Pre-Code Capsules 3: THE SECRET 6; SMART WOMAN, TARZAN, BLONDE CRAZY, THE MATCH KING

It was kind of disconcerting to hear Alec Baldwin and David Letterman this week discussing their love of old films, with Dave adding they start getting good only from after 1934. Say whaaa? Dude, Acidemic readers know the best cinematic times are the eras Letterman doesn't like, the post-silent/pre-code era of 1929-1934, before the code crushed womankind and made her wear ridiculous aprons and act in a fakely wholesome way the bourgeois woman's groups felt would be better for the 'masses.' Here's some 90 proof:

THE SECRET 6
1931 - ***
 Wallace Beery get top billing in this protean (for MGM) gangster drama set in gritty downtown Chicago (there's some chilling tracking shots of stockyards). Hard to believe Beery was once a huge box office draw, playing burly ruffians opposite Jackie Cooper or Marie Dressler. Times sure were different! Here he plays a ruffian stockyard worker nicknamed "Slaughterhouse" who leaves that job to become a gangster during prohibition, and eventually runs for mayor on the "pig-sticker" ticket, with the stockyards howling and mooing away behind his podium.

Andre Bazin would approve of this film since it operates on a loose semi-documentary style: lots of interiors packed with extras and activity and a sense of real time via long uninterrupted takes in medium frame. Everyone speaks slowly and carefully for the early sound equipment.  If nothing else it makes for an invaluable record of Chicago in the actual prohibition era. We see: press rooms, stockyards, nightclubs, bottling plants, breweries, money changing hands, receipt tallying, shakedowns, political rallies, checks being written, highjacking, and blackmail. The cast includes Lewis Stone as the bitter Irish rival, Jean Harlow as a 'hired to hook ya' nightclub hatchecker, and Clark Gable a two-timing no good rat finkwhyIoughtta....

SMART WOMAN
1931 - ** 1/2
Thanks to the light touch of director Gregory (MY MAN GODFREY) La Cava this soggy farce is pretty light on its feet, even with all that dead air, early sound hiss and TCM's print all but faded to light grey. Mary Astor stars as the martyrishly modern wife who comes home from a trip abroad to find her husband, Don (Robert Ames) wanting a divorce and planning to marry a blonde gold digger (Noel Francis) with a claw-hooked mother (Gladys Gale). Once again the gender neutral fuddy-duddy-isms of Edward Everett Horton (the pre-code Michael Cera?) attempt to liven the stiltedness. When Horton comes to pick Mary Astor up from the docks in a huge crowd scene there's a brief, horrifying minute when I thought he was the husband Astor's been boasting of to Sir Guy Harrington (John Halliday) during the voyage. Things get better when Don's gold digger hits it off with Sir Guy during a strangely sexy bicycle ride. Dewy, wild-eyed and seductive, she really wakes up the film in this scene, the exercise perhaps kicking in the bootleg backstage hooch   in her system, but the zzz's are never far behind, struggling to catch up like Edward Everett Horton on a girl's bike.

TARZAN, THE APE MAN 
1932 - ***1/2

There's been so many kid-friendly TARZAN films, from the silent era up through Disney's animated version, that it's easy to forget the first two films with Weissmuller were adult, intense, and uber-lurid. TARZAN AND HIS MATE (1934) gets most of the press, thanks to a nude swimming scene (restored!), wild-ass battles and sexy chemistry between Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan in the hottest loincloth of any Jane ever. But if you can get past the dull-ish first half, which is a lot of mismatched rear screen projection of Maureen wandering past ceremonial dances, the original 1932 TARZAN is just as awesome. The big climax--a tribe of pygmies throws Jane and her father into a pit with a flesh-rending ape monster--is still unparalleled in sheer lurid extremity. A more terrifying version of the lollipop guild, the studio used real African American and African dwarfs in the scene, and to see them all decked-out in exotic furs and fangs swarming around the pit, yelling and screaming for blood, man oh man.... it's so splendidly disturbing, and racist and wrong, you may never want to watch it again, after just twenty more times...

BLONDE CRAZY
1931 - ***
A Warner Brothers Cagney film with lots of good-natured slapping, BLONDE CRAZY's got a little something for everyone... to be offended by, sooner or later, but nothing more shocking than seeing James Cagney--wearing lots of white make-up and eye shadow--getting taken for a sucker by Louis Calhern during a trip to the big city.  Wait... what? Louis Calhern!!!??

Noel Francis

Cagney starts out a bus boy and hooks up with Joan Blondell to implement his scrapbook full of scams. She's the cheese, he's the mousetrap, get me? Guy Kibbee's the first sucker they trim, his roll gets them to 'a big city' and all is well... at first. Cagney in these scenes is already super-modern and hip and making fun of the crisp early sound way other actors talk (Alec Baldwin did an impression of it on the aforementioned Letterman appearance) but I can't stand seeing him get took by the dude who'd later lose a war to Groucho Marx in DUCK SOUP (1933). Am I right, bud? Would you want to see John Wayne get his ass kicked by Franklin Pangborn? And speak of the devil, Noel Francis (above) is as dewy and weird-eyed in her few scenes as Calhern's chippy as she was for that hot bike scene in SMART WOMAN. More please! There's also an impossibly young Ray Milland as a wall street swine who sends Blondell tomes of love poetry (Cagney reads some Browning in amusing style) and look fast for a 'good luck' swastika key chain.

THE MATCH KING
1932 - ***
Thanks to TCM we've had the chance to discover a lot of pre-code stars that fell by the wayside over the years. Perhaps it's because being in the shadows helped stave off the draining of endless imitation. Warren William is one such fella, here as droll and pleasingly devilish as a no-good embezzler can be in a loosely biographical portrait of Ivar Kreuger, the guy who cornered the market on matches in the 20s via counterfeit bonds and inventing the idea of 'three on a match' to help sell more boxes. There's plenty of vicarious thrills in watching the swift rise and sudden crashing fall of William's smooth talker and his literal house of matchsticks. Incidentally, David Letterman mentioned this movie in that discussion with Alec Baldwin this week, though Baldwin hadn't heard of it. Baldwin, you'd do well to absorb a little Warren in your already scintillating rogue repertoire! He's just your type.

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Summer of my Plastic Soldier: BLOW-UP (1966)

Is Anotnioni's breakthrough English language film, 1966's BLOW-UP, a masterpiece, or a dull meditation on artifice? A sober intellectual's wrongheaded attempt to duplicate the confusion of a drug experience, or the most fucked up brilliant film in the world?

1966 was a fabulous time to be young and pretty in London. All you needed was for some pop-eyed freak to toss you a capsule of LSD or mescalin or, failing that, smoke some hash with you and BAM! You were one of the cool kids. The crazy scene reached out to meet you. The whole happening thing was... happening...

Words didn't work on it. Only art.

Nowadays when I go to an art gallery--even in Soho--I'm kind of amazed at all the tourists, even the Europeans, struggling to seem 'overwhelmed' by the bland conceptual art. When I worked at the Cohen Gallery dealing with Chagalls and Dubuffet mixed media oils for hundreds of thousands of dollars, hung-over, I always wondered what in the hell could people see in them that I didn't. What a lot of rot, I thought. Then one Tuesday I came back from a very long psychedelic weekend in Vermont and staggered into work, suddenly I got it. Or at any rate, the tiny little lines that made up Chagall's endless drawings of chickens and Fiddlers on the roofs finally seemed interesting, alive and swirling like a bunch of little spiders weaving wedding gowns. The Dubuffets seemed to drip mud and anger and primal gravitas. My eyes, in short, were open.

Antonioni seems to have been born with such open eyes, and so in the newly turned-on 'scene' of 1966 swinging London he found an audience that had at last caught up with him and his obsessive delight in the signifier-dissonance of industrial age object-making. 

I love Antonioni when I'm strung out on deep art, man, but in the wrong mood--the blase' -entertain me mood-- I find him pompous, didactic and dull. You're either on board or you're not with such things and a film that's a deep spiritual experience one night is a snooze the next, ala Kubrick's 2001. I'm also really attuned to the engagement level of those I'm watching a film with, and BLOW-UP, more than anything, is the film to make a lot of guests shift in their seats, sigh, and check their blackberry, and then I too am over it. So I watch it alone, late at night, when the Chagalls are squiggling and the air breathes around me.


But hey - it abides. Deep Red fans will love it as much as that film's director does for David Hemmings alone, who really sinks his teeth and body into the part of a fashion photog. Strutting and cocky and brutal with his unstained white pants and ruthless artist's open eye, he shags a lot of mod birds and drives a snazzy pint-sized convertible, the kind you step down to get into, which is clearly the inspiration for the one driven decades later by Austin Powers. 

But it's not all eye-con-ography and groovy gear; a snail's paced mid-section finds Hemmings in his dark room "blowing up" part of the Hyde Park background until the pixels are shilling-size. There's no music. Ugh, it's unendurable! With her working class Garbo hair and stoop shoulders, the Vanessa Redgrave who trails him desperate to get the negative seems to have wandered in from a different movie, and for a hot minute the film seems poised to follow her instead. Paranoid alien hunters who spend their lunch hours as I do, looking for alien artifacts on topographical NASA photos of the moon will surely relate both to Hemming's obsession and my frustration. Either way, the bird flies off, but Antonioni's still in the dark room... now the pixels are the size of grapefruits and yeah, there's a body there, all right. Maybe, isn't there? If there is, he'd be a fool to get involved and we begin to feel like the only one who wants to keep watching is Coppola so he can go make The Conversation and De Palma so he can make Blow-Up, and Argento so he can make Four Flies on Grey Velvet.  The rest of us just want to get on out of that goddamned studio and soak up the sutltry London air.

Once we finally do get out, the film breathes back to life; Hemmings winds up at a packed club where the Yardbirds are playing and a cutting contest between Jimi Page and Jeff Beck causes the latter to smash his guitar and hurl the remains into the crowd (this was a year before Monterey Pop, mate) The crowd flies into a mosh pit feeding frenzy to get the guitar neck and, ah can't spoil it, an Antonioni film should never be explained or described beforehand. If you haven't seen it just get it over with and remember this: if you don't know what the hell is going on you are far closer to 'getting it' than someone who does.

Clicking with the artsy counterculture youth would never come this easy again for old Antonioni, though it wouldn't for Dennis Hopper either (i.e. The Last Movie), but Blow-Up is a deliriously perfect meeting of the minds, the sardonic humanist whose a world too wise to ever judge his shallow hipsters in films like L'Aventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse intersects with the hip youth zeitgeist and they matching each other's intellectual aspirations in poker-faced absurdity like two mimes who don't know each other working the same beat and magically clicking into a perfect spontaneous two-man show.

But lightning never tastes as good the second time, no one ever gets as high as they do the first time. Antonioni moved from London to Southern California for Zabriskie Point (1970) but here he seems always either a step behind or ahead of the stoned desert youths. Is he collaborating with these kids or just filming them and wondering where his translator wandered off to? Even a kinky nudist theater group rolling about in the dust can't kick up any resonance. The songs are great, though, Pink Floyd, the Dead, I have the LP!

Plus, Antonioni seemed to be losing his sense of humor by Zabriskie and that's something other disillusioned intellectual auteurs like Godard and Fellini never seemed to do. One should get funnier as one gets older! There's a fork in the road for every creative artist once they reach a certain amount of success: do you begin to believe your own bullshit or continue to believe only in your own absurdity? It's all up to you, man. Depression vs. enlightenment; freedom vs. ego prison. In 1966 people were just beginning to realize there was even a difference. There was no precedent for what they were doing, so it wasn't cliche. Optimism was actually in the air, something we can hardly imagine today,  and yet, Antonioni was already giving up.

But we're talking Blow-Up, so that first hit of LSD scored by the pretty young Londoner is still pulsing in 1966 electric pink and Antonioni still has his deadpan jubilance and sick sense of humor. Here is a man who creates and critiques art at the same time and yet somehow keeps it alive, and if your mind is swirling like a spider riot of Chagallian ink and Dubuffet mud when you watch it next time, you just might disappear.

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Mendacity A-Go-Go: Liz vs. the Little Monsters

 

I'll never forgive Richard Brooks for the Gaspar Noe-ish ending of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977, my review here), but his unflinching eye comes in handy when dealing with  the mythic component of Tennessee Williams, and his dispassionate objectification of Paul Newman's unnerving sexuality and Roman statue profile has a unique fetishistic kick perfectly in line with Williams' rough trade tendencies. IN CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) and in the undervalued SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962), Brooks finds in Newman the gay eye candy grand prize of Williams' hard drinking man-children, then lets genius character actors bounce off the bronze.

But the big early scene in ROOF of Maggie chattering away and Brick just drinking and laying around, muttering passive-aggressive things like "Do they, Maggie?" infuriates me, every time, and keeps me from loving the film like I love NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Newman seems neither drunk nor closeted, and Taylor seems too poised and mannered to be really in heat. By comparison, dig up the old Showtime production with Jessica Lange (above) and Tommy Lee Jones! I haven't seen it since it premiered on cable in the 80s--but I watched it a peck of times back then: a young, pre-celebrity Lange is damn hot in the negligee dress, and Jones mixes it up with Rip Torn as Big Daddy and Lang with a ferocity and cagey weariness that Newman lacks in Brooks' version.

I know it's sacrilege but Liz and Paul seem to lack connective chemistry, so it's strange to me that the long Brick-Maggie bedroom scene is the most famous and recognized part of ROOF (not so strange perhaps considering how hot Liz looks straining at the seams of her white negligee). Maybe I'm off the mark (there's also the stapled-on-by-the-code happy ending) but for me this isn't a romantic drama as much as tale of masculine redemption: Newman and Burl Ives slay me every time in the heavy showdown in the troll king basement that comes later on, and the real scene-stealer is Jack Carson when he finally lets some tears show in his voice it's such a shock and he seems so honestly frail in one moment, warts and all, that the rest of the film fades around him suddenly in a mendaciously artificial overacting haze. Fault it as you may for the now family therapy 101 moments of dialogue and symbolism (the crutch and alcohol, stairs, ice cream), it's the kind of film that holds your hand and invites you to peer--without maudlin weepiness--deep into the harrowing void of mortality the way few films have done before or since. And if you have a dad with cancer who you all call 'Big Daddy' who has a bit of a Welles or Ives gravitas then you will, like me, be devastated.

The family basement is packed with souvenirs and statues from a Cook's tour to Europe Big Daddy took with his wife, who takes after the mendacity side of the family. What could be just a cliche'd rendition of Charles Foster Kane's big ole basement becomes a mythic underworld, with Burl Ives as a kind of pot-bellied troll king, and cobwebs on tall lamps draped to resemble stalagmites. There's moments for Burl and Paul to each smash stuff in a clutching heart attack way as their illusions of immortality and glory are dashed on the altar of passing time, irrelevance, the horror of all existence, and then are redeemed, sweaty and wrecked, by the icky area they fear and recoil from the most - genuine feeling and human love.  And you know that to Williams a hypodermic full of morphine resting on a crate isn't just a symbol; it's something to drool over. Drugs don't help you escape from reality in a Williams effort, they help you confront it head on.

Wait, which reality are we talking about? Not the 9-5 family values no-neck monster reality--it helps turn down the volume on that--but the 'holy shit here comes the scythe' reality. In Williams' plays, its the whole mindless reproductive Christian-patriarchal family dynamic that's an escape from that truer, grimmer reality, the inescapable gravity of death. And if you don't make amends now, you're fucked. And incessant off-key renditions of "Dixie" are not amends. 

I've had those breakthroughs before with my own big daddy, maybe you have too -- the late night boozy moments of truth when you can look at him and suddenly see--instead of a paragon or symbol of authority--a frail, aging  human, ever trying to escape his future by ignoring his present, and you see yourself that way, too, and if alcoholism runs in your veins you can bond quite well until the hungover morning when you scarcely remember the progress you made.  Like many of Williams' plays, it seems made for me, made for a brooding drunk writer by a brooding drunk writer - with booze as the thing that both gives you the brio to stare into that void, and at the same time shorten the distance to the bottom, where the teeth are, in the base of the Sebastian's Venus fly trap garden. Click!

I wonder if the whole first half is intentionally shrill, meant to wear you down with the constant songs sung by the no-neck monsters to welcome Big Daddy home. We identify totally with Brick hiding out in the bedroom, as Taylor's Maggie rants on and on in her one-note voice. And we identify with Big Daddy when he rejects the ugly brood of Gooper for Maggie's hip convertible, and his irritation with the non-stop dinner songs which his wife makes such a show of enjoying. There's also no accident that the ROOF is in the title, as the different levels of the family estate are packed with meaning, from the elevation of the bedroom to the lowest ebb of the basement and the killing floor living room and the convertible quicksand driveway. And when the children go off to bed, and the drama starts in earnest, we above all note the the quietude like a weight removed from our shoulders when their no neck noise stops. It's that 'click.' Brick was waiting for it, and now we realize we too were waiting for it.

The rejection of messy children is one of the few things I connect with in the Apollonian, as per Camille Paglia, vs. the chthonic. Gayness has been one-note in the media since Williams' day, and thanks to PC indoctrination, gays are now the opposite of the depraved lunatics they were in the 1950s; now they're just saintly victims longing to become legally-wed adoptive parents. Either/or but on no level are homosexuals allowed to be properly ambiguous: mercurial, both good and bad, like everything else on this fucked up planet. A negative portrayal will get you a sack full of angry letters; a positive portrayal a snoozing audience and bizarre Christian right wing protests. Can you win?

Few artists today bother to try, to plumb the depths that Camille Paglia writes about in her Sexual Personae, to explore gayness as the rejection of the feminine body, the denial of procreation, involved in the Apollonian. For me and a very few others, the whole media portrayal in things like TV's American Family and The L Word are deeply offensive because they are a betrayal of all that was good and pure about the Apollonian. Now everyone's a breeder, queer eyes or no, and kids are saints by default, suffocated in round-the-clock hyper-monitoring even as their parents aren't home (they have to work overtime to afford nannies and after-pre-school sewing lessons).

In that sense it's illuminating that Brick--who may or may not have fooled around with his late pal Skipper-- is the only one to ask "why!?" in relation to Big Daddy's edict to reproduce. He has a point and it's a harrowing one: why bother to procreate just so some idiotic legacy of wealth and possessions can go on? Where's the meaning?

As someone who reacts with  mute horror to the surplus of children in my Park Slope neighborhood, I relate to Brick's question; and as someone who, because he has no kids, gets to stare into the terrifying mortal mirror without the worry being channeled into anxiety about providing for the kids after I'm gone. And as an alcoholic writer aware of the repulsion aspect of sexuality on a visceral level, I relate. And I relate to Liz's scheming to keep the no-neck monsters off that nice piece of land. Like her I want to drown them in ice cream, choke them on their own stupid toy guns..

Looking at the film in relation to Williams' other works we see a running theme of the grabby, uncouth, poor relations who breed willy nilly and are a pox upon the land with their unconscious brutishness. Against this grain, this unceasing flow of children into the future, stand a few 'whole' souls, like Maggie and Big Daddy, and Brick, Blanche, Mrs. Stone, Violet Venable, Rev. T.L. Shannon, and a boozy actress named Alexandra Del Lago.
 

God bless this old era--the late 50s-early 60s--when Tennessee Williams was as hot onscreen and stage as pocket edition Freud was in the bookstores. A time when cigarettes and whiskey made a nation more alive to the truth and ambivalent about the blind procreative drive of the future.  Maybe one day we'll again have another Tennessee Williams to steer us into some actual dialogue with our own tragic genetic imperatives; someone to have the guts to embrace the terrifying gaze of the Apollonian eye instead of just dressing them up as breeders and aping the most banal of suburban values. Til then, mendacity will remain so common as to be unnoticed, and sexual risk takers will die, whether by AIDS or Brooks' evil Tom Berenger hustlers, or terminal big daddy cancer. Won't someone not think of the children, just for a couple hours, and smoke a goddamned cigarette, or bang that shot Big Daddy doesn't seem to want, so we can talk like real adults?

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Last Year at Marienbad - the Easter Party Game

Nothing spells meta like having a Last Year at Marienbad party for Easter, when San Moritz is beckoning and all you can afford is a rental of one of the most pretentious and bourgeois art movies ever made, and maybe the best, or worst, and both, certainly... maybe. Touches like a voiceover that slowly fades underneath booming organ tones as it speaks of wandering through an "edifice of a bygone era," with carpets thick and ornate mirrors and windows that reflect "galleries, side corridors that in turn lead to an empty room, a silent room where one's footsteps are absorbed by carpets so thick and heavy that they reach no one's ear." Repeat.

Watching it now in the 21st century it's hard to know if the stark black and white perfume and jewelry ads with sad-eyed women lounging by long obelisk-shaped pools, or beds or were they shrubs, surrounded by wealth and models, came first or if MARIENBAD launched them all. In case you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's from 1961 and directed by Alain Resnais and written by S/M intellectual Alain Robbe-Grillet, and is about a girl who may or may not have had an affair or been sexually assaulted in a hotel the year before by some sleazy, dead-in-the-eyes lothario who never stops lingering over her and who makes Boris Karloff look like Clark Gable. This scenario is played out over and over again, with the same cryptic narration about the hotel, shadows that switch sides and disappear in the lovely garden, and a bunch of people either sitting or standing by a row of chairs, oh and there's a memory of a snowbound chalet, which may or may not be just the painting hanging in the girl's hotel room, or the girl might be int the chalet, with a picture of Marienbad (though if the setting of the film is Marienbad or not, who can say, according to Wiki, it was filmed in several different chateaus to "produce a disorienting effect."And Coco Chanel made Seyrig's gowns! They're sleek, but shot cold as a diamond in a freezer.

I concocted this idea while trying to watch the film several times and realizing it worked best watching random chapters over a period of a week. In 15 minute intervals, at random, it's a masterwork. All together it's infuriating and worst of all, pretentious. And the actors don't mesmerize like they must when narrative is this thoroughly deconstructed. When all else fails in Godard or Bergman you can just stare into the celestial beauty of a female face, but as pretty as Delphine Seyrig is, as lovely as her Dietrich-ish gowns are, she really doesn't project the same goddess magnitude of, say, Monica Vitti or Bibbi Anderson, or Anna Karina. Imagine how dull L'AVENTURA, PERSONA or MY LIFE TO LIVE would be without the accessibility, the emotional spontaneity and realness in the starlet's faces. It's not her fault that she doesn't connect and seems trapped in a kind of capitalist hell, one of fine gowns, endless shots of ornate hallways, figures frozen in cocktail repose, and persistent suitor and cadaver-like husband. It's the auteur and writer who are so rigorously intellectual and formal they pin her like an etherized butterfly to the deathly vacant space, so empty past gestures are discussed over and over as if they one day will have meaning. And the organ music... it grates like a list of grievances... and every head of hair is slicked back to the point of cruelty. Empty corridors as far as the eye can see will eventually bore even the most hardened European intellectual (my Argentine ex-wife, a leftist-intellectual film maker who introduced me to Bunuel and Godard, called MARIENBAD the most pretentious piece of shit ever made.)

If you find the film's repetitious nonlinear, fractal-like structure is frustrating over a long haul... may I suggest the MARIENBAD the party game? Here is what you need:

* At least two other people to watch the movie with, ideally if you're in a love triangle with them (invite the person you like, and the one who likes you - the latter will definitely come).
* 3-7 chairs, ideally straight-backed dining room table style, arranged in a semi-circle in front of the TV screen.
* One large framed painting or picture of a winter landscape, ideally with a small house in the middle, lit from within, but who is in there? We don't know!
* A book of kitchen matches and a coffee table space (or card table)

There is a lot of mirroring and refracting in the film, and the idea for the game is to represent a mirror to the action onscreen, but an 'off' surrealist mirror. So when all the men are standing you stand, and freeze when they freeze and mimic their movements when they look in the mirror. Let's say Daphne hangs up the winter landscape painting on her wall, you would then take the painting out of the room and hide it. When she takes it off the wall and hides it, you would bring it out, as if she's passing the painting through the mirror/screen to you. When the men play that weird match game, you play too, and when the chairs are empty onscreen, you sit in them, and vice versa. When that gets old, watch the film; when the film gets old, play the game. Once you get in the habit, you should find yourself naturally going with the flow of the action, going to the bathroom as a character enters the screen, and vice versa, and you can get that post-modern affect high, and avoid being too bored by the film itself -- you can leave and come back and not miss much, or start in the middle, or pick a random chapter, or watch the same chapter ten times instead of the whole film once, and may find yourself in San Moritz, or Marienbad, as the hellish simulacrum comes crashing down and Christ rises like a star of the real in your heaven.

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Great performances, dubious haircuts

1. Laurence Olivier as 
HAMLET (1948)

The 'style of the time' is no reason for the short bangs and clipped wings on Sir Lawrence in this otherwise lovely production. Since director Olivier grants himself so many close-ups, you're forced time and again to reckon with how much he looks like Sting. Truly, the undiscover'd country from which no traveler returns seems like a much more viable option than usual.

2. Fred Ward as Henry Miller in

HENRY AND JUNE (1990)

Nothing's more upsetting than having to consider various 30's bi-curious women having sex with this alleged Romeo. Bald except for a black strip of hair tape around the lower half of his head, he looks painfully square, and dares to act as confident as an Elvis. Nothing at all against the bald, or those with hair around the sides. A bald man can be quite virile-- I love Telly Savalas and Cool Yul--but Ward looks like he's wearing a bald wig with a strip of felt, and the overall effect once you add his his wolfish nostril breathing is quite lewd.

3. Jeff Goldblum as Ed Okin in
INTO THE NIGHT (1985)

Time has not been kind to Goldblum's pouffy 80's 'do. To the point where I couldn't even get past the opening scenes with his unfaithful wife in a recent revisit, and I saw this film dozens of times as a youth... and Goldblum's awesome in everything. He should take a clue from his statuette in above photo. 

4. Cary Grant as Capt. Henry Rochard in 

I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE (1948)

Hard to believe it now in my golden years, but as a Hawks-loving teenager I held this movie in my esteem far above BRINGING UP BABY. Cary Grant as an allegedly sophisto French officer must have been deranged to want to marry someone so dour in appearance, smoker's baritone, and butch demeanor as Ann Sheridan is in this film. And his impromptu war bride wig is both harmful to animals (how is that horse going to keep flies away from his hindquarters?) and, as far as beauty, it's like he's not even trying.

5. Frederic March as Count Vronsky

in ANNA KARENINA (1935) 

It may have been the style of the future's military schools, but the flat fade they give March in this glossy MGM adaptation is--even across the silver veils of time and space--rough on the senses: you can smell his acrid hair tonic and the gunpowder in his ears. It looked right on Wallace Beery's seething, self-righteous German industrialist in GRAND HOTEL (1933) but not on a dashing count.

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The Real Unhinged: THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY? (1969)

I've been watching a lot of reality TV 'elimination' shows like Project Runway, Survivor, America's Next Top Model, American Idol, etc.  and they keep me drifting back to the idea they have a direct relative in the depression-era dance marathon. And Jane Fonda's thousand yard stare and Sydney Pollack's unflinching yet compassionate camera eye.

I'm glad I saw HORSES for the first time around four in the morning after I couldn't sleep, alone in my apartment, on a big projector, and hallucinating on fever and cold medicine. The idea of a group of people all forced to live, eat, sleep and occasionally die together while dancing forever in circles always fascinated me as an alternative to the nuclear family. Here under impresario Gig Young's purview it's both a nightmare and a strange kind of paradise, a grueling metaphor for humanity at its most withered and crushed where at least they give you free meals, and live music.

Pollack doesn't much care about the over-arching metaphor for humanity involved in this reality show-meets-ensemble drama (the players slowly drop out... who will be the next sent home?). Instead he finds everything he needs right in the eyes of the actors - the way the world-weary disgust that infuses Jane Fonda's as they meet Gig Young's during a late night rest break leads to a whole dialogue of seduction, refusal and weary acceptance takes place without a word. Or how the heart attack that grips Red Buttons and seems to lift his skinny sweaty old body (they've been forced to run laps to speed up the eliminations.) like a condor then sends him shattering to the floor in a pale skin spastic heave, but his eyes are still on the prize, twisted and widened with pain and exhausted terror, but you can feel his soul still running through his wild eyed desperate stare. 

It's the idea of all these people being awake for such huge lengths of time, getting only a few hour breaks scattered around the day, driven to exhaustion for the amusement of the rubes, like King Kong spread out over 40 people, until the illusions of sleep and waking being separate are smashed like the above ground subway car in Kong's capable ape hands. Gig Young earned his Oscar not for any sparkle or Satanic gravitas, but because he so brilliantly conveys the duplicitous way humans have of maintaining a vein of compassion even as they torture those around them. They're balanced - all their evil is spoken for -- so they can be nice and calm, and Young is. And it's awesome. Though frankly I don't think I can ever see the film again, I appreciate that a friend of mine once watched it over and over for 48 hours straight. In a way, she did it so I don't have to. It is a movie that should be watched over and over for that long, but how many of us are brave enough, or tragic and tender enough to endure such a withering grind?

Pollack knew how to create a space for Fonda to be sexual in ways she just never was while trying to be sexual under Vadim for BARBARELLA or SPIRITS OF THE DEAD. Under a good director like Pollack's or Pakula's wing, like HORSES or KLUTE (1971), Fonda transcends sex, becomes post-sexual, beyond passion's fleeting orgasms and the sense of druggy stupor that sometimes bubbles up in the war against eternal loneliness. In these films if love does find her she fights it. She rears back against it like, well, a horse with a broken leg. Pollack loved her like that healing bullet to the mare's wild-eyed head, like a scalpel in the sickness of the 20th century. Together they cut your heart out through a hole in the screen and the stale venom of the early 20th century at last begin to purge outwards. .There will be no refund.

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KONGO -The ultra lurid 1932 saga of jungle sin!

 If you know in your heart that 1931-1933 was the most lurid era ever of movies, then dear heart, KONGO is your new king!

Here's what I wrote about the film in a post from last time it played TCM, October 2008:

Based on a play that originally ran in 1926 (with the film's same stars, Walter Huston and Virginia Bruce), Kongo is also a remake of the Lon Chaney silent film West of Zanzibar. Silent film devotees might laud Chaney, and/or say Huston is channeling Chaney here, but I'd say it's more the reverse since Huston originated the role in the theater. Plus, if you love Huston as I do, you will know he would never just emulate someone else, or phone it in, or just ham around in a role where he's the center stage tyrant. Lupe Velez is in the Jean Harlow role of good natured floozy who lives at Flint's trading post/bar, where she spreads her charms liberally and gets drunk with Flint's two dimwitted white flunkies. All is "well" until Flint makes his move for revenge... involving pulling a sweet innocent white woman played by Virginia Bruce out of her Cape Town convent and dragging her into the pits of HELL!

Infamous for his tight control of a vast 80 mile section of the Congo, Flint hoards ivory and controls the local tribes via displays of magic tricks all while planning his OLDBOY-style revenge against the guy who carved up his face and left him crippled to die. This plan involves Flint taking custody of his enemy's daughter and putting her through an all girls convent school, only to pull her out on her 18th birthday and throw her into a Zanzibar brothel for a year or two. After she's sufficiently debauched he drags her out to his godforsaken corner of the jungle, gives her "black fever" and strings her along on booze and beatings. Meanwhile, a white doctor (Conrad Nagel) in the throes of addiction to some kind of local opiate root shows up, and Flint tries to get him clean (via leeches!) so he can operate on Flint's back. But Lupe Velez secretly risks having her tongue cut out in order to bring the doc all the root he can handle in exchange for sex. And that's not all! A parade of sadistic horrors are either narrowly escaped from and/or inflicted offstage while Huston roars in sadistic laughter; and what about the native practice of burning women alive on their dead husband's funeral pyre? GOOD GOD! This was made in 1932!? It's almost too hot to handle!

Aint no doubt Billy Bob Thornton be good in the remake

Part of the pleasure of the pre-codes is in trying to fathom just how X-rated and lurid they can be; we're just conditioned from childhood to think of old black and white films as being safe, innocent fun. When we see something like Kongo  it's like having the bottom drop out on all our socialized expectations; like being all prepared for a boring three hour lecture and having the professor start shooting up speed, passing around brandy and reefers, flogging the latecomers, and cutting off the tongues of anyone who talks without raising their hand.

Time to bleed the junky...

Bruce and Huston's performances here are beyond "riveting"-- each feels very "lived in" (thanks probably to their time spent together in the 1926 play version), like they've been dragged through the ringer together. If you've had a chance to catch Huston's wild-eyed cattle patriarch perfection in Criterion's The Furies, you know how ably this man can embody a super-manipulative, authoritative nut job, roaring in laughter when a man tries to shoot him, weilding his whip like a cross between Indiana Jones and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and playing with his weird chimp companion or awarding bottles of brandy as rewards for debased behaviors. Like Brando in Streetcar, you hate him for crushing the spirits of the weak, but love him for his canny bravery and raw animal humor. (as opposed to, for example, Rocco in Key Largo, who wont give his poor alcoholic mistress a drink even after she debases herself by singing -like Brando in THE GODFATHER, that I do not forgive).

For her part, Bruce is a powerhouse who matches Huston in sheer seething rage, and despite all her torments, she still possesses a sense of humor and a grip on sanity and dignity that can't be destroyed; for all her ranting she's much more an Anna Christie than a Broken Blossom.

With typically detailed MGM production design, Kongo's action doesn't play out as much in the jungles (though they are represented) so much as the bar and bedrooms of Huston's compound - and holds just enough stock footage (probably taken from West of Zanzibar) to make it interesting: The only animals you see are crocodiles, snakes and spiders! No boring zebras or antelope herds. More than anything, Kongo is a valuable window into a time when "going native" in the mind of Hollywood and post-Victorian morality meant being a law unto yourself and indulging in whatever capricious and kinky cruelty suited your mood, the vice and evil stockpiled in repression's cobwebbed basement suddenly elevated to the drawing room, and the roof blown off. In addition to the vice, sex, violence, and vengeance, racism abounds: the film sees the native Africans as inferior savages to be manipulated and abused, and once the flames of sadism get going, the white woman is next! We see in pre-code jungle horrors like Kongo that the tortures and degradations of SAW, HOSTEL and their ilk are nothing new. Though this kind of kinkiness was abolished during the bloodless reign of "the code", before 1934 there was still a place for drugs, sex, slavery and sadism... it was called the jungle. Long may it reign, though thank god it's safely in the past... except for YOU, if you tune in today... on TCM!

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