charlie and Audrey happen across on their journey.
The casting, however, is otherwise a mixed bag. Daniels certainly is likable in the Jack Lemmon Everyman role, and he displays strong comic timing as he unravels amid the force of nature that is Lulu/Audrey. But the audience is asked to suspend a staggering amount of disbelief with Melanie Griffith as that force of nature. She is a shockingly bland seductress here, making it tough to swallow that Charlie would so fully fall under her reckless spell. It almost feels as if Griffith is a placeholder for an actual performance that never quite materialized.
That void is all the more apparent when Liotta blasts onscreen. In his first major film appearance, he lends Ray Sinclair with generous doses of menace of charm — so much so that the movie winds up sagging when he isn’t around.
As a romantic comedy, Something Wild is a pleasant trifle but little more.
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Labels: 80s, Demme, Jeff Daniels, Lemmon, Liotta
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