Out of the closet and Behind the Candelabra

Michael Douglas is mincing across my TV screen in Behind the Candelabra, the HBO teleflick in which the Oscar winning star of Wall Street and husband of Catherine Zeta Jones plays Liberace, the pianist known to his intimates as Lee. To call Liberace a “pianist” is a bit of a stretch. He played piano, and I think those who are better capable of judging musicianship than I would say he played well, but his skill at tinkling the ivories was not what made him famous.

“Flamboyant” is the word usually tossed around when Liberace’s name comes up, but it doesn’t go far enough. It would be more accurate, if a little rude and certainly politically incorrect, to say he was a flaming fruit. Long before anyone talked about coming out of the closet, Liberace’s door was ajar if not wide open. He stepped out of his closet and brought his sequined wardrobe with him, but drew the line at admitting he was homosexual. He successfully won lawsuits against newspapers that dared to print the truth even though everybody – everybody except, perhaps, the more naïve middle-aged women who comprised his fan base – knew he was gay. Like “flamboyant,” “gay” doesn’t go far enough either. Liberace was the embodiment of the once popular homosexual stereotype: a lisping, mincing queen. He didn’t crossdress in the usual sense, but what kind of man wears floor-length fur coats, sparkling rings on every finger, or appears on stage wearing hot pants while twirling a baton?

Why would anyone want to make a movie about Liberace almost three decades after his death?

Steven Soderbergh, the Oscar winning director of Traffic, is the auteur who did the unfathomable and made a movie with HBO based on the trashy memoir of Liberace’s final lover, Scott Thorson. It was Thorson who kicked down the entertainer’s closet door in 1982 when filing the first same-sex palimony suit against the star who denied having anything but a professional relationship with Thorson. When Liberace was hospitalized in 1986, his illness was said to be due to his watermelon diet. Finally, when he died, the medical examiner refused to accept the death certificate, and demanded an autopsy. It was then that the world learned that Liberace died from complications related to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the scourge of homosexuals that had claimed beefy matinee idol Rock Hudson a year earlier.

But why a movie about a campy figure unknown to most of the modern audience”

It can only be to titillate an audience curious about that gay sex. There’s very little insight in Richard LaGravenese’s screenplay, no real explanation as to why the world’s most blatantly obvious homosexual would deny the truth about his sexual proclivities for so long. We see him courting Thorson who moves into Liberace’s gaudy mansion where the male servants treat him with scorn. There’s a scene in which the two engage in anal sex (though no anus or penis appears on screen), and one at a triple X bookstore where Liberace visits a gloryhole. It’s a very seedy contrast to the showman’s otherwise luxurious life.

You have to hand it to Michael Douglas for having the guts to play this bizarre figure. When his father, Kirk, played Vincent Van Gogh, the tortured Dutch painter who, by all accounts, was heterosexual, John Wayne allegedly asked him why he bothered to play such a “pantywaist.” Imagine how the Duke would have felt about Kirk’s son playing Liberace? Douglas is good and seems to be enjoying himself. So does Matt Damon as Thorson. It’s Rob Lowe, however, who seems to be having the best time as a grotesque doctor who prescribes drugs to help Thorson lose weight. Wearing a hideous wig and a too-tight shirt, Lowe always seems to be stifling a laugh.

That’s what the audience is likely to do, too, when watching Behind the Candelabra.

© 2014 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Bela Lugosi stalks the night as Dracula

When Universal’s Dracula premiered at New York’s Roxy Theater in February 1931, the critic for The New York Times wrote that it “can at least boast of being the best of the many mystery films.”

Today, no one would likely regard Dracula as a “mystery.” In 1931, however, “horror” had yet to take its place as a genre like the western, the comedy, the romance, and the drama. There had been “horror” films before Dracula, including Nosferatu, a silent, unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, but they were few and far between. Dracula and the same year’s Frankenstein established “horror” with moviegoers who would be introduced to more vampires, monsters, and mad doctors, as well as mummies, ghouls, giant apes, and zombies in the years ahead.

Certainly, no mere “mystery” concerned itself with a character like the Count from Transylvania. Dracula is a vampire, Professor Van Helsing tells us, one of those curious undead creatures that can “take the form of wolves and bats. They leave their coffins at night and they feed on the blood of the living.”

If not for its historical significance and Bela Lugosi’s signature performance, it’s tempting to wonder how famous this film would be today.

In that initial review, the Times’ critic praised Tod Browning’s “imaginative direction,” but imaginative direction is one thing this now classic film lacks. The opening scenes at Dracula’s castle are memorably eerie, with Lugosi descending a cobwebbed staircase while a wolf howls in the distance. “Listen to them,” Dracula tells his visitor, “Children of the night. What music they make.” The Hungarian actor’s slow delivery, the effect of having to learn his dialogue phonetically due to a poor grasp of English, adds to Dracula’s otherworldly personality. He is a vampire, after all, who comes to life only after sunset.

Once the Count and the hapless fly-eating Renfield arrive in London, Dracula is as slow as Lugosi’s delivery. Although the film is never as good as those first 15 minutes, it has an almost hypnotic quality, due mainly to the star’s fascinating presence. Like most early talkies, there is no music score (the opening titles are accompanied by a snippet of “Swan Lake”), but that only contributes to the film’s deathly mood. All that silence gives the film the ambience of a tomb. When characters speak, it has the effect of a coffin lid being pried open. In the late ‘90s, Universal commissioned Philip Glass to compose a score for the film, but the Kronos Quartet’s music actually detracts from the film’s power.

Although it takes wolf bane, a crucifix, or a stake through the heart to keep a vampire at bay, Dracula was not immune to the 1929 stock market crash and the economic depression that followed. Universal abandoned plans for a big budget film that would have adhered more closely to Stoker’s novel, and filmed Hamilton Deane’s rather mundane play instead.

Though much about the film is disappointing, Dracula is a landmark in cinema. Everybody over the age of 10 probably knows of Bela Lugosi, or did in those bygone days when people were still culturally literate. For fans of classic horror, however, even such obscure performers as Edward Van Sloan, David Manners, and especially Dwight Frye are legends of a sort due to their participation in this and other now revered shockers. Frye, a tragic figure who found himself typecast as freaky deviants after playing the hysterical Renfield, was even the inspiration for a song by Alice Cooper (“The Ballad of Dwight Frye”).

But Dracula is Lugosi’s showcase. No matter how many actors have donned the Count’s flowing black cape and bared some sharp, blood-stained fangs (which Lugosi does not do), it’s a role he continues to own.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Cold Mountain: Civil War love story

Having found Anthony Minghella's Oscar winning The English Patient an interminably dull, exasperating experience, it was with some trepidation that I paid my admission to see his adaptation of Charles Frazier's best seller, Cold Mountain. Would this be something other than an opportunity to catch up on my sleep? I'm pleased to report that I remained awake and generally alert throughout much of the 155 minute film, but in the end, the adjective in the title comes close to describing how I felt about it.

Cold Mountain is a love story set against the turmoil of the Civil War. Nicole Kidman is Ada, the proper daughter of a reverend (Donald Sutherland) whose failing health makes the move to the title location necessary. Ada becomes smitten with Inman (Jude Law), a laborer working near the farm. Inman doesn't say much, is, in fact, teased by his co-workers for his silence, but all Ada and Inman need are a few moments of intense eye contact, and they're helplessly in love.

Their courtship is interrupted when war breaks out, and Inman joins the fighting on the side of the confederates. The lovers keep in touch through a series of romantic letters, and after one battle too many leaves the young soldier disillusioned with war and yearning all the more for the comfort of his true love's arms, he deserts his company and begins a long trek home, a destination Nicole is confident he'll reach after seeing a vision of him doing just that.

Except for some fine battle sequences, much of Cold Mountain is fairly tedious as it shifts from Inman's journey to Ada's patient wait for his return. Then two supporting characters are introduced and the movie springs to life.

The first is Ruby, a scraggly neighbor played by Renee Zellweger who materializes to help Ada with the farm chores. Pouty-lipped and ill-mannered, this girl has lots of gumption and handles things like twisting the neck off a chicken that the more ladylike Ada is loathe to do. At first, Zellweger's performance reeks of ham. She acts like Foghorn Leghorn from one of the old Warner Bros. cartoons. As the story progresses, Zellweger settles down, shakes off some of the more exaggerated mannerisms and delivers a fine performance, the best in the film.

If Zellweger provides the much needed life in Kidman's episodes, Philip Seymour Hoffman does the same for Jude Law. As a seedy man of the cloth whom Inman encounters just as the reverend is preparing to drown a black woman whom he has impregnated, Hoffman bursts off the screen with all the aggression Law lacks and provides some much needed amusement. He doesn't stay around long, but like Zellweger, he gives the film a burst of energy that the film thankfully retains from that point on.

There are many fine episodes, most memorably a heart wrenching interlude between Inman and a young mother widowed by the war. Kathy Baker is very affecting in her brief appearance here. But the movie's problem is that the supporting characters are far more interesting than the leads. Kidman and Law are fine, and there is something touching about Ada and Inman's devotion to each other, but since their great love is meant to be established in some brief, non-verbal scenes that fail to adequately do the trick, their relationship lacks the weight it needs to spark the desired emotional reaction. It leaves us feeling aloof from the pair, rather than deeply involved in their plight.

If Cold Mountain is not quite the epic it seemingly aspires to be, it still works well enough. It's beautiful to look at, the acting is all together fine, and the music is nice. But with a little more warmth at its center, it might have been a classic.

© 2003 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Fighting for his family: Cinderella Man

Cinderella Man is being labeled a “boxing movie,” but there are really only two kinds of films that warrant such classification: training films that offer instruction to those wishing to learn the sport, and filmed accounts of a particular fight. Cinderella Man is neither. It’s not a boxing movie, but the story of a man whose prowess in the ring saved his family from poverty and gave hope to a country when hope was in short supply.

In the late 1920s, James J. Braddock enjoyed a successful career as a professional boxer, winning fight after fight with his powerful right hook, but like millions of other Americans, he was left broke after the stock market crash of 1929. Ironically, his boxing skills also deserted him at this time. After injuring his right hand in one fight, Braddock seeks work on the docks where he develops a mean left hook that will serve him well several years later. But with little work available even for unskilled laborers, even that means of support is hard to come by. Unable to care for his wife and their three children, Braddock swallows his pride and applies for government relief.

“I have to believe that when things are bad, I can change them,” he says.

Braddock’s luck does change when he’s picked as a last minute substitute for a fight at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Defying all the odds, Braddock wins in a third round knockout, and goes on to win several more fights before challenging Max Baer for the title of heavyweight champion of the world. Baer is as prosperous as Braddock is poor, and as played by Craig Bierko, the champ carries himself with all the bravado one might expect from a fighter who killed two men in the ring.

Director Ron Howard stages some marvelous boxing sequences, and the final bout is a brilliantly edited, sometimes brutal affair, but Cinderella Man always emphasizes Braddock the family man more than the fighter. When his son steals a salami, it matters not to Braddock that the family is barely subsisting on meals consisting of little more than fried bologna. He takes the boy to the butcher so he can return the stolen meal and apologize for his theft. He doesn’t discipline his son, but does tell him that stealing is always wrong, no matter how desperate the need. And Braddock has desperate needs, indeed. When the press, who have labeled him the “Cinderella Man” because of his amazing comeback, asks him to explain the turnaround in his fortunes, he explains that he now knows what he’s fighting for: “Milk.”

It may not be his intent, but Braddock is also fighting for the people. For millions of souls battered by the depression, he’s a folk-hero, a man whose incredible rise gives them hope that they, too, can beat the odds.

Director Howard beats the odds, too, by making this story work without relying on overly sentimental touches. Thomas Newman’s lovely score provides just the right touch. It accompanies the action without attempting to force emotions from the audience that the story doesn’t summon itself. Howard’s team also recreates depression era America believably. The atmosphere is suitably grim, but it’s scenes of the Braddocks’ having to water down their milk and of Braddock, with hat in hand, asking for handouts from his more affluent acquaintances that really hit home, as does Braddock’s visible guilt at having to break a promise not to send his children away to live with relatives better able to provide for them.

The performances hit home, as well. As Braddock, it’s not surprising that Russell Crowe is utterly believable in the boxing ring, but he’s equally superb at portraying Braddock the husband and father. This is a thoroughly decent man, and Crowe never fails to make him likeable. Renee Zellweger is one of the few contemporary actresses who looks right at home in the era depicted, and she excels as Braddock’s wife, Mae, so worried that her husband may die in the ring at the hands of the fearsome Baer that she refuses to even listen to the fight on the radio. Zellweger shows, as she did in Chicago and Cold Mountain, that no other actress is as effective in period pieces. Paul Giamatti, most recently seen in Sideways, is well-suited to period pieces, too, and as Braddock’s loyal manager, brings to mind such beloved character actors of the ‘30s as Frank McHugh and Allen Jenkins.

“Boxing movies” rarely fare well at the box-office, and Cinderella Man has not had the real life Braddock’s luck in America. But like I said, this is not a “boxing movie,” but a heartfelt account of one man’s struggle to beat overwhelming odds. He succeeds, and so does the movie. Cinderella Man is Ron Howard’s finest film to date, and one of the best films of the year.

Originally published at Paris Woman Journal

© 2005 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Movie history, like history in general, is often fiction. Take for instance, the case of Woody Allen. The auteur has benefited from the perception that his films are artistic, non-commercial works superior to the bilge filling the screens at mainstream theaters. Of course, that's not the way Allen’s work is perceived these days. Too many duds like his current film, Scoop, have tarnished his once pristine reputation as a filmmaker. But in the '70s and '80s, he was regarded as an artist whose films, generally inexpensive, made a tidy profit but were not geared for mass consumption.

This is fiction. Allen's films were actually quite lucrative in the '70s, and Allen himself was among the top 10 box-office draws in that decade.

One of his biggest hits was 1972's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), a hodgepodge of sketches supposedly based on the best-selling guide by Dr. David Reuben that provided its readers with more snickers than education about sexual matters.

Released in the dead of summer at the classy showcase cinemas in which Allen's films were usually booked, it was among the top ten grossing films of the year. In all other respects, however, it's a bomb: a mostly unfunny dud marked by humor of the most juvenile sort. Oh, there is a brief chuckle to be had from the episode featuring horror icon John Carradine as an insane sex researcher ("They called me mad at Masters and Johnsons"), and from a parody of a game show called What's My Perversion? featuring Jack Barry, Pamela Mason, Robert Q. Lewis, Regis Philbin, and other "personalities" who appeared on actual games shows of the time, but otherwise the film lays a major egg.

© 2006 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Britney Spears in Crossroads

Remakes, sequels, imitative knock-offs of last year’s hits. If the movies can’t come up with some fresh ideas, they should at least come up with an original title. Since no one much remembers the 1987 movie titled Crossroads with Ralph Macchio (and who remembers Ralph Macchio?), why not drag the title out again until it finds itself attached to a hit?

A better title for Crossroads would have been The Britney Spears Movie, or maybe Crossover since that’s the word for what the current Queen of Pop is attempting to do: transfer her success as a singer into movie stardom. She’d have been better off waiting for a movie that can stand on more than her presence, but as a showcase for the star, it isn’t that bad.

The plot is strictly a connect the dots affair. What matters is Britney. Her part doesn’t require the talent of Meryl Streep, so she handles herself well. Of course, her greatest talent is to gyrate with such fervor that her clothes would fall off if they weren’t as tight as they are skimpy. This she does in a scene in which she dreams of pop stardom while singing in front of a mirror.

With her well-scrubbed, girl next door looks, Spears brings to mind the wholesome beauty of Olivia Newton John, but her extroverted performing style places her squarely in the world of Madonna, the decadent diva to whom she is most often compared. As one of her hits claims, she’s not a girl but not yet a woman. Crossroads has a similar problem. It’s not a music video, but it’s not really a movie. Britney’s legion of fans may like it. If so, it serves its purpose.

And Crossroads is still a title in search of a hit.

Originally published at Paris Woman Journal


© 2002 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Psycho still makes the cut

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, revived in a spectacular new print at the 1996 Cleveland International Film Festival with co-star Janet Leigh in attendance, is probably the esteemed director’s most famous film, but while it is now hailed as one of his best, the critics were not too enthused about Hitchcock’s low-budget excursion into the genre of horror at the time of its June 1960 release. Whether or not Psycho qualifies as a “horror” film is a matter open to debate, but the film’s macabre elements, and the violent way in which those elements were presented, was regarded as a step down for the portly English director who usually relied on subtlety and suggestion to convey the more unpleasant aspects of his films. While the justly famous “shower scene” is tasteful by today’s standards, in 1960, the amount of blood exposited by the victim was considered gratuitous. But Psycho still has as much to savor in 1996 as it did in 1960.

The most important characteristic of Psycho may be the superb black and white cinematography, the work of John L. Russell who handled the camera work on Hitchcock’s television anthology program. Brooding shadows are expertly captured by Russell’s lens, and his work was deservedly nominated for an Oscar. Although the scenes in which the protagonist, the notorious Norman Bates, dispenses death to his victims are strikingly photographed, Russell’s talents are also represented in less heralded moments, such as the scene in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) drives along the road at night while the voices of her co-workers, as well as her victim, are heard questioning her whereabouts and wondering what fate has befallen both Crane and the money she was responsible for depositing. Perhaps the film’s eeriest moment, especially for those who have seen the film before, is when Crane reaches what will be her final destination on a dark, rain splattered night. The wipers clear the rain from the windshield of her car, and suddenly the neon sign bearing the legend, “Bates Motel - Vacancy,” becomes visible.

While the look of the film is important, equal attention must be paid to its sound, particularly the music score by Bernard Herrmann. From the opening moments when the titles (expertly designed by Saul Bass) are slashed away, the composer masterfully conveys the sense of a knife eagerly ripping into human flesh. The Psycho score is music to carve meat by, and the film would suffer as horribly as Norman’s victims without it.

The actors could almost get lost in such an atmosphere but the fine cast performs its chores admirably. Not surprisingly, top honors must go to the late Anthony Perkins. His portrayal of Norman Bates, a character as prone to nervous jitters as he is to severing the nerves of his customers, has been frequently imitated, including by Perkins himself, and invests the film with a neurotic, psychological tone that lifts the film into a class it might not otherwise inhabit. Although she is best remembered for spilling blood, Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane is an effectively realized character, one who shares similarities with Norman. Both are on the run - she, literally, from her past, and Norman from the present and future - and both have secrets. Marion’s secret has to do with the contents of her purse which contains a stack of bills that don’t belong to her. Norman’s secret concerns the contents of his house, a spooky old hilltop mansion overlooking the Bates Motel in which Norman’s long dead mother continues to reside, barking orders and hurtling insults at her wayward son. The remaining cast is populated by some excellent performers: Vera Miles as Marion’s concerned sister, John McIntyre as the sheriff, and particularly Martin Balsam as the doomed private detective, all turn in impressive work, and even John Gavin, more mannequin than actor, is appropriately dull as Marion’s lover.

Hitchcock’s characteristic touches of black humor are very evident in Psycho, most notably in Norman’s hobby - taxidermy. Norman likes to stuff things. Birds. Mrs. Bates? Perhaps. The stuffed birds that adorn the walls of Norman’s office were prophetic, for the master of suspense would, in his next film, offer these members of the animal kingdom an opportunity to stuff themselves by snacking on human heads in 1963’s The Birds, Hitchcock’s last film of special merit. Birds have often been used by Hitchcock to symbolize good (In Foreign Correspondent, the kidnapped dignitary played by Albert Basserman, is extremely fond of birds, and, in one early scene, suggests that even on the eve of a world war, there is still hope for mankind when people still take time to feed them). In Psycho, those ever watchful yet dead eyes seem to represent Norman’s voyeurism, his only mode of sexual expression, not only before the murder of Marion Crane when he watches her undress through a peephole, but throughout the film. When not cutting loose with a kitchen knife, Norman is passive, watching, and seemingly waiting for the kill.

The film deteriorates a little at the end, not as badly as Mrs. Bates whose hollow-eyed corpse hogs a well deserved close-up at the film’s climax, but enough to prevent Psycho from achieving perfection. A lengthy denouement in which a psychologist (Simon Oakland) attempts to explain the motives behind Norman’s behavior is filled with a lot of sophomoric psychology that would be embarrassing if it wasn’t so dull. Rigor mortis sets in at this point, and the scene seems longer than the 108 minute running time of the entire picture. Fortunately, there is a payoff in the final moments when Anthony Perkins returns to the screen for a brief but brilliant moment as both mother and son.

Psycho is an important film, not only in Hitchcock’s filmography, but in film history. For Hitchcock, Psycho is unique and a source of controversy. After a string of big budget, colorful, and often glamorous films (To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest), Hitchcock opted to make Psycho on a minuscule budget, filming almost entirely on the back lot of Universal Studios, using the same crew that worked on his then current television series. (At one point, it is even rumored that the film, having shocked the original distributor, Paramount, almost became a two-part episode of that NBC program.)

Hitchcock was known to brag about his decision to film Psycho in black and white, but there have been those who maintain that Hitchcock had originally planned to shoot in color or, worse, film everything but the shower murder in black and white, then jar the audience with a Technicolor bloodbath, a tacky, unimaginative ploy unworthy of the great director. There is no evidence to support this long circulating rumor, and it is rarely considered except in passing. Not so the claim that Saul Bass, the gifted artist who frequently made contributions to Hitchcock’s films, including the design of the opening title sequences for Psycho and Vertigo, actually directed the much praised shower sequence for which Hitchcock has long taken bows. It continues to inspire denials from all but a small coterie of Bass friends and fans.

Psycho’s reverberations were felt throughout Hollywood. The film’s graphic, for 1960, depictions of violence broke a taboo or two, and after John Carpenter’s 1978 production of Halloween, which owed a debt to Hitchcock's style, Psycho was unjustly implicated in the wave of “splatter” films, such as the Friday the 13th series, that followed in the wake of Halloween’s box- office success. Earlier, in 1961, William Castle, often dubbed “the poor man’s Hitchcock,” offered a blatant rip-off of Psycho in the form of Homicidal, a creepy little thriller that was not bad of its kind, if not deserving of Time magazine’s ten best list, an honor denied Psycho one year earlier.

Finally, Psycho had a profound effect on the career of Anthony Perkins who never shook the image he acquired after portraying the king of cutlery in this legendary film. Perkins had played mentally unbalanced characters before (bipolar baseball star Jimmy Piersall in 1957’s Fear Strikes Out), but he rarely played anything but deranged characters afterward. In addition to reprising Norman in three sequels beginning in 1982, Perkins played many variations on the twitching, psychopathic Mr. Bates in unrelated films. His performance of a warped fashion photographer provided the primary entertainment value in Mahogany, a silly 1975 melodrama starring the insufferable Diana Ross. Perkins also hovered on the verge of hysteria as a demented man of the cloth stalking Kathleen Turner in Crimes of Passion, another of director Ken Russell’s cinematic eccentricities. Few of those films are likely to be singled out for a retrospective showing at the Cleveland International Film Festival, but the festival’s 1996 presentation of Psycho demonstrates that, thirty-six years after he first scared people out of the showers, there is still an appreciative audience for good ol’ Norman Bates.

© 1996 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Blue Hawaii: Elvis in shorts!

Tour Hawaii with Elvis Presley!!!

That should have been the tagline on the Blue Hawaii poster (instead of “Elvis Presley Rides the Crest of the Wave”). The 1961 musical is less a motion picture than a moving postcard, but it was the King’s biggest box-office hit, the eighth highest grossing film in the year of its release, and a still impressive number 14 the year after. Shockingly, the movie’s soundtrack, littered with the likes of “Ito Eats” and “Slicin’ Sand,” became his most popular album. The RCA Victor LP held down the number one spot on the Billboard chart for 20 weeks, a record that remained unbroken until Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors overtook it in 1977, the year of Presley’s death.

Like all of Presley’s films for Paramount, Blue Hawaii was produced by Hal Wallis. Unlike 1957’s Loving You and 1958’s King Creole which preserved if toned down his rebellious rocker image, Blue Hawaii gave us a tame Elvis that the whole family could safely see together. It would also provide the template for most of the Presley movies to come: a tropical location with lush scenery, bikini-clad cuties, and an LP’s worth of songs, some of them downright ghastly.

It may have represented the start of the downward spiral that Presley’s career would take in the mid-1960s, but Blue Hawaii has its supporters among the faithful. After all, this is the movie that introduced the lovely “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” the song that closed his concerts after he returned to live performing in 1969. The other songs are coated in too much sugar to compete with “Jailhouse Rock,” but they are agreeable in the movie’s setting. There’s also a good cast with Angela Lansbury on hand as Elvis’ mother even though, at age 35, she was only ten years his senior. If Lansbury doesn’t incite lust in the male audience, there are several luscious babes that should do the trick. There’s Joan Blackman for those who like brunettes and Jenny Maxwell for the gentlemen who prefer blondes.

Blue Hawaii is attractive, alright, but it’s also the very definition of fluff. Elvis still had the opportunity to show he had the dramatic chops for a serious acting career (Flaming Star, Wild in the Country), but Blue Hawaii’s massive success, along with his complacent attitude toward Colonel Parker’s mismanagement of his career, guaranteed that the few gems in his filmography would be outnumbered by the likes of Girl Happy, Clambake, and Paradise, Hawaiian Style. If nothing else, Blue Hawaii is the best of that lot.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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The Shadows of Film Noir

Fleeing the mobsters he has double crossed, Harry Fabian runs through a virtual obstacle course of London’s back streets and alleys during a night in which the shadows seem to grow darker with his every footstep. The night itself seems to be his stalker; its shadows enveloping him like a closing coffin lid.

The scene is from Night and the City, the moody 1950 drama sometimes considered the definitive example of film noir, a genre that flourished in post W.W.II Hollywood, but named and first championed by French critics, most notably Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton whose 1955 book, Panorama du film americain, was the first major study devoted to the subject (Hirsch 9). Richard Widmark was pictured on the cover in a scene from the aforementioned film, and the choice was appropriate. With his gaunt face a mask of desperation, his lips wrapped around a cigarette as if it was a snorkel, and a lit match between the fingers that appear jittery even in a still photograph, Widmark’s Harry Fabian may be the archetypal noir “hero”: a man forever on the run, scheming for success, but, in the end, fighting simply to survive (128).

The film noir is, as critic Louis Giannetti points out, actually a subgenre, one that overlaps with other forms, especially gangster and private detective thrillers. The genre, named after a French word that literally means “black,” emphasizes the dark side of human existence. Its main characters are generally hard-boiled cynics who, if not living on the fringe of society, flirt with it, often with disastrous consequences. When innocence is present in film noir, it is rarely uncorrupted in this world of violence and despair. Greed, lust, murder, and sexual depravity are the principal themes in the genre, and the city, primarily at night, is the backdrop (91).

The visual style of noir is one of its most important and memorable attributes. Cinematographers have rarely been given the opportunity to be as creative in other genres as they have in this universe marked by anxiety and paranoia. Rain swept streets, menacing shadows, and faces lit, intermittently, by blinking neon signs, are common images, as are scenes photographed by a camera that seems to have been contaminated by the seedy milieus in which noir is often set.

“The visual compositions,” Giannetti writes, “are dynamic, jagged, off-balance” (92).

Film noir thrived in the 1940s but had its beginnings in the gangster films that the studios churned out in the wake of such box-office hits as Little Caesar and The Public Enemy in 1931. Those films, however, were more optimistic, presenting characters such as James Cagney’s Tom Powers of the latter film who were determined to succeed at all costs. Only the final, fatal bullets that brought their lives to an end could dissuade them from conquering the world. The typical noir anti-hero has, in many cases, already accepted defeat and counts himself lucky if he at least manages to survive (Hirsch 60).

Noir's visual style can be traced back to German Expressionism, an artistic movement that emphasized exaggerated, frequently grotesque, nightmarish images painted in high-contrast lights and darks. Many of the directors who would make vital contributions to noir, including Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity), Fritz Lang (The Woman in the Window), and Otto Preminger (Laura), were associated with the movement before fleeing Europe upon Hitler’s rise to power. The style wasn’t introduced to the cinema by noir, however, having already been evident in the silent thriller The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Lang’s futuristic 1926 classic Metropolis (Walker 26).

Italian Neo-realism also left a mark on noir by influencing the location shooting, documentary style narration, and less colorful characterizations that became commonplace in films of the genre’s later cycle. Literature had a major impact on setting the tone of these films, and writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, whose stories about hard drinking, chain smoking private detectives whose investigations took them into an immoral world of psychotic killers and femme fatales, often had their work adapted by filmmakers (Hirsch 28).

Though there is disagreement concerning which film represents the first genuine noir, many point to John Huston’s 1941 remake of The Maltese Falcon as the progenitor of the form. Based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel, the film starred Humphrey Bogart who had only recently graduated to genuine star status after years of playing roles in support of Cagney, Robinson, and George Raft in Warner Brothers’ series of gangster films. Bogart played Sam Spade, a tough talking private detective whose investigation of his partner’s murder draws him into the hunt for the objet d’ art of the title. Huston’s mise en scene does not dwell on the odd angles and chiaroscuro that would be characteristic of later noirs, but instead focuses on the characters whose eccentricities would become standards in the genre. Brigid O’ Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), a calculating and ultimately deadly beauty who lies to and manipulates everyone, including Spade, to get what she wants; and a pair of sexually ambivalent crooks, Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) who are also on the trail of the falcon. The veiled but still obvious homosexuality of the latter characters, as well as that of Gutman’s “gunsel” (a slang expression denoting a young, homosexual killer) symbolized, in those days before Gay Liberation, decadent individuals whose lives were lived in the shadows, hidden from the disapproving eyes of society. Such outsiders were unique in other genres but were rarely unrepresented in noir where they stood for depravity and “the sickest of all noir villains” (Hirsch 159).

The deviant sexuality and/or neurotic and psychotic tendencies of many noir characters is an important substructure of the genre. Villains, and even, in some instances, the heroes of noir struggle to resist their darker, normally repressed impulses. Freudian psychology had a strong impact in this regard, having inspired the creation of characters whose actions are guided by internal forces as much as by external ones (Thomas 87).

In Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), Dana Andrews is a detective investigating the murder of a beautiful woman (Gene Tierney). The characters he encounters as he attempts to unravel the mystery are eccentrics of whom he does not approve: a disdainful, bitchy columnist (Clifton Webb), and a prissy playboy (Vincent Price) who is kept by an older woman (Judith Anderson) who seems more masculine than the two men combined. As Foster Hirsch writes, this trio “introduce homosexual traits on the sly” (121).

Yet even the seemingly “straight” detective reveals a disturbing inclination to necrophilia by becoming hopelessly infatuated with the dead Laura’s portrait.

In I Wake Up Screaming (1941), directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, a psychopathic detective (Laird Cregar) murders the woman whose love is denied him, and frames the man who has won her affections (Victor Mature) for the crime. The cop’s devotion to his victim is such that his home contains a shrine built in her honor.

When women are not being deified by men in noir, they are often brutalized. In 1947’s Kiss of Death, Richard Widmark made a sensational film debut as a more demented than usual psychotic named Tommy Udo, who cackled maniacally as he pushed an old woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs to her death. In The Big Heat (1953), Lee Marvin disfigures Gloria Graham by throwing scalding coffee at her face, and in The Street with No Name (1949), a more subdued Widmark merely beats a woman after learning she has tipped off the police about his next robbery. The fact that so much of the violence in noir is committed against women has caused some critics to label the genre misogynistic (Giannetti 92).

There’s no need to weep for the women in noir, though, since they can be just as deadly, sometimes more so, than the men. Witness Barbara Stanwyck’s roles in Double Indemnity (1944) and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946).

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, co-scripted by Raymond Chandler, and based on a novel by James M. Cain, opens with the silhouette of a man who proceeds toward the camera until the screen grows black. After the credits, the blackness dissolves into fog and we are soon introduced to Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) who, talking into a tape recorder, recounts the incidents that have brought him to his office at this time, bleeding, and slowly lurching toward death. Neff, an insurance salesman, had been lured by a bored, middle-class housewife into a plot to murder her husband with the intention of collecting the insurance money.

Throughout the plotting of the murder, and the subsequent attempts to stay one step ahead of Neff’s suspicious and persistent boss (Edward G. Robinson), it is the woman, played by Stanwyck, who is in control. As Foster Hirsch writes, Stanwyck’s role in Double Indemnity is “a grotesque in women’s clothing, a character conceived by men who hate and fear strong women” (152).

The homicidal lovers of Wilder’s classic shoot each other in the end, their scheme having failed due to their distrust of each other more than anything else.

A similar fate befalls the characters in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Lewis Milestone’s bizarre drama of a powerful woman (Stanwyck) and her weak-willed husband (Kirk Douglas in his film debut) who, as children, collaborated in the murder of her domineering grandmother. Now, as the most powerful couple in town, they find their position threatened when a childhood friend (Van Heflin), who they believe witnessed the murder, returns to his hometown. Paranoia has gotten the best of them, and their brutal efforts to silence a man who knows nothing of their crime leads to the very downfall their treatment of him was intended to prevent. The end echoes the climax of Double Indemnity with a perverse twist. Instead of husband and wife shooting each other, the wife pulls the trigger on the gun that her husband is pointing at her, killing herself before the man follows her lead and also commits suicide. Even more so than in Double Indemnity, the woman wields the power. The man is a mere puppet.

Even when playing the victim in noir, Stanwyck dominated her surroundings. In Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), she is the bedridden wife of a man (Burt Lancaster) whose efforts to liberate himself from her control ultimately lead to her murder, and to his downfall.

Like Double Indemnity and many noirs, Sorry, Wrong Number is told in flashback to highlight the role that fate has played in the lives of the characters. Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), a film heavily influenced by noir, describes the flashback technique as a way to establish “an irretrievable past, a predetermined fate, and an all-enveloping hopelessness”

Flashbacks do not play a role in Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, but few film noirs convey a sense of desperation and hopelessness more effectively than this classic of the genre. Dassin, perhaps best known for his later, lighter films, Never on Sunday (1960) and Topkapi (1964), both starring his wife, the sultry Greek actress Melina Mercouri, began his career in noir, first helming the semi-documentary Naked City (1948), which later inspired a popular television series, then directing his masterpiece, Night and the City.

Highly Expressionistic in style, Night and the City’s vivid depiction of a hustler conniving his way through the London underworld is highlighted by Richard Widmark’s finest performance. As Harry Fabian, “an artist without an art,” Widmark, to quote Foster Hirsch, “palpably conveys his character’s mounting desperation, his struggle against impossible odds” (160). Despite enjoying one of Hollywood’s most durable careers which included roles as Jim Bowie opposite John Wayne’s Davy Crockett in The Alamo (1960) and as the Dauphin in Otto Preminger’s misguided adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1957), Widmark continues to be strongly identified with noir, a result of his having performed so effectively on its dark, desperate stage.

The influence of Italian Neo-Realism on noir was the result of producer Louis de Rochemont’s entry into the genre with 1945’s The House on 92nd Street. Shot on location, and featuring a narration the likes of which would later become a signature of Jack Webb’s Dragnet television series, the semi-documentary approach, memorably used in Naked City and The Street with No Name, often included detailed accounts of the way in which law enforcement agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, operate, focusing on techniques and procedures, often to the accompaniment of stirring, patriotic music. These films, though often just as visually dark and sinister as the original, Expressionistic noir films, were, nonetheless, more upbeat, leading some critics to dismiss them outright as the polar opposite of the genre (Walker 37).

Although there are many examples of noir throughout the 1950s, including such exceptional films as Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950), and Robert Aldrich’s highly regarded Mickey Spillane adaptation, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the genre’s heyday was, by that time, at its end. For Forest Hirsch, it was Orson Welles who provided the genre with its final blast of glory.

In Touch of Evil, writer-director Welles “offers an overheated summary of what were by 1958 the conventions of the noir style” (11) in a film that represents “the last brilliant flourishes of noir’s decadence” (12). Described by Welles’ biographer, David Thomson, as “macabre, perverse and unpleasant” (344), Thomson also suggests that Touch of Evil is “a kind of masterpiece, a terrific film” (343), an indication of the often contrary reactions one has to a genre that fascinates and repels at the same time. As an actor, Welles himself does both as a psychotic lawman in a Mexican border town as outwardly corrupt (the already portly Welles donned padding to give himself even greater bulk) as he is within, expressed in his willingness to plant evidence in order to bring about “justice.”

In the 1970s, noir would reemerge as a force in cinema by way of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Dick Richards’ Farewell, My Lovely (1975), films that attempted to recapture the style of the original films, and were set in the general period in which the genre flourished. Though critics have been known to slap the noir label on virtually any film that examines the seedier aspects of life, especially those that revolve around the criminal world, most of these films, such as Dirty Harry, Klute, and The French Connection (all 1971), bear no similarity to the original noirs in either their visual style or characterizations. Even Farewell, My Lovely, in which Robert Mitchum was cast as Raymond Chandler’s world weary Philip Marlowe, the same character played by Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’ 1946 noir classic The Big Sleep, is less a true noir than an homage to the genre. The same is true of Body Heat (1981), a virtual remake of Double Indemnity with Kathleen Turner expertly cast as a contemporary femme fatale.

The original noirs offered, as Foster Hirsch writes, “a symbolic and psychological profile of its era” (19).

Film noir began in a decade - the 1940s - when war clouds were gathering, threatening to make major changes in the lives of Americans. By the end of the decade, Communist witch hunts, as well as a war in Korea, were on the horizon. The intervening years were marked by uncertainty, especially for men and women whose traditionally established roles were being redefined when World War II necessitated the entry of women into the workplace to fill jobs that were customarily performed by men. Whether intentional or not, noir reflected the fears of those who were wary of the changes taking place by presenting women whose independence came at the expense of men who, in noir, were weak, fearful, and frequently the victims of strong, castrating femme fatales (20). In noir, the desperate, cynical, and often maladjusted men mirrored, in a wildly exaggerated way, the men who fought in W.W.II, then came home, finding it difficult to readjust to civilian life (20).

Regardless of what messages can be found lurking under all those shadows in the film noir, there’s no denying the genre’s impact on the films that followed. There are strong elements of noir to be found in Ridley Scott’s science-fiction thriller Blade Runner (1982), in which Harrison Ford appears as a weary, Bogart style detective who hunts androids rather than jewel encrusted birds (Grist 274).

It is in the genuine, original noir films that one can find a world not unlike our own, but darker, sexier, and, no matter how grim and violent, strangely appealing. It is a world where it is always night. It is the world of film noir.

Brian W. Fairbanks
1995

Works Cited
Cameron, Ian. The Book of Film Noir. New York: Continuum, 1992.

Giannetti, Louis D. "Film Noir Festival: Images of Bogie." Cleveland Magazine. January 1974.

Grist, Leighton. "Moving Targets and Black Widows: Film Noir in Modern Hollywood." The Book of Film Noir, 267-85.

Hirsch, Foster. The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1981.

Tellotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark. Illinois: University Press, 1989.

Thomson, David. Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Walker, Michael. "Film Noir: an Introduction." The Book of Film Noir, 8-38


© 1995 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Revenge of the Creature: Pasty-faced sequel

In their smirky, disrespectful and often dishonest book, The Golden Turkey Awards, the Medved brothers stage a mock competition in which John Agar, Tony Curtis, and Richard Burton duke it out for the title of the world's worst actor. Burton won, of course; after all, to choose a genuinely bad actor wouldn't give the authors an opportunity to shock and outrage their readers.

As a great actor, albeit one who frequently descended into hamminess, Burton was a controversial choice. No one, however, would doubt for one minute that John Agar is the most worthy recipient of the "honor." His performance in Revenge of the Creature alone should convince even the most skeptical that Mr. Agar has no rival in this contest.

Writing about a rotten Richard Burton performance is easy. The late Welshman's style is often described as "bravura." Liz Taylor's favorite hubby (she married him twice) was not shy about showing emotion. A John Agar performance is more elusive. The man doesn't really do anything. Agar shows all the emotion of a department store mannequin and has less personality. He reads his dialogue as though he forgot he was in a movie and was suddenly reminded, perhaps by the sight of one of the many monsters with which he so often co-starred. "Let's see," Agar seems to be thinking. "Do Gill Men exist in real life? Nah. This must be one of those movies. Now, what is my dialogue?"

Actually, Revenge of the Creature is the perfect movie for Agar's non-talents. A sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon, it's a pasty-faced shadow of its excellent predecessor even though Jack Arnold who directed the original, as well as the classic Incredible Shrinking Man, is at the helm once again. In a bad movie like this one, Agar's monotone line readings and complete lack of anything resembling charisma or presence don't ruin anything. Besides, with foxy Lori Nelson on hand as the damsel in distress, who'll notice Agar?

The most interesting scene in Revenge of the Creature has nothing to do with a monster or any unconvincing dramatics from Agar. In the scene, a pair of teenagers are driving along when one of them says, "My father told me that these days a Bachelors degree from college is what a high-school diploma was when he was young." I've heard that in the 90's, and I believed it, too, although hearing it in a 1955 monster movie makes me wonder if it's not one of those "I walked twenty miles to school in the snow" stories. Those teenagers don't have to worry about high-school diplomas or Bachelor degrees, though, since the Gill-Man gets them only minutes after their conversation.

Now, more than four decades after its release, Revenge of the Creature is best known, not for dialogue that may cast doubt on things your father tells you, but as the film that introduced Clint Eastwood to movie audiences. In his brief amusing scene as a lab assistant who misplaces a mouse, Eastwood has the presence that Agar lacks, but his acting is just as wooden. There is no indication that, in another twelve years, the tall, soft-spoken actor would be on his way to becoming one of the great icons of the cinema, not to mention an Oscar winning director. Eastwood's name cannot be found in the credits, but it's doubtful anyone would remember Revenge of the Creature at all today if not for his appearance.

© 1995 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Quiz Show

He’s won $50,000 as a contestant on the TV game show Twenty-One, been immortalized on the cover of Time, and celebrated as the perfect role model for the school children of America. But late one evening while sitting in the kitchen of his Connecticut home, Charles Van Doren tells his father that he doubts he could ever be happier than he was when, as a boy, he’d return from school to find chocolate cake and an ice cold bottle of milk waiting for him. “It seems so simple,” he says, and at this time, his life is anything but simple.

Quiz Show, Robert Redford’s Oscar nominated drama, isn’t simple either. It examines greed, dishonesty, family ties, academia, and the whipping boy of the 20th century, what else but television? The fact that Redford and his screenwriter embellished the facts somewhat and compressed time to bring this true story to the screen has caused some to wonder if they engaged in the same kind of deceit for which they condemn the lead characters.

The quiz shows secretly fed answers to the contestants, and the winners became national celebrities. Herb Stempel (John Turturro) is the reigning champion as Quiz Show opens, but the producers think a new winner is needed to maintain audience interest, preferably someone more handsome, and a gentile to boot.

Enter Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), the son of a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and professor at Columbia University. Exit Stempel, who agrees to take a dive, but only after he’s been promised a spot on an upcoming panel show. When the promise proves empty, the vindictive Stempel, who has gambled away his winnings and resents Van Doren’s popularity, craves revenge. At the same time, Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow), a Congressional investigator, is looking into the show’s background, convinced that something dirty is going down.

The script by Paul Attanasio compresses the time frame, turning several years into several months. The role that Goodwin played in the proceedings is also expanded (he wrote the book on which the film is based). These changes were made to strengthen the dramatic impact, but some critics have charged the film with hypocrisy. Hey, this movie is doing the same thing the game shows did: creating drama, contriving suspense, and lying to its audience.

Maybe. But the quiz shows were deliberately hood-winking viewers who were told they were watching reality unfold as it happened. The audience for Quiz Show, the movie, is hopefully sophisticated enough to know they are being manipulated by the filmmakers. A bigger question is whether the deception played on the American people in the 1950s is really significant enough to warrant a 137 minute movie?

I’m tempted to say no, but then Quiz Show deals with greater issues. The ignorance of the American people who gathered around the box in their living rooms is mirrored by Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield), the intellectual, who, despite his Pulitzer Prize for poetry and esteemed place in the world of academia, is foolishly unaware of the impact television is having on both the culture and his son.

“Charlie’s famous,” someone tells the father, “like Elvis Presley.” But the man of letters is not impressed by this shift in the culture.

Charles Van Doren is another matter. A professor of literature, he is nonetheless a man whose identity has been overshadowed by his illustrious father’s reputation. Only by compromising his intellect is he able to come into his own. The price he pays is too steep, however, and Van Doren’s fame only serves to make him feel smaller even as the public elevates him to star status.

What is offensive about Quiz Show is its subtle yet still obvious sanctimonious undercurrents. This is where it all came undone, the filmmakers say. America, that beacon for dreamers, lost its innocence. America, it seems, is always losing its innocence. We’ve been told that America lost its innocence when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and again in Vietnam, and yet again at Watergate. Now, Quiz Show tells us, the cynicism began in the 1950s thanks to a weekly half-hour TV game show.

Sure it did. What, I wonder, was America when the Europeans came and stole the land from the Natives? How innocent was America before the Civil War that brought an end to slavery?

As long as one overlooks these pretensions, Quiz Show is an engrossing film. The era is eerily reproduced (although the Time cover featuring Fiennes as Van Doren looks too contemporary by using a photo instead of an illustration as the news weekly did during the ‘50s) right down to the vacant eyes of the game show host who is more mannequin than human being. The performances, with the exception of Morrow, who affects an annoying and unconvincing Boston accent, are as good as can be. Turturro is gawky, caustic, and intense as Stempel, Fiennes is smooth and superficially secure as Charles Van Doren. Best of all is Paul Scofield as the condescendingly erudite senior Van Doren. Redford’s direction, so flat and undistinguished in The Milagro Beanfield War and A River Runs Through It, finally shows some force.

© 1995 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Bob Dylan is Masked and Anonymous

Bob Dylan once said "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." I'm no weatherman, and I can't say with any certainty which way the wind is blowing, but I know I'll want to avoid any breeze emanating from the cinema showing Masked and Anonymous, a movie starring and co-written by the rock 'n roll bard himself.

One of the characters, a network television executive, warns us early on when he says, "Something's starting to smell here." Dylan himself may have been aware that an odor was present when he decided to use a pseudonym, Sergei Petrov, in the screenplay credits. Director Larry Charles, the co-author, is billed as Rene Fontaine. Sadly, the all-star cast attracted to this project because of Dylan's involvement are not "masked and anonymous," except, perhaps, for Ed Harris whose brief, amusing cameo is performed in black-face.

Did I say "amusing"? I'm not sure if this is meant to be a comedy or a drama. It may have been intended to work like one of Dylan's songs from the ‘60s, you know, a surreal masterpiece like "Desolation Row" whose brilliant lyrics imply depths of meaning but are open to endless interpretation. But Masked and Anonymous is too haphazard and too pretentious to warrant much analysis.

Dylan plays Jack Fate, a now forgotten rock star released from prison to perform a benefit concert for an unidentified, fictional country racked by war and civil unrest. John Goodman plays the promoter, Uncle Sweetheart, a sleazy Colonel Tom Parker wannabe who hopes to pocket the profits for himself. The movie only comes to life when Goodman is on screen, but that's like saying an exhumed corpse seems to have been alive after burial because its hair continued to grow (an illusion resulting from the skin's having shrunk).

Jessica Lange is the representative for the skeptical TV network that plans to televise the concert. She furiously smokes cigarettes while pacing madly and looking frazzled. That's better than furiously praying which is what Penelope Cruz is required to do, unless she's praying for deliverance from this movie. Jeff Bridges, as a journalist named Tom Friend, seems intent on trying to actually deliver a performance, but that's impossible when acting with Dylan who is less animated than Elvis in the notorious "last photo" snapped while the King was at rest in his coffin.

This man who has made such imaginative use of language in some of the greatest songs ever written merely mumbles a few sentences of unremarkable and usually pointless dialogue, and offers an occasional voice-over that never succeeds in explaining anything. In one scene, Bridges as the journalist, harangues Dylan, saying "You're supposed to have all the answers" and compares him unfavorably with the late Jimi Hendrix. "Hendrix let it all hang out at Woodstock," he says without explaining what that means. Dylan defends himself, saying he's been letting it all hang out all along. If so, there's nothing there. In one of his voice-overs, Dylan himself says, "Maybe I'm just a singer and nothing more."

Of course, Dylan's statement is correct, or at least close to the truth. He is a singer. He's also a great songwriter, maybe even a poet, whose songs continue to dazzle and inspire music fans of many generations. He's nothing more than that, but that's more than enough. But many of his more ardent fans, especially those who discovered Dylan at the same time they stopped shaving and let their hair grow, consider him a guru who does indeed have all the answers.

If so, he's saving them for another project. There are no answers here, only questions, the most obvious of which is "Why bother?" Why bother making such a meaningless, deadening film, and why should anyone bother to see it?

Well, there is the concert footage, including a memorable rendition of "Dixie" and a tender "I'll Remember You." Here and there, you'll hear snatches of Dylan's studio recordings such as "Blind Willie McTell," a song that managed to convey more in five verses than Masked and Anonymous does in 104 minutes. But most of the soundtrack is devoted to cover versions of Dylan classics by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Magokoro Brothers and Los Lobos. There's some fun to be had from a scene in the boardroom of the TV network where a wall-sized schedule of programming reveals titles taken from Dylan songs. Maybe someday, someone will make a TV series out of "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." It's bound to be better than Masked and Anonymous.

© 2003 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Night and the City (1950)

Night and the City is a classic film noir based on the Gerald Kersh novel with Richard Widmark as Harry Fabian, a two-bit hustler scheming to become a big-time fight promoter in London.

Widmark is superb in what may be his best performance. He brings to mind James Cagney at times, but he’s actually more like Bugs Bunny, full of bravado and nervous energy.

And let’s not forget Mike Mazurski as the Strangler, as brutish as he was playing Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet but with a hint of more intelligence, and portly Francis L. Sullivan, a “fat man” in the style of Sydney Greenstreet, but more tragic. Herbert Lom, Googie Withers, and Stanislaw Zbyazko, once a real star of Roman-Greco wrestling, are also excellent. Gene Tierney, however, is superfluous as Widmark’s girlfriend, and Hugh Marlowe, who plays the sort of bland role he was often assigned in 20th Century Fox films, has little to do but express his disapproval for Fabian’s way of life.

The look of the film is one of its strengths with scenes cast in a luminous black contrasted with almost ghostly whites.

Dismissed as lurid nonsense about undesirable characters when released in 1950 (Variety chimed in with one of the few positive reviews), Night and the City is a masterpiece that hasn’t dated a bit. It has a modern sensibility that makes it more contemporary than its 1992 remake (with Robert DeNiro in Widmark’s role).

© 2009 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey

As I write this, the year 2001 is a mere seven years away. Unless there are some truly astounding changes in store between now and then, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey will remain science-fiction. This frequently fascinating, sometimes tedious, two hour and 19 minute film, advertised as “The Ultimate Trip” when re-released in 1974 (no doubt, in an attempt to appeal to those still trapped in the drug culture of the previous decade), portrays space travel as a mundane fact of life, and computers as thinking bodies independent of human thought. It’s a cold, dry impersonal world, and 2001 is a cold, dry film depicting a future that I am not impatient to see arrive.

The “stars” of the film, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, are not stars at all, so the special-effects are the most commanding presence. Chief among them is the sinister, lisping machine known only as HAL, voiced by Douglas Rain. As for the plot, there is a skimpy one, but it’s not very important. This is a film to experience, not as a story, but for its remarkable visuals and music score (one of the first to utilize previously recorded music, composed by the likes of Beethoven and Strauss).

2001 doesn't really seem to be “about” anything, which means the viewer is free to interpret it in any way he likes, in which case it could be the most meaningful or most pointless film ever made. It is justifiably a landmark in cinema, one that will leave you inspired, bewildered, or both.

© 1994 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Family Plot: Hitchcock's last

Family Plot, released in 1976, was Alfred Hitchcock’s final film. During production, he informed one of his assistants that he would be retiring because he no longer had the physical energy necessary to lead a film crew.

Family Plot suffers from a lack of energy at the beginning. It starts out slowly, too slowly, I thought, but soon picks up speed and is enlivened by a terrific cast. You’ve got Bruce Dern, dependably loony as ever, as an unemployed actor working as a cab driver hooked up with kooky Barbara Harris, a spiritualist whose powers turn out to be greater than she thinks. She’s been hired to track down the sole heir to a fortune, but the heir supposedly died years ago in a fire at age 17. Funny thing, though: his grave is empty.

The villains are played by William Devane who looks and sounds enough like Jack Nicholson that it probably hurt his career as much as it helped it, and Karen Black. There’s a “chase” scene involving an out of control car that should put you on the edge of your seat, and a lot of subtle humor.

Family Plot isn’t great Hitchcock, but it’s a respectable swan song for the great director.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, with dialogue in two dead languages (Aramaic and Latin) is a film that has been debated and condemned for a year now, often by people who hadn't seen it. Now it arrives, still controversial, but now capable of being assessed on its merits or lack of same. This is not a film one can "like." Rather, it's a film to admire. The effect is visceral. One is either moved spiritually or emotionally by Gibson's film or one is not. I was moved.

The film deals with the life of Jesus, but unlike other cinematic interpretations of the Gospels, Gibson focuses on the passion, a word often associated with love but originally used to describe Christ's sufferings. But love is the ultimate point. This is no white-washed politically correct version of the Gospels with Jesus cast as a hippy philosopher, but one that wholeheartedly accepts his divinity and role as savior of all mankind, the shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep.

Gibson dispenses with the usual opening titles, instead devoting the first frames of film to a quote from Isaiah. We then see Jesus (James Caviezel) praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, asking God the Father to let this burden pass from his shoulders, but vowing to follow through on the Father's commands. Bathed in an eerie pale blue light (the cinematography by Caleb Deschanel is superb), Jesus is alone except for Satan (Rosalinda Celentano), presented here as a female androgen, beautiful, yet barren of spirit. Jesus' meditation is interrupted by Roman soldiers who come to arrest him. Accused by the Sanhedrin of blasphemy, Jesus is passed from Pontius Pilate to King Herod and back to Pilate, who sentences Jesus to death in order to satisfy the Jewish religious leaders.

Here is where most of the controversy originates, but charges that the film is anti-Semitic are ill-founded. Jesus was, after all, a Jew, as were his apostles and many of those who protested his crucifixion. More importantly, Jesus lays down his life of his own accord. His death, like his resurrection, was prophesied in the Old Testament.

The remainder of the film is devoted to Jesus' suffering, and it is presented in graphic, often disturbing detail. Yes, the film is bloody, and very violent, but Gibson somehow avoids being gratuitous. By these wounds we are healed is the message, and the film hopes to communicate the extent of Jesus' suffering on our behalf.

Although the film does not dwell on Jesus' teachings, several flashbacks give us a glimpse of the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Supper, as well as Jesus' life as a carpenter. One of the most affecting flashbacks occurs during the long march to Golgotha. His cross too heavy to bear, Jesus drops to his knees and his mother rushes to his side. A flashback shows Mary (a luminous Maia Morgenstern) doing the same when a youthful Jesus stumbles and falls.

Although this is only Gibson's third film as a director (the second was 1995's Oscar winning Braveheart), he shows himself to be a master film-maker, capable of creating inspired and inspiring imagery, notably a heavenly view of the crucifixion in which a single teardrop forms and drops near the foot of the cross causing the earth to tremble. Gibson ends his film with a brief but beautiful depiction of the resurrection, a scene that brought applause from the audience I saw it with.

One way to determine whether a creative work qualifies as art is to observe the reaction it triggers in those who experience it. No one who sees The Passion of the Christ is likely to be indifferent to it. You may praise it or condemn it, be inspired or enraged by its violence. It is a movie, but it is the result of Gibson's desire to express his beliefs and proclaim them to the world. It's an act of faith. A work of art.

Brian W. Fairbanks

Originally published at Paris Woman Journal

© 2004 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Ed Wood: A great movie about the world's worst director

Tim Burton’s film Ed Wood is a superb piece of work; a love letter to movie lovers. You can’t help but chuckle at the irony that this film about the man dubbed "the worst director of all-time" was nominated for two Academy Awards, winning in each of its categories. Edward D. Wood, Jr., a man whose work guaranteed that he would never collect an Oscar, was honored, if only second-hand, by the Academy sixteen years after his death at age 54.

Wood’s low-budget films are now legendary for their ludicrous writing, inept production, and amateurish acting. Cardboard tombstones may topple over, walls may shake and nearly collapse with the opening of a door, and scenes of stampeding buffalo may appear out of nowhere, but such disastrous moments represented nothing more to Wood than the suspension of belief. For all his incompetence, however, Wood did not really warrant the title of the world’s worst film director. That title would more accurately be slapped on a filmmaker who bores his audience. Wood can be accused of many cinematic crimes, but boring his audience is a charge for which any viewer of Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and his masterpiece Plan 9 From Outer Space will certainly clear him. Wood’s films are generally hilarious, a distinction that redeems his otherwise misguided productions.

It’s clear from Tim Burton’s treatment of Wood’s unusual story that the director of such offbeat, big budget hits as Batman, Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, likes his subject. As portrayed by Johnny Depp, Ed Wood is a charmingly good-natured innocent who is madly in love with movies.

"All I want to do is tell stories," he says, and though his talent is not equal to his ambition, Wood told stories--poorly, perhaps, but with a sincerity that make them hard to resist.

Wood’s love for his craft is strong, however, too strong to reject even though he is repeatedly rejected by critics, studio heads, and even some of the oddest oddballs in the underground exploitation market of the movie business with whom he is forced to do business. Along the way, he must also compromise his integrity, if he has any, by making changes in the cast lineup to include an investor’s son, and even changing the title of his film, Grave Robbers From Outer Space, to Plan 9 from Outer Space to accommodate the conservative Christians who finance Wood’s bizarre epic about alien invasion.

Unlike the Medveds, Harry and Michael, whose Golden Turkey Awards brought about Wood’s resurgence, Burton’s film is not smug. It doesn’t patronize its subject, but instead celebrates Wood’s love affair with film, a love no doubt shared by the maker of Ed Wood. That passion for the magic of moviemaking is evident throughout the film, and is what makes it a surefire candidate for cult status in the years to come. This is a film buff’s movie, hence its failure at the box-office when released in time for Halloween 1994. To fully enjoy Ed Wood almost requires an all consuming passion for the movies, good and bad movies alike.

The sets and black-and-white photography are beautiful to behold, the script by Rudolph Grey and Scott Alexander is fresh and alive with many memorable moments, and the performances are first-rate. As the angora sweater wearing Wood, Johnny Depp is simply wonderful. Jeffrey Jones nails phony psychic Criswell to a T, Bill Murray is his always delightfully insincere self as Bunny Breckinridge, the effeminate member of Wood’s ensemble who is obsessed with having a sex change operation, and Lisa Marie is sexy, stunning, and arrogantly aloof as horror movie hostess Vampira. Sara Jessica Parker also shines as Wood’s long suffering girlfriend, as does Patricia Arquette as her replacement for Wood’s affections, and Juliet Landau as the most ambitious member of Wood’s ragtag repertory company. Even the great Orson Welles is briefly resurrected from the grave, seems to be, anyway, thanks to Vincent D’ Onofrio’s magical cameo as Wood’s idol.

Then there’s Martin Landau’s Oscar winning portrayal of the tragic Bela Lugosi. Spouting profanity laced insults at his rival Boris Karloff, admiring the "jugs" on Vampira, and pompously but artfully reciting Wood’s generally atrocious dialogue, Landau does not merely inhabit some very impressive makeup, he appears to serve as a medium for the long dead actor’s spirit. Prior to the film’s release, Landau stated that he wished not only to portray the screen’s legendary horror star, but to give a great Lugosi performance. He succeeds on both counts.

Everything about Ed Wood clicks perfectly. The film pays tribute not only to Wood, but to the era - the 1950’s - in which he made his very unique mark. It conjures a mood similar to Joe Dante’s Matinee, but even more delightfully. Ed Wood, a tribute to the man who made some of the worst movies in history, is one of the best pictures of 1994, and one of the greatest films ever made about the movies.

Brian W. Fairbanks

© 1994 Brian W. Fairbanks


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