Lonely Hearts

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Lonely Hearts written and directed by Todd Robinson.

The story involves a notorious murder case in New York in 1949. A con man (Jared Leto) who preys on widows and spinsters hooks up with a femme fatale (Salma Hayek) to prey on widows and spinsters and murder them.

The film structure has a flash-forward, flashback structure, but mostly proceeds in parallel between the pathological relationship between the killers, and the investigation, focusing on the lead detective (John Travolta) who is troubled in his own way.

Credits run over a montage of shots of the period, ending with a scene of a woman who shoots herself in the head over a bathtub. Then we jump forward 3 years, as two detectives Robinson (John Travolta) and his partner (James Gandolfini) arrive at Sing Sing prison to witness an electrocution. Gandolfini’s voiceover narration then brings us back in time and carries us through the rest of the story.

The suicide, he tells us, was Robinson’s wife. After that Robinson, a tough, hard-boiled detective, confines himself to desk duty and won’t go out on cases. Until by accident he is called in on a suicide scene of a woman who slit her wrists in a bathtub. Robinson finds it troubling, and he covers the case. He knows it’s a ‘Lonely Hearts’ case and suspects murder.

Meanwhile Gandolfini’s narration also introduces us to Ray Martin Fernandez (Jared Leto), a con man and swindler who writes letters to lonely widows and spinsters. He gives them his line, takes their money, and leaves. But one time he meets in this way a real beauty Martha Beck (Hayek) who is a real psycho. She falls in love with him but is never fooled by him, and together they embark on their crime spree.

The detectives try to get a line on Raymond and his next victim. And we also see how the couple do it: Raymond sweet-talks the women, Martha pretends to be his sister, but she is driven to jealous fury when she seen him romancing another woman, and ends up murdering the girl. Raymond participates in the killing and disposal of the corpse, and they go on to their next woman.

Robinson, the detective, is troubled. He has a new girlfriend (Laura Dern) but tries to hide it. He can’t move on, he can’t face his son with a new love. His son Eddie is 15 and maybe troubled himself; neither one has fully grieved or come to terms with the wife and mother’s suicide. Because of that memory, Robinson drives himself all the harder to solve the Lonely Hearts murder cases.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan Ray and Martha find a new victim, a young widow with small girl living on a farm. It begins to look like Ray wants to ditch Martha and start over; he’s getting along so well with the widow, and when she gets pregnant he tells her to keep it a secret from Martha. But the widow confides in Martha, who promptly poisons her. The poison is still slowly working when Ray gets back with the groceries. Ray isn’t sure who to shoot, Martha or the widow; Martha challenges him to shoot her or the widow. ‘If I don’t have you I don’t want to live,’ Martha tells him. ‘So shoot, Ray, but do it out of love.’ He puts the gun to Martha’s head, but kills the widow instead.

Then he rushes to bring back quicklime to dispose of the body and is pulled over. He murders the cop who pulls him over, but the cop has radioed in Raymond’s name already. The couple go on to kill a farmer for his dog in a mixed-up effort to appease the little girl. But the girl won’t cotton to Martha, and she ends up dead and slaughtered as well.

Robinson and his partner arrive in Grand Rapids and they help the local cops track the couple to the farm. There they take them alive, and get Martha to confess. She almost brags about it. And so, in the end, Robinson and partner witness the electrocution of both the Lonely Hearts killers – and then he resigns from the force.

The voiceover tells us that Robinson takes his son and the boat he had built for his wife, and moved upstate, married his girlfriend, and took up a normal life again.

The first of the end titles tells us that the writer/director is the grandson of the detective, and dedicates the movie to the detective’s son, the writer’s father.

The movie is well made, a good recreation of the period. It moves rather slowly, and seems lugubrious. Travolta’s performance is quite melancholy, repressing his rage and grief. The only time the movie really comes alive is when Hayek and Leto are playing their games. There’s no joy there either, but Hayek really gives oomph to her insane jealousy, and when she does her sex thing, it’s funny in a sick, sick way. The movie really should have just told the killers’ story, and the domestic difficulties of the detective are a bit beside the point, though Robinson makes a game effort of connecting the two causally. He wanted to pay tribute to a famous story his family was connected with, but the real story here is not the investigation so much as the weird, sick love triangles between con man, victim, and lover.

But the chief problem is lack of any joy (or much vitality) and much suspense. The picture only comes alive when following the twisted lovers in their horrible crimes and ghastly-funny declarations of romantic love. Martha is particularly loopy in this regard. As for suspense, the flashback structure lets us know the bad guys were caught, and the only suspense we really are left with is whether the cops can prevent the killers from killing the little girl on the Grand Rapids farm.

(26 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)

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)

Under the Volcano

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Under the Volcano an adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s literary masterpiece, directed by John Huston in 1984.

The story centers on an alcoholic ex-British Consul (Albert Finney) in Cuernavaca Mexico on the Day of the Dead in 1938. He drinks constantly in amazing, staggering amounts. His wife (ex-wife, actually) Yvonne (Jacqueline Bissett) comes back to him, trying to make another go of their marriage, but the Consul can’t forget or forgive her for having slept with his half-brother (Anthony Andrews). And so his life ends, under the volcanoes that loom above the countryside as a malevolent symbol.

Long ago, I believe before this movie was made, I watched a documentary on Lowry and his life and the creation of this book, liberally interspersed with passages read from the book and images of Mexico. This absolutely staggered me and I always wanted to read the book and yet never did … the prospect of hundreds of pages of drunken misery seemed too depressing to me. When the movie came out, I knew it could never match the documentary, so I never watched it, though I was curious about it. Finally, at last, I have.

Here’s an odd coincidence: the DP was Gabriel Figueroa, who may be the same guy (same name, anyway) as the DP on The Young One which was made 25 years earlier! I thought the colors were perhaps too bright, not stylized enough. (Another minor quibble: Finney and Andrews and most of the men in the cast sported hair lengths more suited for the 80s than the 30s.)

It seems at first to be minor Huston in the beginning, but the climax, in which some fascists pick on the Consul for no particular reason, and then shoot him like a dog in the mud in the rain outside the lowest, filthiest cantina and whorehouse in the district, is chilling and very powerful.

Finney gives a fine performance, but Bissett was a revelation to me – never have I seen her give so rich and emotionally deep a performance as this one. I remember her debut in Hollywood in the late 1960s, in Bullitt and some Frank Sinatra private eye film, and a surfer movie, when she was just a model, really. Here some 20 years later she has the chops and world experience to really bring it.

I suspect that Huston and the screenwriters only loosely based this on the book, for there is a strong theme of the approaching war, that I don’t remember from the documentary. For example, in an early scene, the Consul makes quite a scene at a formal event for the Red Cross by insulting the German ambassador, then ranting and raving about the Mexican custom of requiring the dead to be transported by express train only, accompanied by a relative with a first-class ticket; the Consul works this up into trains stuffed and packed with the dead, packed upright, or chopped up and stuffed into bags to make room for them all. Of course there would come death trains that went to the concentration camps in a few years in Eastern Europe.

Huston lived in Mexico in the 1930s, he lived there on and off for other periods of his life, and shot many movies there. Some of this movie might come as much from his memories of the place as the book. It might even be true that Huston met Lowry at the time, I don’t know.

I wish I could see the documentary again. This movie was good, very good … the documentary still overpowers it in my memory.

(6 April 2009)

All Night Long (1962)

Hi Aki,

Today I watched All Night Long a version of Othello set in the London jazz world of 1962.

Johnny Cousins (Patrick McGoohan) is a drummer in Aurelius Rex’s (Paul Harris) band. He longs to break off and form his own group, but there’s no chance unless he can coax former lead singer Delia out from retirement; since Delia married Rex, she stopped singing. Rex was jealous of her in the spotlight and would only marry her on condition she give up her career, which she was glad to do – only she does miss the spotlight, and the excitement of singing.

On the night of Rex and Delia’s first wedding anniversary, rich jazz fan Rod Hamilton (Richard Attenborough) arranges an after-hours party for the couple, and invites all the great jazz players in London at the time. In a neat little twist, and one of the main reasons why anybody would want to watch the movie today, these supporting roles are played by real muscicians like Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, John Dankworth, and others; several jam sessions are used as entr’actes between the dramatic scenes as the party goes on … ‘All Night Long.’ (‘All Night Long’ is also Delia’s signature song, which she sings at one point.)

Johnny proceeds to lie, manipulate, steal, and connive to break up Rex and Delia and get Delia to agree to sing with his band he’ll form – because as booking agent Lou tells him, ‘I got too many bands, but if you can get Delia to un-retire, then you’ve got something.’

The producer also takes credit for production design, and the principal set is the warehouse place in which Hamilton stages the party, with balconies, stage area, circular staircase, rooftop, private office. The film is shot B&W and 1.66:1, though the version I saw was reformatted to fit 1.33:1 TV aspect ratio. I never got a sense I was missing anything in the compositions though, they seemed pretty effective and I didn’t catch any elements crowded off the sides of the frame.

In a departure from the play, Rex pulls back from strangling Delia, and she forgives him. Johnny is revealed as the lying sneak he is, Rex and Delia walk off into the dawn, so we can hope they patch things up. Meanwhile Johnny in a scene that isn’t in the play tells his own wife to go home and leave him ‘like all the rest of them.’ ‘But I love you,’ she says, and he answers, ‘You love me, he loves her, everybody loves everybody … except me. I don’t love anybody. Nobody – not even me!’ The last we see of him he is alone on the stage area, drumming wildly, madly, in total frustration and hatred.

Changing the ending is OK with me since Othello itself is more Iago’s tragedy than Othello’s. All Night Long pretty much pushes any racial concerns aside; at a couple of points in the movie I though they didn’t even need to cast a black man as Rex. Othello works as the Moor’s tragedy only insofar as he is driven to killing his wife, and ends an outcast, because he is black, and the Venetians cannot accept him, have never been able to accept him, as an equal. This movie leaves all that out; there seems no trace of racism anywhere; that leaves only Johnny as the guy who schemes and maneuvers and loses everything when he is at last found out.

McGoohan is the reason I wanted to see it; I’ve been a fan of his work since his TV show Danger Man and later on his masterpiece, The Prisoner. Here he plays a total, weak, sly bastard, smoking pot, trying to push pot on others to ruin their careers … he has no redeeming features in fact. There is no greatness in his character to feel pity for him at the end; he gets what he deserves, he was only a mediocre and envious musician who thought he was better than he was. McGoohan does struggle with the accent a bit – he calls himself a ‘white American jazz musician’ and I don’t know if he is trying for an American accent here, or just trying to cover up whatever vestiges of Irish accent he may have had.

(6 April 2009)

Temptress Moon

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Temptress Moon a 1996 film from Chen Kaige, starring Leslie Cheung and Gong Li.

I’m sure you saw it, right? So here’s just a capsule storyline: in 1911 young Zhongliang is a student, and a minor relative of the powerful house of Pang. As a special ‘honor’ he is allowed to enter the Pang palace and serve to prepare the Young Master’s opium pipe (Young Master is married to Z’s sister). Meanwhile young Ruyi, the Young Master’s sister, is a hellion, a wild kid who’s been raised from the cradle smoking dope by the Old Master, her father. One fateful night, Young Master, crazy doped up, forces little Z to sleep with his own sister. The result of this is that little Z hates Pang and the whole lot of them, and runs away. He tries to go to Beijing to study, but is set upon by thieves at the railyard.

Ten years pass. Z is now living in Shanghai. He’s been raised by the triad gangs, and loves the Boss as a father; in turn the Boss loves Z like a son. Z’s ‘job’ involves making married women fall in love with him; then the gang blackmail the married woman.

He doesn’t seem too happy about his life, though.

Meanwhile the Old Master of the Pangs dies, and Young Master succeeds; but for ten years Young Master has been a vegetable. So Ruyi is chosen to be head of the house, but since she’s only a woman, a distant cousin is her ‘helper’ – really the old guys intend to go on ruling. What they don’t know yet is that Duanwon, the ‘helper’ has always been in love with Ruyi, so he backs whatever she says – she turns out to be the real head of the house.

In Shanghai, the Boss hears of this, and sends Z to seduce Ruyi and bring her back; the fortune of the Pangs is immense and he wants it. Z asks Boss not to send him back, but Z is sent all the same. He plays hot and cold with Ruyi, who is interested in him right away. Oddly enough, Ruyi as a woman is a totally different character from Ruyi as a child – not spoiled, not headstrong, never seen to smoke dope, and innocent. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this movie is about style, not logic.

But Z’s sister is crazy in love with him, too. She’s been so lonely without him, as her husband is only a vegetable, and in ten years Z hasn’t even written once. But he repulses her and tells her he hates her and everybody in the palace.

All the same, Z finds himself touched by Ruyi’s innocence, her frankness, her beauty. Who knows, maybe there is some trace of love for her from when they were kids? He gets her to agree to go away with him, but then he can’t go through with it. He goes to Shanghai and confesses his treachery to the Boss. The Boss turns out to love Z more than the loot, and forgives the betrayal. Instead he arranges for Ruyi to be brought to Shanghai so she can see Z in action; this will cure Z of his heartsickness when Ruyi scorns him, and everything can go back the way it was before.

It doesn’t quite work out the way the Boss intended though. Ruyi is still interested in Z despite how he’s been living, provided he does indeed love her. But he can’t say the phrase – Leslie Cheung is playing the cold bastard yet again just like in Days of Being Wild, the one all the women want, who doesn’t love women back. Sick at heart, Ruyi goes back home, and accepts another man’s marriage proposal. But Z goes back after her, breaking from the triads once and for all. He finally gains courage to tell Ruyi he loves her. But it’s too late. In despair Z determines to go to complete his studies in Beijing after all, but in a final act of madness, he prepares Ruyi’s opium pipe, just the way he did for Young Master on that fateful night ten years back – spiking the opium with arsenic.

Halfway out of the estate grounds, Z has a change of heart. He rushes back to save Ruyi, to warn her – too late again! She has smoked the fatal pipe. From now on Duanwon will be the head of the Pang house, speaking for the brain-dead Ruyi; the triads catch up to Z on the docks and shoot him, and there’s the end to our happy little love story.

Chen Kaige and DP Christopher Doyle try to splash color everywhere on the screen. This is Chen Kaige’s version of Wong Kar Wai, with the emotions always hyped and pushed and exaggerated, characters stylized, narrative stripped of connections and logic until it pushes up against the edge of incoherence. Every character is passionate to the extreme – you could call them crazy. Mirrors are everywhere for shooting things frontward then reversed. Steadicam shots follow people running through the mazes of the palace; wide angle lenses are used to distortion; diffusion filters over a lot of the shots, with frames allowed to go completely out of focus at times. Light is splashed across faces so one part blows out – it’s just that kind of movie.

I didn’t like it much, but I respected it, and I’m glad I watched it. It strikes me that Chinese film is now like Hollywood in the 30s or French films in early 60s. People aren’t afraid to try stunts like this, and can get huge budgets to shoot sweeping period epics like this one, anchored on major stars. It really makes Hollywood films of the past 20 years or so look like timid piles of steaming cliches. Temptress Moon is like a Jean Jacques Beineix film, just delirous, or crazy. I guess if you’re really into Leslie Cheung, you might go for this, and it’s a woman’s picture, so it’s not a knock on the film if I don’t like it much.

(26 March 2009)

Trainspotting

Hi Aki,

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

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

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

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

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

(25 March 2009)

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