Payday (1973)
Payday is one of those pictures that might play better now than it did in 1973; as a retort to the continued wave of movies that pretend to be about various music stars, or the generic life of a star, but are actually about indulging in our personal wishes to be rich and famous. Payday is the perfect, the only, title for this picture; an acknowledgment of an undercurrent we (or I) nearly always imagine as we (or I) digest all the usual encouragement clichés of most musical movies. Almost Famous, Ray and Walk the Line are a few such movies; downplaying drugged, pilled, boozed-up milieus as utopias of self-actualization, while managing to keep in mind what the screenwriters’ manuals say about “likeable heroes”. The creation of art amidst these inner-outer chaotic lifestyles, or the possibility of achieving some sort of personal redemption with this art, is nearly always left unexplored. And that can nag.
The conflict is that I, to varying degrees, like most of these movies. Almost Famous floats on a wishful thinking cloud. Director Cameron Crowe seems to be acknowledging that, yes, he lived those years with the Allmans and Zeppelin, but what he really always sought was to disappear into a Billy Wilder or Francois Truffaut movie with a girl of his dreams who got him. There’s an unintended heartbreak to that subtext, and Almost Famous has beautiful passages, but it breaks Lester Bangs’ rules, voiced in the movie, to remain “merciless”; and that is both the best and the worst thing about the movie. Ray and Walk the Line are star-vehicles, and the various stars are terrific in an immediate-hold-the-screen kind of way, though a major faux pas remains: that Ray Charles and Johnny Cash somehow managed to inspire the same damn movie. Even Walk Hard, an attempted parody of these pictures, is funny, but just as hypocritical-too in love with its subjects to get to anything else.
Payday is the anything else, and this, alone, justifies its de rigueur for the 1970s glass-half-empty outlook. We need a picture that’s as confidently black as others are white. Don Carpenter, the writer, and Daryl Duke, the director, have an ambivalence towards their characters that packs a genuine force. Little subtle-haunting flourishes of observation bubble up throughout the picture on the sidelines, and they slowly accumulate to something casually devastating. Rip Torn stars as Maury Dan, a wannabe country legend who’s courting success from the fringe. People recognize Maury, and he can get laid just about whenever he wants, but he’s not yet an icon-more like an uncle you really liked at a barbeque once but can’t quite remember. Carpenter and Duke patiently dole out Dan’s nature and identity bit by bit and, about seventy minutes in, we realize that our natural-bred tendency to revere those who stand in the spotlight has been played against us-those bits revealed to be something quite foul.
Rip Torn is intuitive, confident and amazing, lacking any trace of actor editorializing. Torn finds the pleasure, the entitlement, the buzzy, self-hating damage, and still manages to make the bastard likeable and sexy without canceling any of the other shadows out. (Most actors have to compromise in some department somewhere.) This is a musical picture that recognizes that the music springs from the same place as the damage, and that they are undividable-a paradox of creation. Torn’s multi-tiered performance has another effect too: it humanizes the supporting characters (Torn is so effective, so contradictory, that we understand why the others fall for it).
The picture opens on Torn singing a song (“She’s Only a Country Girl”) during a gig, and the free-wheeling camera allows us to find him for ourselves as we also sift through the various band members, fans, hangers-on, and ladies, all destined to remain on the periphery. In a few largely dialogue-free minutes, the film establishes the world completely and organically (in league with some Altman). The dialogue, to echo the Melvin and Howard post, occasionally strives for poetry, but it’s the poetry of the cynical (the poetry of the people who hold a drink with a cigarette butt floating in it) and it works without compromising the airy, natural vibe of the picture. Trying to get a girl in bed, one of the guys exclaims, “Girl, you came here on purpose, and this here is the purpose!”
The picture isn’t a civics lesson. The encounters in Payday, even at their worst, are staged with vitality and humor. Power-plays are made over Dr. Peppers and sandwiches with or without mayo. Leagues of disgust are revealed in how hastily someone discards a piece of bubblegum. Some of the episodes (in a disc jockey’s office, or, over a dog, or, later, a woman, who is abandoned for exploding into inconvenient hurt) have that occasionally-out-of-nowhere strange tang of the real. Everyone in the cast registers. Ahna Capri, as the blonde woman left on the road, is allowed a simultaneous pain and hypocrisy: you’re repulsed by and for her in equal measures. Cliff Emmich’s disquietingly obliging driver, Michael C. Gwynne’s manager, who treats a murder as just another misstep to be sidestepped, etc., etc. By the end, Maury Dan and crew have attained something that few of these types of pictures manage: a true untidy-monster-grace.
Melvin and Howard (1980)
Capturing impotence is tricky business in the movies; as to do so is to court unintended flaccidity of narrative. Ask the overrated Carnal Knowledge or the underrated The Weather Man. There’s the issue of getting tied up in something overtly schematic; of choking the life out of your picture with a can’t-win-against-the-big-guy thesis that, regardless of validity, feels rigged and self-pitying. Melvin and Howard, director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Bo Goldman’s film of a middling man stuck in indentured servitude to the myth of the “American Dream”, trumps the poor man card with repetition. Melvin Dummar’s (Paul Le Mat) failure isn’t the climax or a shock or a tragedy, it’s a constant, dependable, infuriating, comforting, given; a diaper this baby, truly, doesn’t want to outgrow. Melvin fails so often that it becomes a source of low-electric comedy; we get used to it, accept it, and move on to something of greater interest: the nature-the necessity-the ironic heroism-the sheer adventure-of delusion, specifically the very American delusion that we’re all going to one day “make it”. (We’re a country of Don Quixotes.) Melvin and Howard attains an uncompromised, compassionate, softly-melancholic-screwball tone; yet another picture that revels in Demme’s equal opportunity humanity; his belief in a flake’s unalienable right to be a flake.
The picture has a fixed lottery ending, the “American Dream” revealed yet again to be a piece of cheese that keeps the hamster’s wheel perpetually turning, but, unlike most pictures, Demme earns his pathos because he doesn’t try too hard. The warm lighting and shooting of the picture contributes, gracefully, to the energy of the characters’ defeat. (Demme favors a particular kind of loving dolly in on the characters that probably inspired certain shots in Boogie Nights.) The picture’s matter of factitude about Melvin’s eventual understanding that the courts will never accept Howard Hughes’ (Jason Robards) will is heartbreaking. Melvin, the puffy man-boy who squanders every opportunity he gets in the continued effort to quench various immediate thirsts sprung from feelings of inadequacy, grows up (kinda maybe) at the end of Melvin and Howard. Melvin drives off; appreciating his elusive night ride with the eccentric, near mythical Hughes for what it was and opting, one hopes, to move on and live his life.
Paul Le Mat is one of many actors that I wish we could’ve seen more from. Maybe it’s because his persona is so specific, so effective in certain molds, that unimaginative studio executives felt little could be done with him. Le Mat’s turn in American Graffiti is broad and sort of magical (how director George Lucas, with Le Mat, Richard Dreyfuss, Wolfman Jack, Candy Clarke, Charles Martin Smith, etc, manages to keep cutting to the aggressively boring Cindy Williams-Ron Howard pairing is beyond me, but that’s for another day). Le Mat brings that same blobby lack of definition to Melvin and Howard, but, again as in American Graffiti, he keeps surprising you, with sharp, off-kilter timing that keeps his character from slipping into the maudlin. Watch Melvin watch his favorite game show, bragging that he always picks the right door; this could easily too openly telegraph his pathetic disposition, too aggressively tug at the heart strings, but Le Mat dials down, without making a show of even dialing down. Le Mat appears to be, and maybe was, a found object.
Le Mat and Demme’s visions of this picture’s ungainly comedy of need are simpatico; and Mary Steenburgen is right there too; she’s, in my memory, never been better. Steenburgen, as Melvin’s eventual ex-wife, answers the phone in the middle of the night when Melvin calls to tell her of the inheritance, we see another man in the dark, his arm over her, but her face, in seconds, conjures that love that probably now itches like a phantom limb. Watch Steenburgen, a little girl who plays at being a sex kitten in a strip club, say (as if it requires no further explanation) that she likes to dance. Steenburgen is also given the dialogue that most consciously strives for poetry, and she assures that it reaches it. Fed up with Melvin (again), she says something to him in French as she leaves (again). Melvin asks about it, she says she always dreamed of being a French interpreter; he reminds her that she doesn’t speak French, she replies, through near tears, “That’s why it’s a dream.”
It’s a given that Jason Robards must disappear early on in Melvin and Howard, but his alienation haunts the picture. Robards exudes that specialty of his, a gruff disconnected man’s man intelligence that masks a surprisingly deep well of vulnerability. Melvin picks Howard up from the desert, where Howard has been sleeping after crashing his bike for an unspecified amount of time, and Melvin needles haggard, homeless-looking Howard into singing a song with him. Howard’s gradual, tentative opening up to this new, strange man is convincing and wonderful; an ideal movie fantasy of transcendent friendship and kindness. Demme confidently sells something here that’s harder to buy than a dinosaur reborn; or flying people, or whatever the physics compromise de jour may be: that we’re in this together.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)
Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? suffers from too much “art”. The picture has a haunting, bizarre, taken from true events premise: in the midst of the Great Depression, a punishing dance-off is staged. The contestants, a variety of the poorest and most desperate, subject themselves to weeks of unending shaking and twirling, punctuated only by fleeting naps; and meals in which they are required to move while chewing. There’s also, seemingly timed to perfectly coincide with the dancers’ most vulnerable moments, race-offs, which eliminate couples at a faster clip and further underline the human-as-cattle motif of the program. An announcer (Gig Young) periodically chimes in with contrived, chilling, “humanity”, which is pitched in rehearsed, energetic blasts of encouragement that further deflates and hammers, hammers, hammers. This is all endured for the promise of fifteen hundred dollars, or, slightly more likely, a chance at attracting the interest of someone of influence in show business.
The dance scenes, staged in graceful, flowing alternations of long and close shots, deliver the outrage and frailty with which Pollack is clearly aiming. Too bad then, that Pollack doesn’t trust his subject matter. There’s too much self-conscious, faux-important, arty-art moralizing going on here. The actors, including Red Buttons, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, Susannah York, and Michael Sarrazin, are all too wide-eyed and heavily misguided naïve. One wonders if this contest is the first indignity these people have had to suffer.
The idea of the picture is appalling enough on its own, so it’s redundant and disappointing that our director should take our hand and guide us across the exclamation points. We feel the waste, the constriction, but in a way that’s overly worked out and partially accidental in equal measure. Pollack clutters the action, which should be focused and unrelenting and speaking for itself, and distracts with devices such as flashbacks of Sarrazin and overly theatrical back-stage lightening. The poverty manifested as game-show sanitized physical misery (the kind that distracts from other, more naturally arrived at, physical misery), and its ironic, unnerving, juxtaposition with the cheery pageantry backdrop, should be the first and only concern. The material begs for a macabre sense of humor, a tongue in cheek of the damned sensibility (one can only imagine what Altman would’ve done with it, or the Kubrick of Lolita) but Pollack seems to be too insecure, too insistent on proving he’s an artist, to allow himself to fully act like one.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? gets stronger and hotter as the story inevitably gets bleaker and bleaker though, and Pollack, surprisingly, lets the characters’ continued deterioration stand on its own. The film’s other actor is its ace: Jane Fonda, in one of her best performances, which is clearly saying something. Fonda doesn’t subject herself to the picture’s thesis governed m.o.: she’s hard, sexy, bitter, and closed-off: come-on within snarling come-on. Fonda, even at her nastiest, is exhilaratingly alive: her hostility channeled as white-electric current. Fonda leaves the broad stuff to the less instinctual actors, and gets at the run-down engine of America at the time-no critique can rein this woman in.
Jane is sometimes too un-fake-ably self-possessed to convincingly register as someone with mortal concerns, someone who’s susceptible to human needs and miscalculations (it’s a barrier that surrounds all of the Fondas) but there’s a scene here, near the end; that sells her panic with a conviction I’ve rarely seen in the actress, even in her frequently brilliant work. The Fonda character, Gloria Beatty, finds herself paired with an older partner (Buttons) who’s clearly on his way out of the competition. Another race is called, and Gloria fights, screams, claws her way beyond the disqualifying bottom three places. The race goes on and on, much longer than we’re conditioned by movies to expect; and Fonda’s cynicism, her sweat, her panic, her unbendable will, unite and pitch forward with pure animal abandon. This is a memorable study of survival.
Gig Young is also fascinating in his ambiguity; he’s a portrait of charm and “the show must go on” savagery disguised as sympathy that might still, somehow, house just a little bit of authentic sympathy anyway. Young calls the contestants “good kids”, even in private, apparently oblivious to the irony of his own advice and solace-but he also always has a but up his sleeve-a way to further harvest the characters’ misery in the service of furthering audience satisfaction and profits.
The second half of the picture takes off from Fonda and Young’s performances (the first half is too dependant on the inexpressive Sarrazin); and the little details, which are initially minute, or perhaps only slightly irritating, gain a nightmarish quality in repetition: The siren that signals the return to the dance floor (it sounds as if it would announce the arrival of the secret police in another society). The increasing cruelty of the races. The spectators’ throwing of pennies at the contestants. The self-delusional announcements. Pollack’s touch, ironically, becomes surer with each fresh turn of derangement; probably because, by this point, the scenario has gained enough obvious, tangible affect for him- it straightens his sensibilities.
Until the end that is, which, not to put too fine of a point on it, sucks (no reveal here-but consider the title). They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? has a high-school short story ending: fatalistic and symbolic without the slightest consideration as to whether it fits the characters. On paper, the ending works-and it has effect in the movie too-but its stock, shock effect-melodrama that again distracts from the potent, despairing bulk of the story. The very final image is all that Pollack, and the audience, needed; a promise that the shop-‘til-you-drop madness is truly timeless, always shuffling, always racing, the music never ending. I’m playing devil’s advocate here to a certain extent, the picture is still a weird triumph- there are too many moments- and the subject matter is too strong, too readily lending to metaphor both past and present, for it not to be. But it’s also too fitting that the title to Pollack’s film should end with a question mark-the picture has unresolved issues about its unanswered questions.
Advise & Consent (1962)
The political picture can be difficult, primarily because it appears to be one of the genres (films dealing with mental breakdown being another) that’s most encouraging of a certain suffocating self-righteousness. Life, humor, even sex mostly, are choked out of these pictures in a desire to be taken seriously as (I assume) works of criticism or essays of change (Oscar traps). Charlie Wilson’s War, the recent Mike Nichols release, is such a film. War began promisingly as a boozy, one thing after another chronicle of a guy in Congress that kinda-sorta grows a conscience by accident, only to squander its strengths and originality (a we scratch each other’s backs to keep the machine rolling by way of compromise by way of humor born of despair that fleetingly recalls a contemporary screwball comedy by way of Altman on a lesser day) in favor of the usual eat your vegetables civics beats. Charlie Wilson’s War had a more honest than usual ending, I’ll give it that, but I had checked out long before, finding the self-congratulation too stifling.
Happily, the problems many usually note of Otto Preminger’s movies (cold impersonality being a primary), run straight into the problems of the political picture in Advise & Consent, and cancel one other out in the process. The film concerns the approval of the President’s (Franchot Tone) nomination for Secretary of State, Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda), by the Senate. Advise & Consent, unmistakably a Preminger film, opens with the most essential, definitively first, cog in the plot-the announcement of the nomination in the paper (an example of the picture’s admitted naiveté, primarily springing from a just adequate screenplay), which the President has made to the Senate’s excitement, dismay and shock. The conventional candidates were ignored (of course) in favor of Leffingwell, whom the President feels is essential to maintaining his legacy. The Senate Majority Leader (Walter Pidgeon) immediately kicks into spin drive on the President’s behalf, contacting a variety of (again, of course) eccentric characters in the Capitol in an effort to put the President’s nomination through with as little question and conflict as possible (the underrated Aaron Sorkin-Rob Reiner film, The American President, is a comedic gloss on an intentionally similar premise).
The President and Senate Majority Leader’s primary hurdle is South Carolina Senator Seabright Cooley, played by Charles Laughton in one of his grand, willfully bizarre scenery chewing roles. Laughton’s walk, intimidating in its purposefully, ironically visible vulnerability (an old fat man’s come on), has more personality and wit than many actors’ full bodied orations. Laughton’s full bodied orations then, which have no bearing on any kind of speech existing on planet Earth, are feats of hyperbolic poetry (also catch Witness for the Prosecution, if you haven’t yet) that puncture that ridiculous seriousness that pervades in many political pictures (The Contender, being another, recent, laughable example). Laughton accomplishes something notable here: he takes, as he’s normally apt to, his character so far into the theatrical stratosphere that he comes to resemble something more true (at least in our movie fed imaginations) than most movie politicians. Laughton signifies the idea of inner government as ultimate performance art, a perpetual game of evening the stakes, of give and take, tit for tat. (It stuns me that Preminger didn’t give Laughton a scene of eating rare steak.)
Preminger uses most of the other performers just as adroitly, with Gene Tierney, returning to Preminger after all those years, registering in a bit as a socialite Pidgeon is seeing in secret; blessing the film, briefly, with the pathos of her real story-a still beautiful woman, struggling to hold herself together amidst a society of jackals. Burgess Meredith brings the picture to a temporary standstill as a man of mental doubt who comes to accuse Leffingwell of Communist leanings; his frailty and torment seemingly borrowed from another picture, which brings the picture at hand to frightening, vivid life (he gives us a sense of the cost of all this nonsense without resorting to the pedantic). Tone, as the President, feels miscast at the beginning (we wonder how he could be elected) but blossoms, as Advise & Consent continues, into a memorable, convincing, portrait of casual, insidious, slight of hand entitlement.
Advise & Consent’s tone, and manipulation of plot, particularly pertaining to the Henry Fonda character, are what strike me as most interesting and subversive though. The opening third primes us for the usual, morally rigid story that subjects our spiritually untouchable character to a series of insults and doubt before allowing him to conquer all and rise to the occasion in order to bless us all with his sense of right and indignation. The picture introduces Fonda to us in a scene with his little son, drinking milk of all American things, never a good sign. Fonda’s scenes primarily consist of him defending himself to the increasingly self-amused Laughton character, again no surprise. Then the film drops Fonda almost entirely, after revealing him to be a bit more fallible than we expect. Contracting Fonda’s guilt, jarringly (like a disease), is an up to this point secondary character, Sen. Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), who discovers Fonda’s indiscretion via a manipulation on the part of Laughton. At this point, Advise & Consent, written off by Pauline Kael as mindless melodrama, comes to unexpected, feverish, lurid life.
The film, once again characteristic of Preminger, consciously concerns ahead of its time subject matter; namely, homosexuality, and the never-ending compromise that is service in the big government. To write off Preminger’s treatment of homosexuality, and its subsequent influence on the Leffingwell case, as merely melodramatic and puritanical (both true) is to miss part of the point: the Puritanism, whether a limitation of Preminger’s or an intentional manipulation of the filmmaker, informs Advise & Consent in a way that undeniably increases its fascination and tension. The shift in focus of characters is interesting enough for a mainstream American film of the early 1960s, but the shift in tone strikes me as amazing.
Brigham Anderson, facing professional and personal collapse, loses his wits, which in turn transforms much of the last third of Advise & Consent into a near horror picture. Yes, a gay club is portrayed as a nest of forbidden evil, but this is also the culmination of Anderson’s panic and is complimented by an earlier scene with Anderson and his wife at their home, and their child’s almost alien voice and she asks to play with dad. Is Preminger overplaying his hand? Or exhibiting considerably more empathetic filmmaking than is traditionally acknowledged in his work? I think it’s both, and that’s an unsettling accomplishment, with the picture’s brilliant, open-ended anti-climax serving as the cherry on top: revealing the entire story to be just one of many daily controversies, with the next already ready at the wings.
Preminger’s curious, remote approach dries the subtext free dialogue of the script. The superb, full compositions lend the picture a subtly and implication of inner life that is absent on the page. Preminger’s aloof outlook (a criticism that’s overstated but undeniably present), when wedded to the right story, perfectly compliments the barely repressed hysteria and perversion of the subject matter. Angel Face is a wonderful example, and so is Advise & Consent, rightfully regarded as one of Preminger’s strongest films.
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Elevator to the Gallows has a menacing central image that the rest of the picture struggles to equal. Julien (Maurice Ronet), a man of dubious reputation, murders his boss, flees, forgets something, and gets himself stuck in the damn titular elevator trying to go back for it. Julien waits and waits, trapped, a bug in a particularly precarious jar. This sight, of a killer cramped and crowded by his own guilt, at the mercy of a larger justice disguised as perverse bad luck, is unforgettable. Unfortunately, Louis Malle, in his directorial debut, isn’t satisfied with this simple, ingenious scenario. The story splinters into another scenario, and then yet another, these latter plot strands only distracting from the sensuality and power of the original story.
Elevator to the Gallows is an example of two otherwise perfectly suitable thriller ideas being forced into competition with one another and nearly canceling each other out in the process. As Julien finds himself imprisoned in the faulty elevator, a callow young couple decides on impulse to steal his car and, well, they haven’t quite gotten that far yet. They eventually end up inadvertently framing Julien for a murder he had nothing to do with. The police close in on Julien for this second murder, all as Florence (Jeanne Moreau), the wife of Julien’s former employer as well as (of course) Julien’s lover, searches the streets for Julien, thinking he’s discarded her and their plan, running out with another woman.
Elevator isn’t as frantic as all the above would lead you to believe, Malle allows the picture a deliberate, dreamy, existential pace that distracts us from the sheer busy-ness (and ludicrousness) of what we’re watching. And we should be careful with the term ludicrous, as to apply logic to a picture that’s clearly striving for (and obtaining) the poetic is to miss the point. The sensuality of the images and the one thing after another tumbling dominoes nature of the scenario aren’t totally of a piece though. We’ve seen many noirs or crime pictures in which events shatter in many different directions, but the best of those pictures (let’s recruit Rififi as Exhibit A, as it’s in front of me as I write this) achieve a true willy-nilly chaos. We feel swept up with the characters as their existences slip out from underneath them. Elevator to the Gallows is a slower, narrower picture, and the excess of events is an intrusion. The frequent cross-cutting to updates of the other wronged parties breaks the “all alone as the world folds in” spell. (Let’s recruit, as Exhibit B, a picture that nurtures this sort of wounded mood, carefully, without a bunch of extraneous hugger-mugger, Le Samourai).
I wouldn’t dare advise you skip the picture though. I go back to the haunting image of Julien in the elevator, awaiting judgment, a regret or common decency still beyond him (he would appear to think in more animal, instinctual terms) smoking cigarettes to pass the time. There’s also the image of the beautiful Moreau in close-up, whispering words of love and concern to her doomed partner in a pay-phone, moments before the murder is to go down. There’s the near Expressionism of the interrogation room sequences toward the end: the room bathed in darkness, only the speaking parties allowed the slightest of vision by a sliver of light above. Elevator to the Gallows has a hazy, soft, but somehow sharp at the same time cinematography that conjures hallucinatory, naughty, sexy thoughts as corrupted by a greater moral decay and outrage (pointed references to Algeria abound). This picture would make an ideal double bill with either Godard’s Le Petit soldat or Allen’s Match Point. (The former also explores Algeria in thriller terms; while the latter also addresses the notion of chance as ultimate judge, jury and executioner.)
In the end, I still very much value Elevator to the Gallows, allowing the good and great scenes to count for more than the scenes that tend to verge on the tedious. The film is obviously the work of a major filmmaker (though that’s easy to say fifty years after the fact) and I imagine Elevator is a picture that will grow in estimation as it fades in immediate viewing memory, possibly reshaping itself in the mind as the slimmer, less tangible picture it was always meant to be. That possibility is one of the many facets of the magic of the movies.
The Left Handed Gun (1958)
It’s impossible to see Arthur Penn’s The Left Handed Gun nowadays and not consider Bonnie and Clyde, the ironically, morally gray outlaw picture that Penn would direct nine years later. The films are startling in their similarities, particularly in their ahead of their time insistence that violence amount to something more than men merrily, mindlessly blowing one other away in the service of some self-justifying, hypocritical, appease the manly man coda. The Left Handed Gun isn’t nearly as violent as Bonnie and Clyde, there’s no way it could have been in the U.S. in 1958, but you may find it, in its own way, even more uncomfortable than Clyde. There’s a disconnection of style and artistic temperament in Gun that’s unexpected and frightening.
Younger viewers can slip Bonnie and Clyde into their DVD players and prepare themselves for one of the first of the new wave of violent, rebellious American pictures of the 1960s-1970s: Bonnie and Clyde undeniably belongs in that era. The Left Handed Gun, on the other hand, shot in stunning, stately, black and white, looks just like another breezy, authority reaffirming American western of the 1950s, perhaps directed by Howard Hawks in the second or third act of his career, and that expectation comes to bite you in the ass. The Left Handed Gun behaves according to the standards of the day, at first, complete with instantly dated opening song, but it gradually becomes something darker and more ambitious. Bonnie and Clyde, like Psycho or any other classic that’s at least partially legendary for its bloodshed and anarchic sensibilities, unavoidably braces you through cultural osmosis. The Left Handed Gun has the benefit of relative obscurity; it’s a vicious little animal that doesn’t announce itself with a BEWARE sign.
I tend to forget how dangerous Paul Newman can be in the right role, as his wonderful elder statesman performances have a habit of coming to my mind first. Newman’s charm, at times, particularly in his youth, could trump whatever the character may have actually been about (the traditional trap of the movie star) but he was also, and would continue to be, an astute, instinctual actor; a man very much aware of his presence and charisma. Occasionally, Newman would turn that heat right back on the audience (Hud, Cool Hand Luke) and do something risky and uncomfortable, or at least more risky and uncomfortable than you expect. Billy the Kid is cut from the same cloth: good looking, commanding, likeable, but also a flake; a live-wire who reaches for his gun at the slightest provocation with no consideration as to how the gunfight will affect his friends or himself the day, or even moments, after. Armistices, apologies, secret alliances, back door hand shakes, these are the dealings of corrupt higher-ups; Billy’s gun is, in his eyes, the great equalizer.
The Left Handed Gun may have an even fuller, more complicated understanding of its troubled hero than the (still greater) Bonnie and Clyde. Billy the Kid is glamorized, revered (largely by townspeople unaware of how casually he screws people caught in the cross-fire) but the picture never dilutes his self-absorption or near insanity. That refusal comes into focus in what is possibly the best scene in the picture: Billy and his de facto gang are at a party hosted by destined pursuer Pat Garrett (John Dehner), and a gentleman, resenting Billy’s fame as well as the subsequent, by the skin of his teeth pardon afforded by an armistice, tries to start something. Billy initially resists, and Newman handles his push and pull towards and away from violence and agitation with understatement, slowly boiling to an intense, unchecked fever. It’s a testament to Penn, Newman and John Dehner’s work that the almost murders of The Left Handed Gun are more disturbing than the actual murders of most pictures. This picture, at its best, has that same liquid violence to comedy to violent comedy to slapstick volatility that marks Bonnie and Clyde as an undeniable masterpiece.
The true bloodshed of The Left Handed Gun is also a triumph, memorable in its strangeness and near abstraction. Billy and his boys, as they must, ultimately disregard the armistice and plug one of the men they’ve vowed to punish for their former boss’s murder, and the shooting is ghastly and cold-blooded: the man’s terrified, twisted face framed in a triangle as he collapses to his death. Another murder, committed out of indifference to a promise Billy made to Garrett, is a bit more justified but even more perverse in its violation: the partygoers cry and stand shocked and aghast, the weight of what’s just transpired acknowledged with remarkable (even for today) honesty.
Penn, again foreshadowing Bonnie and Clyde, doesn’t let us off the hook with a lazy, convenient ending either: the right person dies and the right person lives, but the final act is denied any riding off into the sunset closure: the final killing is as much a suicide as anything else, a loss brought about from imperceptible damage, bitterness and twisted authority. The ending is even more of a lump in the throat than Clyde’s, that picture, reminiscent of Easy Rider, at least allows us a certain self-glamorizing, self-pitying, the little guy can’t ever win fantasy. The Left Handed Gun pitilessly reveals Billy the Kid to be every bit as self-motivated as the big man he opposes, he’s just not as adept at playing the game, which is, unfortunately, our country in a nutshell.
Mon oncle (1958)
Jacques Tati’s Mon oncle (the second in the Monsieur Hulot series) is one of those pictures that reaffirms how underutilized the comedy picture generally is, especially nowadays. The comedy (along with the horror film) seems to be seen as a genre to cut your teeth on before moving on to more “important” pictures, tossed off to the little guys when there should be room reserved for our masters. We should know by now that the comedy and the horror picture are two of the hardest genres to realize, as well as two of the richest and most malleable: the two genres most willing to lend themselves to subtexts that can be heavy, or maudlin or self-congratulatory in other genres.
Mon oncle is a tonal wonder, a film that appears to be light, airy and inconsequential, but slowly works its hooks into you without your knowing. The films all too often these days announce their effect from the outset, a program might as well appear in the lobby announcing the evening’s intentions; “tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Haggis wishes to present to you a story of racial strife and hope” or “tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Gondry wishes to present to you a story of incoherent whimsy and self-consciousness.” If you haven’t read or seen much of Tati’s Hulot series (I’m a novice myself), you can be forgiven for assuming you have Mon oncle figured out, particularly after the stylish/cute opening scene that follows a group of dogs from the cramped, cluttered, more rambunctiously alive city to the stylized, stiflingly chic home of the family of a higher-up in the plastics industry. One dog gets beyond the gates while the others don’t; a blunt but more succinct summation of the classes than Haggis has yet to offer.
The family is comprised of a puffy, proud wife, the puffier, prouder plastics executive, and a boy who appears to be over it all (he longs, as many people in these types of pictures have a habit of longing, for something more tangible and real, a bit of mischief to jar all that overwhelming pride in purposeless accomplishment). Left to their own devices, this family would be assured a place of tranquil suburban convenience that fosters a certain kind of new age modern lobotomy, chic ritual at the expense of anything messy or imaginative. But that is not to be, Monsieur Hulot, the uncle of the title (whom the director plays himself) occasionally drops by to shake the family out of their domestic stupor. Hulot is a stranded misfit, clad in coat and pipe, (suggesting Sherlock Holmes by way of Peter Sellers, though purposefully lacking the personality of either) that lives a life, like the Tramp, or even Boudu, totally devoid of any structure or self-consciousness. Hulot isn’t contemptuous of his surroundings as Boudu was; he, like the Tramp, projects an aura of mystification with the world around him, always one, two, a hundred steps behind.
Tati’s primary interest here would appear to be the character’s homes and how they contrast and comment on their inhabitants. Hulot’s apartment, established in a classic bit, appears to have been designed by a hyper, over-imaginative child: doors, stairs and ramps appear for their own dream sake divorced from any practical purpose. The exterior of Hulot’s home is a silent marvel, a design that (poignantly) reaffirms the beautiful, common textures and rituals of our lives. The family’s house is one of those 2001 competence at the expense of personality nightmares crossed with the board game “Mouse Trap”; the family spends as much time shifting from room to room (each of which having to be allowed to fulfill its maximum capacity for use) as Hulot does climbing his stairs, but they carry on with a joyless, sad manner of manufactured obligation that chokes the love of process away; this family’s having coffee before they’ve adequately set the dinner table for the dinner they barely remember eating.
Mon oncle has a dreamy, slow start, but the jokes accumulate like a snowball down a hill, and soon you find yourself overwhelmed with Tati’s layered, restrained, seemingly free-form framing, his world falls apart with a smirk and a sure hand. A party sequence, near the middle of the picture, is one of the most impressively sustained bits of comic dementia I’ve ever seen, managing to turn a series of ridiculously elaborate walkways (all to protect the non-existent garden) into something elusive, unshakable and distinctly menacing. Hulot is to meet the family’s neighbor, in the hope that he settle down and stay out of everyone’s way, but he quickly gets distracted with the boy and a plant, while the rest of the family and guests find themselves grappling with an already troublesome fountain (the mother only keeps it on for guests, who slip in and out with maddening frequency) that has broken. Business transactions are had, banalities are exchanged, all as tables, snacks and chairs are moved from one end of the yard to another, and all in accordance with those damn walkways. Tati ratchets the tension, and you slowly realize that he’s effectively squeezed you from laughter to an authentic discomfort: the stifling, formal hypocrisy of the upper class has become a rounded, authentic, original vision of hell.
Mon oncle is overlong, and Tati’s technique here ultimately inspires more exhaustion than elation (though one imagines this is also purposeful) but the film is justifiably revered, and ends on an unexpectedly devastating implication. We’re conditioned by Chaplin to expect this type of picture to go for the tear ducts at the end, to mourn the little guy swallowed by society, but Tati sends his Hulot on his way toward another setting to fumble (the father’s plan finally taking hold) and the film, surprisingly, views this as a positive. The father, at odds with his little boy throughout much of the picture, is finally allowed a moment of grace and mischief that’s unobstructed by the inattentive, bumbling uncle. Hulot’s dreaminess ultimately revealed to be as insidious a form of self-delusion as the house and all its baffling gadgetry.
★★★★
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
Or director Monte Hellman attempts to elevate the cross-country film to the level of existential art. Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1970s race picture paced like an Antonioni film: every scene drawn out to the point of surreality, every line of dialogue punctuated with pregnant longing, doubt, and despair. Two-Lane Blacktop is more about movies than Antonioni’s work, it would certainly appear to be about Easy Rider, it’s about drinking Coca-Cola out of a glass bottle outside in the most photographically macho way imaginable, it’s about the myths of the old west and self-discovery (or lack thereof). The picture is also about ennui and the erosion of confidence in your native country. Hellman skirts absurdity, but ultimately gets away with stuffing all that into his race picture because he doesn’t ever play the part of outraged schoolmarm. Two-Lane Blacktop has a more original, less judgmental, blitzed humane one thing after another sense of humor about it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Terrence Malick and David Gordon Green were admirers.
The picture, because it is so casual, is really the movie Easy Rider tried so hard to be: a document of fade, of pent up rootlessness channeled into a distracting obsession. Easy Rider, despite moments (particularly with Jack Nicholson), was never the picture so many made it out to be at the time; it’s too full of itself, too pandering and sloppy. Two-Lane Blacktop is dryer, less accommodating, more elusive and probably just as stupid, but you won’t care: it’s a have your cake and eat it too picture: a question and reaffirmation of the American myth in equal measures. The film is, unquestionably, more for the guys; a man’s idea of how remaining unfulfilled and unrealized should hopefully look should you find yourself unfulfilled and unrealized. Two-Lane Blacktop, sadly, also represents something else entirely to the contemporary viewer: a fantasy of driving cross country with only a few dollars to your name; such an activity would max out even fat credit cards these days, providing you haven’t maxed out your fat credit cards already.
The picture is spacey, tranquil and loose, and as such it may take a few minutes to get into its headspace. It took me about twenty before the slow, emotionally textured groove began to captivate me, though the picture gets better and better as it proceeds along anyway. We initially meet three characters: symbolically referred to in the credits as Driver (James Taylor), Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and Girl (Laurie Bird) and in the film itself pointedly not referred to at all. They race their 55 Chevy, and in between they flirt and eat and drink and look for other races. The connective tissue that we’ve come to expect between scenes has been removed here, events arrive with little to no build: the girl, for instance, first appears (in a wonderful shot) in a window in the background of a cafe where the boys are eating. She slips into their Chevy and sits in the back waiting for them, the boys get in the car with her and drive away, no one seeming to have too many questions, except the girl, once, wondering why she always has to sit in the back.
Just as we assume we have the entirety of Two-Lane Blacktop figured out, and sink into our couches and savor the photography, particularly Hellman’s master shots (the images of the cars moving restlessly across the screen are especially majestic) and accept that nothing will be allowed to rupture the picture’s chic 1970s thing, along comes the Warren Oates character, referred to in the credits as G.T.O, because, well, he drives a beautiful G.T.O. We discover that the boys have been following him across at least two states, and that G.T.O. has had about enough. He picks up a hitchhiker and pulls into a gas station a few moments later. The boys catch up and, in an extended roundelay between boys, the girl, and G.T.O, that comprises possibly the picture’s best scene, a bet is finally made. They are to mail their pink slips to D.C.; first one there waits for the other one to catch up with their other newly acquired car.
The bits and pieces of Two-Lane Blacktop slowly stack up on top of one another (the hard boiled eggs, the stealing of the plates, the charge of a new challenge) and eventually we come to realize that we’re watching a great movie: a funny-flakey-haunting creation, a work of loss and disillusionment that sticks because it doesn’t seem to be sticking at all. That is the key to the picture’s subjective/objective mastery of tone: it emulates, glorifies but ultimately pities the numbing passivity of its characters. Wilson and Taylor (both the people you’re thinking they are) are surprisingly rich presences: similar looking, confident and broken: playing the musicians’ mystique to their advantage.
Oates is the true performance of the picture though, and its emotional wallop. Seemingly blessed with a differently colored V-neck sweater for every occasion, Oates is initially established as the intimidating opponent, an older man schooled in the ways of the nomad lifestyle, only to be revealed as the loneliest and most eager to impress: he’s the boys’ ghost of Christmas future, a man eaten and chattering away, continually picking up increasingly disinterested hitchhikers in a quest to slow the dissipation of his soul. His last line is a heartbreaker: “those satisfactions are permanent”. There’s someone in the car with him at the time but it’s clear that he’s, as always, talking to himself. G.T.O.’s at least partially right though, as the satisfactions of Two-Lane Blacktop are unlikely to fade anytime soon. To take a cue from the film’s abrupt, chilling ending, I think it appropriate that I don’t continue on much longer about it. See Two-Lane Blacktop, if you haven’t already.
★★★★
Masculin Feminin (1966)
A portrait of confusion and aimless wannabe existential despair masked as a battle of the sexes tragicomedy, Jean-Luc Godard’s justifiably adored Masculin Féminin is a picture from 1960s France that 2000s U.S. could sorely use. Sadly, none of us seem to have the nerve or curiosity to pull it off. Godard had already made several legendary pictures (Breathless, Contempt and Le Petit soldat among them) but Masculin Féminin, while not necessarily better, feels more inclusive, Godard seemingly just as willing to question himself as everything else around him. This picture stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, and Léaud appears to bring with him a bit of that feisty but more genteel spirit that characterizes the Truffaut collaborations. This picture has the vibe of Truffaut and Godard bringing out the best in one another, though with Godard that could be tongue in cheek, I don’t pretend to know (hence the chicken shit qualifiers). Masculin Féminin is a humane, bitter, contradictory, full picture, which is appropriate considering the subject: a group of undefined twenty-somethings, flitting from one interest, pursuit, or life defining quest to another.
The children of Godard’s film are looking for something or anything that feels sound and lacks in condescension, bitterness, falsehood; something tangible that hopefully safely avoids the hypocrisy of their parents. These children, most immediately and prevailingly, find the opposite sex, a mystery they can conveniently prescribe all of their other mysteries onto. Paul (Léaud), a would be revolutionary who chafes at organized government and work, and all the other ways society controls the common man, finds that his true concern is getting the beautiful, aloof, Madeleine (Chantal Goya), who couldn’t be more his opposite, and who doesn’t care enough about his wannabe politics to even feign interest, into the sack.
As most people of that age terrified of intimacy have a habit of doing, the characters of Masculin Féminin favor talk above all else, turning sex into verbal gunplay, cross-examining one another for astoundingly long, unbroken shots that reveal the friction between young people of differing genders as strongly as any picture I’ve ever seen. The girls tease and elude and hide behind words with dimensions they don’t entirely understand, the guys crouch behind bravado borrowed from American and French pulp films (Paul continually tries to perfect Belmondo’s cigarette lighting technique). Paul talks to Madeleine, about love, existence, pop culture (of which he tries to be contemptuous) and science (there’s a wonderful episode late in the picture that somehow manages to illustrate the mysteries of life with mashed potatoes). Paul talks to his friend Robert (Michel Debord) about Madeleine and sex in general. Madeleine talks to her friends about Paul, sex, and music as she strives to be a pop singer. One of the girls may be in love with Paul. Robert may be in love with that same girl.
Masculin Féminin lends itself structurally to its confused heroes, repeating words and images over and over in only slightly differing contexts, underlining the often rootless one thing after another, entirely self-contained, episodes of their lives. The film is divided into fifteen chapters, punctuated with numbers, prose and gunshots, but that doesn’t feel as deliberately intrusive as devices in other Godard films; it’s perfectly, naturally of a piece, every sketch a little life that begins and dies in and of itself, that fuels these characters’ gotta know and feel everything right now urgency.
This picture probably contributed more than a bit to the variety of youth in headlights films that would be made in America later, but most of those pictures stole the wrong things or missed the point, buying into their protagonists too much or not enough, becoming exercises in cool that celebrated ennui or sentimentality above all else. Godard’s triumph is that this picture is everything equally, simultaneously: naïve, insincere, cynical, starry-eyed, fatalistic, all possibly within seconds of one another. Godard’s syntax and capturing in amber a particular society would be enough to qualify it as a masterpiece alone, but it’s his surprising empathy and compassion (again, I think) that elevates the film to absolute, can’t miss classic. Paul, Madeleine and the gang are more than placeholders for Godard’s grand points: they hurt, ache and reach out in scenes of unforgettable connection.
A moment between Paul and Madeleine in bed, touching one another’s faces skittishly, is vulnerable and deliriously romantic, as is the scene where they watch a film (supposedly, according to Criterion, a parody of Bergman’s The Silence) leaning into one another. These moments set the stakes for Godard’s condemnation of checking out, and the filmmaker seems to understand here that the heartstrings are the best entry point for change. Godard’s youths are flowing with ambition and yearning, but they don’t MEAN anything, and this acknowledgment is the picture’s ultimate poignance, a portrait of young folks struggling and striving to bob their heads above the waves of consumerism that are drowning them, but really wanting to take part and benefit from said consumerism themselves. Godard’s infatuation with hot young things of little intellectual curiosity is at its most honest here, a candid reveal that a man can want to mean something and still fall for a wonderful body.
The characters’ endless self-comment and absorption play perfectly into Godard’s gifts for games and hall of mirrors symbolism and refraction, even his beloved American noirs are employed to startling effect here: lurid episodes that occasionally, inexplicably intrude upon the characters’ pontificating with shocking, hilarious ease, before going out again like a match: the unease of the youth personified as their cinematic addictions and getaways.
I needed this picture. You need this picture and, if you’ve already seen it, see it again. Masculin Féminin may have been about the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, a reaction to France at the time, but it could just as easily be about the children of MySpace and Youtube. Sadly, though, the children of today may be more in line with Madeleine than Paul, leaving out the Marx entirely in favor of the Coca-Cola, only wanting to be the next Carrie Underwood instead of the Beatles or Bob Dylan. Masculin Féminin captures something that is more urgent than ever: a generation lost and numbed into submission by everything and nothing. The ending is typically Godardian in its perversion: a major character dies off screen, flippantly, after recognizing his/her own self-righteousness. The police question the remaining characters, whose final words are “I don’t know.” Admitting that is a start.
★★★★
Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)
Another of Luis Buñuel’s elegant outrages, a picture brimming with a tangible warm bathwater rage, Diary of a Chambermaid was Buñuel’s first collaboration with screenwriter Jean Claude-Carrière, who would go on to write or co-write all of the director’s late period French masterpieces, including Belle de jour, The Phantom of Liberty, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. Of all those pictures, Diary is the least obviously strange and challenging, adhering to a more or less conventional narrative from minute one, in which we follow a train from Paris to a grand country house, to minute ninety-eight, where a fascist revolution is cheered as it gains prominence in a troubled country, all to the ignorance or encouragement (or both) of the majority of the characters, who are, typical to Buñuel, beholden to sex, money and general self-absorption over any and all else.
Our entry-way to said grand country house is Céléstine (Jeanne Moreau), a maid from Paris who, it is immediately apparent, is accustomed to nicer things than the typical help. Céléstine wears perfume, which arouses the suspicion of the shrewish lady of the house, Madame Monteil, who is, at the expense of relationships with her husband and her father, fanatically devoted to the pricey knick knacks that clutter every corner of the home. The economy with which Buñuel establishes the inner workings of the Monteil home is masterful: the Madame looks Céléstine’s clothes over and, sighing, tells her it’s obvious she’s from Paris. A moment later another servant tells her the same thing, only with palpable awe, the difference between the classes crystallized in two lines of dialogue.
And so the picture proceeds, in a series of sketches that trace the shifting dynamics of the Monteil household as informed by the powerful, aloof, self-contained new presence of Céléstine, who remains, for the entirety of Diary, a purposeful cipher, an enigma. As with Belle de jour (an even stronger picture, probably because it plays so readily to Buñuel’s amusements) the sexually potent woman is a measure of the skeletons and obsessions of all the other (primarily male) characters. Madame Monteil’s father (Jean Ozenne) is perhaps the most moving, and his notable scene with Céléstine could have just as easily occurred in Belle: the father asks Céléstine if he can call her Marie. She obliges. The father asks if she will put on a pair of little black boots. Céléstine again obliges, and the father watches in ecstatic longing as she walks around the room for him. The scene, as with many in Buñuel’s canon, is a marvel of tone: satirical, creepy, and heartbreaking in equal measures, supplying Ozenne with the most emotionally accessible role in the picture. The father is a member of the much maligned upper-crust who checked out long ago, enslaved by his fantasies. Ozenne’s character illustrates Buñuel’s brilliance and humanity: the filmmaker was never satisfied to score cheap points from one side of the room. Buñuel’s pictures, instead, have an empathy that deepens the pathos as well as the shock.
There are several other scenes in Diary of a Chambermaid that are just as wonderful and impossible to forget. Madame Monteil’s husband (a thuggish, fascinating Michel Piccoli), having given up on sleeping with Céléstine, and once again rebuffed by his frigid wife, sets his sights on a lowly laundry woman, Marianne (Muni). The woman, grasping Monteil’s intentions, allows herself to quickly cry, before being tugged away out of audience sight into a nearby barn. The moment has the rapt primal horror of a great silent film. So does the image of a murdered girl that happens late in the picture, and, on the most obvious level, embodies the price of the corruption and apathy that’s festering in the Monteil home. That may sound too cool, too academic, but the image of the girl’s legs: exposed, the snails she was collecting earlier crawling over the pale skin, is anything but.
These charged moments and images establish Diary of a Chambermaid to firmly belong amongst the other Buñuel pictures, and, if you’re unaccustomed with the man’s work, this may be the place to start. Diary provides the other pictures with context, a base for the filmmaker’s preoccupations and curiosities. All of the later Carrière collaborations are bolder, even more accomplished pictures, but that’s more a comment on the high stock of the Buñuel filmography than Diary’s merit. The picture has an atmosphere of dread; of defeat and unease unencumbered by boring directorial editorializing, that is rare in most (particularly American) films. Robert Altman’s work is an exception, and if you’re interested in a mainstream American picture that has that mood I’d check Altman’s The Gingerbread Man. Bob Fosse’s Cabaret also has this elusive light rot, and the ending, a terrifying triumph of evil amongst the common citizens’ preoccupation with banal things, is eerily similar to Diary’s.
And Diary of course also has Jeanne Moreau, a film legend who wields her gifts of beauty, intelligence, calculation and mystery to considerable effect for Buñuel. One glance at Moreau’s Céléstine explains why a weak or strong man might waste the world away attempting to possess her. Toward the end we think we may have figured Céléstine at least partially out, having heard of the little girl’s murder, she attempts to expose the killer by seducing the confession out of him and, later, even supplying evidence that didn’t actually exist. Céléstine’s concern is never explained, though perhaps she’s attempting to do something noble for the same reason that characters in many of Woody Allen’s later pictures do something monstrous, to see if the act can succeed, and be survived and tolerated. Buñuel’s answer is as cynical (though funnier) as Allen’s. Proven wrong, Céléstine retreats to her new good fortune, destined to one day be the old man with the strange boots.
★★★★
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