Die Vikaren (THE SUBSTITUTE) und die Nordic Land sind sehr schon!

Summer in Manhattan I like to turn up the AC, weep for the environment, and escape into Nordic horror cinema, which is currently undergoing a major burst of (dark, what else?) energy at the, thanks probably to the surprise art house success of Sweden's GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008, below).

No one in the overpaid brain trusts of Hollywood marketing seemed smart enough to sink their talons into the whole Nordic cold/blonde/snow/stillness rubric as a romantic selling point for these films--what are they, racist?--anyone with a crayon can connect the dots between RIGHT ONE and the TWILIGHT series, and stuff like 30 DAYS OF NIGHT and THE SUBSTITUTE miss big dollars by not stressing the Nordic / Scandinavian connection to TWILIGHT and RIGHT ONE (Yes, RIGHT ONE came out technically after the SUBSTITUTE, but that's what re-releasing is for).

30 DAYS OF NIGHT's graphic novel ink splatter poster meanwhile looks like drug-deal-gone-bad with Ice T, rap soundtrack, and probably a gaggle of bad CGI vampires and bright red digital blood splatter. In reality it's balls-to-the-wall awesome, with enough dark, moody, grim stillness to earn it a spot right in between Carpenter's THE THING remake, Kathryn Bigelow's NEAR DARK, and any 80s-90s film where the sheriff of a small northern town is a young buck all alone save for his wizened but still hot ex-girlfriend deputy... This time, it's Alaska, and the 30 Days of Night have sent most of the population to other areas for the month, leaving the place wide open for invasion by Swedish Goth vampires.

 

Like the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, the countries just outside the Arctic Circle--Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark--are all way up North, where it's cooool! In this way TWILIGHT has more in common with LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and THE SUBSTITUTE than it does with other American movies. Consider these factors:

1. Cold, dark, underpopulated - good place to film in stark contrast, since the light is constant and diffused - gives everything a doomed, foreboding quality.
2. Polar Bears adrift on ice cap islands = suicidal ideation on a global scale / yet here is close to nature.
3. Sarah Palin, the Younger, Hotter Mrs. Iselin
4. All the girls (and guys) in Scandinavia are hot, blonde, single, and wowed by an American accent. (according to our popular culture)
5. Beautiful children with stunningly above average intelligence and quiet speaking voices.
6. Long nights of depression but for once you have a legit reason
7. turtlenecks, wood-burning stoves, promiscuity
8. A lulu of an excuse to drink continually (it's never the morning after)
9. The idea of endless nights freeing you from the day/night duality.
10. Connection to real alien grays, eugenics, Nazis, genocide and Aryan reptillian insanity waiting to be explored. (See: Uma Thurman is from Venus) 
11. Lots of blonde hair... and the evil that implies
12. Black Metal
13. Vancouver, City of the Million Made-for-DVD Tax Write-Offs
14. Pale skin - vampires in the land of the midnight sun wont die of skin cancer like everyone else.
15. Bibi Andersson - she looks just like my mom (when I was the age of the kid in the morgue in PERSONA) yet is terribly, terribly sexy, forcing me at least, into a delirious Hitchcockian fugue state every time I see her. In short, cinema.

In shorter still, a disruption of the fantasmatic, or a break between the real and the vividly painted. The Nordic fantasia short circuits our normal sense of light and dark - the ever-grayness of these regions makes them like a timeless dream. We can't even admit to ourselves how sick we are of night and day, day and night and day, over and over, here in the non-Pacific Northwest states, but we are, let's face it, or we wouldn't be hiding out in the eternal cold darkness of the movies.

The Scandinavians rock because the guys are all asleep or mysoginists and their chicks are way hot, educated, cool and see Americans as sexy the way we see, say, the Italians (again, according to our simulacratic mental fantasias). We're practically a Mediterranean country compared to them!  It seems in these films there's nothing in all of Scandinavia to do except drink, kill your tormentors , watch TV, have sex, and wander around in the dark in a drunken fog like Max Von Sydow in PASSION OF ANNA (1963, below).  Even if you don't get a beautiful blonde, or you do and she leaves, you can still drink and pass out in the snow or get bit by a vampire or animal mutilator. Oh slow death by alcoholic and hematological causes, where is thy sting?

Even if little to none of the items on that list turn out to be true, who cares? This is a Nordic land of our collective imagination, born of our need to escape from the hamster wheel of 9-5 living into the cold, calming comfort of the eternal night.

So that's the fantasia, mine anyway; I listen a lot to Lee Hazlewood's Cowboy in Sweden, savoring the "empty whiskey bottles / and records scattered on the floor" and dream my way up to Sweden or Denmark for a soul-searching vacation, falling in love with a sweet wondrous blonde-haired beauty I meet at the coffee bar; it turns out he or she lives in a cool pad and asks me to move in; everyone speaks English and they all appreciate my tortured depth; I fall into a hip alt-rock crowd; my art's not "too dark" for them, nothing is too dark for them!  I just quietly disappear into the fields of white, gray, and black, like that kid in INTO THE WILD, which "coincidentally" also co-starred Kristen Stewart (below, left).

Am I the only one who's got this Nordiclust? Not if the TWILIGHT sales figures are a judge, because I'd say the Pacific Northwest-teen horror tradition counts, too, and Alaska. It's the last American frontier, the last world frontier, a place where the rats of humanity can still escape and live like... kangaroos, or kings, or at the very least colorful truckers and waitresses that get killed before the opening credits.

 When you rent the teen-friendly and highly recommended Danish horror/sci fi film, SUBSTITUTE (2007), on DVD you also get endless trailers that all look pretty good, from an obviously Nordic-looking series called the Ghost House Underground. If you're wondering which films are actually in English or just dubbed/subtitled, keep your eyes peeled on the lips. In the foreign language trailers you will never see anyone actually speak. Everyone talks offscreen, except maybe to say "hey, man" (the way we say "gesundheit"). When you go to actually watch these films, make sure to see them in their real language with subtitles rather than the English language dubs, which kind of defeat the purpose, especially when there's great acting like that of Paprika Steen, who also starred in Dogme 95 hits like THE IDIOTS and THE CELEBRATION, here as a crazy kind of Aryan Nordic alien uberfrau who tries to turn her 6th grade class into a mini master-race (below).

The typically doltish releasing companies behind THE SUBSTITUTE also failed to pick up on how this is a LET THE RIGHT ONE IN waiting to happen. Even better, a LET THE RIGHT ONE VS. THE TWILIGHT GENERATION  (our lead lad broods Edwardianly, as if to announce the future American benchmark teen look--one of privileged grief and numb disinterest) + some of the sensible-ages-and-up ready fun of THE FACULTY, a 1999 Rodriguez film that's still my favorite of his oeuvre, and maybe a little PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE and THE FORGOTTEN (below) thrown in for good measure.

I mean, seriously, look at all these SUBSTITUTES already out there! Can you even guess which one I'm reviewing in this post?

Love that Mark Wahlberg vs. Amanda Donohoe frowning contest! So, yeah, it's the last one, but how would you know it's cool, cold and full of fine stuff based on that cliche-ridden poster?

Since Alaska is a northern cousin of the Nordics, there's a strong whiff of Sarah Palin teaching THE CLASS here in THE SUBSTITUTE, and if the marketers were smart, they would have played up that angle. Like Palin, Paprika's alien-monster teacher plays heartstrings like a lute and drives whole nations to cataclysm, but there's also some of Colonel Krebs (Lotte Lenya) in that she's not as hot as you'd expect given the Skinemax-ish title, but kind of ravaged around the gills, especially compared to my current crush, Sonia Richter (all the way atop and below) who plays the single cop mom to the cute new girl student in class. There she is below, reminding me of a girl I loved in college. Man, she was flaky.

It's too bad THE SUBSTITUTE doesn't focus solely on the classroom scenes with Paprika, which are magnificent to watch as she switches from deep emotional manipulation to heartless, laughing cold-hearted Nazism on a dime (imagine Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS crossed with the Bibi Anderson from WILD STRAWBERRIES). She's still good in lots of those "o why won't our parents believe us?"-style angst moments, but it's the classroom scenes that are golden: Ulla isn't afraid to run a gym class like an SS death run, and she spouts brutal philosophies that would win the applause of James Mason in BIGGER THAN LIFE! Those Danes don't miss a trick and it's nice to see all the old dogme faces (the single dad looking to love again is played by Ulrich Thomsen, also from THE CELEBRATION); it's like the Ardennes campaign (I know Belgium's not Nordic, but, hey, it was cold and snowy), all over again!

Ah the war. How sweet that we need no longer miss the sound of howitzers, or the threat of angelic blonde faces in Hitler Youth neckerchiefs, running their SS daggers down our backs like warm September rain. It's all still here, or rather up there, along the shining blu-ray way... they're all blondly waiting to gobble us up, and seldom before has death seemed so coldly inviting, at least for an hour or two, out of the stifling humidity of summer and into the cold, windy climes of the cinema, where death is life and love is two cold fangs in your warm, hot neck, like blood stream air conditioning.

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The Coolest of Couples #1: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

"Joanne is one of the last of the great broads." 

- Paul Newman 

               

The weirdness aspect here isn't age, but that Paul Newman is actually hotter than his own wife, and yet they were together and happy from the 1950s right through to Newman's recent sad passing. The actual physical beauty of Woodward is not insubstantial, but as Newman is still probably the closest thing cinema has had to a living Greco-Roman god one would think he'd need someone like Rita Hayworth or 1967-era Raquel Welch to be evenly matched. And yet! Newman seemed to have an altruistic gift--perhaps an old soul too cool to be shallow--in realizing excessive beauty can be a curse after few months into a sexual relationship, as anyone who's dated a painfully hot girl can tell you. A woman who is too beautiful becomes like a dagger, stabbing you in the heart with recrimination because no matter what you do, somehow, you can't live up to her, the ideal, the pedestal, which advertising and the media has helped raise to ludicrous heights in this country... so you end up fighting against becoming an insecure drunken wreck over all the skeevy attention she gets and she instinctively recoils and acts out against your spinelessness by playing it all up, like Marlene Dietrich in DEVIL IS A WOMAN. Conversely however, Newman is almost too hot to cheat, it's just too easy. Men cheat because they need validation; a guy as hot as Newman never needs validation. Also, if you're a girl with a guy like Newman in your hands, you know better than to bother getting jealous.

Woodward's suspected uninhibited sexuality, then, is a blessing that comes with the phenomenon known as "ugly-sexy," i.e. someone is enough themselves that even their conventionally unattractive features become incredibly sexy (perhaps defined ultimately by Serge and daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg). Woodward's healthy lust is something Newman was always quick--even wolfishly proud--to confirm in the press. He praised her as one of those rare and all-but forgotten creatures of the 1960s and 1970s, the broad. Women extroverted to the extent that their sacral chakras hum like spinning tops, theirs is actually the highest level of sensuality short of the tantra. It's a casual, open-hearted lust that prettier women sometimes never develop thanks to an excess of skeevy male attention at too early an age. Instead of learning to go after the boys they like, to parlay out into the field to claim a particular prey, the too-pretty women cultivate a defense against "men" as a whole, a facade of shallow bitchiness that repels close contact but rewards long-distance worship. While gorgeous women become obsessed with making themselves prettier, no matter how pretty they may be, the clock ticks and they recoil from each new wrinkle like Baby Jane in the mirror. The ugly-sexy girls don't worry so much and so wiggle free from narcissism's trap, staying eager for the flesh of their opposite rather than their own ego ideal. As a result, ugly-sexy women often get the hottest guys, while the hot girls wind up with rich short dudes, looking around their expensive lofts and wondering if their girlfriends' are bigger.

As for Newman, as goddesses would throw themselves off horses just to touch his garment, carousing around on a midnight creep carries no 'thrill of the chase,' so marrying Woodward and being faithful to her becomes a key to spiritual enlightenment, as Shakespeare intended, like Siddhartha chucking his kingdom for a spot on the river. If Newman spent most of his career free from the shallow insecure vanity that leads men astray, the cause lies perhaps in this sacrifice.

Newman and Woodward's relationship is built, in Newman's words, on "equal parts lust and respect." The "broad" comment atop may be lost on today's generation outside of MAD MEN fans, but I still remember flirting with drunken secretaries at my dad's bridge games as a swingin' eight-year-old in the 1970s. I value and remember those "broads," and if the juggernaut of feminism has them steamrolled, I hope they don't look back on their swinger days with any remorse. They shouldn't. Sex needn't always be a weapon or means to an end. If you give it a little effort you can wiggle free from guilt, shame and repression and just have a good time. It's clear Newman and Woodward did, and they probably helped usher in 1970s permissiveness as a result. Acidemic salutes them and all broads. Ladies, please come back.

But blue eyes and Greek god sculpted features, sex and slinkiness, aren't the true measure of Newman as a man, it's his unshowy altruism and wry, self-effacing humor. He's a veritable Otto Kruger from MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, as is evidenced in the couple's preference for rural Connecticut over Hollywood, and in the many amazing food products-- popcorn, salsa, cookies, tomato sauce, you name it--all delicious, well-made, affordable--the profits from which go to charity. Yeah, man, not just "a portion" of the profits but all. ALL PROFITS!  And the company's been a huge success without having to hoist any TV commercials on the public, nothing with Newman in overalls, intoning gravely about the importance of natural ingredients. Just sunny pictures of Newman and sometimes Woodward clad as farmers on the labels.

Just look at those still-hot sweet elderly beaming faces! So much wisdom. They're in the documentary on LONG HOT SUMMER, looking great and radiating enough matrimonial calm assertiveness to fuel twenty Thin Man movies.

Now, to confess, LONG HOT SUMMER is the only movie of theirs I see over and over. PARIS BLUES (1961) and A NEW KIND OF LOVE (1963) were okay but dated in their winky attitude towards sex. I'd love to see FROM THE TERRACE (1960) but RALLY ROUND THE FLAG BOYS (1958) pissed me off no end, as I couldn't stand seeing Newman's character being cock-blocked at every step by bratty children and Woodward's community activism; I cried seeing him struggle to get a much-needed after-work drink: he can't even fit into the crowded bar car on the commuter train home from the city, and at home there's barely enough gin in the liquor cabinet to make even one gin and tonic, and--right as the lip of the glass is reaching his lips--one of his bratty boys knocks it out of his hand with a pillow thrown from across the room. And the kid is not punished! Rather the dad is supposed to be very tolerant that neither his sexual or alcoholic needs are  being met.

And then when Joan Collins--the only other awake, sexually frustrated human being in this gossipy white collar settlement--tries to get him into bed (all the way safely over in Paris, mind you), who should show up but the wife for a surprise visit. Woodward is great, of course, but what's the point of watching a match not burn?


I did stick around for Collins' Pocahontas dance at the Thanksgiving-cum-fertility festival. Whoop! Whoop! And since I'd read Robin Wood's essential but slightly bitter Sexual Politics in Narrative Film, I knew to see it as the "repressed erotic (barred from the home) returning in the exotic" (p. 170) Whoop! Whoop!

Ah, but THE LONG HOT SUMMER (1958), that never fails me. Their first co-starring vehicle, it does what so many films, including CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, can only try and do and don't often get right: that whole American Gothic style whoop-whoop that was so hot in the television-competitive Cinemascope-crazy late 1950s. Colliding a couple of Faulkner stories and contrasting acting styles. Unlike some of their other vehicles, here the passion between Newman and Woodward is allowed to be super hot in its non-hotness, as Newman's hustle only strengthens her spinsterish desire.

Woodward is deliberately school-marmish here the way a modern hipster chick might be today, all she lacks is granny glasses--promoting an implied gender neutral celibacy via unsexy clothing and carting around devoted and coded momma's boy, Oscar Madison from SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN. Gender, man, it's a weird thing when a girl tries to not be sexy. I don't know how to handle it! Neither does Newman. He can't steamroll over it, so he surrenders into a calm, submissive state for the first time in a tender final monologue.

 Masters of staying humble and in character, there's no more spark or heat than needed between these two, yet they still sizzle. Their bond has developed naturally through antagonism and begrudging respect-- though offscreen they were--according to the DVD extras---racing down to Florida to ball all night during their days off. Man, I know what it's like to be in love, don't you? If not, just learn from the masters: Newman and Woodward were a solid front, completely devoted, and it helped no doubt that they were in acting class together and probably got all inside each others' heads through hours of improv and exercise. So often stars dictates to what extent the supporting characters around them are allowed to flesh out and develop in any particular movie (they don't want anyone stealing their show). But no one in the family dynamic here feels the need to spell out their connections to one another in any showy or expository manner. It's all direct non/interaction, immediate, forceful! It cuts through the artifices of poetry and grabs right at the bull's balls, without seeming to grab a damn thing. Son, that's mythic!

Orson alone seems oblivious to such dynamics, and is thus superb. We see the way living with such a boisterous, animal breeding tyrant--no matter how benevolent and witty he may be--takes its toll on his children and shows in Fanciosa's and Woodwards' sense memory resignation. Welles' complete obliviousness to all but his own charm links him to Kane and Quinlan, and matches a current of self-loathing running below Newman's self-satisfied drifter--a mutual respect forms between them, one not sullied by confusing issues of trust.

But it's humility and vulnerability that win out. As they said in later years, their relationship was built on affection and tolerance, an understanding they didn't need to meddle in every aspect of each other's life. Noted Newman: "You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each others' necks ... We are very, very different people and yet somehow we fed off those varied differences and instead of separating us, it has made the whole bond a lot stronger.”

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Coolest Couples #3: Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart

Bogey - a man of contradictions, perhaps more like the no-bullshit tolerating screenwriter of IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) than some would like. Bacall - plucked from the fashion model ranks by Howard Hawks' classy wife and brought to Hollywood for a screen test, contract and lessons in classiness. She was 19 and Bogie 45 when they starred in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) and fell in love, a romance allowed to bloom under the Hawks' watchful, nurturing eye. Hawks had his own yen for her but was no fool about it. Eternal lightning in a bottle movie magic had priority over his petty desires. True artists understand this. Hawks is a true artist.

I love Howard Hawks so much that I wont even read his biography. If I read he wasn't as wondrous and nice a spiritual father as I imagine, I might lose some of my admiration and I would be lost. But even Joan Crawford deserves to have her films evaluated purely on their own merit, and so Bogey and Bacall need to be judged, purely on their amazing chemistry in Hawks' two films with them: THE BIG SLEEP and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, for in some ways they were his couple. Their non-Hawks films together - DARK PASSAGE, KEY LARGO, are okay movies, but aren't really in the same league. They're movies with Bogie and Bacall in them, and someone trying and failing to get what Hawks got out of them. Hawks' camera is the third wheel all third wheels aspire to be.

Poor Bogart died rather early on in Bacall's life and perhaps that's how all May-December romances should end: the elder member dying before becoming old and unsexy.  As our country gets more and more repressive and ageist, it's important to remember that May-December romances are awesome if they don't drag on too long, and both parties are in their right mind. Unusually  intelligent and soulful men in their forties and girls in their early 20s have a lot in common: they both want to face death more than they care about safe boring normalcy. Sensitive women in their 40s and boys in their 20s have a similar bond only in reverse: complete disillusionment and resentment towards the status quo, life's cold-hearted casino dealer on the endless boulevard of broken lights. Men mature later than girls, and don't have to deal with menopause. Early 20s girls don't have to deal with the anxieties of having kids or fretting over the biological hourglass running out. They do have to deal with immature boys more anxious to huff solvents and play air guitar hero than fund vacations or co-create stable family environments or plumb emotional depth connections. The 40-something men are dealing with wives that have stripped off sex like a wet burlap dress and slipped into fresh-from-the-drier mommy pants right as they--the men--are just beginning to have any sort of sexual self-confidence. 

When they met, Bogey was married to a drunken jealous psycho named Mayo Methot and lacked the wherewithal to do much about it except match her drink for drink, nickname her "Sluggy" and just do his best to not get shot in the face.

Bacall meanwhile was 19 and practicing lowering her speaking voice under Hawks' tutelage. As Hawks later said, "Bogie fell in love with the character she played and she had to go right on playing it for the rest of their marriage." See, right there I could almost get disillusioned. I read that in HAWKS ON HAWKS and it was enough for me. Enough to know he's a bit of a cynic. I got to walk away right there.

In the 1940s we should remember, marriage was tough to escape and sex was still a commodity; giving it up before marriage required either an engagement ring, diamond bracelet or double the amount of alcohol it takes now. Unless of course you were already divorced or widowed. Consider the times and realize that this couple had the chips cast against them: an ex-wife that used to show up at parties with pistols, their own age differences, cancer, gossip. Yet that stuff just makes it all the more romantic. The tales of how he would walk alongside the road and Bacall would stop to pick him up for brief hand-holding car get-aways is familiar to me through my own past indiscretions and I can assure you it just makes it super-hot for it to be so wrong. I thought a lot about Bogie and Bacall during that whole period in my life; they were my road map, my validation, like WC Fields had been before I sobered.

The sad part of it all is of course Bogey's cancer in 1957. On the other hand, they went to Africa to film THE AFRICAN QUEEN before that. I love that Bacall tagged along for moral support, hanging out in the wilds of the jungle, smoking and reading Hemingway (I'm guessing) and making sure cocktail hour was scintillating as it could be with so many bugs around. As for Bogart's three-pack-a-day unfiltered Camel-related cancer, well, we all got to go sometime, and sometimes getting out while you can still get it up is pretty good. Bogey never had to get old and crotchety and watch her take off with Frank Sinatra (who almost married her and took over Bogey's "rat pack" chairman of the board role after his death) or the pool boy. He never had to go all Mr. Chatterly.

I also love that Bacall and Bogart led a staunch anti-blacklist crusade, daring to step up and shout down the ravings of that alcoholic paranoid Joseph McCarthy (above). Later he kind of back-pedaled, but could you honestly say you knew black from white or red from green in that business?

But so what? In a way, Hawks was something like the Dog Whisperer, in telling his characters what he needed from them he also gave his actors a way to live. The codes of ethics these people have is clear-cut, admirable, and yet leaves room for plenty of improvisation, drinks, cigarettes, sex and fun.  The censors even let Hawks get away with stuff they'd never let pass in other directors' films, because, as Hawks says: "they liked my pictures." And you can see why: Hawks' characters operate on much higher principles than even the censors would hope for in cinema. His principles are high enough that he can kick aside conventional morality and its gossipy, sexually-frustrated parameters like a card table at a saloon-side brawl, and no one's going to dare say a word about it.  No amount of money or danger, pain or pressure, can stop a Hawksian hero from doing what he feels is right: he wants his women to know there are no strings attached to him, and he wants them the same way, even if he has to unearth all their darkest family secrets before rolling the hay bones. We can also find this level of ethics in the novels of Raymond Chandler, which is why THE BIG SLEEP was such a good fit all around:

Ms. Rutledge: Why are you doing this?
Marlowe: Maybe I'm in love with you, too.
Mrs. Rutledge: You know whether you're in love with me or not.
Bogart: Maybe I do. 

Baby, he did. More than 50 years after his death, Bogart is still going strong, a benchmark of masculine honor that all men still turn to for dating advice, like Woody Allen in HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU KID. Bacall is still going strong, on Broadway and in gutsy films like DOGVILLE.  She went on to marry and divorce no less a coolio than Jason Robards. But of course, you can feel the spirit of Bogey still coursing through her being. If she had to stay in character all through their marriage, let's not forget he stayed in character as well, and has continued to do so even from the grave. He's more than an actor to those who love him, he's the wellspring from which much of what is cool today flows -- Jean Paul Belmondo mirroring his HARDER THEY FALL lobby card in BREATHLESS or Sinatra's own reinterpretation in his re-imagined post-war tough guy persona (pre-war let's not forget, Sinatra was a beanpole crooner from Hoboken who'd show up on Jack Benny and suffer through being regularly blown away by strong winds or auditioning for the role of a broom handle. Bogie surely had a hand in inspiring his later tough guy image).

On a personal note, when I went through some rough single in the city stretches in the mid 90s, my friend Max instructed me to adopt the mantra: "Be like Bogey... be like the Bogey," which wasn't some sleazy bit of base-running advice, it was a deeply honorable and resonant way to not lose track of who I was while waiting for some chick to call me back. A whole wealth of soul-grooming advice is packed into the word Bogey: it means "become a self-sustaining honorable tough but compassionate, sarcastic but loving, wise but fearless, unflinching but sensitive hero who doesn't live and die by whether or not some broad calls him back, and so they always do."

All I ever have to remember when I'm losing my shit is: "be like Bogey," my rudders are magically righted. There'll only ever be one Bogey and Bacall, but their love was our love, they had enough to share, and in sharing they helped a nation dealing with war and noir disillusionment refashion their sense of self in such a way as to allow numerous antithetical attitudes to exist simultaneously. They were two toughs who loved each other with a love that mixed attraction and respect in equal measure and they could soften around each other yet be twice as tough at the same time. Just look at the above pictures. Whenever or not they're gazing into each other's eyes, you can feel, even in the photos, their love - even when neither is smiling. Audiences felt and feel it too then and today. Even today those two movies they made with Hawks give us hope, confidence, trust, a renewed sense of honor, and a need to smoke and tell the truth, whatever the consequences.

If modernism is the cause of stripping away arts' illusion to reveal death too suddenly and in disguise to allow our brain to mask it, if only for a second, then Bogey was the man for whom it was never masked at all --he like few others saw it clearly and recognized it without flinching or blaming or bargaining. Being on LSD can be like that too, which is why Bogey's films were so popular at 60's-80's college campuses. Bogey helped you navigate your way out of bad trips. As Bazin and Truffaut wrote in Cahiers du Cinema, Bogey was, I paraphrase, a walking corpse who's smile was the smile of death, of laughing at it even as it eats you. Bazin goes on to say Bogey represented "the immanence of death, its imminence as well."

Here's lookin' at you, kid.
And hurrah for the next who dies.
And sometimes...

Sometimes you're just a stinker. 

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Coolest Couples #2: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

When a towering drunken genius collides with love, sometimes it's like a human torch marrying into a wet fireman's blanket. Other times it's a human torch colliding with another of equal heat, two towers of drunken balls-out badassitude that burn each other out like two candles lit on both ends, laid across so they burn waxy holes in each other's mid-sections at the same time. That was the case with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

Of course their life together is legend; they met on the set of CLEOPATRA (1963), their torches burning up enough money to practically bankrupt 20th Century Fox in the process (Fox had to sell off half the studio to pay for overtime).

A part of their success stems no doubt from a shared love of liquor, and this is also perhaps their demise. Booze made Liz bloated and Dick droopy-eyed, but it also made them burn twice as brightly when they were burning, as they did in films like WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, TAMING OF THE SHREW, THE SANDPIPER. When they were fire blanketing each other out--as in BOOM!, THE VIPS and THE COMEDIANS--they were still sporadically worth watching. Somehow the more weary and hung-over they appeared, the more adult they became, sometimes stiflingly so. You can imagine watching THE COMEDIANS with your parents on TV as a kid and being bored into a coma, but if you're old enough, you can at least count the drinks and enjoy as Liz wafts in and out of her German accent.

 A book is coming out next week that incorporates a vast trove of love letters between the two stars, and paints a sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful portrait of their relationship. Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor And Richard Burton And The Marriage Of The Century by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger (order it here). An abridged excerpt:

On July 9, Elizabeth flew to San Felipe, arriving while Burton was still shooting. She spent the afternoon with him on the set and later they returned to his hotel to make love.
All their old sexual fire came back, despite her recent surgery, the energy-sapping 115-degree heat and the fact that he had now gone 140 days without drinking. Her presence and her body lifted his Welsh gloom, and it was as if they had just met. The two of them devoured each other.

The following week, Elizabeth returned to Los Angeles and Richard pined for her all over again. She informed him she had lost one of her tooth caps and he wrote to commiserate, closing his letter with 'all my love. Never think of anything but you for very long. I fancy you a very lot, Shebes.  -  Rich'.

While still in San Felipe, Richard accepted a part in a low-budget thriller, Villain, to be filmed in London. Elizabeth, too, had received a film offer for Zee And Co.  -  an adaptation of Edna O'Brien's novel about a sexual triangle, to be made in London at the same time.
Richard urged her to accept it.

'Dear Long-wayaway-one,' he wrote, 'Very antisocial I am when I don't booze. And no fun when you're not around... I hope that girl's teeth are not hurting too much... are you going to do the film?

She accepted the role and they decided that, rather than fly, they would take the train from Los Angeles to New York, before boarding the QE2 for England. The train trip gave them a rare chance to be alone together for the first time in over a year.

They made love and Elizabeth giggled at what she called Richard's 'new technique,' which he insisted was simply the movement of the train swaying and rocking as it rolled down the track.
But the seeds of destruction were also planted on that train  -  for the first time in four months, Richard had a drink.

'Forgot the momentous news,' he confessed in his diary on August 2. 'I had a Jack Daniel's and soda and two glasses of Napa Valley red wine last night with dinner. Felt immensely daring and all it did was make me feel very sleepy.'

A few days later, he polished off a bottle of Burgundy and by the time they crossed the Atlantic to England and reclaimed their yacht Kalizma, Burton had slid completely off the wagon.

Elizabeth's co-star in Zee And Co. was Michael Caine, who was nervous about meeting 'a living legend' for the first time, and equally nervous about meeting Richard Burton. He had been warned that Burton's presence on the set was his way of keeping an eye on Michael, considered to be a ladies' man  -  a real-life Alfie  -  at the time.

But the truth was that Burton, drinking heavily, usually spent the afternoons sleeping on the couch in Elizabeth's dressing room. And sometimes, the tremor in his hands was so bad that, afraid of embarrassing his wife, he stayed away.

If Elizabeth was alarmed at Richard's tremors she didn't show it. Neither of them as yet considered Richard to be an 'alcoholic'. Besides, she, too, continued to drink heavily. They each needed the crutch of alcohol. The difference was that she drank to free her emotions, while he drank to numb his. (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: The Love Letters. How drinking cocooned them from pressure of fame. Without it, they couldn't even make love)

Man, I sure can feel that pain. Booze, like xanax, pot, or coke, gives you the world and promises more, then takes the senses away with which you would perceive that world, and instead of more offers less and less until life's just waking, baking and taking naps. While it's sharpening your wit it's dulling your speech so that poetry comes out slurs and vice versa. But who the fuck cares? Booze and drugs make you cooler. Period. So long as you don't vomit on anyone or make your mom sad by dying. At least at the time their drinking was more celebrated than openly demonized. Imagine Dick in Celebrity Rehab, or wearing one of those SCRAM ankle bracelets like Lindsay Lohan, and you realize just how lame this decade really is.

And this is not to mention their casual openness with regard to sex. Burton once cut short a poolside afternoon interview, saying "excuse me gentlemen, I have to go make love to my wife." And that's a catch phrase and a half, enough to remind a million marrieds what they got into this mess for anyway. Again such frankness was common in the more enlightened age of the 60s-70s, and Dick and Liz probably did a lot to help make it so. You couldn't get all prim and judgemental like a salacious church lady over their lifestyle, they'd lay you flat with great acting in tones so mellifluous everything they said seemed true and right. A few years ago I reviewed the Burton and Taylor boxed set, and wrote of THE SANDPIPER:

Piper doesn't even have to be good when the chemistry between this pair is in full flow the way it wasn't in The VIPs and The Comedians. There's a great scene where the two are gazing into each other's eyes, emoting and talking, and the wounded sandpiper that Liz saved earlier in the film comes flying in for a landing right on Liz's head! She doesn't even flinch; she just keeps staring into Dick's eyes, and for his part, even with that sandpiper there he doesn't freak out, just stays in the scene, fixed on her gaze like a hypnotist. Then after they kiss, she reaches up and cups the bird in her hand without even looking at it, and then lets it loose, saying, "Fly away, baby, in that husky afterthought style of hers, as she waved it off into the air.  Was this something they shot twenty takes of, just to get that damned bird to land on her head, or was it just a lucky accident that the pro thesps seized on? I spent the whole rest of the film just admiring the perfect nonchalant stillness with which these two lovers acted out their scene with this bird standing in Liz's wild hair. Then, when she later chases her old sugar daddy-cum-rapist out of the house with a hatchet, my heart was sealed... like a crypt. (Snap went the Dragon 12/08)

on THE VIPS (1960):

A couple as coolly debauched as Dick and Liz could probably not exist in the films today anyway. The power-suit and baseball cap-wearing "industry" people would probably have a hard time getting either actor to agree to product positioning and not smoking. Plus, these days it's tough getting insurance for any film starring notorious drunks, and audiences are far less indulgent and quicker to forget; there's no long-term loyalty. Liz and Dick made apparently dozens of Giglis and people dutifully came, ditto Martin and Lewis. Now those kind of loyal fans are gone and so are the boozy couples. The equivalent to the Dick and Liz pair bond today would probably be Courtney Love and Nick Nolte, if they were a couple, and maybe they should be. (The Case of the Mysterious Disappearing Accent, 12/08)

Times have changed since I wrote the above, now of course there seems to be just Lindsay... is she all alone out there? Won't some soused actor or actress come and help that lady off her feet? Til then, the first couple of drunken gravitas-pulled thesping will always be Taylor and Burton, and if they only made a few good films together and maybe if they were soberer they could have done it better, I'd say the fault is ours. When artists go that far out on a limb for us the way Dick and Liz did, we owe them something more than enough money to choke a diamond horse, we owe them material cracked enough to be worthy of their lustre, and it just wasn't there and still isn't (aside from WOOLF, a film that still startles and makes us reel from its besotted brilliance). Since there was no other material, they made art of themselves, and if their paint hardened and their livers swole like rivers, well, that's show biz. Dick would die and Liz would go on to help make rehab centers ubiquitous in our culture. But hey, for awhile they blazed, they raged, and they showed drunken America how to burn itself up like there wasn't a wet fireman's blanket in 100 miles.

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Coolest Couples #4: Burt Reynolds and Dinah Shore

Couples are, let's face it, rarely cool.  Am I right? Come on, ladies, raise your hands. Even if the two of you are cool to begin with, and promise yourselves not to make all the same mistakes and become your own father or mother, things can quickly turn uncool. You must be firm as Cialis and yet supple as a cedar riding crop otherwise you will surely weaken and crack under the lashing magnetic polarity of the other. So the couples stay at home more, raise each other's kids, and, the next time we see them, they've gone cheerful on us.

But when a couple really clicks in the right way--as two cool people making each other cooler--then they're more than the sum of their parts; they shine forth and make the world a better place. Acidemic is proud to present a new series "Coolest Couples" - focusing on the few awesome Hollywood matches. We'll start with one of my very favorites, from my childhood:

He was the 1970s embodied: an archetype of mustached, swaggering, Trans-Am driving, curse word-using, raunchy good old boy with a heroic heart when push come ta shove. She was an afternoon TV show host, former radio star and sweet-natured blonde singer from the 1950s-60s. Two less likely candidates for a genuine bona fide no-nonsense "til the wheels come off" love affair you'd never find, but don't doubt their love wasn't real and heartfelt. Read this from PEOPLE magazine:

Burt Reynolds is the star you hate to love. Artistically, he is the male Raquel Welch. His only innovative breakthrough has been as Cosmo's first centerfold, stripped to his hairpiece. His lifestyle and costuming are studiously vulgar. When a visitor is startled to silence by the overpowering tastelessness of his Sunset Strip pad, Burt agrees cheerily, "It looks like a bullfighter threw up in here, doesn't it?"

That sense of self-parody makes the rest of Reynolds' macho malarky bearable, if not ingratiating. And he does have a certain redeeming social value. Stardom, for example, never interrupted his friendship with the old Southern buddies he keeps casting in his TV shows and pictures. He just staged a fund-raising benefit and personally kicked in $50,000 to alma mater Florida State U. (where he dropped out in his sophomore year). He has set up his parents in his lush 180-acre Florida ranch that once belonged to Al Capone. He is on best of terms with his ex-wife, Judy (Laugh-In) Carne. And finally, Burt is, in his fashion, affectingly loyal to his new old lady—19 years older—Dinah Shore. (People 10/28/74)

 I've been looking all over youtube for the footage of their graceful reunion on the Dinah Shore Show a few years after they'd split up. I remember seeing it on TV with my mom and being moved by the sincerity with which Burt, the alleged womanizing macho brawler,  professed not only love and loyalty but admiration, trust, and everlasting friendship to this woman who then and now looked a lot like my mom. Both Burt and Dinah are professional enough that they don't actually cry on the show; they just talk openly, hesitantly but proudly, and hold hands, and it's so intimate and nice and slightly tacky in the 70s tradition, right there on live television, with other guests gathered around on both sides of them; I felt connected to their love and its loss, concerned for all the strikes against them, their age and differing fan bases particularly, and the fickleness of changing styles and how relentlessly each had to adapt to keep their finger on the pulse public, and my faith in love as a uniting force in a fractured world was renewed.

Let me just close with this bit of an interview Reynolds did with Larry King in 2000 on CNN. With his usual direct poetic-realist elegance, Reynolds sums up a beautiful and courageous women with a few touching, but unsentimental words:

KING: Then "Deliverance" of course made you, right?

REYNOLDS: "Deliverance" changed -- totally changed my life. And I met a person, a woman, a love, friend that -- who is crazy for you, and I know you were -- Dinah.
KING: You met her during the filming of that? Or...
REYNOLDS: Right after that. And she was such an inspiration in terms of making me believe that this sheriff's son could understand that -- about art and maybe do some art and maybe understood a little bit about me, introduced me to Chet Baker and jazz and Chagall.

KING: (...)The thing with Dinah Shore, was it -- was that -- you know, people would read about the age difference. Was that love from the start? Was that romance?
REYNOLDS: Yes.
KING: It was?
REYNOLDS: But I swear to you, I never -- and I don't right now, if I was under oath. I never knew her age, never cared about that. It never entered my mind. She was just this extraordinary person. And you know, you'd say, "Well, what about Hitler?" And she'd say, you know, "very good house painter." I mean, she had nothing unkind to say about anybody. I mean, you -- and I'm sure there were rough, rough times for her. I never heard about them. All I heard about was -- there was an interesting story. You may know this story. But it's a great story about when she kissed Nat King Cole on "The Show of Shows."
KING: Never been done.
REYNOLDS: Never been done.

KING: Black and white kissing on television.
REYNOLDS: African-American never white person kissing: 28 affiliate stations in the South dropped her show. And they said, well, what are you going to do? And she said: "Well, next week I'll just (UNINTELLIGIBLE). And the following week I'll kiss Sidney Poitier." And then the following week -- and she did! And you know what? They all came back. That was her way of doing it. And it was right for her and it worked.
KING: Why didn't you get married?
REYNOLDS: I wanted to marry her; I really did. That was her.
KING: And she didn't want to?
REYNOLDS: No, I think she kind of thought that, and rightly so, that I hadn't, you know, done all the crazy things that I was about to do in my life.
KING: Sowed all of your oats?
REYNOLDS: Yes, I suppose that's the saying we would say. I don't know how they would express that in -- yes, I hadn't -- I hadn't sowed them. I hadn't even found them. But I did.
KING: Do you think she was right?
REYNOLDS: I suppose. I suppose she was.
KING: Were you close at the end of her life?
REYNOLDS: Yes, very, very.
KING: Did you know she was ill?
REYNOLDS: Yes, yes. She didn't -- not because she said anything, but she asked me to come over, and when I saw her, I knew something was very wrong. Never talked about it, never discussed it. We just talked about a million laughs that we had.
KING: How did you find out she died?
REYNOLDS: I think I got a phone call -- I know I got a phone call from someone, and I just -- it just put me right on my knees, still does. I mean, I think of her all the time, in terms of truly a great friend. I could talk to her about anything...

 

 (read the rest of the interview here)

See that's the thing. We can see dim shades of it in Demi Moore and Ashton, but it's far more about, or seems about, two insecure narcissists desperate to connect and unafraid of raising some hackles. And Ashton and Burt in 1974 have a certain immature rawness in common where you could understand an older woman going for it, because she knows she has something worthwhile to give them back, more than money or maternal support. But there's no comparison beyond that because Burt was a man. And here he's being more emotional than Shore was, and that's why it's so brave, why it brings me almost to my knees to read that interview above. That's something our 21st century has yet to find, the male sensitivity now is inescapable, but it's worthless, it's just passive-aggressive snickering boy nonsense wrapped in high-voiced ectomorphic pretentiousness. Dinah would bitch slap the lot of them, while Burt cracked up in the background, and because she's not here to do it, we all mourn. 

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Moments of Manly Godliness

Every once in awhile we all get "on" and our A-game shines forth like a beacon unto the galaxy, but how many times is this actually captured on film for all to see, for all time? Sure there was young Brando, and James Dean, and Jackie Chan, Buster Keaton, but what about, like, physical prowess, commanding aura, superhuman speed and skill all in one package? When it merges both the focused intense auric brilliance of prime performers like Streetcar Brando with Drunken Master agility and Richard Burton gravitas? Let's take a look at these top five film documents of men rocking it, rollin' it, or punchin' it down.

Elvis Presley in ELVIS: THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (1970) 

No one in Las Vegas could have anticipated the glory of Elvis' big comeback tour in 1969. We see a silver fox Cary Grant in the audience, smoking a cigarette and flanked by two beehive hairdo Vegas beauty queens, now what else do you need to know? Sure, the King's monkeying around and struggling to keep a straight face through even his ballads, but just to look at him onstage in that glorious, 70s-heralding stuntsuit, is to see masculinity at its most ferociously loving and beautiful. When he busts out a standard like "Mustang Sally," he warps time itself, like Neo at the end of the Matrix. It's brought tears to me eyes and made me sigh like an orphan looking for a pappy... all is life... and has suddenly found one.

2. Muhammad Ali in WHEN WE WERE KINGS (1996) - (Rumble in the Jungle, 1974)

Poor George Foreman. He was a perfectly nice guy and yet the big celebration of African-African American unity in 'the jungle' paraded around him in a wide berth; he was their straw dog and everyone forgot maybe he was also just a guy who never hurt no one, aside from in the ring. But that aside, it's glorious - Ali coasts into Africa like a living God, and then backs that up by performing one of the most poetic bouts in boxing history.  For round after round, Muhammad hangs back and just absorbs Foreman's punishment. Then, George all punched out, Ali bursts forth like a lion and pounds him down with the strength of the entire African nation, and yet, somehow, also with love, and Ali knows that if no one else. George is just another boxer, after all, just doing his thing, and look who got the golden grill!!

3. Bruce Lee: ENTER THE DRAGON (1973)

Every kid in the 1970s knew Bruce Lee was, but we never could see his actual films, unless they came on afternoon TV on "Chop Socky Theater" dubbed and panned and scanned so badly half the time you just see one guy's one eyebrow. By the time it's the late 1980s and you finally get to rent ENTER THE DRAGON, you've basically forgotten all about poor Bruce Lee. But once we get down to his big basement fight around pots of boiling heroin and imprisoned old men in black pajamas, a whole rift in time is opened up and we're back to being wide-eyed, turned-on-by-life 70s godlings instead of worn-down pouffy-haired John Hughes chick-chasing lowlifes.

The most classic scenes involve middle range shots that keeps Bruce in the center of the screen, his eyes unfocused so as to see everywhere at once, looking downwards at the floor in fact, his head cocked, relaxed but puzzled, as if he's trying to remember the line of some old song while waiting for a train, his feet shuffling back and forth like he's doing an admiring parody-homage of Muhammad Ali, or in close-up, bugging his eyes and holding very still, then snapping someone's neck with a loud crunch offscreen.  Sure purists sing the praises of the CHINESE CONNECTION over ENTER THE DRAGON, and sure Jet Li and Jackie Chan both may have out-kicked Lee in later films, but it's DRAGON that has the universal appeal. Even if the script borrows heavy from James Bond and Ten Little Maidens, the music is awesome 70s copshow funk and the hero's not afraid to snap every neck in sight.


4. Keith Moon / The Who : "A Quick One (While He's Away)"  Rock and Roll Circus (1968)

Poor the Rolling Stones. I also know what it's like (it's exhausting!) to be throwing the party your band is playing at, as happened with Mick, Keith and Company at the shooting of the 1968 TV Special, The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus. At best you bring your B game since you're always half-focused on the cup emergency, the lack of ice, the broken keg pump, the a**-hole townie and frat boy gate crashers and the cops responding to neighbor noise complaints. It's fine to play your B game when all that shit's going on, but if some band you invited to open for you brings their A-Game, well well... well. You end up mayb like the Stones and dot even releasing this hour long TV show for a few decades, and most rock fans believe it's because the Stones were just so ashamed--not that they played particularly badly, but they were just so outgunned. The Who were just those guns!

I've also seen how being in a band among bands makes you very insecure and that can bring out either your best or your worst in a performance, depending on how drunk you were the previous evening;  I've been around, is what I'm getting at, and I can assure you there's no finer rock moment in the history of the universe than this performance of "A Quick One While He's Away."  I've never been much of a Who fan. But I'm a huge gushing fan of this, and especially the madman dervish insanity of Keith Moon. Not only is "A Quick One" a great mini-opera all in itself, it's also about forgiveness, a soft spot.

5. Tom Cruise as Les Grossman: MTV Music Awards 2010 / Tropic Thunder

I don't know much about theater, but I have worn big padded clothing and had to dance around on a hot stage under blazing spot lights, so I know what it is to sweat like a withdrawal-stricken junkie (for that and other reasons too). So when I saw Tom Cruise in a huge fat suit hadn't even broken a sweat after an amazing, hilarious dance session with Jennifer Lopez (who came in halfway through the song and was still sweating, even wearing next to nothing, by the end) then I knew I could finally finish this entry, as I'd been waiting for quite a few years.

Presumably a loose caricature of the late, hairy-chested producer Don Simpson--who helped launch Tom Cruise's career with TOP GUN--Grossman is the first truly Lacan-Lynchian example of grotesque over-enjoyment to make it to the MTV, and much Lacanian Ink could be spilled over the rich eloquence of Grossman's connection to such other anal fathers as: BLUE VELVET's Frank; STAR WARS' Jabba the Hut, and APOCALPYSE NOW's Colonel Kurz. Add them together and Cruise is Don Rickles and William Demarest welded to Sammo Hung and the cocaine-enhanced militarism of John Milius. Can you handle it?

A good performance shows the terrifying green headed fury of Oz and the gentle merry charlatan behind the curtain, simultaneously. Is this not the purpose of Brecht, Godard and bad horror movies, to express our deepest anxieties in such a form as we can laugh at them and realize death is not the end. If theater be at all a model of the cosmos, don't all severed soldiers once the day's dying's done return, corpse-like at first, then as a butterfly, until mom calls them in for dinner or the show gets canceled? Cruise as Grossman is the butterfly-chrysalis that Charlize Theron and Aileen Wuronos conceived in MONSTER and the 2003 Academy Awards, rolled and unrolled until a seamless J. In the words of D. Boon: "Our band could be his songs / I'm his soldier child."

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Blades in the Apple: LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR, The Village People, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER & WINDOWS (When the Rainbow is Enuff)

It's easy to come across a "torn from today's swinging singles nightmare" headline movie like LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977) or CRUISING (1980) and think they're just exploitation fearmongering "scare" films that just kind of appeared at the side of 70s mainstream cinema like mutant babies left to die (as IT'S ALIVE, PROPHECY and THE MANITOU), but you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. And those of us who vaguely remember the thrilling danger of local drive-in movie and newspaper ads in the 1970s have a wide-eyed respect for the potent sexual menace of pre-GIULIANI Manhattan - it was scarier than Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman combined, and sexier than Barbarella with torn stockings.

From the safety of drunken wife-swap American suburbia, the weird mix of leather, queerness, and something called "a singles bar" seemed to be a provocation, almost a challenge. The sex in the suburbs was 'safe' but the "city" brand was cinematic. 70's Manhattan was a nightmare, a tourist freak show that was fine to pass by and gawk at but you just didn't want to dive right in and actually rescue a teenage prostitute or get mugged. Just as now tourists come to go to gawk at vast displays of WB and Disney goods, in the 1970's tourists would go to gawk at X-rated marquees and a street theater ballet melange of strutting pimps, jittery winos, wobbly hookers, and shifty-eyed junkies. As we got older, the idea was to sneak up there and find Plato's Retreat, a club where apparently everyone walked around naked and had sex in the open. My mom even helped us look for it, that will give you an idea of the weird sexual permissiveness of the era. By the time we were even older and actively looking for the "sleazy theater experience" ( if the word grindhouse was popular then, I don't remember) it was all winding down, way down... but I still remember the grisly, soul-stunning smell of the Roxy.

I remember, too, going in to see "a Broadway show" in scary old Times Square as a kid with my family, and waiting in the big outdoor, middle-of-42nd Street Cheap Tickets line and getting permission to run off by myself and get a coke from a nearby deli, weaving my way past shocking X-ray marquees and tons of depressing urban dirt, trash, grime, and decay. I was horrified, traumatized, turned-on, and nauseated.

 Letting a nine year-old kid run loose through that sort of neighborhood would be considered negligence today, but back then sleazy sex had a detached aura; we were exempt from harm by virtue of our disaffected stances. We weren't saints like kids are today, so there was less to despoil, a shorter distance to fall.  But I was still plenty scared going to get that Coke, but that just heightened my senses: cigars and asphalt tar for the olfactory; the roar of jackhammers and the groans and blaringly loud Kung Fu kicks coming from loops playing on a television in the marquis windows for the auditory; an overabundance of naked female flesh and twisted title marquis for the eyes, and it all swirled together and coalesced into the faded sadness of the woman's face on the pre-dirty and pre-faded Subway-style poster advertising For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuff. As I walked I ran through the giant black and long-haired figures, it seemed locals seeing me, all alight and bug-eyed, began performing bizarre street scenes for my amusement, demanding only my feigned nonchalance and thinly feigned disinterest as payment.

Safely back in the suburbs, films like TAXI DRIVER (1976), MEAN STREETS (1973) and MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) provided the artsy boilerplates for not just our tourist perceptions, but a whole genre of 1970's films that used the vice-gripped city as a backdrop, from early 1980s video rentals like MS. 45 through to bigger budget mainstream grindhouse that capitalized on the 1970's suburban yen for singles bars and "aren't we glad we moved to the suburbs and had kids instead of staying single in the city" cautionary tales like DEATH WISH (1974), LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (both 1977). All you had to do was point a camera in New York and you had a movie about grime and vice, from graffiti-covered trains to wino-drenched stoops and turned-over, Ocarless garbage pails, it was all there without any need for set designers.

It's bizarre to think that William Friedkin was ever given a budget to make something like CRUISING (1980),  as the sadomasochistic homosexual environment of the West Village couldn't possibly turn on straight America and gay America was protesting it even before it was finished. The suits must have presumed the mainstream's penchant for inner-city sleaze extended to gawking at homosexuals, but they didn't factor that for all it's swinging medallion-on-the open chested liberalism, white middle class suburbia was still pretty provincial, and being very frank and open about your hatred and fear of gayness was how we knew you weren't gay, because there was so much loosey-goosey touchy-feely swinging going on, you needed to be clear up front, if only to yourself.

To give you an example, none of us knew The Village People singing "Macho Man" was at all gay. We thought it was, you know, Burt Reynolds-style cowboys and Indians... for the kids. If we'd have known the truth, "Macho Man" wouldn't have been the first .45 single I ever bought, that's for sure. I would have been afraid of reprisals and dints on my manly armor. We learned instead about the 'gay agenda in our midst' via Anita Bryant, who was always on the news, ranting and raving about gays corrupting our kids' morality, until even the starchiest parents figured that if an obviously evil old broad like this (the Sarah Palin of her era) was so anti-gay, then homosexuals must be all right... wherever they were. Thanks to Bryant we were guided from hating them as straw dogs to fearing they were amongst us to siding with them against the real menace, rabidly intolerant orange juice shills

Even so, at the pre-AIDS awareness moment of Friedkin's CRUISING (1980), gays were still pretty reviled outside city limits. The only "out" celeb of the day was Elton John, and he was British and already covered in so many feathers it made tarring redundant. Lesbians were a slightly different matter: sexy as long as they weren't too butch, we were fascinated by them and by another now almost impossible to find film about homicidal queerness called WINDOWS (1980), starring Talia Shire as the victim of an obsessive dyke stalker.

WINDOWS got terrible reviews, caught gay rights flak, and everyone seems glad to have forgotten it today. Everyone, that is... but old Erich, who's still traumatized by seeing it reviewed on some local Philadelphia news show back in 1980 (they called it depressing and hateful - I was instantly thrilled).

I guess it's easy to sum up a decade as being sinful or doomed by its propensity to abuse newly found freedoms--especially in the US., where even the backlashes have backlashes--so for every starry-eyed examination of the polyester scene there's going to be three pieces of nihilistic dread-mongering like Richard Brooks' LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977).

Out of circulation for a long while (presumably over music rights) there's no denying the power of a film that dares to star Diane Keaton and Tuesday Weld--two of the most brilliant comedic actresses of the era--only to proceed to throw them to the wolves with no regard for audience emotional endurance, making every single guy in their lives an unrepentant sleazy jerk, including dad and brothers-in-law, and leaving the girls no place to turn but between the sheets with any poisonous ogre who cuts them a line.

GOODBAR's best scenes involve Keaton getting off over her fear and ambivalence towards Richard Gere as a coked-up rentboy mix of ROCKY (1976) and John Travolta in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977). But for all his kinetic air-punches, Gere's character is still a stereotype of Vinnie Barbarino barbarousness. Meanwhile, Keaton's so good you want to abduct her in a white van and drive her over to a better film. But you can't, and the only glimmer of light is an in-joke scene where she picks up Richard Gere via small talk about Mario Puzo's The Godfather (which of course, Keaton co-starred in as Pacino's wife).

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER  is a film that too many people--including my mom who took us to see it as children at the drive-in--thought was a dancing rags-to-self discovering class hero epic like ROCKY or BAD NEWS BEARS (1976) and instead turned out to be depressing and way-too-sleazy for children, no matter how many kids birthday parties had danced to the album.

The main drag is Travolta's posse of youthful Italian-American hoodlums hanging out under the Verrazano bridge, balling their collective whore/gang deb played achingly well by Donna Pescow, and generally fuming with working class self-loathing and thick New Yoahkka accents. I haven't seen FEVER since that night with mom at the drive-in but I remember how much I hated all the characters and shuddered in sympathetic horror at the sad sexual desperation and abuse of poor Donna Pescow... and I remember only one line "Ah, they're spics, they're greasin' up the floah." a remark made against a competing Latin dance couple. Now what does that tell you about the power of evil to endure in an innocent child's memory? We all grew up wanting to be DAMIEN: OMEN II (1978) or have Patty Duke for our mother in LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY (1976), but we didn't want to do it in fucking Brooklyn, especially goddamned Bay Ridge! Yeeeeesh. I still hate Brooklyn, even though I'm sitting in it right now! At least it's Greenpoint, or Fort Greene, I can never tell them apart, but not because of reasons you think, playa. That's racist.

Of course by now you know I'm a sensitive soul, so please sympathize when I tell you that one lazy Sunday in the very early 1980's I caught the last 30 minutes of MR. GOODBAR by accident at a friend's house.  I was around 13 or so, and I was alone (my buddy was out mowing a lawn), I thought it was ANNIE HALL at first, recognizing Keaton, which I'd never seen but heard was great. Of course it was not the case.

I was so traumatized I couldn't even look at a Playboy for six months.

Seeing the film in full for the first time last night--some 30 years later--made me realize it's still way too shocking for my poor system. Sexual violence is something much better digested when unrealistic, as in bad, as in fake-looking.  Little winks of Brechtian narrative disruption do much to relieve anxiety in the viewer, or at least me, but when full-on Hollywood muscle is applied to giving you a strobe-light asphyxiation panic attack then Mr. Brooks, you should be ashamed! This nasty little ending traumatized me in 1981 and it traumatizes me now, worse than REQUIEM FOR A DREAM which used a similar eye-rape strobe technique and left me feeling similarly in need of a Xanax, which I didn't have. Where's the cinematic Xanax for our come-down for this daring but misogynistic and undeserved ending, Mr. Brooks?  Even Buck had a Ratzo! Give Keaton a break, like a sympathetic girlfriend who isn't a knife-wielding psychotic. Why not give her a friendly, protective dog? She's a beloved saint at her school for the deaf, but the one time she fails to show up on time, all the kids instantly hate her. The minute the one good guy in her life starts to seem human enough to waken her from her nympho slumber, he starts acting as shady as Jackie Earle Haley in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006). It's like Brooks was still angry the censors wouldn't let him castrate Paul Newman at the end of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1963) and he's been castrating us all by proxy ever since.

At any rate, back in the day, as I well recall, GOODBAR was on everyone's lips (adults had all read the book) as the cautionary buzzword that kept 70's singles ever alert for signs of derangement in their take-home projects, razors in their Halloween apples if you will. A Goodbar was slang for a dangerous date ("watch out for the Goodbars!") that we kids didn't understand, associating it with the candy bar and wondering if it had something to do with getting in cars with strangers or accepting opened candy bars (before the Tylenol scare of 1982 for example, there were very few protective coverings on bottles). But that was the attitude of the time: safety and security took a backseat to getting your kicks and rocks off. There were no 24/7 hall monitors, no racing to pick the kids up from school rather than letting them walk home alone through the spooky park. The complete reverse of how it is now, when all our liberties are slowly stripped away and we're glad to get rid of them, tightening our security systems until we choke on boredom and claustrophobic anxiety.

Long unavailable on DVD, GOODBAR is currently on Netflix streaming and see it if you can, before they yank it down again, but just remember that this film really should have a tag like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, "it's only a movie, it's only a movie," or in this case, only the first sparks of the early 1980's anti-sexual backlash hysteria. What it's not is what the ads and stills all promise, a dramedy where a girl runs with a dangerous crowd in pursuit of herself, and then probably winds up with Gerard Butler or some nice Jewish boy, and her klutzy best friend cries at her wedding and winds up with a caterer.

 In 1977 things were still good. The coke was flowing and the hospitals had yet to fill up with heart murmurs. We still had some time to sleep around and not fear the AIDS reaper. But when the change finally came, we were ready. We were exhausted. We were sorry. We  learned to be politically correct and gay-friendly at first just because we hated the haters more than the hated, and because America naturally sticks up for the underdog. We also cleaned up Times Square. Now we can't dance or smoke in NYC bars, and we can't drink outside in brown paper bags or smoke cigars in the theater lobby. Everyone's 'happy.' And no matter how hard we looked--and still look--through the trash of 42nd Street, we never did, and never will, find Plato's Retreat. When I finally did stumble into that orgy I'd always wanted it was Halloween night of 2003, and before I could strip off my tie I mumbled an excuse and ran outside to smoke a cigarette, panicky, hand shaking as I lit in a way that would have made a Corleone wince, then ran home on shaky legs to call my sponsor. Vomiting guidos in shitty costumes splayed before me like a gauntlet, I leapt over them and ran from it all.

God help me, I ran to "freedom."

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