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)

The Barefoot Contessa – Structure

Hi Tim,

I saw the Joseph Mankiewicz (writer and director) movie The Barefoot Contessa a couple of days ago. It’s a flashback-movie, and I was struck by the way the flashbacks do or don’t coincide with Frank’s idea of the 8-sequence structure.

Opening on funeral

After the titles we see a small cemetery in Rome. (Note that credits claim the picture was shot entirely on the Cinecittá lot outside Rome, though there are location shots along the coast. Also of interest is that this is a ‘Figaro Production’ so I would say that Mankiewicz had almost total control here – this is his baby all the way, although he might not have been able to get his ideal cast.)

Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart in trench-coat) appears as our main narrator. Although it’s raining, Harry’s VO tells us that the lighting is ‘exactly’ what the Contessa would have wanted. We see the statue of the Contessa in Grecian robe showing beneath the hem one bare foot, and Harry launches us into his first flashback.

This is entirely expositional, and sets up the flashback structure; more like a prologue. If this picture is anybody’s story, it is Maria’s. This scene tells us

1. She was famous
2. She is dead at a young age
3. She was a Contessa although a recent one
4. She is buried here in Rome
5. She was a famous and beautiful movie star in her life

Flashbacks:

Harry No 1 part 1

This flashback consists of 4 technical scenes, or one ‘greater scene’ set in a small nightclub in Madrid. It introduces us to most of the main cast.

We open with a scene of Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner) doing her dance, the fame of which will bring super-rich oil-man and neo-producer Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) and his entourage from Rome to Madrid. But we don’t get to see Maria dance. Instead while she dances, we get shots of a half dozen patrons watching her dance, and we are treated to mini-stories of each of them – the fat rich man who’s trying to seduce an unwilling younger girl, the rich man who sits alone and lusts after Maria, the wife angrily watching her husband get hot under the collar while watching the dance, and one or two others. This scene is covered by Harry’s VO and the music only. At first I wondered if this was a clever way of giving us the idea that ‘Maria is a great and super-sexy dancer with tons of charisma’ without having to teach Gardner how to dance. But later on in the story we do get to see Maria dance. So I guess that this is just part of the buildup to her: the delayed or indirect introduction. We’ve seen the statue and heard how famous she is, now we see how a typical audience reacts to her performance.

The second technical scene is in the same space. To the ‘Reservado’ table which has been featured prominently in the montage of audience, are ushered the American movie people: Kirk Edwards, producer; Harry Dawes, famous though over-the-hill writer-director; Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien), press agent; and a slightly over-the-hill blonde actress we assume is Kirk’s latest mistress. Kirk is producing a big, big picture (his first) and is seeking ‘a fresh face’ he can launch as a star (and own exclusive rights to, and get to fuck as well). To this end he has bought Harry Dawes who has a great script he’s been working on at least 6 months, in all of which time he’s been on the wagon. Harry is a drunk trying to stay sharp for his comeback. Oscar is the typical press agent, and the blonde is here to help establish Kirk’s character and contrast with Maria, who will never take the shit this blonde must swallow all the time.

They’ve come too late to see the dance so they tell the manager to get Maria out there. But Maria has a rule, she never mingles with the customers, and the manager returns Oscar’s money. Kirk sends Oscar in to fetch Maria; soon Oscar returns, without Maria. All the while Harry has been enjoying the sight of Kirk not getting his way, and needling him. Now Kirk tells Harry to go and bring Maria back – if he doesn’t, Kirk will drop the picture and Harry’s comeback, and let it be known that Harry’s script is no good and Harry was too drunk to do the job.

Scene 3 of the flashback shows Harry back in Maria’s dressing room meeting her for the first time. At first the room seems empty, then Harry sees her bare feet under the curtain to the closet, and reveals Maria kissing her ‘cousin’ a guy who plays in the band. (This is to be the first in a line of many ‘cousins’ or nameless penniless studs Maria takes up with, all the while refusing to go to bed with any of the stars, producers, or rich men who lust after her.) Harry and Maria have a talk. She knows his name from his great pictures of the 30s, which surprises him. She has mixed feelings about the whole movie star life and is only really interested in whether Harry can help her become a great actress. She consents to go back out to Kirk, since Harry reframes it not as mingling with the customers, but having a business meeting with a famous producer. But she takes her shoes.

Scene 4 brings us back to the showroom of the club. Maria takes the measure of Oscar and Kirk. She excuses herself for a moment. And Harry tells Kirk he’s lost and that Maria won’t return. Harry enjoys needling Kirk. Kirk sends Oscar to get Maria but sure enough, she has left. Kirk is furious and tells Harry to meet them in an hour at the airport where they will take off with Harry and Maria, or without both of them – which will mean the end of Harry’s career.

Harry No 1 part 2

Harry’s flashback continues without (I think) a return to the cemetery and present time. But clearly the Inciting Incident has taken place in Maria’s story: she has met with rich Americans and been offered a screen test and a chance to become a movie star. But she has turned her back on it.

The flashback continues and will carry us through the second sequence. This one flashback will give us the entire First Act (after the expository Prologue of the funeral scene.) ‘Harry No 1 part 2’ has two scenes.

Harry comes to a poor section of Madrid, to the squalid apartment buildings where the Vargas family have their home. At first the Mother refuses to admit that Maria is at home. Then the brother says she is. Maria comes out and she and Harry have a long scene on the open walkway outside the apartment. I didn’t clock the scene but it must run more than 5 minutes of two people standing and talking.

There isn’t much overt conflict in the scene, let alone action. They stand and are blocked here and there on either side of a support pillar, and closer to the building or to the railing over the street in the moonlight. Harry does want to bring Maria back with him, direct his comeback picture, and get his career back on track. But he also hates the idea of delivering Maria into Kirk’s money-stained hands. Maria tells Harry all about herself and her childhood in the Civil War and how she only feels safe with bare feet and her toes in the dirt. She also wants fame and fortune, but she distrusts Kirk and all rich men, doesn’t want to wear shoes and all that shoes entail, and is wary about ending up like the blonde (though she doesn’t say so explicitly). She ends up agreeing. She and Harry come to an understanding that they will support each other against Kirk and the other Kirk types in the business (though this too is left unstated).

The second scene of this sequence is in a screening room in Rome. Maria’s screen test has just been run for Kirk and Oscar and Harry and three distributor/producers, one American, one English, one French. This is the first time any of them have seen it (Harry probably has seen it though.) The other producers recognize the test for what it is, that one improbable great screen test where a star is born. They all want to deal with Harry; Kirk insists he owns the rights to Maria, but it’s a lie, as Maria has signed no contract at Kirk’s own insistence – he wanted to see the test before he committed any money. Now Harry has outfoxed Kirk; Kirk can no longer sink Harry or bury Maria, as they can go to any one of the other producers and get a deal. Kirk is defeated, angry about it (although he never much shows emotion) and agrees to Harry’s terms.

This ends Act 1. We go back to the present at the cemetery, and the camera moves from Harry to oscar who is also present at the side of a black-haired man who we’ll later learn is the Argentine Maria Bavano (Marius Goring – couldn’t they even have gotten an Italian Lothario to play this part? Why an Englishman? Weird casting). Oscar then launches his first flashback:

Oscar No 1

Oscar’s first flashback has 3 scenes, but really only one. Oscar is explicitly a man who doesn’t understand Maria and doesn’t know any of her secrets; his flashbacks are mainly expositional in nature and tell us not only of Maria’s rise to stardom but also of the incomprehension of the Hollywood establishment to understand a woman of Maria’s caliber.

In the first semi-scene Oscar back in Hollywood is hard at work in his office as his VO explains how Maria made the picture, but never went to the famous nightclubs where the elite of Tinseltown do their gossiping, flirtations, and important business. She stayed completely out of all that and even though Oscar tells us he succeeded in planting lots of rumor-stories in the rags about Maria’s dates with famous stars, none of it was true, and nobody knew the real Maria.

In the second semi-scene Oscar tells of the premiere of The Dark Dawn (or something) Harry and Maria’s first picture together for Kirk. Maria doesn’t even bring a date to the premiere, but shows up with Harry and his young script-girl wife. But the premiere is a success and the picture will surely be a blockbuster.

In the third, and only full scene of his flashback, Oscar arrives in the London hotel suite Kirk has rented to launch the picture internationally. Kirk is there and the British distributor/producer we saw earlier. Everything looks good about the picture except one bit of bad news: back in Madrid Maria’s father has just murdered her mother. Mother-worship is one of the main stays of the Hollywood bible, so Kirk tells Oscar to call Harry back in Los Angeles and make sure that Maria never learns of this news until the picture can have its European premieres. They are all afraid that Maria, who hated her mother and loves her father, might get involved in the scandal, which would sink not only the picture but Maria’s career.

But when Oscar calls Harry he learns that Harry already knows – Maria told him, and she’s already flying to Madrid to be by her father’s side.

So this flashback gives us success in Hollywood, playing by her own rules, and a setback to the rise to stardom. So it’s Sequence 3, the first of Act 2?

Harry No 2

Back to the cemetery, and Harry launches us into his second flashback.

Harry attends the trial of Maria’s father – so does Oscar. The trial is a semi-scene, with no dialogue, covered entirely by Harry’s VO. Maria, Harry tells us, spares no expense and effort to get her father cleared. She even takes the stand herself and gives the greatest speech of her life in which she says everything that no star should ever say – her poverty and squalor, how her mother was a bad person, etc. And she wins her father’s acquittal, and walks out of the courtroom a bigger star than she was when she walked in, thereby disproving every rule Oscar and his kind live by.

The second scene (actually 3 technical scenes) of the flashback tells of a party a year later after 2 more pictures; she is now a super-star, Kirk is holding this party (improbably in Maria’s house) to celebrate their grand success. But Maria is thinking of leaving Hollywood and going back to Madrid. She is being courted by the Argentine, a man even richer than Kirk, and the two big-wallets are engaged in some rivalry over her. Oscar meanwhile is courting the Argentine, hoping for a bigger job and paycheck from the international playboy. Harry and his wife play backgammon. The blonde is also around, her career even bleaker than when we saw her in Madrid.

Third technical scene gives us Maria and Harry out on her terrace, apart from the other party-goers. Here Harry and Maria discuss again her fairy tale life, and compare her to Cinderella without, so far, any Prince Charming. Harry hears music playing from the property’s bungalow, and he surmises Maria is keeping yet another ‘cousin’ there for fun and games. In the balcony scene in Madrid, Maria called her sexual dalliances with handsome studs her own ‘sickness’ and claims she can’t help it; though it’s an important plot device to call her a nymphomaniac and liken it to a disease, by today’s standards her sex life is about the healthiest part of her whole life. But Harry thinks it’s really bad for her, and he has heard that this latest ‘cousin’ even abuses her. But Maria claims he is no better or worse than any of the others.

Fourth technical scene brings Harry and Maria back into the main living room where a pissing-match has sprung up between Kirk and the Argentine. Kirk calls the Argentine immoral, the Argentine admits it freely and laughingly, but says that what he does openly, Kirk does in secret, so Kirk in addition to all the Argentine’s vices is also a hypocrite. Maria gets dragged into the quarrel, the Argentine invites her to sail with him on his yacht in the Mediterranean, and Kirk forbids her. In defiance of Kirk, and with no love for the Argentine, Maria agrees to go sailing.

This flashback then would be Sequence 4, and it would follow the pattern of the previous flashback: success followed by a check, danger, or setback. It also brings us to the Midpoint, which would mark a big change, and so it does: Maria leaves Hollywood and begins a new phase of her life. She will never make another picture, and we know that, because in the opening cemetery scene Harry has told us that Maria only made 3 pictures in her life.

Oscar No 2

Oscar (who has also won the job with the Argentine) now tells of Maria’s life among the rich and titled. She won’t sleep with the Argentine, but Oscar tells us the Argentine doesn’t care about that, so long as everybody believes that she is sleeping with him. The first semi-scene of the flashback takes place on the yacht, where we get no location sound, just music and Oscar’s VO. The Argentine sports a black eye – evidently he was more insistent than Kirk – and Maria takes off her robe to sunbathe on the deck, while all the men present leer and ogle her in a scene that somewhat mirrors the nightclub dancing scene.

The second scene, a full one, lets Oscar tell us about the ‘International Set’ in Monte Carlo, composed of rich Americans and European penniless Pretenders. The Argentine is gambling, Maria seems somehow happy – it’s the first time we’ve seen her happy, and Oscar wants to know why. Maria offers only a vague answer. Then the Argentine comes in from the tables, furious at Maria. He says she stole money from him at the table, which ruined his luck, and he curses her publicly. Then a handsome stranger intrudes, slaps the Argentine’s face, offers his hand to Maria, and takes her away. And that’s the last time Oscar saw Maria alive.

Oscar’s second flashback might comprise a full sequence, but here the notion that a flashback = a sequence falls apart. In terms of the story, Oscar’s second overlaps with the Count’s flashback, and the end of sequence 5 straddles the two, is I would say doubled – it shows up in both.

Count

Back in the cemetery, the camera moves over to the Count (Rossano Brazzi) also mourning his beloved dead Contessa. His flashback is the most complicated with the most scenes.

It opens as the Count, plagued by insomnia, drives into France to distract himself from what is bothering him, but whose cause he doesn’t tell us. Along the way his car overheats, and he stops and gets water from a gypsy camp. There the gypsies are playing, and the Count has his first sight of Maria, dancing with a handsome young gypsy. The Count gets a pail of water and drives off, sure that he will meet Maria again, even though they only exchanged a single glance of a few moments.

He goes into a casino that night, and wins his second sight of Maria taking up some chips at the side of the Argentine, all smiles and winning; sees Maria cash the chips and go out to a balcony where she tosses down the wad of bills to the young gypsy, who tips his cap and races off. Maria and the Count exchange glances again; Maria seems unsettled and goes on to the table where Oscar and the ‘International Set’ are whiling away the empty hours. The Argentine comes in and curses Maria, and the Count slaps his face and takes Maria away.

Out in his car, the Count proposes that Maria go get her things at her hotel and go back with him to his home. She resists, though she’s attracted to the Count, but the Count insists that there is a mystical bond between them, they are destined to be united, and it’s no use even resisting. She agrees.

At the Count’s ancestral palazzo he shows her the paintings of his ancestors, and shows Maria off to his widowed sister (Valentina Cortese). Maria admires one painting and sees a resemblance to the Count, which flatters him: this ancestor was one he especially likes, and was one of Cesare Borgia’s assassins.

Some days or weeks later, Maria enjoys dipping her bare feet (hmm, maybe Buñuel should have directed this one, that would be a treat) in the surf, and on the heights above, the Count asks his sister if she would approve if he married Maria. The sister says that she’s never seen a woman as much in love as maria is, and claims that it would be cruel if the Count married her. She herself is barren, and so with these two their illustrious house will end, and she accuses the Count of only wanting to have a beautiful portrait of the last Count and Contessa. The Count is moody and sad, and grimly mentions the date of October 25, 1942 as his justification for doing what he will do. He has made up his mind and his sister won’t stop him.

This ends the Count’s flashback. So the close of Sequence 5 must be meeting the Count, but actually going away with the Count is what really changes Maria’s life, so maybe it comes in the middle of this flashback.

Harry No 3

Back at the cemetery the camera picks up Harry again, and he launches his third flashback.

He is now location scouting in Italy. Maria appears – of course she has written him many letters about meeting the Count and falling in love.

The second scene in the flashback is set in the Count’s palazzo with Maria posing for her statue (which reminds us of her death) and Harry talks with the Count, telling him that far from being one of Maria’s lovers, Harry is more like her father, and in fact will be giving her away at the wedding.

The third scene is a half-scene: the wedding, just a few shots of the beautiful bride covered by Harry’s VO.

The fourth scene is the reception. Outside the palazzo the servants and peasants are dancing and enjoying themselves; inside the elite nobility are as lifeless as the paintings and statues. Maria joins Harry at the window overlooking the servants, and suggests they go join them for more fun; Harry is disturbed by the suggestion she might be reverting to her ‘cousin’ loving ways. They are joined by the Count, Maria gets permission to go down outside, and Harry bids farewell to the Count. Harry has a sixth sense about people, and he intuits that something is wrong here in this marriage, but he doesn’t know what. He warns the Count not to hurt Maria.

This flashback (or part of one – see below) brings us Sequence 6 and the second curtain will of course be the wedding. Maria has now met and married Prince Charming and all is well. She has achieved her life’s happiness, fame, fortune, a title, a wonderful man who loves her as her bridegroom. But we have a few intimations that tragedy will follow, and we know that Maria will soon be dead.

Harry No 4

I don’t know if we return to the cemetery or not at this point, to break Harry’s flashback in two. It makes sense, since there is a gap in time, but I don’t remember.

Months later, Harry is in production for his Italian picture, and rewriting the scenes he will shoot tomorrow, when Maria comes without warning into his hotel room. Something is wrong, but at first she denies it; we learn she has been married for 13 weeks, and then she tells Harry her husband kisses her hand. And that is all that he does.

She proceeds to tell Harry the story of her wedding night, and we go into her flashback.

Maria (flashback inside Harry’s flashback)

Inside Harry’s fourth flashback comes Maria’s flashback.

On their wedding night, the Count meets with Maria and professes his total love for her. Then he hands her a paper, an official medical form, and reveals what he should morally have told her before he proposed: that on October 25 1942 he was wounded by a bomb and is impotent. Their marriage will be in name only. He loves her with all his heart – and only his heart. And Maria will sleep alone on her wedding night.

These two flashbacks would be Sequence 7, and the twist is: Prince Charming is not the perfect man for Maria, and her marriage is a sham, and a terrible mockery of her dreams.

Harry No 5 (continued out of Maria’s flashback)

After telling Harry this, Maria goes on to admit, at Harry’s demand, that yes, she has been involved with a new ‘cousin’ since getting married. But this time it’s different, she insists: she only took up with him to make the Count happy. What will make the Count happy is a child and heir; Maria is now pregnant, she will raise the child as the Count’s, and will break off with the ‘cousin’ and proceed to tell everything to the Count, whom she still loves deeply.

Harry protests that she has misunderstood the Count, and he’s a sick, morbid man who would never accept the arrangement. But Maria thinks she knows the Count better than Harry does, and all will be well. She leaves, and from his window Harry sees her drive off in the night – followed by another car. With a terrible foreboding, Harry goes down to follow them both

At the palazzo Harry finds the two cars. No one answers at the door so he goes around back through the gardens. He sees her statue again, and hears two shots. The Count appears bearing Maria’s body. He has shot them both. He had long suspected something was going on, but rather than accept it he had to spy and sneak and finally kill – this confirms that Harry had a better take on the Count’s heart than Maria did. She never got a chance to tell the Count her plans and intentions, and Harry hasn’t the heart to tell him now. The Count calls the police, and Harry sits holding Maria’s corpse in his arms.

So ends the final flashback, and Sequence 8: Rise and Fall of Maria Vargas.

Final wrap-up at cemetery

Back in the present, the sun is now shining over the little cemetery – the lighting at last matches Harry’s original description as being perfect for Maria – and the mourners depart. The Count is taken away in handcuffs by the police. Last to leave is Harry, who walks off as the camera cranes up.

(19 April 2009)

The Barefoot Contessa

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched The Barefoot Contessa a 1954 movie written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. It stars Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart.

The story opens on a small cemetery in Rome where a funeral has just taken place. In the rain Harry Dawes (Bogart) the veteran American movie director and writer, is among those mourning the passing of the Contessa, whose marble statue surmounts her tomb. The movie unfolds in flashbacks. In the first, Harry remembers meeting the Contessa, aka Maria Damata, aka Maria Vargas, for the first time.

It was in Spain. Ultra-rich Texan Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) has decided to finance some movies; he has hired a press agent Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) and Dawes, who at this point is a washed-up drunkard and has-been who might still have another picture in him based on his latest script. They have come in search of a ‘new face’ and hope to launch a new star to grace the picture. In Rome they heard of Maria Vargas who dances in a small club in Spain; they flew here to meet her and arrange a screen test.

Maria (Ava Gardner) doesn’t know if she wants to go into pictures. She does know she despises Oscar and finds the Texan repulsive. He doesn’t drink, or smoke, and holds himself in total, hypocritical self-control which Maria senses comes out of an innate sickness. But she likes Harry and loves his old movies, and if he can help her become a good actress, she’s willing to go through with it.

In a long scene, Harry tracks her down at her home, a small dirty apartment in a poor part of town where her family lives. There Harry and Maria swap stories and confess who they really are. And Maria tells how when she was a little girl in the Civil War, she dug in the dirt with bare feet and felt safe. To this day she doesn’t like to wear shoes, she likes to feel the dirt on her feet.

Harry does convince her, and the screen test is a great one. Now Harry’s flashback ends, we go back to the funeral, and Oscar takes up the tale.

Everyone agrees Maria has all the makings of a star, and the first picture is a smash hit. But with all the rumors and gossip, nobody ever catches Maria dating her producer, her costars. She doesn’t go to the usual nightclubs or schmooze the business. She shows up at the premiere of her debut picture without any date, accompanied only by her director Harry Dawes and his wife.

The picture is a smash in America, but just as it’s about to be released internationally, Maria’s father is arrested for the murder of her mother.

Back to the funeral, and Harry starts a new flashback. Maria hated her mother. She does everything she can to defend her father. She breaks every rule in Hollywood. And she gets her father acquitted, and emerges a bigger star than ever. Maria goes on to make two more pictures which the Texan produces and Harry writes and directs.

But then she has a falling-out with the producer and goes away with an Argentine playboy to sail with him on his yacht on the Mediterranean Sea.

Harry’s second flashback ends and Oscar starts his second. The Argentine also hired him, and Oscar went on the cruise as well. But even as Maria never would fuck the Texan, so she won’t fuck the Argentine; Oscar doesn’t know it, but Maria only sleeps with common men, men who arouse her and don’t buy her, men who are in the dirt. (This is shown in the earlier Harry flashbacks. Harry understands Maria, so in his flashbacks we see an understanding of her. But Oscar doesn’t ever understand her, and all we see in his flashbacks reveals his befuddlement and what he himself knows and understands.)

On the French Riviera, in gambling casinos, Maria is bored by the ‘International Set’ while the Argentine gambles. Sometimes he wins big. But one day he loses big, and he blames Maria. He’s not getting any sex from her anyway, and he erupts and curses her in front of the socialites in their parties. Another man appears (Rossano Brazzi) and slaps the Argentine, and takes Maria away. And that’s the last time Oscar sees her.

Now we return to the funeral and find the Count who married her (Brazzi) and he gives us his flashback of her. He remembers when, driven out of his mind by sleeplessness and despair, he drove out of Italy into France. His car overheats along the road, and he goes to a gypsy camp for water. There in the gypsy camp he is enchanted to see a woman dancing with one of the gypsies. She is beautiful and no gypsy – she is in fact Maria; this is the Count’s first sight of her. For a couple of seconds they look at each other; then the Count gets a pail of water and returns to his car. He drives away, confident he will see this woman again.

And so he does, at the casino. He sees her collect some of the Argentine’s winnings, cash the chips, and toss the bundle of money out the window to the gypsy she danced with. Then he sees her confrontation with the Argentine, who blames her taking the chips on the change of his luck. The Count slaps the Argentine, and takes Maria out to his car. And so they go to his ancestral home.

To Maria the Count is a perfect gentleman, the Prince Charming of her Cinderella dreams (the fairy tale is mentioned in several conversations between Harry and Maria in earlier and later flashbacks). He never tries to fuck her, he only kisses her hand and gazes at her with love. And she loves him back. But there are warnings we get in a conversation between the Count and his sister. They talk about the end of their family; she is barren, and he – ever since October 25, 1942– The sister tells him she sees that Maria is completely in love with him, and it would be cruel of him to marry her. Just to have a beautiful portrait of the last Count and Countess of their house. But the Count will not be talked out of it.

Harry gives us his final flashback. He was in Italy scouting locations for a new picture. Maria of course has written to him many letters of her newfound love. Now she comes to him and takes him to meet the Count. Harry gives her away in the marriage ceremony. But Harry has a foreboding. Something is wrong about the whole setup, but he doesn’t know what it is.

Harry doesn’t see Maria for some time after that. Thirteen weeks later, she comes to him in the middle of the night. He’s hard at work rewriting the scene he’s going to shoot tomorrow. She confesses the dreadful secret to him, the thing that made him uneasy. Her husband never did anything more than kiss her hand. In a flashback-inside-a-flashback, Maria tells Harry about her wedding night, when the Count came to see her, handed her a military medical form, and explained how in the war he almost died in an explosion, and the doctors saved his life but not his manhood.

And ever since then, Maria confesses, she’s been sleeping with one of the lusty earthy men she can’t help fucking – one of the servants. But she’s going to break it off now, because the affair did what she wanted: she is pregnant and she will give her husband a child and heir.

But when Harry watches her car drive away, he sees another car drive after her. Worried, Harry gets in his car and follows … to the Count’s palazzo … where he sees her statue, finished at last … and hears two shots fired.

The count comes out of the gardener’s cottage carrying his dead Countess. He has shot both of them. Maria never got to tell him she was pregnant. And Harry doesn’t have the heart to tell him.

Back at the funeral, the rain has stopped. The sun has come out to shine on the statue of the barefoot contessa. The mourners break up. The Count is led away in handcuffs. Harry bids her a final farewell and walks away.

The picture was shot in Italy in Technicolor but I always remember it in black and white. It would have been better in black and white; Gardner’s coloring and cheekbones and chin dimple come out great in black and white with kickers and rear cross key and obi lights. The color in the print was a little washed out, uneven. Jack Cardiff was the DP, he’s famous for his nature photography, but this is mostly on sets. But the production ownership might be mostly responsible for the unevenness of the print; it wasn’t made and owned by a major studio that could safeguard the elements.

What is most curious about the film to me is the attitude toward sex, and lust. Maria is a woman of great physical beauty and desires; there are many men in her life; not one of them fucks her. Much is made in the script about the difference between how stories turn out in real life and how they turn out in scripts. So maybe Mankiewicz is deliberately going against type here. Of course the ad campaigns all stressed Maria’s many men and hinted at wild sex orgies. And of course the film would have sold a lot more tickets with even one hot love scene. Did Maria even get to kiss a man? I mean a passionate kiss? I don’t recall one. I only remember kisses to the cheek and hugs.

Beyond this, the men seem to fall into two categories, or three: the least important are the nameless ‘cousins’ that Maria beds down along the way, unable, she says, to help herself (although today we would probably call these the most healthy and ‘normal’ expressions of love/sex in the story, oddly enough). None of these guys gets a name or a single line of dialogue, they don’t really count, which is why they don’t really deserve to get a category of their own.

The other two categories are the big shots, the money men, who try to buy Maria’s favors, and the men who are gentlemen and understand her, but for all intents and purposes might as well be gay. The failure of the money men is foreshadowed in the first scene in the Madrid nightclub: Maria Vargas has a rule, never to come out to sit with the customers. She ends up working for the Texan, and ‘sitting with’ the Argentine, but won’t sleep with either.

As for the gentlemen, Dawes is the father figure, too old to fuck her, too tired. He is saved from being the ‘gay friend’ (only just saved, mind you) by having an attractive young wife (his third or fourth according to the script) and being played by Bogart. But this character might as well be George Cukor for all that, and I wonder if Mankiewicz really intended to code Harry Dawes as the gay friend. As for the Count, he too seems gay – my old dad thought that would be the Count’s secret, although the mention of a specific date that begins his misery told me it couldn’t be that – but impotent is just as good, and if he were gay, then there couldn’t be the fullness of irony that he loves her with all his heart, but hasn’t the body to follow through on it.

Ava isn’t given really enough to do here. The role seems written around her limitations as an actress; as a sex star, she could have given a lot more with the right cameraman and if only Mankiewicz had stooped to giving us fans a little more of the salaciousness we crave, and that the ads promised. But Ava had a reputation of looking good but not remembering lines so good. We should be glad she manages to suggest a Spanish accent – really not an accent so much as a foreigner’s way with English.

The movie also is one of a long line of ‘inside Hollywood’ pictures that they seem to relish so much. As though the plumber really is that interesting when he goes on at length, down at the bar, about how he fixed the leaky faucets…

(17 April 2009)

The Seeker: The Dark is Rising

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Seeker: The Dark is Rising which is adapted from Susan Cooper’s YA novel The Dark is Rising. Cooper’s book is one of a series of 5 novels she published back in the 1960s and 70s. The adaptation is Fox Studio’s entry in the ‘Harry Potter Blockbuster Series Imitation’ sweepstakes but, like New Line’s The Golden Compass, is probably destined to be a one-shot money loser.

The story has the Stanton family in England from their native California. Will is the youngest of a big brood of 6 brothers and one sister. His brothers pick on him, and when he gets home from school for Christmas term break, he finds that his second-oldest brother has come back from college and has taken over his room. Well he’s not going to move in with the twins who are always picking on him, so he puts a futon up in the attic of the old house.

Strange things are happening in town, though, and Will is starting to see some strange things – usually swirling shapes in patterns. And there is a man all dressed in black who rides around town on a white horse, and stops Will on the road and demands that he hand over ‘the Signs.’ But Will doesn’t know what these are.

The answer is soon to come as the people of the Manor house take Will into an ancient church and tell him they are the Old Ones, who have been fighting on behalf of the Light against the Dark in an age-old struggle. Will they claim is an Old One himself, in fact the all-important Seeker – the one who can read The Book and know the Signs. Six Signs there are, hidden over the ages from the Rider who is the incarnation or representative of the Dark. The Rider’s powers are growing, for it is the time of the age once more when the Dark will rise and threaten to overwhelm the world, unless the Old Ones can assemble all Six Signs and use their power to counter the Rider. The Signs are made of different elements like glass, wood, iron; but the sixth Sign is in a human soul, and can never be found. On top of all this, Will can go through time to find the Signs where they were hidden. And there are only 5 days before the Rider’s powers will be at their peak, and if the Signs are not found before then, the world will be done for.

Well Will doesn’t believe this, but the Rider comes again, and the representatives and allies of the Rider, and there are thousands of black crows over the town, and the Old Ones walk Will from winter into spring, so what’s so hard to believe? One by one Will finds the signs; he sees the swirling fractal pattern glowing, and walks through time into the past, and retrieves the Signs.

But even members of Will’s family, and even the girl he’s got the hots for, can be tempted by the Rider into betraying Will. And though Will gets the five elemental Signs, how on earth will he find the Sign that cannot be found?

Of course there is a happy ending and young Will Stanton, the Seeker, uses his growing super powers to defeat the Rider and save the town and the world from snow and ice and dark. But it isn’t the end. The age is still one of conflicts, and there will be more battles ahead for … the Seeker!!!

The movie makes several crucial changes from the novel. It’s a while since I read Cooper’s books, so I only know a bit of the changes they made. The basic one, that sums up all the others, is that Cooper told of a family of Londoners who were on vacation in a small town in England, a quaint old place where they had some relatives. But Hollywood is sure that American kids can’t sympathize with British kids, Harry Potter notwithstanding, so Fox has to have a California Stanton pack.

And in the book Will didn’t have the super powers – or not so much anyway – and he was humble. But Americans today aren’t humble, if we ever were, and Hollywood wants to pander to our self-deceptions, and feed our egos. So Will is American, he is the Destined One, the Chosen One, and a Superboy all in one.

The books have their faults. It’s quite difficult to show a world of fantasy coexisting with our modern world; in fact I don’t think anybody succeeded in doing so before Joanne Rowling. In addition, The Dark is Rising is hard to film because it’s a puzzle tale: six signs have been hidden about the town, and all six must be found. That makes for six sequences of clues and discovery, on top of which there must be a couple of opening sequences to show Will in his status quo ante and learning who and what he is, and then coming to terms with it, and a climactic battle scene. It makes for a movie with about 10 sequences, all of them involving flashy special effects, and a huge budget with a long running time.

Fox chose instead to short-change the puzzle sequences, making them very short, which makes the puzzles seem easy, and not true puzzle at all: Will is just going along, suddenly sees the swirling fractal pattern, and boom! – he’s in the past and sees a Sign, grabs it with a bit of a struggle, and boom! – he’s back in the present.

But each of the sequences, almost all the scenes in fact, are packed with typical Hollywood digital effects. And the director tries to shoot everything to make it look ‘magical’ so it’s all pretty crazy to look at. This movie almost qualifies in the ‘looks great, stupid script’ line of films I started keeping track of when I first noticed that The Avengers looked cool and awesome with the sound turned off. (Tomb Raider is another in that line.) But The Seeker: the Dark is Rising doesn’t look good enough to quite qualify, and the cutting is so crazy (probably to bring it in with a short running time; there are something like 3 credited editors) that I couldn’t really enjoy the production design and effects anyway.

In the end the most damning thing I can say of this movie is how bland and generic Fox has made it. If they wanted just to imitate Harry Potter, why not come up with their own script property – surely 50-year-old minor British books aren’t famous enough to warrant this treatment, and the rights to the book must be less than the shoot’s craft services budget – paltry in comparison to the hundred, two hundred million dollars or so it cost Fox to develop, shoot, post and launch it (and it only grossed 8 million in North America, and 22 million abroad, for a really dreadful 31 million dollars total – somebody for sure got fired for this one).

Nobody in power understood that the charm in Cooper’s book lay in the specificity of the time and place, and the humble and unassuming nature of the tale, meant to be read over a school break to while away boredom of being shut in while the bad weather raged outside.

Just a waste, in fact.

(16 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)

Willie Dynamite

Hi Aki,

Today I watched Willie Dynamite from the heyday of blaxploitation films.

The story chronicles the fall from heights of a pimp, Willie. As we first see Willie, he’s on top of the world, commanding the finest stable of hookers in the City, driving a pimped-out purple Cadillac with gold trim and fur-lined seats, wearing real fur. He sends his girls out to work, with especial orders for his newest, finest, Passion, who doesn’t seem to understand that she’s an independent businesswoman. Willie gives her a pep talk worthy of an Amway distributor; after all Willie is a capitalist, he is the finest example of the market’s entrepreneurs.

After this Willie meets up with the other top pimps of town. Bell, who seems to have a rivalry going on with Willie, proposes they all join forces, pooling their cop-bribes and divvying up the territories. Bell has big business in mind, a sort of pimps’ conglomerate. But though the others are all eager for it, Willie is determined to go it alone. ‘I like the competition!’ he exclaims. ‘It’s what capitalism is all about!’

But things quickly turn bad for Willie. The cops start hassling him every chance they get. His women get run in, especially Passion; his car is towed wherever he parks it. One salt-and-pepper cop team comprised of a Black Muslim exercise in self-righteousness and a tired old white cop who only wants to brutalize suspects on his way to retirement, seem to be on Willie’s ass everywhere he turns.

Passion meanwhile is being tempted to leave Willie’s employ by a social worker, the black DA’s girlfriend. Passion seems interested at first in a life of modeling and maybe acting, but she scoffs at the paltry sums involved. She knows she can make five times as much on her back for Willie.

The social worker takes this as a challenge. She busts into Willie’s girls’ apartment and start undermining his authority with them. Later she returns and finds his secret stash of bank books. She copies down all the amounts and accounts, feeds them through the DA to an IRS agent, and gets Willie’s accounts frozen.

Willie can only find solace at his mom’s home. His mom is not too well, but all the family gather there every week for Sunday dinner. They only know Willie is a musical impressario and his girls, they think, are a singing group. Willie lavishes gifts on his mom and doesn’t disabuse his relatives of their illusions.

But Bell makes moves to grab Willie’s girls; he also tries to kidnap Willie, but Willie turns the tables on him and leaves Bell naked under an overpass in the Bronx.

Without cash, Willie goes to a rundown neighborhood to get his secret stash of dope, to sell for cash. The pair of detectives are hot on his trail, and Willie has to do some fancy running through torn down buildings and vacant lots to escape, in what is the movie’s finest, most realistic, sequence.

But the end is near for Willie. Bell gets all his girls, and his thugs work Willie over; the cops drag him in for another petty bust, and in a final indignity, Willie must watch as the street punks strip his Caddy.

At his hearing, Willie knows he can beat the rap, because the cops had no warrant to enter his apartment. But his mom shows up in the courtroom and suffers a heart attack.

When he gets out of jail the next day, Willie goes wild. Doped up, he goes for Bell with an automatic, but only shoots up his car. Visions of Passion, who was scarred by the dykes in the jail, haunt him. When he gets back to his place, there’s his nemesis the social worker. She tells him his mother is in the hospital – he gets there and apologizes for himself to his mom, only to see her die.

He breaks down in his car. In the film’s best-acted scene, Willie and the social worker have their final confrontation back at his place. She doesn’t rejoice to see him brought down. She was a girl like Passion herself, she confesses. Willie gives her an envelope, ‘for Passion. Make her all right again.’ And he says, speaking perhaps of Passion or himself, ‘cut and bruises heal in time.’

He goes outside to find his Caddy being towed again. But he doesn’t seem to care now. When a young kid asks him if the car is his, Willie answers, ‘No – not any more.’

The movie has strong and weak points. The script is trying to touch on too many bases at once. Willie as the entrepreneur is a good satire on the success movements; this is then dropped for standard crime movie conflicts with rival pimps; then we move on to being hassled by the man (perhaps at Bell’s urging, though this is never made explicit; these cops are tough and almost lawless, but they are not shown to be corrupt). Then there is the more melodramatic side story of Passion and the social worker, action scenes like the chase through the tenements, a revenge bit against Bell, mom’s heart attack…

The direction is television level, just getting the camera to give basic coverage. Lighting is also adequate but not expressive. Costumes and makeup are all good (apart from the f/x for bruises, which are weak).

Acting is quite strong, all the cast is good for their roles. The general acting style is a little broad and over the top, but not out of line for a crime genre picture. And the intentions are all good.

Music is only so-so, very typical of the early 70s. But somebody had the idea they wanted to copy Superfly and its use of songs as a sort of Greek chorus. Though not up to Curtis Mayfield’s score, the three songs give us the opening – Willie on top – second curtain – Willie’s lowest point – and end, the hoped-for rise to come.

The weakness lies mostly in the movie’s lack of authenticity. Compared to Superfly, this seems like a typical Universal TV cop drama with some cusswords. Zanuck and Brown produced out of Universal, which enabled the production to have the money for decent costumes and shooting schedule, DP, and so on. But the drawback to having a couple of white Hollywood execs make a blaxploitation picture is that at the top of the production, there is no understanding of the black experience. Those two didn’t know their audience. So the result is rather like today with grandfathers shepherding pictures aimed at teens. ‘Give them some of this and some of that, the kids seem to go for that crap,’ you can imagine them saying, over and over again, in script notes and production meetings.

This was not all that different from what happened when just a couple years earlier Hollywood had tried to make hip drug movies about the counter-culture.

(14 April 2009)

True Romance

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched True Romance and I just can’t write about it yet. But I ought to say something to start with, anyway. I really like Quentin Tarantino’s writing on the surface level. I just wish he had written something about life. He reminds me of comic book illustrators who only learned how to draw from copying other comic book artists. They never learned how to draw a real person or building or anything from life. It’s just stylization of stylization. With Quentin Tarantino it’s even worse, because he’s honest enough to tell you in his script what are the movies he is stealing from. Yeah I know Kids who will go on and on about the ‘cool movies’ or comics they have seen or read. But when you make a movie which just has a Kid telling you about the cool movies he has seen, it seems beside the point. Why am I not watching those cool movies instead of this movie telling me that other movies are cooler?

Tony Scott directed, and it’s kind of a joke to see the dvd marked ‘director’s cut’ since there really is no personality to any entity called ‘Tony Scott’ – this is all Quentin Tarantino all over the place, and (to carry the comics illustration metaphor a little farther) this is just Tony Scott playing Mike Royer to Quentin Tarantino’s Jack Kirby. He’s just inking what Quentin Tarantino has drawn and trying to exactly duplicate the pencil lines. Though I will say that Scott knows how to shoot a scene better than Quentin Tarantino ever will.

The opening and closing voice over narration by Patricia Arquette gives you the poetry of Quentin Tarantino, and the scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper is just great dialogue delivered by two masters. A wonderful scene.

The story is just junk and teen boy fantasy. It plays out like a dream, and the embarrassing moments come when Tony Scott tries to pretend that he cares, or wants us to care, about somebody dying. The most ludicrous example of this is the cop who has about 3 lines, he gets shot at the climax and dies. And we have a long lingering shot of him dying. Like we care. Like anybody who would like this movie, or would like Quentin Tarantino’s arrant badassery, as tim calls it, would care about anybody dying. It’s just a movie quote after all.

Christian Slater plays a nerd name of Clarence Worley who loves Sonny Chiba movies and works for peanuts in a comic book store. Not unsurprisingly, this guy has no girlfriend! so his boss the store manager hires a hooker to ‘accidentally’ meet him at a Sonny Chiba triple feature and pretend to fall in love with him, and sleep with him. So they do that. Only she does begin to fall in love with him. And she confesses all this after the fact. He falls for her too – why wouldn’t he, she’s like a dream come true to him – and they get married.

Now casting Patricia Arquette as the girl, ‘4 days into a life as a call girl which is not a whore there’s a difference you know’ – is just perfect. But Christian Slater is not well cast as the Kid, because he’s not nerdy enough to be the geek at the opening, and he’s also not cool enough to be the master gangster of the end. I don’t really know who could have pulled it off. Brad Pitt has a small comedy role as a stoner, and he could have done it, but he would never be believable as the nerd who doesn’t have a girl friend.

So there’s a problem with the structure of the script. The lead can’t be cast. You have to go one way or the other: A real geek who won’t be believable as the guy who gets away with it at the end, or a badass mofo who’s unbelievable as the nerd. Scott goes with Slater as a badass type. But I think I would rather have seen the geek. This movie really should have toned the violence way down and the language as well, and gone comedy and satire all the way. Because the more satirical scenes are the ones that succeed best.

Now this Kid is also obsessed with Elvis, but not any Elvis you ever knew. Instead his Elvis is a badass. And in his fantasies Elvis tells him what to do. And Elvis tells him to go over to the pimp’s place, the pimp who owned Patricia, and kill him. This is not what any comic book store geek would have nerve to do, and he certainly would not be able to get away with it.

Anyway, Slater goes on over. The pimp is a sort of keystone to the movie and its notions. It’s a black pimp played by british actor Gary Oldman in his hollywood badass period. Oldman is quite watchable. But the scene is ridiculous. So the british actor is playing a black pimp wannabe. Who is totally scary and intimidating in that Gary Oldman way, and somehow Slater turns the tables on him and manages to kill him. This is presented as the Kid having the balls and guts to do it, but really it should be a total accident, just lucky – again, the scene would have worked better as a comedy rather than chilling and thrilling.

Oh yeah, in collecting his wife’s dresses from the pimp’s place, the Kid finds a suitcase full of cocaine, and he steals this.

Problem is, Gary Oldman had stolen that suitcase from ‘Blue Lou’ a bigtime gangster, and though the cops don’t care who killed a pimp, Blue Lou wants his coke back, and sends out Christopher Walken and his Sicilian boys to get it. Walken kills the Kid’s dad (Hopper) and learns that the Kid has gone from cold snowy Detroit to LA.

In LA, the Kid hooks up with a longtime buddy, who’s trying to be an actor. Through the actor they set up a deal to sell the cocaine to a big Hollywood producer. But the gangsters are after them, and the police get wind of the sale too.

It all comes together in a swanky luxury hotel suite, with cops and bodyguards and gangsters in a shootout, the Kid gets his eye shot out, but the cops and bad guys all kill one another, and the Girl gets the Kid out, and they make it with the money to Mexico, where all outlaws with money dream of going. And in Cancun they raise their little boy named Elvis.

Tarantino is trying here to marry abstraction and idealism with gritty ‘reality’ as real as he can manage. So what it is, is a mashup of romance movie with crime movie. Star vehicle with action genre flick. That is tough to do, and escapes Tony Scott, but I don’t think anybody could have pulled this off. Scott would later, I think, go on to direct Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers script, which covers a lot of the same ground, and there too the satirical scenes play pretty well, but the action and bloodletting just seem unexciting and overkill. Yes they can fire off a hundred rounds and blast sound around the theater, yes they can splash fake blood over the actors. But it ends up just an assault on the senses that leaves me stunned, exhausted. Which is why I didn’t want to write about it immediately, and I thought I didn’t have anything to say about it.

I wonder if Quentin Tarantino would have been a better writer or director if he had had to work in genre with low budgets for a decade before being feted as an a-picture star.

(14 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)

The Three Bandits of The Hidden Fortress

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress.

You know the movie very well, of course. I’ve only seen it three or four times. Every time I remember that the beginning is slow and there’s a lot of the two Fools who are the heroes, before the real story gets going. And every time when I watch, the beginning with the two Fools before the real story gets going seems to take longer.

I guess you have to find the Fools’ antics funny to enjoy them. The odd thing is that I do find them funny, once they are contrasted with the heroic General and brave, fiery Princess. But on their own, the Fools don’t amuse me at all. Could it be I’m missing a lot by not knowing Japanese? Maybe their accents, the words they use, are funnier than the bare-bones subtitles.

Anyway, it’s 45 minutes before we meet the Princess for real. And it’s an hour before the General, Princess, and Fools set out on their mission. I count that as the end of Act I. A whole hour for Act I! Too long for me!

The story: War has broken out between the Akizuki and Yamana clans. The Hayakawa clan stays out of the war but has agreed to shelter the survivors of the losing Akizukis – if they can cross the border.

But we really begin with the two Fools. They are peasants who sold all their goods to buy a couple weapons and join the war, in the hope of gaining riches. Didn’t work out that way: arriving late to battle, they were pressed into service stripping corpses. Now in rags, they are trudging back to Hayakawa where they’re from, and quarreling every step of the way, blaming each other for the mess they’re in.

They find the Yamana-Hayakawa border closed and patrolled by Yamana soldiers watching lest any last Akizukis escape. Then the Fools get picked up by Yamana troops and are thrown in with other captives digging out the foundations of Akizuki castle, searching for the rumored 200 gold pieces that formed the basis of Akizuki wealth.

The fools manage to get away in the confusion following a slave revolt, and wander the wild hinterlands, hungry, stealing what they can, at the end of their rope. Then they find some sticks with gold pieces hidden in them.

Searching for more, the Fools run into a fierce bandit (Toshiro Mifune) who says he knows where the rest of the gold is. And he has a wild spitfire of a girl wandering around too, in the Hidden Fortress abandoned by the Akizukis, which was used at one time as a spy post on Yamana lands.

But in fact the bandit is the Akizuki general Rokurota, and the girl is the Akizuki Princess Yuki, with a high price on her head. They are holed up here unsure what to do. And the General would have killed the Fools, only when he asks them their plans, they babble out some nonsense about the only way to get to Hayakawa is by going into Yamana first. This appeals to the General, and so he spares them and even adopts their plan.

So (at last, after a whole hour!) they set forth: the General, the Princess, two Fools and three horses weighted down with billets of wood concealing the Akizuki gold. They enter Yamana territory, but news of their movements are always just behind them. Along the way they sell the horses, buy a enslaved Akizuki captive and a cart, do battle with Yamana generals, burn all the wood in a fire festival, dig up the gold from the ashes come dawn, and flee for their lives over wild mountains on the Hayakawa marches. But it’s all in vain. The two Fools make up their minds to betray the Princess, but they fail even in this – Princess and General are already captured. Totally defeated but still with their lives, the Fools trudge on into Hayakawa to make their way home.

Behind them the general Rokurota defeated in a duel comes to identify the General and the Princess. But he has been beaten savagely and scarred for having lost the duel, and his old honorable friendship with Rokurota has soured in the rival general’s heart. Rokurota apologizes to the Princess, but Yuki thanks the General for the best time of her life, and sings the song from the Fire Festival on rising above attachment to life.

Come the morning, they set out from the frontier for Yamana castle. But at the last moment the Yamana general, remembering the song, battles his own men, sets the General and Princess free, and sends them into Hayakawa, with the horses laden with gold ahead of them. Then he leaps on a horse and follows.

Far ahead, the two Fools trudge along. Once again they are swearing friendship – until the horses with the gold come along. Then they start bickering over who gets what, until some Hayakawa troops ride up an arrest them.

In the final scenes, the Fools meet again their traveling companions, now transformed in courtly dress and battle armor. General Rokurota offers the Fools two gold pieces in thanks for their services, and the Fools leave Hayakawa castle, finally (it would seem) having learned their lesson, and no longer squabbling over gold.

This was a hard project to make work. It seems as though Kurosawa is really telling the Fools’ story, but the heroic General and brave Princess are too interesting, and as soon as they appear, the story shifts to them. I could say Kurosawa was making more of a kids’ story, and the Fools give the kids somebody to look down on and laugh at. But it goes deeper.

The opening scenes tell us what war is like for most of the people who fight it. Dirty, destructive, and inglorious. When the General and Princess hijack the story, we get glimpses into what war is like for the elite: glorious, adventurous, honorable. The point then is clear: the samurai elite can wage glorious war, on an individual basis, but as soon as it gets into clans and states, then inevitably the peasants are drawn in, and war is no longer so nice. The idea that a peasant can gain from war is the ultimate folly.

The opening reminds me a little of Yoshikawa’s Musashi which also opens with the hero, a peasant gone off to fight in war, waking up in the piles of dead, learning that his side has lost the war. He also went to war with a buddy from his home village, and the two end up following very different paths from the corpse-field. There is also Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu monogatari about two peasants who go to war for gain, which came out five years before The Hidden Fortress.

Does anyone remember the folly of war at movie’s end after seeing the General strike down his foes, and the heroic escape at the end? Or do we instead see the dirt and ugliness of the beginning as the Fools’ own fault, and nothing inherent in war at all? Intellectually I can say that war is wrong here, but I can’t help but get excited when I see the horses galloping and hear the grandiose martial music that is General Rokurota’s theme.

(10 April 2009)

Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry the 1976 documentary by Donald Brittain that I saw so many years ago, that first introduced me to Lowry and his book Under the Volcano – a book I never read.

The doc is in many ways superior to the John Huston adaptation of Volcano in capturing the book, the mood of the book, the flavor of the book. The problem in making a movie out of that book is that there is a story, but the story is secondary to the manner in which it is told. And the primary impulse in adapting it to film must be to tell the story. For a Hollywood movie, the story is the main and primary thing.

Huston at this point in his life was in failing health. He knew just what he wanted to do, but he was not in total command of his set. More: the movie was shot on location, and the budget was such that Huston and his crew could not remake Mexico. And yet for all that, I thought that the shots of the volcanoes in particular were much better in the documentary than in the film, even though Gabriel Figueroa was a great cinematographer.

The doc quotes extensively from the novel. And it has the great good fortune of Richard Burton’s voice to read all passages quoting Lowry. There is no better voice for the job; it makes me wish for an audiobook edition of Volcano done by Burton. Not only did Burton have a great voice, and a wonderful mastery over his voice, not only was he a great actor, but he knew a thing or two about drinking and alcoholism himself.

But watching it tonight, I was struck by something else. I caught myself wondering how Albert Finney (who starred in Huston’s movie as the semi-autobiographical character of the author) would have read those passages. It seemed to me that Finney would have brought a bit more humor to them – a lot more humor. Even whimsey. This is in keeping with how Finney played the Consul, of course, and it’s quite possible he would have read the book with a heavier take on the thing; but the subject of the tale, of a drunk man’s dying day, is so heavy in and of itself, that the lightness, almost jollity, Finney brings to the part, would have helped a lot with reading the novel.

Burton now began to strike me as overly dramatic, too heavy, too gloomy, almost demonic, almost hateful. Surely there must have been self-loathing in the Consul’s soul, but self-loathing can also be expressed with playful irony. And in one passage Burton read, the Consul is trying to express how it’s important to see the fun of it all, or else we will never understand the appeal of the liquor.

There are many other pieces to the documentary, of course – biographical bits covering Lowry’s family, his school years, his years after Mexico (I was shocked, actually, to learn that Lowry spent only 20 months in Mexico that first sojourn, when he conceived of the story and wrote most of the first draft – it seems as though the Consul must have been there for decades, and that Lowry too must have steeped himself in Mexico for years and years) and the triumph of final acceptance and publication, followed by years of bitter humiliation and defeat, unable to write anything else that was decent, that was even publishable.

I should give you some idea of the shape of the doc also, because shape is everything to a doc; the doc is really written in the editing room as you know. So they begin with Lowry’s death, and they leave it open, unanswered, just how he died. Was it heart failure, was it choking, was it suicide, was it accident? Had he swallowed sleeping pills and overdosed, had it just been an accident that he took them, had he not taken them at all? Had he drowned in his own vomit? Nobody, it seems, knew; the court inquiry came down with a verdict that it was an accident, ‘death by misadventure’ in the legal term.

The doc then takes us to Lowry’s birth family and upbringing, and goes forward, in linear fashion, to his end. Along the way there are many horrors, and Brittain’s crew films the important places Lowry visited in his life – the public school, Oxford, New York, Mexico, Vancouver, and finally back in England. But rather than use archival footage, Brittain does something bold and quite evocative: he films those places as they are today. So the students at Leeds public school have long hair as they did in the 1970s; but they are shown doing all those things that they did in the 1920s (or 1850s for that matter). In New York we see the homeless drunks and the seedy bars Lowry would have known; they are the drunks and bars of 1975 and yet we get much of the flavor of what Lowry would have known – what I imagine Lowry would have known – what I imagine Lowry would have felt about it.

Bellevue, the notorious mental hospital where Lowry was committed, is only shot from the street; I guess they didn’t give permission to shoot inside; but Brittain shows us a strange man walking down the sidewalk in front of Bellevue carrying a sign, I KNOW and shouting to the world, ‘Do you know your name? Do you know what to sign? When you go to work? I know!’ It’s chilling.

From New York the doc follows Lowry’s trail to Mexico, Los Angeles, Vancouver, finally back to England for the final years of his miserable life. There at last the doc resumes the question of his death, offering us more details (though Lowry had cut way back on drinking, on the night of his death he drank half a bottle of gin, got in a great ripping row with his wife, she smashed the gin bottle, he attacked her with a chair, she spent the night in the landlady’s place, and Lowry swallowed two entire bottles of sleeping pills) and determining, to the satisfaction of Brittain at least, that it was most definitely a suicide. (Oddly enough, though he interviews Mrs Lowry on camera, he shows us nothing of her comments on Lowry’s end; did she refuse to talk of it? Or did she not give the answers Brittain wanted to hear?)

So we have a circular or ‘ring structure’ in which the movie comes returns at its end to the starting-point. This I find is often used in biopics, especially when the end of the subject’s life is seen as meaningless or unchosen (see Lawrence of Arabia and Gandhi for other examples of this).

The title An Inquiry Into the Death, etc. supports the notion that the movie is aimed at settling this question. But really – who cares about that matter, whether Lowry jumped or stumbled on that last night? He’d been ‘dead’ literarily speaking for a decade; indeed he was only ‘alive’ to the world of letters for the two brief periods when he put forth his first novel, Ultramarine to ridicule and swift oblivion, and then ten years later or so, the eight years of working up Volcano.

Other choices for structure might have been to begin and end with Volcano itself: great literary éclat – what about this book, now? Who wrote it, under what circumstances, why? Then trace Lowry in Mexico, intercutting bits of backstory – the whirlwind courtship in Paris to the wife who soon fled back to New York, years in New York then down to Mexico, and so forth. From here we can then look forward to his failure to follow on, and then into the rising scholarly interest in the novel.

Maybe the autobiographical bits in Volcano and its intense quasi-self-portrait, interested Brittain more in Lowry than in literary matters. Beginning with the inquest is something of a hook for our interests, and the mystery structure holds up some glimmer of suspense to keep us watching to the end? I felt no suspense, however; I didn’t care whether Lowry suicided or had a heart attack; it was the evocative portrait of a squalid, wasted life filled with wretchedness fog and confusion, and illuminated by this one great flash of light, that appealed to me.

Here’s an interesting bit: I’d remembered the whole movie in black and white. Did I watch it on a black and white television? I don’t believe so. But in particular the Mexican footage I remember in grainy black and white, though it’s in Ektachrome gaudy color. Weird. But that maybe just me. Maybe my mind considers Lowry’s life in the light of The Lost Weekend and that time as only properly seen in black and white photography.

I still don’t want to read the book. Only, if the Burton audiobook edition exists, I would listen to that.

(11 April 2009)

Mr Brooks

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Mr Brooks a recent film that aspires to be the film that launches the careers of the new versions of the Coen Brothers. Coen Brothers launched on Blood Simple a twisty story of killing and revenge and guilt with many cool shots.

Mr Brooks (Kevin Costner) is a well-respected Oregon businessman, man of the year of his chamber of commerce, and a super-wealthy man who owns a box business. He also has a hobby of making pottery in his own studio with his own kiln which turns out to be a very convenient way of disposing of the evidence of his other hobby, which is killing people.

Mr Brooks, you see, is a serial killer. He is aided in this ‘addiction’ by his alter ego ‘Marshall’ (William Hurt) who is the one egging Mr Brooks on to kill and kill again. Mr Brooks does fight to control his addiction, but as our movie opens, after going without for a full 2 years, Mr Brooks – after enduring the awards banquet naming him Man of the Year – succumbs to Marshall’s temptation and kills a couple making love in their apartment.

Unfortunately, the couple liked to make love with the lights on and the drapes open, so all their neighbors could watch; and tonight one of those neighbors saw them killed. What’s more, he also was taking photographs.

Mr Brooks has his own problems with his daughter, who shows up at his office and declares she’s dropping out of school. But Mr Brooks and Marshall both know the daughter is lying, covering up something else, the real reason she left school.

But wait – ‘Mr Smith’ appears at Mr Brooks’s office the same afternoon, with pictures of Mr Brooks at the scene of the murder. He’s not a blackmailer though, all he wants to do is experience the thrill he felt when he saw the lovemaking couple killed, but again, and up close. All he wants is to be there when Mr Brooks kills again.

A pretty puzzle, that the scriptwriter/director delights in. Now I must ask, why is America so enamored of serial killers? I don’t know, but I trace it all back to The Silence of the Lambs and its sequels, and Anthony Hopkins’s charismatic performance as a serial killer.

Be that as it may, Mr Brooks starts taking ‘Mr Smith’ around cruising for a victim – Mr Brooks is very choosy about his victims – and at home, Mr Brooks finds out the reason why his daughter has quit school: she’s pregnant. Oh no, the daughter says that is not the real reason, and Marshall, Mr Brooks’s alter-ego, agrees that the girl is still hiding something, something really big. This we discover when a couple of cops from the college town arrive. There was a murder on campus, a bloody savage murder with a hatchet which was left on the scene, and daughter-Brooks is the prime suspect.

Yes, that’s right: we have not one serial killer, but a serial killer in training (‘Mr Smith’) and a fledgling serial killer, daughter Brooks. All we need now is for Mrs Brooks to be a serial killer, and pretty soon everybody in the cast will be killing, killing, killing! But Mrs Brooks doesn’t get anything interesting to do but be good wife.

While all this is going on – isn’t it enough? Not for our neo-Coens – we follow the detective who is on the case of the ‘Thumbprint Killer’ or as we know him, Mr Brooks. The detective is played by Demi Moore, and she is also, as it happens, fabulously wealthy. Her father was a very successful banker, but she works as a cop, and a good one. But her second marriage to a handsome younger jerk is ending, and the jerk is asking for millions of walk-away money.

But wait, there’s more! The detective is famous for sending yet another serial killer, Meeks, aka ‘The Hangman’ to jail. But Meeks has escaped and is looking for revenge against the detective. And, he has a tough as nails girl accomplice. So our scorecard is now up to five, yes, five serial killers in the story. Heavens, is everybody in Portland a serial killer or wannabe?

Mr Brooks debates what he should do. On the one hand it would be best to let his daughter be convicted and go to jail, because she is going to kill again unless she is stopped now. And Mr Brooks wants to die and end it all. On one level he is tired of all these games. But he loves his daughter, which prompts him to fly down to the college town, and kill somebody else using the same methods of the hatchet, to give his daughter an alibi and send the police looking for a serial killer who’s still down there.

That much taken care of, Mr Brooks turns his attentions to the problem of Mr Smith. This is very complicated, but in the end, to cut to the end, Mr Brooks has murdered ‘Mr Smith’ and convinced the police that ‘Smith’ was the ‘Thumbprint Killer’ and he has killed the detective’s ex-husband and his lawyer, and he has sent the detective to where Mr Brooks knows (by amazing coincidence) Meeks, the ‘Hangman’ is hiding out. The detective gets rid of her husband, she becomes a hero when she does away with Meeks and his girlfriend in a pitched gun battle which is staged, I suspect, for no other reason than to give us lots of cool shots of guns blazing and an exciting action scene for a climax.

Mr Brooks is left only with the problem of his daughter, future serial killer. There are a couple ways it could end. She might even decide to kill daddy. The neo-Coens solve this in an ingenious though well-worn method, showing daughter kill daddy in bloody savage attack, then twist and reverse and presto, it was a dream, a nightmare Mr Brooks was having.

Mr Brooks ends the movie just as he began it, reciting the Serenity Prayer in what we all know will be a useless effort to overcome his addiction.

The casting is interesting. For my money, reversing Costner and Hurt was the natural play: Costner is very good at playing footloose and feckless and charming, as he showed with his first breakthrough in Fandango and William Hurt is much better at showing tormented depths. It was perhaps a clever joke to put them in roles against the grain. On the other hand Costner is a bigger name, and he would probably jump at a chance to play against type, stretch himself, do something dark and very different. (The scenes in cars with Costner in front seat and Hurt in back reminded me a little of that Tom Cruise movie where he played a heartless hit man being driven around by Jamie Foxx. In fact I’m sure that hip people, who have seen and memorized Coen brothers films and other violent serial killer movies, could find many quotes and cribs here in Mr Brooks.)

I didn’t like it. I was about to turn it off. I kept watching, and in the end the intellectual puzzle had me hooked, despite many implausibilities and loopholes. The main tour de force here is in trying to get the audience to be rooting for a serial killer to kill again. They almost pulled it off with me; I can’t answer for anybody else.

Only I wonder, why should anybody spend millions of dollars to get people to root for a murderer? And why should audiences spend $10 for a ticket to watch killing after killing and enjoy it? We are all serial killers; maybe this is the point, maybe the movie is simply presenting us with evidence of our own depravity as proven by the fact that we paid money to watch and haven’t walked out. On the other hand, this movie, produced for a very small budget (as Kevin Costner vehicles go) was a flop.

Maybe Americans aren’t serial killers after all?

(9 April 2009)