Category Archives: Movies

LOVING YOU

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This film, has nothing — whatsoever — to recommend
it . . . except Elvis Presley in his prime and a bunch of decent early
Elvis songs.  Of course, that's enough.

The story, which riffs superficially on Elvis early
career, is contrived, the dialogue thuds along without even a whiff of
wit or believability, the photography is dull and the directing is
ham-handed.  But the young Elvis prowls through this wasteland of
mediocrity with an almost feral grace — as innocent as a panther, and almost as beautiful.

He
doesn't seem to realize himself the power his
combination of virility and sweetness projects, and that naivete is
part of his charm.  Unless you were there, and of a certain age, it's
probably impossible even to imagine the effect his persona had when it
appeared as if from nowhere in the middle of the Eisenhower years. 
America still hasn't gotten over it, and probably never will.  He's
become part of what it means to be American.

When you watch this film — Elvis's third, and first in
color — just sit back, endure the exposition, and wait for the miracle
to manifest itself . . . every time Elvis shows up on screen.

THE SILENT LAWRENCE

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I
saw Lawrence Of Arabia when it came out in 1962, in the sort of grand
roadshow presentation big movies used to get back then — reserved
seating, an overture and intermission and an expensive souvenir program
on sale in the lobby (I still have mine.) My dad used to take me to
these big roadshow presentations of big films — it was one of the
great rituals of my childhood.


Lawrence blew me away back then, at the age of twelve. I saw it a few times
later and was less impressed. As an adult (and apprentice screenwriter)
I found the dialogue excessively literary and aphoristic — every line
was a bon mot, a philosophical nugget, an intellectual construction.
Real people, I thought, in real wars, don’t talk like that — even if
they’re Oxford-educated British officers or wise old Bedouin
chieftains.


Then I saw the restored version back in the Eighties, on a big screen, and
realized how wrong my second thoughts were. What I’d lost touch with
was the power of the images — the extent to which the images are the
story of this film, its narrative and its subtext, its spectacle and
its subtlety. The moment of revelation came watching the shot where
Lawrence walks along the top of the captured train. His Bedouin
followers run along the ground below him. In the shot, we only see
Lawrence’s shadow on the sand — his followers chase his shadow.


This is the whole film in a single image — the essence of the filmmaker’s
view that Lawrence both invented himself in Arabia and lost himself . .
. created an image that had no substance beyond the events it inspired,
yet cast a real shadow into the future. In the last shot, as Lawrence
is driven away from the scene of his betrayed triumph, we see his face
through the windshield of an open car. A reflection on the windshield
suddenly obliterates his face, and the film is over.


This is a mode of filmmaking — in which a film’s deepest truths are conveyed
by images alone — that characterized the silent era of cinema and which is
rarely seen today except in the theoretical film experiments of
Jean-Luc Godard. I began to see the dialogue of Lawrence in a
different light — as the functional equivalent of title cards, which
offered a kind of running literary commentary on or clarification of
the images but did not drive the narrative or the drama.


In short, I realized that Lawrence is essentially a silent film — in
the same sense that Titanic is essentially a silent film, a film
whose dialogue is virtually irrelevant to the actual meaning of the
work. Relatively unsophisticated twelve year-old boys and girls, for
whom the experience of a film is primarily visual and visceral, who
feel no intellectual need to translate a film into literary terms
before being able to appreciate it, have easier access to such
sound-era “silents”. They are, in this, sometimes wiser than their
elders.

THE BELLBOY

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It’s impossible to categorize Jerry Lewis’s movies, and that’s why it’s
always been hard for critics to appreciate him — or even to see his
work for what it is. It has roots in vaudeville and silent film and
circus clowning, and owes much to the antic, animation-inspired cinema of Frank
Tashlin, who directed some of Lewis’s early films, but the influences
are all mixed up in an eccentric blend that has no obvious continuity with any cinematic tradition. He was a genuine radical whose popularity kept his films free from the
controls of corporate Hollywood and gave him the opportunity to follow
his instincts wherever they happened to lead him.  There’s a
resulting lack of discipline in his movies that makes them disconcerting on an
intellectual, aesthetic level — unless, like the French, you find
their conceptual incoherence intellectually and aesthetically
satisfying.


The Bellboy, the first film he directed, remains
unsettling a quarter century after it was made. It embodies a unique
sensibility unmodulated by the cinematic conventions of its day, or
ours. It’s best viewed and enjoyed as a critique of those conventions,
spiced with moments of hilarious visual and verbal comedy — and as the
debut of the most original provocateur ever to function within the nominal
boundaries of the Hollywood mainstream.

VITORIO STORARO

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When Bernardo Bertolucci and his cinematographer
Vitorio Storaro began preparing The Conformist, Storaro suggested a
visual style that would emphasize bold contrasts between light and
shadow, to reflect the conflicted nature of the film’s protagonist.  He
said he thought immediately of the painting above by Caravaggio, with
its strange, not quite naturalistic lighting scheme, and tried whenever
possible to introduce similar hard edges between the dark and light
areas of his images in The Conformist.

In general, Bertolucci’s films draw on effects from painting, especially
from painting that has marked stereometric qualities.  Many of the
beautiful compositions involving the urban spaces of Paris in The
Conformist seem to reference the urban landscapes of Caillebotte, an
Impressionist who incorporated the spatial dramatics of academic
painting into his work to a far greater degree than his peers in the
Impressionist movement.

Much of 1900 seems to reference the treatment of pastoral scenes in
19th-Century academic painting.


It’s hard to know how conscious the references to
19th-Century academic painting were for Bertolucci and Storaro, since
this influence had already been absorbed in the visual styles of the
great silent filmmakers like Griffith and Vidor and Murnau, who in turn
clearly influenced Bertolucci.  Bertolucci
and Storaro might have tapped into the tradition at any point along the
line of its transmission.  But Storaro has made clear his
indebtedness to Caravaggio, and that should lead us logically into an
investigation of other painterly influences on his work, especially his
work for Bertolucci.

I’m not sure how much such an investigation contributes to the experience
of the films, since these sorts of visual strategies and references must
work first on a subliminal level if they are to be genuinely effective,
but it’s certainly fascinating . . . and perhaps of use to other
filmmakers.

BABY FACE

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In the days before its Production Code got really strict (around 1934)
Hollywood had extraordinary latitude in the subjects and attitudes it
could address.  Turner Classic Movies has just released a set of three
pre-code films, under the title Forbidden Hollywood, that gives some
startling examples of the freedom that was lost.

Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck, presents a world-view of
jaw-dropping cynicism — a case study of bimbo feminism that would be
shocking even in a Hollywood film of today.  Stanwyck plays Lily, a
girl who’s been hooking since she was 14, pimped out by her own
father.  She meets an eccentric Nieztsche fan who tells her to use her
power over men ruthlessly, without sentiment or conscience, to get what
she wants.  And this she does — fucking her way to the big city, and
up the ladder of success, until she’s the filthy rich mistress of a
pathetic old banker.

The passion and jealousy Lily arouses in the men she uses eventually erupt in violence, and set up a nifty blackmail opportunity for her, but also throw her into the orbit of a different sort of man than she’s used to, a man who knows all about her past but loves her anyway . . . and she finds a kind of redemption in his arms.

All the men Lily encounters, except for the last one, are slimeballs
and pushovers, and Lily never shows even a flicker of remorse about
exploiting them and destroying them.  The really shocking thing is
that the film doesn’t condemn her for this, any more than her last lover
does — she’s been dealt a bad hand in life, as a woman, and she’s
played it the best way she could.

This is all dizzyingly surreal.  Seeing Hollywood stars and Hollywood
production values deployed in the service of a story like this makes
one feel one has entered an alternate universe — except of course that
it’s closer to the universe we actually inhabit than to the post-code
Hollywood version of reality.

Baby Face is lurid pulp melodrama at its most entertaining, and it’s
something more, too — a vision of what movies might have been if
corporate hypocrisy and totalitarian concepts of social hygiene hadn’t
put them in an artistic straightjacket.

Rush out and get this set, and prepare to be seriously discombobulated.

1900

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It’s hard to imagine that there will ever be another movie like 1900.  The sheer size of its physical production (as opposed to the CGI resources it deploys) and the care and imagination
lavished on almost every scene, every set-up, every shot, seem beyond the resources and the ambitions of modern filmmakers.

When it came out, in 1977, Pauline Kael said it made every other movie released that year look like “something on the end of a toothpick”.  It makes most movies ever released look that small.

Which is not to say that it’s a grandly satisfying film, that it doesn’t fail on many levels — but it really is a hell of thing to look at and experience.

Bertolucci’s initial cut of the film clocked in at something over five hours — and that’s the only length at which the film makes sense.  There’s no urgent narrative at the heart of it that
emerges when it’s pared down — abridgment just violates the leisurely pace of the film, which asks us to immerse ourselves in images, in recreated eras, in the slow meandering of history.

If you can surrender to its pace, relish its imagery without hurry or anticipation, you are treated to an orgy of cinematic beauty — a pure and joyous celebration of the possibilities of the medium.

You can forget, or set aside, what’s wrong with the film — its programmatic characters, who sometimes come to dramatic life but just as often stayed fixed in their roles as
political archetypes, its naive celebration of the romance of Communism, its cartoonish reduction of history into icons and slogans.

What you will remember are places, times of day, the play of light, the choreography of peasant dances and cavalry charges and duck hunting from small boats.

Afterwards you’ll find yourself wishing the film had been better — but while you’re inside its rapturous, disjointed visions, it’s hard to imagine anyplace you’d rather be.

[A DVD with Bertolucci’s original cut, in an excellent transfer on two discs, has just been released, and it’s well worth owning — it may be the only five-hour-plus film you’ll want to look at again and again.]



The picture above — showing Bertolucci, in the checked cap, setting up a shot on 1900 — is from a web log that regularly posts great images from film and popular culture.  Check it out here:

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

THE CONFORMIST

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Perhaps the most exciting cinematic event of 2006 was
the release on DVD earlier this month — finally, and in a terrific
transfer — of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.

Few films of the post-WWII era have been as
influential as this one — few films of any era have been as ravishing,
as sensually exciting.

In the freewheeling atmosphere of the time, and with
the final collapse of the old studio system, Hollywood in the late
Sixties was in an experimental mood, though the experimentation often
involved only superficial stylistic gimmicks — the hand-held camera,
promiscuous zooming, elliptical editing, split-screen images.

At the same time a new generation of filmmakers was
coming into prominence which had been schooled in, and deeply loved,
the classic Hollywood films — among this generation were
Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg and Lucas . . . all of them, except for
Spielberg, the products of film schools rather than of apprenticeship
in the industry.

They were tackling new subjects and ones that were often more challenging
than the old studio system could embrace but they were
developing a style that owed much to the formal elegance of the
cinema of the studio era.

Then, in 1970, The Conformist burst onto the scene,
the work of a young Italian filmmaker who had not only mastered the
formal elegance of the old studio style but was taking it into new
realms of expressiveness and invention.  Indeed, The Conformist had
something of the visual eloquence of the highest achievements of the
silent era, of Murnau’s and Vidor’s films, whose
extravagant poetic imagery had been lost with the coming of sound.

The effect was electric — confirming all the creative
instincts of the American film-school avant garde.  The movie was so
important to Coppola that he, along with a number of other American
directors, personally lobbied its distributor to release the film in
the United States.  He used one of its actors in The Godfather, Part
II, and its visual style influenced every frame of Coppola’s
masterpiece.

Bertolucci never made another film quite like it.
His visual imagination, his gift for dynamic plastic composition and
choreography within the frame stayed fresh, but was often lavished on
unworthy material and degenerated into mere mannerism.

The Conformist was of a piece because its story and
its visual style reinforced each other.  Bertolucci was, in the film,
breaking dramatically from the severe aesthetic strategies and rigorous
intellectualism of his mentor Godard, indulging himself frankly in the
cinema’s power for sensual seduction — all the while telling the tale
of a promising student who betrays the political ideals of his old
professor and eventually collaborates in the professor’s murder.

The Conformist remains alive with the allure of forbidden
pleasures, tense with the guilt of giving in to them.  The film is
erotic but disturbing — a dynamic that Bertolucci would explore
more explicitly in Last Tango In Paris, but without the organic
emotional coherence of the earlier film.

The Conformist also marked the emergence of its
cinematographer Vitorio Storaro as an artist of international
stature — but that’s a subject for a future post . . .

G I. BLUES

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Bad songs plus a silly plot plus Elvis equals . . . movie magic.

Before his management got utterly cynical about the quality of his films, before he himself gave up on Hollywood as a creative challenge, Elvis made some enchanting movies just on the strength of his persona and charisma. He commands the screen the way a star can, without having to work very hard at it, and the very ease of his performances makes them fascinating. His dancing is toned down from his work on stage but it’s still unique and riveting and the commitment of his vocal performances, even on substandard material, is touching.

In G. I. Blues, the surrealism of the overblown sets, the travelogue nature of the location shots (none of which feature Elvis) and the frank artificiality of the production has a delirious effect at times — like Jerry Lewis and James Bond movies.

There was more wit than incompetence or naivete to this style of filmmaking in the Sixties and it seems oddly less dated than the hipper avant-garde approach that eventually overtook the Hollywood mainstream. Elvis’ serenade to the hand-puppet here is sublime cinema — inspired silliness that still manages to be charming and emotionally involving.

Just go along with it and marvel at the mysterious, ever-elusive phenomenon of Elvis Presley.