Billy Liar

Hi Aki,

Today I finished Billy Liar a movie I recorded, and watched about an hour friday, 20 minutes yesterday, the end today.

This was a play. Then it was a movie. Then it was a TV show. The writers really hit the jackpot with this one. John Schlesinger directed.

The story is set in a small town in northern england, early 60s. Billy (Albert Finney in the play version, then Tom Courtenay took over the role in the play, then Courtenay played in the movie) is a young man with big dreams. We open with a radio show just going on-air at 6 am. The host begins what he usually does: read letters and dedications that listeners have sent in.

As we continue to hear the radio show and the many dedications, we see exterior shots of houses, apartment buildings, all over town, as happy housewives react when their letters are read. These are all extreme long shots (the film was shot Panavision, black and white) from the street; the women are far away. Finally we end on a closer shot of a woman (Mona Washbourne playing Billy’s mom) behind a window. We go inside with her. she’s wondering when the radio show will ever get around to reading her letter and playing her record. The Mum, Dad, and Mum’s Mum are all around the breakfast table getting ready for the day. They occasionally shout upstairs to son Billy to come down and have breakfast or he’ll be late for work.

Billy, meanwhile, lies in bed, daydreaming of Ambrosia, the country he imagines. Ambrosia has just won the Great War, for peace and freedom and independence. We see Billy as the general who won the war, as the wounded leader of a wounded squadron, as one of the women recruits … all marching in parade before the general-king of Ambrosia (also, of course, Billy).

Billy at last goes down stairs, half an hour late. He gets in a fight with his Dad and Mum, his Dad especially attacks him constantly and in one flight of fancy Billy turns, now in uniform, and guns them all down with submachine gun (a recurring motif Billy imagines whenever somebody is giving him too much grief).

Another point of contention is the wardrobe in Billy’s room. His Mum wants to clean it, she wants him to unlock it, and why does he want to keep it locked for, anyway? When Billy goes up to get ready for work, he unlocks it, and we find out why: inside it are 200 or so calendars from his workplace, a funeral home. Billy was supposed to mail them out. Instead he spent the postage money himself, and now is stuck with all these calendars and no idea what to do with them other than hide them in his wardrobe!

Billy goes on to work (late, and yelled at for it) and along the way he indulges in some more fantasies. He imagines being caught for pilfering the postage money; thrown in prison, he dashes off an exposé on prison life that turns into a major best-seller before Billy even gets out of prison; the Warden thanks him, and Billy leaves the prison to universal fame and acclaim.

Being a writer seems to be the core real-world ambition Billy enjoys: he has a novel he keeps intending to begin, and he has sent sample scripts to a radio comedian who happens to be in town to open a supermarket; Billy is sure the comedian will hire him and take him to London. But the comedian doesn’t even remember Billy’s scripts and just gives him the brush-off when Billy finally does get to see him.

Real-world problems are mounting for Billy: he has gotten himself engaged, twice, to two very different girls: Barbara, the shy, repressed girl who really loves him but won’t even kiss him before they are married, and Rita, the brassy waitress who’s been shagging Billy. Billy gave Rita an engagement ring, only he got it back from her ‘to give to a jeweler for alteration’ and gave it to Barbara. Now Rita wants the ring back, and Billy is trying to get Barbara to give up the ring ‘for alterations’ to get it back to Rita. Only Barbara won’t give it up. To make matters worse, he has invited both girls to his home for tea on the same day. And, of course, he has told them both a pack of lies about his home life. And on top of this, an old flame, Liz (Julie Christie in her first big role on film) has come back to town.

Billy is telling everybody that the comedian will hire him and he’ll be going to London. This is his escape. He tries to quit his job at the funeral home only to have his obnoxious boss Mr Shadrack (Leonard Rossiter) let Billy know they are on to him and the calendar/postage gag, and he can’t quit until he’s worked off all the money he owes.

Billy goes in and out of fantasy. Walking by a stadium where a football (soccer) match is in progress, he dreams he is the Prime Minister of Ambrosia promising a new and better future for all (in best Winston Churchill imitation) to the mad cheers of the populace. But his real life is getting worse and worse. The two women are pressuring him for the ring, to see his parents. The comedian doesn’t know him and has no job for him. And when Billy shouts at his Grandmum, she has a bit of an attack, making his Dad even harsher on Billy.

That night the whole town congregates at the dance hall. Billy tries to avoid Rita and Barbara (he has dates with both, of course) but they meet up and the whole business of two fiancées and one ring comes out; the women fall into a catfight. The band though is playing a song Billy and a mate wrote, which is good – until the MC gives Billy credit and announces Billy will be going to London to write the radio show; more humiliation is bound to follow when this is revealed as a lie, and indeed, several of Billy’s pals are razzing him when the dance hall applauds him, calling out, ‘Billy Liar! Billy Liar!’

Billy escapes the dance hall for a walk with Liz. They catch up on old times. Billy is amazed that Liz has left the small town so many times, but she says it’s easy, you just get a ticket and get on the train. Liz seems to really understand Billy, she knows all his faults and fibs and likes him anyway. They share a penchant for day-dreaming, and Billy reveals to Liz, the first person ever, his fantasies of Ambrosia. Liz wants to make love to Billy in the park, he proposes, really seems to mean it, and they lie down in the grass. Only Billy’s mates have followed them, and mock him. The secret of ‘Ambrosia’ is now out, and it’s a sure thing that by Monday night the whole town will know all about it.

Billy is furious but Liz tells him it doesn’t matter, those guys, the whole town, aren’t worth it. She tells him they can go to London tonight on the midnight train; that she’ll be on it, and she gets him to agree to meet her at the station.

Billy goes home, once more full of hope. At home though, unpleasantness awaits: his Dad tells him that Grandmum is in the hospital and Mum is there waiting for Billy. And they know all about the calendars and postage, and they’ve broken into the wardrobe and found Mum’s letter to the radio show dedication, which Billy never sent either. Billy tries to stand up for himself and stick to his promise to Liz, and he packs and leaves to go to the infirmary.

There he sits with his Mum. She is no less determined to keep Billy at home, though she uses gentler tactics. Grandmum dies, and Mum grieves, and Billy departs for the station.

He walks to the station, dreaming of his regiment’s military burial of his Grandmum in Ambrosia and humming a military tune. But the camera pulls away and reveals Billy walking down a dark city street, engulfed in shadow, his tune more like whistling in the dark. We know Billy is not going to London, even though he thinks he is, and is making every move to go.

At the station he finds Rita, dragging around one of Billy’s mates who is drunk. There’s also a young soldier who is going off to serve, and supported by older women relatives. And out on the platform he finds Liz.

They board the train and wait. Only minutes before it will depart. And Billy is feeling anxious. He tries to get Liz to ask him to go back out to get something to eat – she has packed sandwiches. What about something to drink? She doesn’t want anything. Some milk? She doesn’t want any. But Billy goes out to get the milk anyway.

He stands at the vending machine. The train will depart any moment and Billy takes his time. He holds two cartons of milk in his hand, his back to the platform. He could still make it but he waits until he’s just too late, and only then turns and runs, runs when it’s too late, runs just to make a show of trying to go.

In the carriage window Liz looks out, shaking her head. She knows Billy too well, is sorry he couldn’t come but doesn’t seem to blame him too much. She didn’t really expect him to go. She has left his suitcase out on the platform for him.

Billy walks home, alone on the dark streets. But he walks a bit faster, parade march, and behind him march in step the paratroopers of Ambrosia. Billy marches up to his house and inside, and the camera pulls back down the street, as the national anthem of Ambrosia rises on the soundtrack. Billy’s window is the only one lit in the house, far away, at the end of the street, as the anthem ends and closes out the movie.

It’s an excellent picture. Schlesinger was a terrific filmmaker for about 10, 15 years. The beginning, with the radio program and shots of the streets, has a nice, naturalistic feel, but it was a bit flawed in that it’s just an effort to ‘break out’ of the play, which probably opens on Mrs Fisher dusting and cleaning and making breakfast while the radio plays the other dedications.

The biggest challenge for the picture is bringing us in and out of the daydreams. This is done usually with sound helping: either we begin to hear Ambrosia before picture takes us there, or we go on hearing Ambrosia after picture brings us back into ‘reality.’ I wonder how it might have felt if they had had the budget and tried The Wizard of Oz gambit, putting all the Ambrosia/daydream scenes in color?

One thing that had my head turning while watching was thinking how Albert Finney would have been as Billy. Tom Courtenay is a frail, slight man, and so I interpret his Billy as the recourse of a weakling; when he interacts with others, telling lies, it’s like somebody who has this one defensive mechanism to help him through life. But Finney is much heartier, stronger physically. He was playing Tom Jones at about this period, so I have a good picture of what he was like in a somewhat similar genre (comedy of a young man against the forces of the established order). Finney as Billy would have been more cheeky, more aggressive, more mocking. He would have been lying more out of strength than weakness, or else more out of a boyish, Peter Pan, not-yet-grown-up personality. Whilst Courtenay is lying and fantasizing because life is too heavy and hard for him, Finney might have been doing it because, well, it’s fun! And to hell with everybody else if they can’t take a joke! Finney would have been more ‘dangerous’ if you will as a suitor in the scenes with Rita and Barbara. More calculating.

I don’t know if I would have liked Finney’s Billy as well. I certainly wouldn’t have sympathized with him, or pitied him so much. But Finney is an amazing actor, and I expect he would have won me over if not with pity, then with sheer ebullience and sense of enjoyment.

The other thing that struck me is one scene. It’s the scene where Billy enters Mr Shadrack’s office to resign (because he’s so sure that he’ll get the radio scriptwriting job). Mr Shadrack isn’t there, so Billy imagines a conversation with him. Billy goes on and on, talking to the empty desk, and I was sure that the scene would take a turn for the worse when Mr Shadrack appeared in the doorway behind Billy. Sure enough it happened, but not the way I expected. The usual way to do this, the ‘elegant’ solution, is to have the camera move to follow Billy. Generally camera movement is invisible to the audience when it is ‘motivated’ by something that happens on the screen. Billy walks screen right, and the camera follows him. This is invisible to us because it gives us what we want to see; our brains are hard-wired to track such side-to-side movement. The camera moves just as our eyes would move if we were sitting where the camera is.

The natural, ‘elegant’ solution to revealing Mr Shadrack then is to get the camera over behind the desk, looking at Billy; Billy walks to one side or the other so the doorway behind him is gone out of frame; then Billy walks back, camera follows, and there is Mr Shadrack, appearing as if by magic.

Schlesinger doesn’t do it that way. He moves Billy around the desk, and pans the camera after him, right enough. For several shots the doorway is offscreen. He then moves Billy back around in front of the desk. Still the doorway is offscreen. All Schlesinger needs to do now is move Billy a little bit farther screen left.

Instead, Billy stays put, and the camera, from an unmoving spot, ‘decides on its own’ to pan left, and find Mr Shadrack.

Now why did Schlesinger do it this way? I thought it was a ‘mistake’ at first. But in general it’s never the best approach for a critic to assume the artist is ‘wrong’ but instead assume he is ‘right’ and find some sort of reason why Schlesinger would want to prefer to do it the way he did; and then see if that reason might be valid, a ‘better’ solution to the problem.

When a character commands the camera – when the camera must follow him, and nobody else in the scene – that character acquires power. He is dominating the shot. This is generally true, and so the opposite is often true as well: if the camera ignores a character and moves against him, then the character loses power. Here Billy is ‘cut down to size’ if you will, when the camera, ‘on its own’ decides to ignore him and look over there – over to the door. (I don’t think this movement is motivated by a sound from Shadrack – say a footstep or clearing of the throat – but I can’t say for sure.) Since Billy has been fantasizing of himself as a big man, an important man, someone superior to the imaginary Shadrack, when the camera moves against Billy, it deflates this image which the filmmakers hope Courtenay’s acting will have won us over (after all, the audience should be on Billy’s side at this point, and who among us hasn’t daydreamed about telling off our obnoxious and petty bosses?).

Schlesinger’s camera move might, therefore, be a deliberate effort to accelerate Billy’s loss of stature, to tear us back into ‘reality’ before Billy himself is ready for it, or aware of his boss’s presence.

I still don’t much like it though. Because the second half of this scene, in which Shadrack enters the office and proceeds to tell Billy off, rejecting Billy’s resignation in no uncertain terms, will cut Billy down quickly enough. What after all is the first thing that’s going to happen in this part of the scene? Mr Shadrack is going to walk into the office, go behind his desk, sit down, open the letter of resignation, read it. Shadrack thus can capture and command the camera with his moves, and acquire power; the camera follows him and lets Billy go in and out of frame, undermining Billy’s power in this part of the scene. This sort of solution is generally used and preferred and considered more ‘elegant’ because it is invisible and organic – organic in the sense that it is invisible and the camera is following the blocking of the actors.

(4 May 2009)

Along Came Jones

Hi Aki,

Today I watched Along Came Jones a Gary Cooper western.

The story shows us a hold-up of the stage of the Express Company at night. The robber is masked, but he kills one of the drivers and escapes with the money bag. The other driver shoots the robber, who loses his prize rifle engraved with his name, but he rides away. Wanted posters are put up all over the territory, for Monte Jarrad, dead or alive, who robbed the stage and is often seen with his half-witted ‘Uncle Roscoe.’

Melody Jones (Cooper) and cranky old sidekick George (William Demarest) happen to be riding through, by mistake (four or five hundred miles back, Melody took the wrong turn). Melody is a light-hearted ‘bronc stomper’ and they’ve just finished a cattle drive and are headed for jobs somewhere else. When they get into town, the locals in Payneville (‘What town is this here?’ asks George. ‘It’s Payneville,’ says the local. ‘Well, what’s painful about it?’) catch sight of the ‘MJ’ on Melody’s saddle and see that he’s tall and thin just like the posters say Jarrad is. So naturally the whole town thinks he’s the killer. And they treat him with great respect, even fear. Some though aim at him through windows to shoot him.

A pretty girl, Cherry de Longpre (Loretta Young) helps Melody get out of town, explains the whole matter to him, and sends him on his way. But the truth is, she’s helping the wounded Jarrad, and wants to send the posse after Melody so Jarrad can go the other direction and get away. Melody figures this out and returns to the de Longpre ranch, in part because he’s falling in love with the girl.

Comedic complications (and a few killings) follow before Melody, who’s a total klutz with a gun, faces off with Jarrad. But Cherry has to shoot Jarrad to save Melody’s hide, and all ends happily.

This is a charming picture. It follows in the vein of the 1939 Destry Rides Again although Destry does turn serious for its final act, and Tom Destry turns out to be good with his dad’s guns; Jones is light-hearted throughout.

Cooper produced in part of the new trend of stars and star directors making pictures independently with an eye towards profits after the income tax had risen so high that the old system of salaries looked less advantageous, and when the ‘Consent Decree’ gave independently-distributed pictures a better shot at bookings. For this Cooper put together a fine cast and brought in Nunnally Johnson to write the script, adapted from a story or novel. Johnson in fact was given his name above the title: Nunnally Johnson’s Along Came Jones which is extremely rare, especially back then. I’ve seen it happen that the best-selling brand-name author of the source material can get his name above the title: Graham Greene’s blah-blah or Noel Coward’s blah-blah but for the mere screenwriter?

The picture gives us a glimpse of what the golden age was all about, even apart from the studios. Everybody knows just what they were doing, everybody agreed on making an entertaining picture which nobody took very seriously, just a piece of rollickin’ good-natured fun. (About the only people who might have taken this seriously would have been the young boys watching on a Saturday matinee – but even they must have been disillusioned when Melody never does come up to the mark with a gun – he can throw a good punch, at least.) Cooper even sings to meet the ‘singing cowboy’ label, though this too is given us as tongue-in-cheek. Stuart Eisler is listed as director, a name I don’t know. Direction is solid, though, including most notably the way Melody hauls back and kisses Cherry in the two scenes that cement their love and close the picture.

(25 April 2009)

The President’s Analyst

Hi Aki,

Yesterday I watched The President’s Analyst a 1967 picture written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, and the finest satire on postwar America I can think of.

Story has respected New York psychoanalyst Sydney Schaeffer (James Coburn) being recruited to be the President’s analyst. It seems the weight of the world (unspecified and thus presumably everything that was going on at the time, from riots to the Cold War to the Vietnam War to hippies and desegregation and Civil Rights) is just too much for any one man to bear. Sydney is checked out by the ‘CEA’ (CIA) and ‘FBR’ (FBI) and cleared, although the director of the FBR, a short humorless man, disapproves of Sydney sleeping with his girlfriend.

Sydney is whisked from New York to Washington and he and his girlfriend are set up in a handsome house in Georgetown. This house is of course thoroughly bugged and spied-upon. The President is too busy to schedule appointments, so he signals when he wants Sydney, and Sydney must go to the White House for counseling. This happens when Sydney is eating, sleeping, making love, in the toilet … soon Sydney is getting frazzled. ‘The President has me to talk to, but I can’t talk even to you,’ he complains to his girlfriend.

Sydney starts to acquire paranoid symptoms. He even begins to imagine his girlfriend is spying on him (and, of course – she is). He knows he’s going to crack, so he slips in with a tour group in the White House and talks a New Jersey family (played by William Daniels) into taking him home with them.

This leads to a sendup of the so-called ‘liberal’ family man with his obsession on the latest sound equipment, making good time on the freeways, and guns. ‘When the right-wingers disarm, we liberals will disarm!’

Word of Sydney’s escape immediately reaches all the secret services in the world. Africans, Russians, Chinese, British – everybody wants Sydney.

Sydney tries to call his own analyst in New York, but can’t get through. Meanwhile Jr. is tapping and recording Sydney’s phone conversation, and two FBR goons (all in suits, without humor, and short) come in with orders to kill Sydney on sight. But Sydney has gone with the parents to eat out in the city.

There he slips away from the couple, but the spies are after him and chase him through the streets. Sydney only makes his getaway by slipping into a minibus owned by a stoned rock band, who agree to take him with them back to Minnesota.

There Sydney, now garbed like a fashionable hippie, trips out and makes love to band groupie ‘Snow White’ in the middle of a green field while various spies kill one another competing to see who can capture him.

He is captured by a British-seeming rock band who turn out to be Canadian spies, and sail on a yacht across the Great Lakes. But the FBR goons take over the ship, murder the Canadians, and are about to kill Sydney – but they are out of bullets and must go reload. When they do, Kropotkin, the Russian spy, kills them and drugs Sydney. He intends to sail to the North Atlantic to meet a trawler.

But at last Sydney gets to use his psychoanalytical skills in self-defense. He succeeds in revealing Kropotkin’s hatred for his secret-service-commanding father. With three to seven years of treatment, Sydney promises to cure Kropotkin of his neuroses. Kropotkin says they will take Sydney back to Washington to carry on the treatment; first Sydney should phone the White House and tell the President to stop the FBR.

Sydney tries to call at a phone booth, but the operator is less than helpful. Kropotkin agrees that ‘the phone company’ is hated the world over, and goes back to town to get more change. Meanwhile Sydney finds himself locked into the phone booth beside the highway in the middle of nowhere. Along comes a large truck that scoops up the phone booth with Sydney in it, puts another in its place, and drives off. Kropotkin meets the CEA agent Dan (Godfrey Cambridge) at the site and are baffled at what could have happened to Sydney.

Sydney comes to in the bowels of an advanced underground lair suitable for a James Bond villain. There (still trapped in the phone booth) Sydney is made to watch a smiling, unctuous man’s pitch: he represents the Phone Company, and they have a breakthrough phone as small as the head of a pin. Surgically implanted in the brain, it will allow everyone to call anyone else just thinking of them; people will get the CC chips implanted before they are born, and all names will be replaced with numbers – their personal phone numbers. If Sydney will just convince the President to push through all the needed legislation…?

Sydney calls him nuts, but it doesn’t phase the Phone Company representative. Meanwhile Kropotkin and Dan break in; Kropotkin sabotages the phone lines so that service will be damaged for months, with the Phone Company getting all the blame, and Sydney, the man of peace, finds he enjoys wielding the automatic weapon and killing all the service technicians who arrive to repair the damage. And the ‘representative’ turns out to be a robot, wired to a plug in the floor.

Later on, at Christmas, Sydney is happily installed at his Georgetown home. Since his girlfriend is CEA and has just as high a security clearance as he does, he can confide in her. Kropotkin and Dan come by for a Christmas party, and on the news they see that the Phone Company, blamed for incompetence for the bad service of recent weeks, has agreed to be nicer, and lower rates.

As the four friends celebrate, the camera pulls back: they are being watched on a large monitor by a group of shadowy figures. And behind them are rows of men in suits and vapid expressions, sitting in chairs and wired to plugs in the floor…

This is a very funny movie. Shot in Panavision in bright colors, it had a big budget even though this was only Flicker’s second feature (Flicker had a long career as writer and director, almost all of it on television). The action is staged at a nice balance between seriousness and cartoonishness.

Flicker stages things very well. In one hilarious scene, when the Director of the FBR is giving the order to kill Sydney to a room full of suited, humorless agents just as short as the Director, a man walks in from the back of the room – a very tall man. He weaves his way in and out of the agents, head and shoulders above them, deposits a paper on the Director’s desk, and retreats. The contrast in heights make for a great laugh, but Flicker shoots it all in one master shot, underplaying the gag.

My big question about the movie is casting Coburn. He was undoubtedly the coolest American actor in the period, and lends a hipness to the production. He also was a big star at the time, notably as the parodical American super-spy Derek Flint in Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967), so his participation helped green light the picture. But part of the humor of Analyst lies in the prospect of a middle-aged, sober, serious Doctor coming up against the world of wacky spies, getting turned on, and ending up mowing down men. With this in mind it seems that William Daniels, Wally Cox, or Bob Newhart (or even Jonathan Winters) would have been funnier. On the other hand, audiences had shown they liked to laugh at the spy world with Coburn, and his hipness helped bring in younger viewers who wouldn’t have been so keen to go watch Wally Cox.

(21 April 2009)

In Bruges

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched In Bruges a ‘dramedy’ about a couple of irish thugs in Belgium.

Story involves the Laurel and Hardy of Irish hit men, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) who, after their latest murder, are ordered to go to the Belgium city of Bruges to lie low for a couple weeks.

Ken is older, an experienced, veteran killer. He enjoys sight-seeing in the town, which has preserved its medieval character. Ray is a young punk who is bored, doesn’t like history, and considers the city a shit-hole. Plus it’s coming onto Yule and the weather is just cold freezing fog all the time – pretty, but not pleasant. He only gets excited when he sees a movie production going on, crashes craft services, and chats up a pretty local girl who’s an extra. Though she’s a bit put off at his crass stupidity and insults to her town, for no obvious reason she drops her card, and Ray gets a date with her next night.

But Harry, their boss, called while they were out, and was very mad. Every other word in the message he leaves begins with the letter ‘f’ and he tells them in no uncertain terms to be there next night for his call. Ray still wants to go out on his date, so he bargains with Ken: if Ray will put up with another morning and afternoon of sight-seeing, then he can go on his date and Ken will stay home at night to take the boss’s call.

That day they visit an ancient church that is said to have a relic of Christ’s own dried blood which every now and then miraculously turns liquid before drying again. Ken wants to climb up to see the relic, and he does, but Ray leaves. On his own, Ray remembers the killing they did in London before they got sent to Bruges. The target was a priest, and Ray shot him over and over and killed him, but one of the bullets by accident killed a little boy at the altar. For this killing Ray still feels a heavy guilt and is moved to tears.

Ray gets his date at night, dresses up, and has various comic misadventures along the way, including meeting an American dwarf from the movie and beating a man and woman sitting at the next table in the restaurant. Just as he’s about to score with the girl, lying on her on her bed, and she’s stripped down to her slip, Ray feels a gun at the back of his head. It’s a guy threatening to kill him unless he hands over all his cash. Ray’s a tough guy and doesn’t take this too seriously; he easily gets the gun from the guy, but the girl tells him the gun only has blanks. Sure enough it does, but the guy is still threatening, so Ray shoots him in the eye, blinding him. Turns out the guy is the girl’s boyfriend – maybe former boyfriend – and the two of them had a little side business of luring tourists to her rooms and robbing them. ‘Christ! I knew it was too good to be true, that a nice girl like you would shag a guy like me!’ Ray exclaims. This profession of true love softens the girl’s heart, and though she has to take her boyfriend to hospital to see about his eye, she promises to see Ray again.

Meanwhile Ken gets the call from Harry, and it turns out the reason Harry sent them to Bruges was to give Ray a nice treat at the end of his life. Harry now orders Ken to murder Ray for killing the boy.

When Ray gets back in, the two lie about their evenings. Since Ray has stolen all the drugs from the girl’s stash, along with some live rounds for the boyfriend’s pistol, the two go out on the town, snorting coke with the dwarf and a couple of local whores before heading back to the hotel.

Ken says Harry didn’t call. But next morning he goes out to meet the local guy and get the gun to kill Ray. The local guy tells him the best place to kill Ray is in the park. When he gets back to the hotel, Ken finds that Ray has also gotten up early, and has gone to the park. There Ken watches Ray from a distance, makes up his mind, takes out the gun, and marches up behind Ray … to see that Ray is putting his own gun to his head to kill himself. Ken without thinking stops Ray from killing himself.

The two now have a heart-to-heart talk and reveal all. Ken takes Ray’s gun to save his life. He tells Ray to get on a train and go someplace else, and he’ll square things with Harry. Ray gets on the train and heads out and Ken calls Harry and tells him he didn’t kill Ray and if Harry wants to punish Ken for disobeying, he should come over to Bruges and do it.

But on the train the police stop Ray because the guy Ray beat up at the restaurant is pressing charges. Ray is put in jail and has to call the girl to bail him out. Ray promises to pay her back bail money as well as for the gun and the drugs he stole; the girl seems glad to see him.

Harry (Ralph Fiennes) is a cockney mob boss with a temper. He swears at his wife in a fit of rage when he gets the phone call from Ken, and heads out to Bruges himself. There he picks up a gun from the same gun dealer, and meets the half-blind boyfriend. He goes out to meet up with Ken. Together they go up top the famous bell tower to sort things out. But Ken knows he owes everything to Harry and tells him he doesn’t want to fight him, that whatever Harry has to do, he can do; he expresses his obligations and love for Harry, since years ago Harry killed the man who murdered Ken’s beloved wife, and has employed Ken in all the years since.

Meanwhile on the square below, Ray and the girl are having a fine time at an outdoor bar. The dwarf comes up dressed in a boy’s school uniform and tells them the shoot tonight is like a hell scene out of Hieronymus Bosch and they should come see it. They laugh and say they are going to go fuck instead. It looks like love.

In fact when Harry says he can’t kill Ken and starts down the bell tower stairs with him, it looks like everything will come out all right for all our heroes.

This is the second curtain, and the balance of comedy and drama were at this point upping the suspense for me. See, if a movie like this seems like it’s a tough gangster morality play (with a few laughs) then I figure it’s going to end in death. But if it’s a comedy about a couple stupid bumbling gangsters like fish out of water acting like tourists in a pretty ancient town (with a few dark tones) then I figure everybody is going to get away with whatever crimes and violence they’ve done, and there’s a possibility of redemption, or even of not taking anything seriously.

But then…

But then the boyfriend sees Ray and the girl laughing it up at the cafe, and he goes up the bell tower stairs and tells Harry he’s seen Ray, he’s alive, he’s just outside in the square. Immediately Harry and Ken engage in a struggle; Harry shoots Ken in the throat and leaves him to go kill Ray. Ken drags himself up to the top of the tower, attracts a crowd, and leaps to his death. This brings Ray who has a few last words with Ken – Ken warns him Harry is in town.

Ray runs off, chased by Harry. It almost looks like Ray has made a getaway, too far off for Harry to hit him, but Harry’s aim is true and Ray gets blasted right through the chest. All the same he still manages to stumble on through the town, right in the middle of the movie shoot where actors are dressed up like visions out of the Last Judgment painting by Hieronymus Bosch that Ken and Ray saw while sight-seeing. Harry relentlessly follows Ray and in front of the whole set blasts Ray through the chest several more times. Ray turns to him and says, ‘The little boy,’ and Harry answers, ‘Exactly – for the little boy.’ But then Harry sees that his bullets have killed a little fellow past Ray, dressed in a school uniform. True to his earlier word, Harry prepares to blow his brains out on the spot for having killed a child. Ray tries to tell him it was a dwarf not a child, but he can’t get all the words out, and Harry tells him it’s for his ‘principles’ and kills himself.

The last scene is shot from Ray’s point of view as he is taken into an ambulance. We see the girl weeping over him, the medical team putting the oxygen mask over the lens, but all we hear is Ray’s thoughts as he makes up his mind that if he lives he will go to the mother of the boy he killed and confess all and take whatever punishment, even if it’s death. ‘Only I really really hoped I wasn’t going to die.’

The script treads a fine line between comedy and tragedy. It’s this mixing of genres that provides most of the entertainment and suspense. (The acting is also damn good by the three leads, all veterans.) If the movie seems more like a comedy, we don’t expect to see everybody end up bloody dead; and even though there’s lots of fake blood, the script treats the violence like a cartoon – there is no way that Ray shot through the chest by a dumdum bullet would be able to walk a few blocks; he’d be dead on the spot. And Ken is shot through the throat and bleeds a few gallons but still is able to drag himself up to the top of the bell tower before Harry can race to the bottom.

But then there’s the killing of the little boy. And most of all, Ray breaks out into tears of anguish over having done this – twice he breaks down. Stan Laurel broke into tears plenty of times in his movies, but the tears were over trivialities and treated for laughs; not so with Ray’s tears.

So the success of the movie in convincing you, one way or the other, that it’s a comedy in the second curtain scene between Ken and Harry atop the bell tower, is what makes the suspense work. Will Harry walk away? Even though he shoots Ken, he shoots him in the leg and it’s treated for laughs; we wouldn’t believe it if Harry let Ken of scot-free, but a punishment like a shot in the foot or leg seems like it should be enough, and Harry even helps Ken down the stairs. Meanwhile Ray and the girl are enjoying each other’s company and it’s looking good all around. The boyfriend (here allegorically half-blind) must tip the balance over into tragedy. The boyfriend himself is a character who could be a buffoon in a comedy or a dangerous punk in a drama, and the seed that this will not be a comedy after all is planted when Harry meets the gun dealer and the boyfriend is there. Then the boyfriend tells Harry that he will never see out of that blind eye again.

In a comedy, all wounds are healed and no violence is permanent, and therefore all can be forgiven. In a drama, wounds linger and fester and there may be no forgiveness; everything has its consequences and its price and all bills must be totted up and paid before the final curtain.

(18 April 2009)

How to Murder Your Wife

Hi Aki,

Another movie very different, though it too is a guy movie – How to Murder Your Wife from 1965. just about a perfect comedy. Absolutely flawless, at least from a man’s point of view; I suspect women would not find it entirely amusing, even though it pokes almost as much fun at men as it does at women.

The battle of the sexes waged in new york city in the mid-60s. Jack Lemmon plays Stanley Ford, a successful comic strip writer and illustrator whose strip, Bash Brannigan Secret Agent is famous because Ford never asks Bash to do anything Ford himself hasn’t already done. So for every caper Ford hires actors, props, and goes about the city engaging in make-believe spy antics while his faithful butler photographs everything; Ford then uses the pictures as the basis of the illustrations in the strip.

One more thing: Ford is a committed, philosophical bachelor. Marriage is the one thing to avoid, and his butler epitomizes the attitude and worships Ford as the embodiment of the ideal – until one night at a bachelor party Ford gets drunk and marries the girl who pops out of the cake.

This girl turns out to be italian, a contestant in the Miss Galaxy contest, and doesn’t speak a word of english. So arranging for an annulment or divorce is difficult. Moreover, as a good catholic, the new Mrs Ford will never, never agree to divorce.

Ford loses his butler and settles down to unhappy wedded life. He turns his comic strip into The Brannigans, the adventures of America’s Favorite Hen-Pecked Boob and fills the strips with all the comic misery of his own life. He puts on 20 pounds, is lethargic, and knows america is laughing at his strip – and at him.

Finally he snaps and decides to put the strip back to spy business; to do this, Bash Brannigan must murder Mrs Brannigan, and Ford concocts a fiendish scheme which he play-acts also, just like in the old days. He puts on a party, gets his wife drunk and high from ‘goofballs’ so she passes out; while the party still is in full swing, Ford takes a mannequin representing his wife out and buries it in the cement foundation of a building under construction next door.

When morning comes and Mrs Ford awakens, she finds the strips that Ford, asleep on the drawing board, has just finished. Upset, she takes off her ring, puts on only the clothes she came in, and leaves.

Ford reports her missing. But suspicions arise, when the strips are published, that he has killed her. Soon Ford finds himself in jail, charged with murder. And everybody knows he’s guilty.

The trial goes from bad to worse. Ford’s attorney, a hen-pecked boob himself, hardly tries to defend Ford, fearing the wrath of his own wife (these two are great in support – Eddie Mayehof as the lawyer, and Claire Trevor as his shrill and domineering wife). at last in desperation, Ford takes over his own defense and in a brilliant, and brilliantly-acted speech, convinces the jury (all men) to acquit him on ‘grounds of justifiable homicide.’ he ends up being carried out on their shoulder, the hero of all the hen-pecked boobs.

But though Ford now has his old life back again, he doesn’t embrace it, because in the end, he misses his wife. He loves her after all and when he and the butler get back to the townhouse, there is Mrs Ford, and Ford eagerly embraces her. Meanwhile in the butler’s quarters the butler (another perfect turn by Terry Thomas) finds Mrs Ford’s mother – and it’s love at first sight there, too…

George Axelrod wrote it, the direction is by David Quine, a name I don’t know. Richard Sylbert, top production designer, is on hand and does a great, great job; Neal Hefti’s music is catchy and funny at once.

Everybody in the production is on top of his game. It reminds me overall of a French farce of the late 19th century, when play mechanics were worked out to perfection, everything worked like clockwork, and the cast was perfect for their roles and knew just how to exaggerate their performances by just enough to get the laughs, but (outside a couple moments) never go over the top and overdo.

One point that is not from the 19th century, perhaps, and marks it as coming from the 1960s, is what passes for love between Ford and his never-named wife: it is less love, and more sheer sexual chemistry. For Mrs Ford they cast Virna Lisi, a blonde ‘sex bomb’ of the period, but luckily she could also pantomime and act and be sexy, touching when needed, and funny throughout.

I’ve seen this movie several times, and I almost have it memorized. Even as a kid I loved it, although it was obviously aimed at the WW2-generation of American men, then hitting mid-life crisis and maybe wondering what they’d missed by getting married and settling down. So I’d have to say it appeals to the boy in all men; it does indeed depict American men as boys at heart, impervious to maturing or growing up.

(15 April 2009)

Leatherheads

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Leatherheads a recent comedy about the early days of professional football in the US. Starring George Clooney and Renee Zellweiger, it was directed by Clooney.

The story is set in 1925 when college football is a popular sport but almost nobody is interested in professional football. Clooney is ‘Dodge’ a middle-aged man who is the star of the Duluth Bulldogs which is a joke of a team, but then again, all the pro teams are jokes. In fact the whole league is collapsing, as team after team goes bankrupt and folds. Finally the Bulldogs fold and Dodge is out of a job. He doesn’t have any other skills, either.

But Carter ‘Bullet’ Rutherford is the biggest college football star in Princeton, and a war hero as well. Dodge gets the idea that if he can convince Bullet and his agent CC to take a year off college and play football for the Bulldogs for $5,000 a game (which was a LOT of money in those days) the publicity would pack the stadiums, and the Bulldogs would be back in business.

What Dodge doesn’t know is that ‘Lexi’ Littleton (Zellweiger) is a hotshot reporter for a Chicago paper who’s got the assignment of unmasking the Bullet as a fake war hero; her editor has learned that the story of the Bullet’s heroism is false. Lexi doesn’t much want the job, but the editor insists she’s the best for the story, and if she’ll do it, he’ll give her the assistant editor job she’s wanted for so long.

Dodge and Lexi catch up with Bullet at the same time. Dodge and Lexi immediately hit it off in cat-and-dog manner in the best tradition of romantic comedies, trading witty lines and insults but underneath it all attracted to each other. Dodge manages to talk CC and Bullet into the Duluth team, and Lexi goes along supposedly to do a flattering portrait of Bullet, and our Act 2 begins.

Now what would any romantic comedy be without a love triangle? So Bullet is interested in Lexi too, and she kind of likes him as well. And the team prospers, all the old players quit their jobs as miners or mill workers or farmers, and come back to play, and sure enough the crowds come out to watch the Bullet.

Later on though Lexi gets Bullet to confess the truth of his war hero story. It turns out the truth is a lot like the official story, only Bullet wasn’t brave at all – turns out he got drunk in a trench and passed out; the Germans took the trench but didn’t notice him there; when Bullet came to they were under fire by the Americans and Bullet shouted, ‘I give up!’ in German, surrendering to the Germans. Only they thought he was one of them, and they all surrendered too – to the Americans. (Well, it’s only a comedy.)

Lexi now has the full story, and Bullet tells her he’s embarrassed by the whole thing, only he can’t make his fellow soldiers out to be liars. The whole thing just got too big and ran away from all of them. Lexi goes off to have a drink at an illegal bar (whisky is outlawed in the 1920s) where – of course – she meets Dodge. The two escape a police raid in madcap fashion, end up kissing, and she tells Dodge what Bullet told her.

Bullet goes off to play for the Chicago team for more money, and Lexi goes to print the story. But the Army denies her story, and the Chicago team demands a retraction. Dodge is in Chicago to play against the Chicago team, and he manages by a trick to save Lexi’s career. But the worst thing happens: a new Commissioner of Pro Football is appointed, and he promises the sport will now be played fairly and by the rules – and there will be a lot of rules to come.

So at the base of it all this is a coming of age story, of America, of a lost age of innocence when the sport was played dirty for fun by a bunch of guys who didn’t make any money at it to speak of, without sponsors or agents. And how all that was lost when the sport was forced to grow up and become more a business. Dodge, who’s one of the trickiest of the old style players, is given an ultimatum by the Commissioner: retire or else face fine after fine for doing nothing, and if he breaks any rules, he will be kicked out of football.

All that’s left now is for the two teams to play each other for the movie’s climax. Of course every sports movie has to end with a big game or match to close things off. The field is very muddy after rains all night long, and with the new rules, nobody quite knows how to play, so the score is 3–0 Chicago as the clock is running out. Dodge knows his team will lose, unless he plays dirty. He looks at his teammates and asks them if they are having fun. They all laugh. So he cooks up a trick play totally against the rules. And he wins the game.

But he is out of football.

But he has won the girl, as Lexi consents to be his bride and they ride off together on his motorcycle.

Everything is shot in ‘nostalgia’ sepia and yellow, warm tones. There’s nothing spectacular or even excellent here, but the production is good. The recreation of the period is good. The stars are charming, though Zellweiger’s makeup is pretty garish and I couldn’t quite figure out why all the men were so hot for her; it helped that there were no other women in the cast for competition! The script has its share of jokes, and gags, and physical comedy.

It also has lots of montages. Unfortunately a sports movie is prone to lots of montages to cover this game and that game, as well as passages such as all the players going back to their day jobs, then leaving day jobs to go back to football, and the rise to fame of Bullet.

As a director Clooney does a manageable TV-level job. In an interview with Jaqueline Bissett about her role in John Huston’s adaptation of Under the Volcano she said Huston never failed to place the camera at exactly the right vantage point. Others have said the essence of film directing is knowing where to put the camera. Alas, Clooney does not. There are several compositions here that are so awkward, to say nothing of how poorly they cut together, that I don’t know why they even got left in the movie.

Worth $10? No. Worth my time to sit at home and watch, and chuckle now and then? Yes.

(13 April 2009)

Baby Mama

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Baby Mama a comedy (semi-romantic comedy) that came out last year, starring two women stars of Saturday Night Live.

Kate (Tina Fey) is a successful vice president of a natural food grocery chain, given the biggest assignment of her career, to open up the biggest, best ‘Round Earth’ healthy food store in Philadelphia, where the chain first started. But unknown to all her colleagues, Kate has a secret longing: she has always wanted to have a child. And now at age 37 the urge has completely taken over her mind.

She tries everything. Nothing works. Her specialist tells her she has no better than a one in a million chance of getting pregnant herself. As a single woman, she will have to wait for years on lists before any institution will consider allowing her to adopt a child.

At last she signs up with a clinic which, for a $100,000 fee, will oversee impregnating a surrogate with Kate’s egg, fertilized from artificial insemination from a sperm bank.

All that is left is to find the woman who will be the surrogate, and even this is hard: the surrogates, in short supply, get to choose which infertile women whose eggs they will carry. And as a result Kate ends up teamed with Angie (Amy Poehler) who is in every way opposite to Kate (surprise surprise!) – she loves junk food, never graduated from high school, and is a total loser in life … except she gets pregnant really, really easily. In addition Angie is living with a total yahoo jerk of a boyfriend, who put her up to ‘the baby business’ in the first place.

Well, Angie gets pregnant all right, but then the trouble starts. Angie has a fight with her boyfriend and moves in with Kate. Kate is totally possessive and demanding, and wants to control everything Angie eats, what music she listens to, everything she does while pregnant. The ‘odd couple’ pairing is set up for lots of gags and laughs.

But there’s a twist or two along the way – of course! This is Hollywood! In the first place Kate meets a guy she likes (Greg Kinnear, who has made a career out of this kind of part). But the big twist is that Angie isn’t pregnant after all. She failed to get pregnant, but she and her boyfriend figured they would go on collecting checks from Kate for 9 months, then escape with the money. And the boyfriend keeps turning up, demanding that Angie come back to him or he will tell Kate that Angie is lying to her.

Over and over, Angie makes up her mind to tell Kate. But every time she tries … she can’t do it. Finally she is undergoing ultrasound, when the truth must come out, she tries really hard to tell the truth – and finds out the ultrasound checks out. She is pregnant after all. But, it’s with the boyfriend’s baby, not Kate’s.

So there is another lie, another secret that Angie hides. But in the baby shower, it all comes out when her boyfriend bursts in. Kate learns Angie has been lying; boyfriend learns that he will be a father (again, I guess, unless Angie has been having abortions … which might be true); and Kate on her part tells Angie that as part of the process, the pregnancy test might have given a false negative – the baby might still be Kate’s. Meantime Kate’s boyfriend hears about this for the first time, and Kate breaks up with him.

Months pass, and at a court hearing, Kate and Angie meet for the first time to learn the official DNA tests. It isn’t Kate’s baby. Awwwww… Kate is disappointed. But out on the street Angie goes into labor, and Kate takes her to the hospital, and attends the labor, and faints.

And in the morning Kate is told she is pregnant! Hurray!

An epilogue shows the party for Angie’s kid’s first birthday. Kate is there with her baby and boyfriend/fiancé, Angie’s boyfriend is there, still a jerk … most of the cast is there, all one big happy family while the credits roll.

I laughed at several points in the movie. There were good gags. Not a waste of time. But, to apply your test: $8 ticket worthy? $2 ticket worthy? Worthy to watch on TV for $0? Hmmm.

This movie of course is pitched at women, not me. I’m not the audience for it, except maybe for boyfriends and dates the women drag in with them. So, I would say in that regard, it is worth it. I mean, if my girlfriend or wife says, ‘We have to see this movie!’ I will go with her, and I won’t feel that I wasted my time.

The biggest annoyance here was the use of montage. Honest, there must be 10 montage sequences in this sucker. That is about 10 too many! It’s as if the writers and director (credit is given to one guy as writer and director, but I’m sure Tina Fey and Amy Poehler contributed gags, and Fey had her whole TV show writing crew on set with her every day) don’t know how to make a scene. All they know how to do is come up with gags. So the montage sequence lets them throw up a whole bunch of gags. One or two will get a chuckle, at least, then move on.

I think there should be a movie rule: No more than one montage sequence in any movie. And, zero is better than one!

Another thing that struck me is how awkward it is to film on location. They chose Philadelphia as the location and, since this is not Los Angeles or New York, they had to insert local flavor references and shots. Even though they didn’t advance the story or have anything to do with the story. So we have scenes shot out on location that aren’t conducive to good performances, good sound, and that just plain distract us in the audience from what is going on.

Finally, there is just one little other thing. This is a common complaint of Hollywood movies. Kate is a ‘successful career woman.’ Fine, but does she have to be a bloody millionairess to be called successful? I mean, as soon as she agrees she will pay $100,000 to a service just to have a baby, she puts herself outside the category of almost every other woman on Earth!

People have real problems out there. Like having a job, any job. Like getting enough food to eat. Like getting an operation or medication to stay alive. Seriously, $100,000 to buy a baby? What kind of world do these Hollywood writers and executives live in, anyway? Why the hell do they have to blow everything up to such absurd levels? And then they try to pass Kate off as just Everywoman with a fertility problem?

Okay, I know I said ‘finally’ up there, but there’s another thing. The whole ending. This movie is about surrogacy. Only it ends up not being about surrogacy at all. Angie doesn’t carry Kate’s baby, and Kate ends up getting pregnant anyway! COME ON!!! Maybe this is the most annoying part. None of the whole plot was necessary. A deus ex machina reached down out of screenwriting Heaven and gave Kate her own baby with a cute guy who is going to marry her anyway!

I know you like the stories to end with everybody getting what they deserve. But this is just too much. This is giving everybody what they want. Moral of the story: you can do everything and have everything.

You don’t have to live in reality when you’re in a Hollywood movie.

(8 April 2009)

Trainspotting

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched Trainspotting – oddly enough I’d never seen it before. I suppose Steve’s description of the notorious ‘toilet’ scene turned me off. I liked it though.

This is the kind of movie where story is less important than style. The writer, director, set designer, and editor just put together a flashy, fun, smorgsabrod of strange cuts, weird subjective sets and shots, camera lenses that distort without being obvious about it, garish colors. The actors join the writer with cartoonish performances of over-the-top characters.

Mostly what the movie does is give me a view into a world I’d never been in. This is one of the wonders of movies, to take us where we’ve never been. The book was a sort of underground cult classic, but mostly a series of incidents and snippets rather than a story. The script tries to salvage a semi-story out of this, but it remains more of a portrait of a kind of life, that of the poor, disaffected, heroin junkies of a dying Scottish city, rather than any sort of story. There is an attempt in the writing to give us a sort of redemption along classical lines, undermined with a bit of a sarcastic twist.

This has to do with taking a speech, ‘Choose life! Choose marriage and a job and kids and washing machine and a car and CD player…’ and moving it to the opening of the movie, over a scene where the junkies are running away from a store where they’ve stolen some goods to sell for cash for heroin, and plays very ironically. At the movie’s end, the hero, having just ripped off his mates for the proceeds of a big sale of 2 kilos of heroin, walks away blithely, while the VO gives us the same speech – this time as though he is going to embrace this lifestyle (on the basis of the stolen drug-deal money) which further undermines it. And yet the film leaves us wondering if this guy Renton is really through with smack or not; as his VO says when he takes his last onscreen hit, ‘There are final hits, and final hits … which one was this going to end up being?’

Along the way a baby, seen crawling around happily amidst needles and the remains and other trash of the junkies’ life in their main hangout, dies from neglect; one of the kids gets sent to prison; another OD’s and is put into cold turkey where we get the classic (since Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend in the 1940s) montage of the DT’s; the only one of them who is healthy and never does drugs loses his girlfriend (because our hero has stolen the sex-tape he and his girlfriend made of themselves) and takes up smack, only to contract AIDS and die of toxoplasmosis when the kitten he got to win his girlfriend back is sent back to him; the fiercest anti-drug pal (a totaly sociopath played by Robert Carlyle, the guy from The Full Monty here with dark hair and mustache) sends more than a few folks to hospital; and the hero dives into ‘the worst toilet in Scotland’ in that famous scene. And yet it’s given to us from the viewpoint of the junkies, and tries to convey some of the pleasure and crazy-wild fun they experience. It’s a comedy believe it or not. This is very refreshing, although I doubt many censors saw this as a good thing.

(25 March 2009)

PS — to read Aki's translation of this post in Japanese, click here.

What Happens in Vegas

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched … ‘What Happens in Vegas’ a loud, obnoxious comedy that tried to be sweet in the most mechanical, overbudgeted, Hollywood mess. I have never seen Cameron Diaz look so unattractive. Ashton Kutcher proves he doesn’t have the talent to do light comedy.

Garish, bloated, with montage sequences filled with gags where skillful filmmakers would have put in scenes.

At yet at the end, they still choked me up. A bit.

Am I a softie, or was the movie better than I want to accept?

It did make me laugh at several places.

The story: cute slacker Kutcher works in his dad’s furniture business, but is a slacker who can never finish anything, he has a cute girlfriend who plays naughty sex games with him but even she would never want to marry him. Meanwhile obsessed, driven to be ‘perfect’ Diaz is a commodities trader who is engaged to a buttondown corporate type. She plans and executes an over-the-top ‘perfect’ surprise party for him, but when he walks in the door, before everybody can yell ‘Surprise!’ he dumps her. Meanwhile Kutcher’s dad finds him goofing off at work for the last time and fires him.

Both end up in Las Vegas to lick their wounds and get drunk and obnoxious but by a quirk of the screenwriter, they get booked into the same hotel room. So they ‘meet cute’ and go out drinking in Vegas, where they win some money, get totally smashed, end up speaking honestly to each other (which he never does) and getting loose to have fun (which she never does) and end up the next morning married. Which they both accept is a big mistake. And they tell each other that. But then, each feels a bit offended that the other agrees it was a mistake. So it turns into a big shouting match (did I mention the movie is loud, too? It is L.O.U.D. in every way it can be). And walk away from each other. Never to see each other again. Except…

…except that the quarter she leaves with him, he drops into the slot machine she was playing, and it wins three million dollars.

Which they both want. But they don’t want each other.

Back in New York, they try for an annulment, but each also wants all the money – out of spite, mainly. The judge is sick and tired of such people, and everybody in their generation, so he tells them they have to stay married for 6 months, must live together, and must see a marriage counsellor every week. He will tie up the money in escrow for all that time, and at the end they have to see him and he will decide.

So they’re stuck with each other. She must move into his apartment, but each is scheming to make the other give up and surrender the claim on the money in return for divorce. So there are all sorts of low, dirty, crude tricks they play on each other. Gross-out humor has been done grosser, but the writers and directors are not aiming for ‘class’ here by any means.

Of course along the way there is real attraction between them, and they grow closer together, though they can’t quite call off the war, they can’t quite tell the other they love them. We see that it is true, though, and we see that they balance each other well, that they learn from each other, and they could be a very good couple after all.

At the climax – there is a sort of double climax – they are first on a retreat for her company, where she must impress her boss to get a promotion over another girl, to leave the trading ‘pit’ and rise into an office. And Kutcher so charms the bosses, and shows them the fun side of Diaz, that the promotion will surely be hers. And they dance together, and in the hotel room, they want to sleep together … but it doesn’t happen, they are both a little bit too much on guard.

Second climax comes 2 scenes later. In between is a small scene that turns her feelings around totally: she meets up with her ex-fiance who asks her to take him back, and gives her the engagement ring again. She guesses correctly that Kutcher gave the ex the ring, and also told the ex some secrets that Diaz had confided in Kutcher. So at the second climax, the court hearing, Diaz proclaims that she is willing to give up all claim to the money if only she can have her divorce.

So Kutcher ‘wins’ what he wanted, but ‘loses’ what he needed. And he is unhappy.

What follows is a scene of Diaz at work, being given the promotion, and instead quitting. Meanwhile Kutcher goes back to work at the furniture shop and finally finishes a counter piece, to his father’s demanding satisfaction. But it isn’t enough for him, and he tries to find her, but she has vanished, and nobody knows where she is.

At the apartment, he finds something she left behind: a framed picture of a lighthouse. She told him the story behind the picture, it is of a place where she was happy, some 30 miles east of New York city. Kutcher drives along the coast looking at lighthouses, checking them against the picture, and finally, the fifth lighthouse is the one – and there she is. He proposes on the beach with a big speech about how terrible he was as her husband, but it was the best time of his life. And she answers with a big speech of her own, and accepts, and they kiss, and the camera cranes up and away to see them alone and kissing on a wide sandy beach before the setting sun…

---

Hi Tim,

So, is the climax the retreat where they are closest together, but fail? or is it the courtroom scene where he gets what he wants but not what he needs? it would seem to be courtroom. But i note that there are only about 13 minutes of screen time after that, and much of that is credits. So call it under 10 minutes for the whole friggin’ third act?

The twist would have to be finding the photo of the lighthouse, though we know in the audience that this is the place he’ll find her – she only tells that lighthouse story at the retreat, so it’s fresh in our minds.

There is another twist, her rejecting the money. This is handled quite economically with a payoff, when the ex fiance gives her back the ring (that Kutcher had given to the ex, in hopes that the ex would come running after Diaz and wring her heart - which she sees almost as soon as she sees the ex has the ring).

Oddly enough, there is no ‘I’m sorry about that ring business’ and no forgiveness given for it. By our previous discussions, this would need to be atoned for in act three, as a means of winning her back - maybe by a cell phone or text message?

It’s possible that such a scene was in the screenplay, maybe even was shot, but it’s so obvious, and had no laughs, and was slowing things down, so they decided to cut it – and that may be the reason there are only 8 or 9 minutes after the divorce is granted?

There doesn’t have to be a twist to keep us interested, of course, if the third act is a dash to the finish line and clocks in so short anyhow.

Do we need to see that atoned for? or forgiven? I didn’t feel it, really, because I could see that Kutcher had moved on from that point, and so had Diaz, at the retreat. Even her lines to him at the divorce hearing, ‘Just a divorce is the only thing I ever want from you again.’ This is something spoken to hurt and wound and is a confession in itself.

‘So go on, get together, you’re so right for each other!’ We are impatient to get to that point now. Maybe a twist and back, the whole mechanics of it, as you suggest, are too busy.

There is no subplot (well, there is a love-hate relationship between the supporting best friends) and so if you don’t count the romantic comedy as a double-plot in and of itself, there is no other thread to tie up or deal with.

Maybe the twist could be the wrapping up of the B-story, which redounds upon the A-story in such a way as to impel the protagonist(s) to finish things once and for all? Since there is no B-story here, there is no twist. (A potential for such a twist might lie in developing the love-hate storyline of his-buddy and her-galpal: If they hook up at last, the buddy could learn from the galpal where Diaz is, and together they could manipulate the lovers to turn up at the same place and time, unbeknownst to each other – would that work?)

(21 March 2009)

Late Summer

Hi Aki,

Tonight: Late Summer, Ozu’s next-to-last movie. Man the colors were bright! They had a pristine print. All the compositions were good, almost all of them were good enough to be paintings.

Again Chishu Ryu was in small part. In fact it was only a cameo, although he delivers a philosophical tagline that sums up what could be the message of the film.

The photography really struck me. I don’t recall so many deep shots in other Ozu films. Lots of halls like tunnels, lots of vanishing lines. Did I just miss this in his other films? Is this a new DP? Hmm.

The last images of the film are striking. Chishu Ryu could have played the lead – the father of the family who was always playing around, and goes off to see his mistress and dies at her house - I wonder if Ozu didn’t want to ‘spoil’ Ryu’s persona having him play the part, or if he just thought he was wrong for it, or if he was interested in mixing up his usual cast. Setsuko Hara is in it, playing the sister of the lovely young actress who played her daughter in Late Autumn, or the last Ozu I saw; these titles drive me nuts.

Anyway, after the funeral of the father, a couple of bystanders, fishing in a nearby stream (a woman and Ryu) comment on life and the dead: ‘If he was old, then it was time, but it would be tragedy if a young person died,’ says the woman. Then Ryu gives the sermon, and they go back to fishing. Then we see three shots of headstones, with big black crows on them, pecking at the stones. Disturbing, not Ozu-like at all.

I wonder if he was feeling like he was going to die soon. Maybe he had been sick. Don’t know.

It’s amazing how he juggled these family dramas, always the same story, with little wrinkles.

One sequence that struck me as really good writing and direction: the youngest sister works at a place, and one of the co-workers is being sent to Sapporo (from Osaka where the movie takes place). So they have a farewell get-together, and finally she and the young man are the last ones to leave, sitting at the train station. Well, the two scenes before this, the office setting up the party, the girl gives a look – you suspect her feelings for whoever is going are rather deep. Then at the party, everybody has a line – except her. And when they are singing, to end the scene, she stumbles over the line, and starts again.

I thought it was interesting as a way to treat the major actor in the scene, to give her no lines of dialogue. Usually actors want the lines, and the writer tries to come up with something clever, some way for her to say goodbye to the guy while revealing other things. Instead it’s done opposite.

But then Ozu does give us the station scene, where the guy just keeps saying, ‘What a great party! I’m going to miss you guys!’

At the movie’s end, the girl decides not to accept the proposal by the guy her family has set her up with. Instead she is going to go to Sapporo. And I don’t know if she means to be the guy’s mistress, or if she plans to marry him. But big sis Setsuko Hara says that’s the right decision, so that must mean marriage, right? Or will she just take a transfer and work in the same office, and maybe never marry?

(23 january 2009)

Trapped in Paradise

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched a pan and scanned version of Trapped in Paradise, a pretty stupid comedy. I’m sure it got greenlit after Dumb and Dumber was such a hit, and the other Jim Carrey movies. Unfortunately the writer/director here doesn’t have the genius of the farelly brothers, and the stars – Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz, and Dana Carvey – can’t match Carrey here.

There were a few laughs and good tech job generally, but I’m sure they spent way too much money here too, with that cast.

This was pretty universally panned and it’s not great but it’s not terrible. Fox lost a lot of money on it too. I wonder if the director ever got another shot. [Update: writer-director George Gallo did get other directing gigs, but not for another 7 years. Luckily he was an established writer, so he stayed in he game writing until he managed another shot in the directing chair.]

One of the main problems is overacting. it’s as if they know the material isn’t funny and have to boost it. But then, Dumb and Dumber was a real exagerrated cartoon, and that’s what they were aiming at.

(written around 29 February 2009)

Our Man in Havana

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Our Man in Havana another Carol Reed movie, from the Graham Greene novel and screenplay. Satire of cold war made in late 1950s – by the time they made it, the Cuban revolution had come, so they had to add a disclaimer before the titles.

Cuba, late 50s: Alec Guiness is a vacuum salesman who doesn’t make enough money to give his teenage daughter the rich life he wants for her. His wife has left them long ago.

He is offered the job of being a spy in Cuba for extra money, and for the sake of his daughter he agrees, only after his friend tells him he can just invent all the reports and agents who are supplying him with information.

At first it’s a big joke, and he enjoys it. The service pays his entry into the country club, his daughter gets a horse, and he’s on top of the world. But then he takes things a bit too far, drawing ‘secret military installations’ based on parts of his vacuum cleaners.

British intelligence takes this serious, and sends him a secretary, radioman, they want photos of the installations, etc. The Other Side also are spying on him, and they believe all this too, because british intelligence does. Before he knows it people are getting killed, and his own life is in danger. Somehow he must get out of it. He makes a clean confession to his secretary (with whom he’s fallen in love) and avenges the death of his friend, before being expelled from Cuba.

Upon returning to London, expecting a long prison term for treason, he is shocked to find himself promoted, given an official decoration, and the whole thing hushed up – nobody wants to admit they were fooled by a vacuum cleaner salesman. He sends his daughter to Switzerland finishing school, and goes off to marry his secretary.

It’s cute, but the best moments are the scenes where he goes to avenge his friend. Carol Reed shows himself far more sure of himself in directing suspense than comedy. The comedy itself is typically british, rather dry, restrained, no Jim Carrey-style broad slapstick, no fart jokes, no cursing, no pratfalls.

Shot in Cinemascope in black and white on soundstages with some exteriors done in what looks like a Caribbean country. The dvd unfortunately doesn’t capture the black and white correctly, scenes shift from bluish to beige-ish, which is distracting.

Guiness is good as always but it’s Ernie Kovacs as the hated ‘red butcher’ police captain who steals the picture.

It’s odd but 20 years or so later Alec Guiness would star in a series of television series as George Smiley, the master spy of John Lecarre.

She left them because she’s fed up with poverty?

It’s very strange – and written by an obviously older man, no younger man or woman would have written it this way. Guiness has been left by his wife, years ago, for no good reason that we learn. And secretary’s husband left her years ago for no good reason too. So they are both abandoned but still married with no idea where their spouses are. And at the end of the story they walk off hand in hand.

(written around 9 March 2009)

Juno

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched ‘Juno.’

Hmm.

I can’t deny that it choked me up and engaged me. So, I must’ve liked it.

But I was trying not to like it almost from the start – certainly from the convenience store clerk’s overwritten dialogue, and all the slang.

Here’s the story, though I bet you’ve seen it.

16 year old Juno discovers she is pregnant. She is a geeky girl, a nerd outcast of sorts, though her dad and stepmom both support and like her.

At first she goes to have an abortion, but something about the clinic setting freaks her out and she can’t go through with that so she finds a childless couple who seem the perfect couple, and they say they will pay for her medical expenses, and she says she will give them the child.

Her pregnancy follows, including her awkward relationship with the kid who is the father, but they are not really dating; her friendship with the cheerleader, the discomfort of being heavy. But most of the scenes revolve around her growing relationships with the adopting couple. The husband seems to be relaxed and able to relate to Juno on her level, talking about rock bands and music and horror movies. The mother though is a corporate worker bee, and too tightly wound, wanting the child too much, too anxious, too eager, too desperate.

But the twist comes when the father adopter is afraid to be a father, he initiates divorce proceedings against his wife, and moves out.

This precipitates the crisis, the second curtain; Juno doesn’t know what to do, and we get a series of short scenes in which clues for the resolution are given to us, but not the full answer. (this is rather a cheat but it leads to a more satisfactory ending because it prolongs the suspense for us).

She reconciles with her boyfriend and they become truly boyfriend and girlfriend. She has the child, and it’s almost the usual giving-birth sequence of scenes. And she doesn’t see the child after delivery, because she considers it to be the adopting mother’s in reality.

Adopting mother, alone, not alone, gets to hug and hold her baby.

Juno and her boyfriend get to go back to practicing for their rock band, kissing, happy together.

There are points about it that bugged me, though.

The witty repartee strikes me as over the top – it fits a stylized movie world but not this indie/naturalistic world.

Best moments were the quiet ones where the witty repartee stopped.

For this reason, perhaps, Jen Garner steals the picture for me. She has the highest ration of silent to talky scenes, and she almost never has a witty banter line. Almost all (or even all) of her lines are straightforward, sincere, honest, never trying to conceal her emotions under witty banter or pop culture references.

Camera moves were clichés all the way. So much they annoyed me, but then those moves that annoyed me were subtle and so common that most viewers probably would not even notice them.

Lighting was good, production design good, costumes good, focus was rarely a problem. Technically, this is top notch for an indie, though I don’t know if i’d call it an indie really, outside of the script.

I think it’s a bit too girl-power as a subject to grab me all the way, and that’s probably a big part of my resisting it.

I had a great fear lest Juno and Bleeker wed and raise the kid themselves. The script and direction successfully pushed me in the direction of that fear (I suppose it would be ‘hope’ for many in the audience but it was ‘fear’ to me because it would have been too neat by half). I was so happy they fooled me. Though I should have remembered the note would pay off, and how else could it pay off? With a shot of Jen Garner sobbing and alone and miserable over a note saying ‘the kid is mine, you don’t deserve a child’? That wouldn’t have been very nice, and then the picture wouldn’t have had the boxoffice legs it did, and I knew it did have those legs, and would arrive at a very satisfying ending for bourgeois Americans over a very controversial subject, you know?).

(written around 6 March 2009)

You Can’t Take it With You (Structural Analysis)

Hi Tim,

An odd structure. I’ve tried to figure it out according to Frank Daniel methods. But it seems to be out of the beaten path.

Based on a play, probably with 5 acts therefore 5 curtains, though I’ve only seen the movie, which is what I’m trying to figure out.

Story first:

You Can’t Take it With You script by Robert Riskin after the Pulitzer-award winning Hart & Kaufman play. Director Frank Capra, and he won his third Best Director oscar for this one – the third in 5 years! He was on top of Hollywood, that’s for sure.

The story deals with several characters. It seems the protagonist is Antony Kirby, rich wall street banker, who is on the verge of completing a world monopoly in explosives and munitions. He has only one rival to crush along the way, guy named Ramsay who has one independent munitions factory (all the others have agreed to sell out) and who won’t sell. Kirby’s plan is to buy up every single piece of property around ramsay’s factory so that ramsay will be forced to sell (this is screwy, but we are not supposed to know how business or the law work here). Kirby has deals to buy every single property except one – and that guy will not sell, no matter what the broker offers him.

Kirby, if he is the protagonist, promptly vanishes from the movie for about an hour or so. Instead we meet his son, a happy go lucky guy who doesn’t want to be vice president in daddy’s bank, but there he is. he’s madly in love with his secretary. She happens to be the grand-daughter of the guy who won’t sell, only Kirby doesn’t know that.

Kirby’s wife is stuffy, and is outraged her son might want to marry ‘a stenographer.’

Meanwhile, we meet the guy who won’t sell: he was once a business big shot himself, only one day, 35 years ago, he learned he wasn’t happy, so he quit to do only what he enjoyed doing. Since then he has raised his daughter and her husband who live in the house, along with the two granddaughters (the other is married and this couple also live in the house) and a collection of freeloaders and misfits, all of whom do whatever it is they want to do – play zylophone, print things, paint, dance, write plays, invent things, make fireworks.

Later we will learn the reason why grandpa won’t sell: he loved his wife dearly when she was alive, and is convinced that there is a strange odor in her old room – it’s her, she’s still there somehow, and he couldn’t bear to leave the house for that reason.

Granddaughter and Kirby Jr. get along well, and Kirby Jr. is enchanted and amused by the collection of oddballs in the house – he is no stuffed shirt like his parents. He says he doesn’t care what his folks think, but the girl is determined that they can’t be happy together unless she wins his parents’ approval – the mother’s approval most of all. But one thing leads to another, and it only gets worse.

Granddaughter insists that Kirby Jr bring his folks over to meet the household for dinner. She is determined to impress them and win their blessing. But Kirby Jr sees that alice (the granddaughter) is going to make the oddballs behave normally, and put on a fraud, so he double-crosses her, by bringing his parents over the night before alice expects them.

As a result (I know, there’s a lot going on in the story) the Kirbys encounter the menagerie in all its kookiness; moreover, as a result of Kirby’s real estate broker’s sneaky doings, the cops bust in and try to find incriminating evidence so as to force grandpa to sell the house. The cops corrall the Kirbys along with everybody else when the basement full of fireworks go off, and they all go to jail.

There the Kirbys are forced to encounter the lowest of society. This has no impact on Mrs Kirby, but mr Kirby is shamed when grandpa gets mad and tells him he will die friendless because he’s a failure as a man and a father, and is much worse than the ‘scum’ he finds in jail, who at least have friends.

In the court hearing, the Kirbys are ashamed to admit they were in the house because their son was romantically involved with alice; at this alice blows up, tells them all off, and tells Jr the engagement is off.

A montage of headlines details how Kirby was arrested, Jr was spurned by ‘cinderella’ and how ‘cinderella’ has fled new york and nobody can find her.

At the house some days later, things just aren’t the same without alice. Kirby Jr. comes by, begging them to tell him where she is, but they don’t know and wouldn’t tell him anyway. He goes, but grandpa comes in afterward with a letter from alice. she’s trying to get over heartbreak, and the house has bad memories, so she has decided to live in connecticut with her school friend.

At this point grandpa decides he can’t let alice live alone and miserable, and they all miss her, so he will sell the house and they will go live with alice.

As a result of grandpa’s decision, though all the real estate deals become valid, and all the neighbors will lose their homes and businesses – Kirby will own all the blocks and kick everybody out.

The result of this is another montage of headlines, as news of the big monopoly shakes wall street, stocks go up, they go down, and Kirby is about to become king of the world.

In the Kirby bank, all his allies and board members are congratulating one another on the success, but Kirby is alone in the conference room, wondering about what grandpa told him, wondering if grandpa might not be right. But he decides he’s got to grab the great deal he has engineered, and to hell with grandpa’s words! He tells the board to go up to the board room and they will sign all the papers and make the monopoly.

Just then ramsay himself comes in, tells Kirby that he is friendless and how awful it is, and forecasts the same fate for Kirby. He collapses and later dies from heart failure.

The board members go upstairs, leaving Kirby alone to contemplate this for a moment. Then his son enters. Kirby Jr tells daddy that he’s quitting. ‘but you’ll be president of the monopoly,’ dad protests, but Jr says he never wanted it, and he won’t have it. he’s going away to try to forget alice, and figure out what he does want to do in life – probably he will pursue solving solar energy (yeah, in the 1930s they were talking about this! Amazing). He goes, leaving daddy shocked.

Daddy goes up the elevator to the boardroom, and the elevator doors open, all the allies and board applaud, and Kirby tells the elevator man to take him back down again. He leaves the deal undone.

In the madhouse, they are all packing up getting ready to leave. it’s sad farewell, and the cook tells her fiance she found grandpa in grandma’s room crying in front of her portrait.

Kirby Jr comes in, and begs them to tell him where alice is, for the last time. But grandpa won’t tell. He will say, ‘upstairs is alice’s luggage, and that’s going where she is’ and Jr starts upstairs to watch the luggage and never let it out of his sight until he finds alice.

But then alice herself comes in. she has heard that grandpa will sell the house, only she knows what it really means to him, and she begs him not to. Jr wants to explain to alice, but she tells him to shove it and goes up to her room to pack, locking the door. Jr pounds on the door, begging her to open up.

At this point, Kirby Sr enters. He talks with grandpa alone. He says he wants his son back, and asks for advice. Grandpa says, they should play together on the harmonica. Real loud. So they do, and the xylophone player joins in, the dancer dances, the crazies set in again, and one lights off the last unlit firecracker.

This noise brings alice and Jr downstairs. She sees Kirby and grandpa playing together, and Jr nods to his dad, and his dad nods back, and alice kisses Kirby Sr, and Kirby Sr wrestles with the russian dance teacher, and everybody cheers.

In a final epilogue, the family – grandpa and his crazies and the Kirbys alike – are gathered for dinner, some days later. Grandpa blesses the meal, talking to God the way he does, giving god all the credit for arranging things, and nicely tells us how everything has been wrapped up, nobody lost their home or business, and everybody is happy, and even Mrs Kirby will come around eventually.

The end.

I had a bit of a hard time analyzing this one. If we look at is as the romantic comedy starring Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart, then the breakup scene in the courtroom is our second curtain. But this leaves 45 minutes left, a very long act 3. better for general timing is if the banker is the protagonist – he after all is the one who learns ‘you can’t take it with you,’ meaning money is worthless after You’re dead, so you should enjoy life while You’ve got it. Then the second curtain comes when he tells the elevator man to take him down: he has gotten his big deal just like he wanted – only he finds he doesn’t want it after all; it’s his son, his family, life and friendship he really needs.

Now generally the rule is to enclose lesser storylines within greater ones, so:

A Story begins … B Story begins … … B Story end … A Story end

If we follow this, we find first Kirby Sr introduced with what he wants. Kirby Jr is introduced but we have no sense of what he wants. Then vanderhof (lionel barrymore, grandpa) is introduced, and we learn what he wants.

After this we get an introduction to the menagerie, then Alice is introduced indirectly – they talk about her in the menagerie – and directly – her mother the playwright calls her, and interrupts a makeout session with james Stewart as Kirby Jr. at this point we find out what alice and Kirby Jr want – each other.

There are 2 problems with calling it a battle between Kirby Sr and vanderhof though. First, they drop out of the story; most of the screentime involves the romance and family complications to this – will the Kirbys accept alice? Will Kirby Jr be welcomed by the menagerie, and what will he think of it?

Kirby Sr does not directly work upon getting the house: he just tells his broker that there’s to be no commission unless he can get every single property in these 12 blocks, and do it anyway he can. Hangs up phone.

And grandpa doesn’t really work to secure his household. He doesn’t intend to move or do anything about the attempts to buy the house except to ignore them all.

Is it grandpa’s story? He had his happy menagerie life, second curtain is deciding to sell the house (which gives the banker his victory by implication, though it hasn’t been fully settled yet).

Both these moments – alice breaking the engagement, and grandpa saying he will sell – interestingly enough, are followed by swift recap of events in a montage of headlines.

A twist ought to follow the second curtain, about the middle of the third act. Well we have 2 twists also: when grandpa says he will sell is the twist in the romantic comedy (because when alice learns of it she comes back, and finds Jr waiting) – and when the banker says ‘take me down’ and turns his back on the monopoly (we have been prepared for this with a series of shots of the banker thinking over what grandpa tells him in jail). and if the banker saying ‘take me down’ is the second curtain, then the twist would be that playing the harmonica with grandpa brings Jr down right to him, and everything is solved.

The two storylines are wedded in that alice’s heartbreak leads to grandpa selling, and Kirby Sr’s newfound desire to get his son back depends upon Jr getting alice to wed, which also depends upon getting the house back.

So, whose story do you say it is? Where is the climax, and what is the twist (if any)? is it a good structure, one that is complicated, or does the double-storyline make it a bad model, and outside of the model Frank proposed?

(written around 27 February 2009)

You Can’t Take it With You (general thoughts)

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched You Can’t Take it With You script by Robert Riskin after the Pulitzer-award winning Hart & Kaufman play. Director was Frank Capra, and he won his third Best Director Oscar for this one – the third in 5 years! He was on top of Hollywood, that’s for sure.

The story deals with several characters. It seems the protagonist is Antony Kirby, rich Wall Street banker, who is on the verge of completing a world monopoly in explosives and munitions. He has only one rival to crush along the way, guy named Ramsay who has one independent munitions factory (all the others have agreed to sell out) and who won’t sell. Kirby’s plan is to buy up every single piece of property around ramsay’s factory so that ramsay will be forced to sell (this is screwy, but we are not supposed to know how business or the law work here). Kirby has deals to buy every single property except one – and that guy will not sell, no matter what the broker offers him.

Kirby, if he is the protagonist, promptly vanishes from the movie for about an hour or so. Instead we meet his son, a happy go lucky guy who doesn’t want to be vice president in daddy’s bank, but there he is. he’s madly in love with his secretary. She happens to be the grand-daughter of the guy who won’t sell, only Kirby doesn’t know that.

Kirby’s wife is stuffy, and is outraged her son might want to marry ‘a stenographer.’

Meanwhile, we meet the guy who won’t sell: he was once a business big shot himself, only one day, 35 years ago, he learned he wasn’t happy, so he quit to do only what he enjoyed doing. Since then he has raised his daughter and her husband who live in the house, along with the two granddaughters (the other is married and this couple also live in the house) and a collection of freeloaders and misfits, all of whom do whatever it is they want to do – play zylophone, print things, paint, dance, write plays, invent things, make fireworks.

Later we will learn the reason why grandpa won’t sell: he loved his wife dearly when she was alive, and is convinced that there is a strange odor in her old room – it’s her, she’s still there somehow, and he couldn’t bear to leave the house for that reason.

Granddaughter and Kirby Jr. get along well, and Kirby Jr. is enchanted and amused by the collection of oddballs in the house – he is no stuffed shirt like his parents. He says he doesn’t care what his folks think, but the girl is determined that they can’t be happy together unless she wins his parents’ approval – the mother’s approval most of all. But one thing leads to another, and it only gets worse.

Granddaughter insists that Kirby Jr bring his folks over to meet the household for dinner. She is determined to impress them and win their blessing. But Kirby Jr sees that alice (the granddaughter) is going to make the oddballs behave normally, and put on a fraud, so he double-crosses her, by bringing his parents over the night before alice expects them.

As a result (I know, there’s a lot going on in the story) the Kirbys encounter the menagerie in all its kookiness; moreover, as a result of Kirby’s real estate broker’s sneaky doings, the cops bust in and try to find incriminating evidence so as to force grandpa to sell the house. The cops corrall the Kirbys along with everybody else when the basement full of fireworks go off, and they all go to jail.

There the Kirbys are forced to encounter the lowest of society. This has no impact on Mrs Kirby, but mr Kirby is shamed when grandpa gets mad and tells him he will die friendless because he’s a failure as a man and a father, and is much worse than the ‘scum’ he finds in jail, who at least have friends.

In the court hearing, the Kirbys are ashamed to admit they were in the house because their son was romantically involved with alice; at this alice blows up, tells them all off, and tells Jr the engagement is off.

A montage of headlines details how Kirby was arrested, Jr was spurned by ‘cinderella’ and how ‘cinderella’ has fled new york and nobody can find her.

At the house some days later, things just aren’t the same without alice. Kirby Jr. comes by, begging them to tell him where she is, but they don’t know and wouldn’t tell him anyway. He goes, but grandpa comes in afterward with a letter from alice. she’s trying to get over heartbreak, and the house has bad memories, so she has decided to live in connecticut with her school friend.

At this point grandpa decides he can’t let alice live alone and miserable, and they all miss her, so he will sell the house and they will go live with alice.

As a result of grandpa’s decision, though all the real estate deals become valid, and all the neighbors will lose their homes and businesses – Kirby will own all the blocks and kick everybody out.

The result of this is another montage of headlines, as news of the big monopoly shakes wall street, stocks go up, they go down, and Kirby is about to become king of the world.

In the Kirby bank, all his allies and board members are congratulating one another on the success, but Kirby is alone in the conference room, wondering about what grandpa told him, wondering if grandpa might not be right. But he decides he’s got to grab the great deal he has engineered, and to hell with grandpa’s words! He tells the board to go up to the board room and they will sign all the papers and make the monopoly.

Just then ramsay himself comes in, tells Kirby that he is friendless and how awful it is, and forecasts the same fate for Kirby. He collapses and later dies from heart failure.

The board members go upstairs, leaving Kirby alone to contemplate this for a moment. Then his son enters. Kirby Jr tells daddy that he’s quitting. ‘but you’ll be president of the monopoly,’ dad protests, but Jr says he never wanted it, and he won’t have it. he’s going away to try to forget alice, and figure out what he does want to do in life – probably he will pursue solving solar energy (yeah, in the 1930s they were talking about this! Amazing). He goes, leaving daddy shocked.

Daddy goes up the elevator to the boardroom, and the elevator doors open, all the allies and board applaud, and Kirby tells the elevator man to take him back down again. He leaves the deal undone.

In the madhouse, they are all packing up getting ready to leave. it’s sad farewell, and the cook tells her fiance she found grandpa in grandma’s room crying in front of her portrait.

Kirby Jr comes in, and begs them to tell him where alice is, for the last time. But grandpa won’t tell. He will say, ‘upstairs is alice’s luggage, and that’s going where she is’ and Jr starts upstairs to watch the luggage and never let it out of his sight until he finds alice.

But then alice herself comes in. she has heard that grandpa will sell the house, only she knows what it really means to him, and she begs him not to. Jr wants to explain to alice, but she tells him to shove it and goes up to her room to pack, locking the door. Jr pounds on the door, begging her to open up.

At this point, Kirby Sr enters. He talks with grandpa alone. He says he wants his son back, and asks for advice. Grandpa says, they should play together on the harmonica. Real loud. So they do, and the xylophone player joins in, the dancer dances, the crazies set in again, and one lights off the last unlit firecracker.

This noise brings alice and Jr downstairs. She sees Kirby and grandpa playing together, and Jr nods to his dad, and his dad nods back, and alice kisses Kirby Sr, and Kirby Sr wrestles with the russian dance teacher, and everybody cheers.

In a final epilogue, the family – grandpa and his crazies and the Kirbys alike – are gathered for dinner, some days later. Grandpa blesses the meal, talking to God the way he does, giving god all the credit for arranging things, and nicely tells us how everything has been wrapped up, nobody lost their home or business, and everybody is happy, and even Mrs Kirby will come around eventually.

The end.

I had a bit of a hard time analyzing this one. If we look at it as the romantic comedy starring Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart, then the breakup scene in the courtroom is our second curtain. But this leaves 45 minutes left, a very long act 3. better for general timing is if the banker is the protagonist – he after all is the one who learns ‘you can’t take it with you,’ meaning money is worthless after You’re dead, so you should enjoy life while You’ve got it. Then the second curtain comes when he tells the elevator man to take him down: he has gotten his big deal just like he wanted – only he finds he doesn’t want it after all; it’s his son, his family, life and friendship he really needs.

Or it’s grandpa’s story? He had his happy menagerie life, second curtain is deciding to sell the house (which gives the banker his victory by implication, though it hasn’t been fully settled yet).

Both these moments – alice breaking the engagement, and grandpa saying he will sell – interestingly enough, are followed by swift recap of events in a montage of headlines.

A twist ought to follow the second curtain, about the middle of the third act. Well we have 2 twists also: when grandpa says he will sell is the twist in the romantic comedy (because when alice learns of it she comes back, and finds Jr waiting) – and when the banker says ‘take me down’ and turns his back on the monopoly (we have been prepared for this with a series of shots of the banker thinking over what grandpa tells him in jail). and if the banker saying ‘take me down’ is the second curtain, then the twist would be that playing the harmonica with grandpa brings Jr down right to him, and everything is solved.

Hmm.

(written around 27 February 2009)