All the King's Men

I’d been meaning for some time to watch this and Face in the Crowd again, for their relevance to contemporary American politics, but this got bumped forward because I am contemplating a film series on “Remembering New Orleans.” In actuality, the particularities of Huey Long and Louisiana are quite submerged in the film, in the interests of the broader political fable, of demagoguery and the corruption of power. Hmm, still relevant -- and the film holds up pretty well, probably earned its Oscar for Best Picture, as Broderick Crawford did for Best Actor and Mercedes McCambridge for Best Supporting Actress. It may just be a Classics Illustrated version of Robert Penn Warren, with Robert Rossen’s densely-packed frames replacing the novel’s depth of insight, but a good one nonetheless. For example, he can only include half of what to me is one of the most memorable lines in American fiction, when Willie Stark instructs Jack Burden to dig up the dirt on Judge Stanton, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption. He passeth from the stink of the didey to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” As it happens, Steve Zallian (Searching for Bobby Fischer) is now in post-production with a remake starring Sean Penn -- should be interesting. (1949, dvd, r.) *8-*

Another New Orleans film I just caught up with, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), is a real car wreck of a movie -- a pile-up involving Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift; Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Joseph Mankiewicz; incest and homosexuality, madness and murder, demons and blasphemy. You can’t watch, but you can’t look away either.

Mad Hot Ballroom

Shamelessly entertaining, this documentary about kids competing is not as deep or as well-constructed as Spellbound, but does borrow from its subject an irrepressible energy and charm. Fifth-graders in NYC are required to take a ten-week course in ballroom dancing (now that right there would have forced me to drop out of school and run away from home), with citywide competitions at the end. We start with schools in Brooklyn, Tribeca, and Washington Heights, which are gradually winnowed away by the contests and the film itself. Many intriguing characters are glimpsed, but no more, though by the championships we know our favorites pretty well, at least by name and style of hip-shaking. Much of the film’s humor and warmth comes from the premise of pre- or incipiently-sexual children doing flagrantly-sexual dances such as the rhumba, merengue, and swing, all very proper and polite you understand. One very knowing little girl, Jodie Foster precocious, explains seriously that 11-year-old girls are the object most desired by perverts. So I have to be careful what I say, but these kids, girls and boys both, are damn cute. Director Marilyn Argelo puts many appealing elements together, mixing music and gym class, etiquette and enticement, so it hardly matters that the film just skims the surface, when it does it so dancingly. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-71, RT-82.)

Panic in the Streets

An unrecognized gem, this outstanding noir film from Elia Kazan makes a worthy companion piece to his On the Waterfront from four years later. And it is still timely today, depicting a public health hazard that threatens New Orleans, in the form of an infection brought into port by an illegal alien. Panic in the streets is just what Richard Widmark is trying to avoid, as a Navy doctor responsible for public health, when a murdered hood turns out on autopsy to have pneumonic plague. He works assiduously to contain and quarantine the infection, but needs the initially reluctant help of police captain Paul Douglas to find the murderer(s) before they flee and spread the disease to parts unknown. That would be Walter Jack Palance in a memorable screen debut, with Zero Mostel as his flunky and foil. Widmark is both steely and fragile as he fends off medical disaster, while the clock ticks on solving a crime with no clues. Barbara Bel Geddes makes the absolute most of her few scenes as his lovely, straight-talking wife. The dialogue and character work are astoundingly naturalistic and flavorsome, as are the classic noir cinematography, of black shadow and atmospheric light, and the dockyard and warehouse location settings. With FEMA so much in the news these days, it’s fascinating to watch a federal officer deal with police, politicians, and press to fend off a public health disaster. If only “Brownie” had Widmark’s competence and conviction! (1950, dvd, n.) *8*

Monterey Pop

As a time capsule, this is fabulous. As a film, not so much. So its documentary worth depends largely in how interested you are in the subject -- the time, the place, the people, the performers. As a concert film, it is seminal but not altogether successful. Thirty years on, it all looks very old hat, but at the time it was a first chance for a who’s who of direct cinema -- Pennebaker, Leacock, Maysles et al. -- to bring their cameras to bear on a music festival as a defining cultural moment, with benefit of advanced (for the time) sound recording. Some camera innovations work and some don’t, some of the music is great and some isn’t, some of the performers have lost none of their electrifying power (Janis) and some have turned into a joke (Jimi), but all are utterly redolent of the moment when I, for one, was turning 21. The final performance by Ravi Shankar on sitar is excruciatingly prolonged, but does implicitly signal that the Monterey International Pop Festival was an initial wave in the rising tide of globalism, as well as an advertisement for San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” and the transformative power of youth culture. In the sea of wildly clapping hands at the finale, the camera pans past one guy in gloves clapping only because he’d look like an idiot if he was the only one who wasn’t -- that could be me. (1968, dvd, r.) *7-*

Dear Diary

I am off my regular rhythm of film viewing and reviewing, but I wouldn’t want you to think my commitment to Cinema Salon was waning, so I’m going to offer a quick round-up of what I’ve been watching this week in the absence of worthwhile movies.

With my beloved Tribe falling just short of the baseball playoffs, I take only a distant interest in the postseason proceedings. I can’t love the White Sox who ousted my guys, but I am rooting for the end of another near-century-long Sox curse. And as it happens, I will be in Chicago while games 6 & 7 of the World Series may be transpiring. That didn’t work out so well in ’86, when I happened to be staying at the Sheraton in Boston and watching on tv as the Red Sox tried to close out the Mets. I was getting ready to go out and join the insanely joyful midnight crowds in Kenmore Square, when that dribbler rolled through Buckner’s legs.

For my winter film series at the Clark, I will be offering “Triple Feature: 3 Colors, 3 Painters, 3 Studios.” The last part will be a marathon of animation from three different studios: the National Film Board of Canada, Aardman Animation (of Wallace & Gromit fame) and the Hubley Studios. I’ve been surveying all available films by the last, to put together a program of Academy Award-winning shorts and others by John, Faith, and Emily Hubley. I will write up my findings in some detail soon.

As for my current film series, “Architectural Dreams,” it has been meeting a better response than I ever dreamed possible for a special interest series of documentaries on architects. I selected the films to survey documentary styles as much as architectural styles, and each is a good movie in its own right. If you’ve missed them, check out the program notes in my Archives of September 2005, and catch up with these excellent films from Netflix, or from the Milne Public Library in Williamstown, where the DVDs are available to borrow after they’ve been shown at the Clark.

While I was holding on to the Hubley disks from Netflix, my other viewing turned to daily TiVo maintenance. I am quite enjoying the current HBO series, Rome, which is sexed up but historically accurate as far as I have checked. It’s not The Wire or The Sopranos, but does maintain an HBO tradition of quality original series. This week I’ve been getting double doses of the Daily Show, as Jon Stewart has cloned off The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert is as talented and funny as good old Jon, but his one-note persona, as hilarious as it is, may wear thin after a while. Also, with a satellite upgrade I can now get a regular PBS station, so I’ve programmed a “season pass” to Jim Lehrer’s Newshour, to go with my daily Charlie Rose. I have to check the latter every day, since my good old friend Tom Krens is supposed to show up there sometime soon. Rose consistently has the most interesting talkers on tv, and is it just me getting more tolerant or is he gradually learning to shut up and let his guests answer questions without excess interruption? I tended to tune out the news after last year’s election, but as the dismantling of the disastrous Bush Administration proceeds apace, my interest is renewed and I’ve even started reading political blogs again.

Trying to clear out items that have been on my “now playing” list for months, I finally got around to watching the Luis Bunuel short film, Simon of the Desert. I’ve never been a Bunuel fan, immune as I am to the appeal of surrealism, not even Viridiana or Belle de Jour or other presumed classics. But I had fond memories of seeing Simon thirty-odd years ago at the Weston Language Center of Williams College. The story of the eccentric ascetic perched on his pillar in the desert, and repeatedly tempted by the devil in the shape of a voluptuous woman, is amusing if slight.

Another Spanish language film offered no such pleasure. Jamon Jamon is, as its title announces, a piece of ham, a diluted-Bunuel, sub-Almodovar sex farce that wishes it were a Spanish Tampopo. Despite the presence of Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, director Bigas Luna accomplishes the remarkable feat of making sex tedious, farce unfunny, and food tasteless. I’d say you couldn’t pay me to watch it, but that’s exactly what the Clark did. I wouldn’t give it a number grade, but will say that it vies with Lethal Weapon for the title of worst film I’ve ever watched all the way through, but loses because I don’t find kinky sex as offensive as supposedly funny violence.

In a completely different vein is the silly but not stupid Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The title had come up when I was researching 1955 films for a possible Clark 50th anniversary tie-in; then there were some favorable reviews when the anniversary DVD came out. So I TiVo’d the recent TCM presentation. I’m definitely not an aficionado of MGM musicals in Cinemascope and eye-poppin’ color, but this was watchable. Howard Keel and Jane Powell don’t radiate star power, but this adaptation of a S. V. Benet story about the “Sobbin’ (i.e. Sabine) Women,” makes something of its 1850 Oregon setting, even if studio-bound. Stanley Donen can be a lively director, and Michael Kidd contributes some notable choreography. None of the songs were familiar to my ears, but none grated on them either. But it's a little hard to take how women are treated as chattel, either in the 1850s or the 1950s.

I’m going to be traveling a bit over the next ten days, but after that I will be back with more serious film reviewing, so please keep Cinema Salon bookmarked and come back again.

The Talk of the Town

What a weird amalgam! Sort of a screwball version of Fritz Lang’s Fury, mixing lynch mobs with romantic comedy. And what an odd pairing of Cary Grant and Ronald Colman as well, two Englishman supposedly representing antithetical New England types. And then the strange triangle in which they vie to give up Jean Arthur to each other. None of it believable for a minute, but with these three performers the nonsense hardly matters, and George Stevens is enough of a craftsman as director to give the proceedings some surface plausibility. Grant is a milltown anarchist (Leopold Dilg, if you can imagine -- well no, you can’t) falsely accused of arson and murder; Colman is the aloof and prematurely aged law professor destined for the Supreme Court. Through the agency of the appealing Ms. Arthur, the escaped fugitive winds up in the attic of the lawyer, and through debate on the philosophical basis of the law (I kid you not!), they become friends and both the better for it. Bizarre but enjoyable. Would certainly be fodder for any cultural psychoanalysis of American society in that era -- check out Colman’s relationship with his “man Tilney,” actor Rex Ingram. *6* (1942, dvd, n.)

Grizzly Man

The documentaries of Werner Herzog are always about something more than their ostensible subject, and here the theme is styles of self-dramatization. Not just of Timothy Treadwell, who obsessively filmed himself interacting with grizzly bears in the remote Alaskan wilds -- until one ate him -- but of every other person who appears in the film, including the director himself. With hundreds of hours of Treadwell’s filming to work with, Herzog constructs a meditation on wildness, environmentalism, personal weaknesses and coping strategies, filmmaking, and a whole savory pot of bear stew. The up-close footage of bears in the wild, foraging and fighting, is extremely vivid, even if the animals are continually upstaged by Treadwell himself. I’m sure Herzog left out most of the “Wild Kingdom for kiddies” footage and focussed on those frames where Tim’s damaged self-assertion were strongest. But everybody gets in the act: the coroner, a bush pilot, old girlfriends, each seeks to dramatize their touch with celebrity, just as Treadwell tried to borrow celebrity from the bears and foxes whom he professed to love. And of course, Werner’s own self-assertion is implicit. His narration starts defining and interpreting Treadwell even before the subject appears on screen, and keeps on pointing out and underlining through the course of the film. The voiceover is bit hectoring, but makes clear that this film is a personal essay and does not attempt to be an “objective” documentary, despite the he-said-she-said, on-the-one-hand-and-the-other talking heads. Still, there is a richness of material that leaves the viewer to his or her own conclusions. (2005, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-86, RT-93.)

A Very Long Engagement

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and star Audrey Tatou of Amelie re-team in this adaptation of Sebastien Japrisot’s WWI novel. Despite the exuberance and fancy of Jeunet’s style, the insane horror of that conflict comes through as well as in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. But there’s mystery and romance and humor as well, too much of everything in fact. Frankly I did not give the film my best viewing, but its own excesses of plot and whimsy contributed to the wandering of my attention. Wow, wait a minute, that French housewife is Jodie Foster. Man, look at that crane shot, that CGI recreation of Paris, those sepia tones in the stunning cinematography. In a theater, perhaps it would all have washed over me, immersively, but in my easy chair it was just a box of bonbons, from which I was happy to sample a few and leave the rest. (2004, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-76, RT-78.)

A Special Day

Netflix subscribers beware, the DVD of this title is very low quality and dubbed. As such, I cannot give it a rating. It was watchable, however, as a last pairing of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni -- she a frumpy(!), homebound mother of six and fan of Mussolini, he an antifascist homosexual about to be deported. Nonetheless, how could you keep them apart, it’d be like keeping the pasta separate from the sauce? They live across the courtyard in an apartment complex, unknown to each other until the day in 1938 when everyone else goes to join the parade as Il Duce welcomes Der Fuhrer to the grandeur of Rome. Ettore Scola’s story and direction seem rather diagrammatic, but the setting is invested with authenticity and the stars provide passion and complexity. I have to believe that Meryl Streep went to school on Sophia Loren here to prep for the similar character and story of Bridges of Madison County. (1977, dvd, n.) *NR*

The Constant Gardener

Director Fernando Meirelles achieved acclaim for City of God (though I preferred the documentary Bus 174 as a portrait of Rio’s homeless youth), but here his swift mosaic brand of filmmaking is perfectly suited to the shattered glass worldview of John Le Carre’s novel. Fast-paced, dense and impenetrable, passionate and explosive, all-out and all-inclusive, the style suits the story. Though I felt a slight muddling of energy toward the end, and the denouement seemed implausibly underlined, this is really a marvel of visual storytelling, nonlinear, fragmented, caught on the fly in burning images. You get a sense of the overpowering realities of Africa, from the teeming streets of Nairobi to a desert refugee camp in the Sudan. Ralph Fiennes is excellent as the title character, a British diplomat, and Rachel Weisz is seductive and strong as the firebrand activist who marries him to get to Africa so she can confront the heart of darkness, which in this case is Big Pharma. This is a thriller with a brain and a heart, cannily unfolding its mysteries and puzzles, and bringing light to a hidden corner of the world’s woes. (2005, Images, n.) *8-* (MC-82, RT-82.)

Festival Express

This rock doc about a 1970 train trek across Canada is a time capsule for the era (which coincidentally is “my” era.) Swallow it and you are swept back to the Sixties. Obviously a lot of critics got high on this (witness cumulative scores below), but I just caught a mellow buzz, nothing like the wild times the musicians had in the capsule of the train -- drinking, drugging, playing and singing -- jamming the groove to the rhythm of the tracks. Oh yes, they’d occasionally get off the train and give concerts, and the performance footage is excellent. I’d just seen Janis Joplin’s same all-out performances of “Cry Baby” and “Tell Mama” in another doc about her, and it was good to see alternate takes from The Band performing “The Weight” and “I Shall Be Released” (though Scorsese’s Last Waltz will remain forever definitive), but the revelation was the Grateful Dead in “Workingman’s Dead” mode, which was the only period in which I really followed them. Fact is, Jerry Garcia was quite a musician. There’s a scary-funny-thrilling sequence in which he, Janis, and Rick Danko are in the bar car wailing away at an old work song. She would be dead of a heroin overdose in two months; the guys would follow in their own due time. But what a time it was while it lasted. (2004, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-85, RT-96.)

Garbo again

Two weeks ago would have been Greta Garbo's 100th birthday, which was celebrated not just by the long-awaited release of ten of her films on DVD, but also by the best station on tv, Turner Classic Movies, presenting an original documentary by film scholar Kevin Brownlow, titled simply Garbo. This was a profile that went beyond simple clips and interviews to present a complex and intriguing portrait of the mysterious star, but the best moments of all were from a brief screentest from 1949, seven years after her last movie, for a project that never got off the ground, despite the fact that she was clearly still a face that the camera loved, alive with a range of emotion, in spite of her reclusive personality. Garbo is an old-time star whose artistry is still alive, so get Camille or some other films of hers, and settle in for some real Hollywood magic.