Kimberly Linn - "The Sparks" (video)

"The Sparks" - song by Kimberly Linn / Video from "The Devil Bat" (1941) PRC Bela Lugosi classic, edited by Erich Kuersten - 4 mins - the story of a love between a bat and a mad scientist, and the power of the sparks to set them free.

"For Bela, and for madmen everywhere, the misunderstood, the unappreciated and the tyrants with no subjects who rage in their secret laboratories, creating their atomic supermen, and their music, and writing, and their art. And Kimberly, come out of hiding and continue your awesome music! Like Bela, and like Poe, you are and shall be.... avenged! "

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Great 70s Dads: Roger Winslet at 2008 Oscars

 

Of all the key moments at the 2008 Oscars, who could forget the single shot of Kate Winslet's pa, way way back in the mezzanine, his big black slouch hat on, rosy cheeks, as cheery and unshowy about it as you could ask. In a way he was in a way a bit reminischent of Jack Nicholson, who's easygoing rogue charm usually fills in the front row, usually (was he there that night? Who remembers.) Winslet won for THE READER, a film that to me epitomizes all  that's wrong with craftsmanship Oscarbait (see my Oscarbait checklist for the Reader here), but Winslet deserved to win, for HEAVENLY CREATURES, her debut which is still iressistable to this old codger's eyes, and for having a salty-looking 70s dad like Roger.

From the site Free Frank Warner 2-23-09

  Kate Winslet accepting the best actress Academy Award and wondering aloud where he father was in the audience.

"Dad, whistle or something ’cause then I’ll know where you are."
Roger Winslet whistled so loud everyone in the world heard him. (Dad is an actor, too, appearing in several television productions. Kate is 33. Dad is 69.)

The UK's Daily Mail ran a thing about Kate's childhood where she talked of being poor, fat and bullied, which proved in the face of it to be exaggeration:

Kate Winslet never seems to tire of repeating the story of her miserable adolescence. She says that she was fat, weighing 13 stone when she was 15 years old and nicknamed-Blubber' at school.She was picked on and bullied, mentally and physically, and even locked in a cupboard; or so she says. 'I was bullied for being chubby. Where are they now!' she tells this month's Marie Claire.

Class act: Kate Winslet who grew up in a working class family in Reading, Berks., pictured with her sister Beth and father Roger.

It is interesting that, now that she has won an Oscar as Best Actress, Kate feels that she wants to talk about her past misfortunes.

It rather gives a different dimension to her current achievements and acknowledged beauty: that she has suffered in earlier life makes her seem, perhaps, all the more likeable.

But speaking to some of the friends from those early days, one can't help but become a little suspicious about just how very miserable it all was.

It is true that the Winslet family did indeed live in a small terrace house, and she shared a bedroom with her sister Anna while her father, Roger, took on all kinds of part-time work to supplement his faltering acting career.

And yet, despite a lack of ready cash Roger to this day drives an ancient Vauxhall car, the fact is that money was found to send both Kate and Anna to a private theatre school. Kate went aged ten to Redroofs, then based in Reading, at a cost of £1,000 a term. (more)

Now, why would such a childhood indicate a 70s dad? It's not the childhood, it's the remembrance and the freedom to talk about. Were her childhood truly dismal I don't think she would remember it the way she does, or be so free to talk about it with journaliststs. A great 70s dad, as I've discussed in past 70s dad entries, is a master of indirectly inspiring rebellion against himself; he provides for his kids while seeming to be louche and undisciplined, to free the child from the neurosis caused by parental expectations, anxieties and insecurities. If Kate knew their lives were semi-impoverished JUST SO she could go to a tony drama school, she might have decided not to go. Instead she seems to not make the connection at all.

A great 70s dad runs counter to the average hypocrite:  they preach vice but practice virtue; they roll their eyes at the self-sacrificing martyr while doing them one better. Looking at those pics above, the truth is all there in the casual smiles, the relaxed atmosphere. At the Oscar podium Winslet didn't need to paint her father in noble colors; she just spake directly to him, "Whistle!" and he whistled immediately - he was right there, like a faithful steed; he seemed to be having a great old time way the hell back in the audience, completely relaxed and needing no validation, no 'credit' for her win. Not worrying if he would be thanked or not, he doesn't need it and that's why he deserves it. In that winning sense he's a cross between Stella Dallas and Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara.

Still in a punk band and it's not weird? Yep, 70s dad

Lastly, you can tell he's a 70s dad by the persona of Winslet herself, her keen thrilling sense of gravitas and lack of self-serious sanctimony. A real 70s dad can only be behind that, the kind of dad who gives his daughter the space to freely criticize the way he brought her up. He doesn't measure himself by his parenting; he pursues his own (mostly TV) acting career and music career and isn't afraid to take a tumbler or two. In the process he allows a true actress to thrive, for children are like plants - you water them, give them access to sun, transplant as needed, and then step back and let them figure it out - most stage parents prune and fuss and overfeed until the plant's a nervous wreck, not the 70s dad. Instead he leaves an invisible signature. You'd never guess he was even there - until it's time for him to whistle, and show an entire academy audience the definition of ballsy 70s dadness.

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The War Against Normal: A STRAW DOGS remake and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

I just saw there's a remake of Sam Peckinpah's great misunderstood masterpiece STRAW DOGS. Take a look at this poster:

First of all, what is up with that reflection of a face when we can see clearly that the chunk of glasses where said reflection would be has broken off? Did this guy get a tattoo of a dude's face on his eye? Did only his reverse clip-on shades get broken? See the original poster below and wonder to yourself what kind of poster artist would think lenses that have broken off still reflect?

And of course, no crap remake poster would be the same without a meaningless tag line. Are they asking us or telling us about this breaking point? Have they tested every man for one? What about women?  Deconstructed, the tag intends to align the viewer with 'everyone' - indicating the sneering contempt the copywriter feels for their target demographic: "Don't worry, the hero of this movie is bland, easily led, normal and stupid, just like YOU!" Chances are the author of that tag didn't even see it, or the original, or any movie made before 1993, the year punk broke! 

The original poster was terrifying since if you look at Dustin's expression it's calm, even smiling, and compacted down to resemble Roman Polanski after a night of some energy expenditure. His eye behind the broken glass is dead like a shark's, or as if its been gouged out at the pre-photoshop art department, yet he's smiling.

Since Peckinpah considered Dustin's math professor 'everyman' to be the bad guy, a self-satisfied liberal who considers himself six cuts above the riff-raff of the icky rural England locale that he settles in with his hot young wife (Susan George), who was born there and left behind several strapping ex-boyfriends. Since he's long since been lumped by the literally-minded critics (how riff-raffish of them!) in the category of vengeful ass-kickers like Buford Pusser in WALKING TALL, and Cameron Mitchell in any AIP biker film, one can only assume the complex shadings of a self-righteous lefty nerd narcissist in Hoffman's everyman will be weeded out in the remake until he's American Average like "everyone" with their breaking points and whatnot.

I've been reading the new Pauline Kael collection, so forgive me if I sound self-righteously astringent, but apparently the idea that the one educated man who stands alone against the many armed yokels might actually be the bad guy in a film is beyond the average (petit-bourgeois) movie critic unless it's spelled out with ominous music cues and sudden outbursts of misogynistic violence. It hasn't been done to death so they don't believe it even exists. The fools! The bombastic ignoramuses! And then there's the reverse: sometimes the villain everyone presumes is evil is actually the only sane, sympathetic person around!

Kim Morgan and the Self-Styled Siren discuss one such film, LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945) across both Kim Morgan's site, Sunset Gun, and Siren's classic self-titled blog, and the realization that Gene Tierney's murderous bride is actually the complex heroine of the film, which is a kind of horror story about a beautiful bi-polar artist who gets trapped in a normal marriage with a husband who hides behind Norman Rockwell facades and close extended family sing-a-longs to avoid being intimate. It's most worthwhile to check out, here's a sample from Morgan's side: 

Gene/Ellen is a modern type of woman, a poetic, ingenious woman, and I always get the sense that her inner struggle to express whatever power or talent she has, well beyond her beauty, is pure torture. Many may look in her eyes and see cold orbs of hate, but I see… Wagner's entire Ring Cycle, and beautiful, damnable Richard W. seems especially appropriate since, for some crazy reason, he also managed to write, in 'Lohengrin,' 'Here Comes the Bride' amidst his Götterdämmerung. 

Is this an excuse for her dastardly acts? No, but she does serve to symbolize every trapped, powerful woman flapping around her white picket fenced-in bird cage. That war raging inside her twists into a a full-scale blitzkrieg on the… normal people. Her revenge is her final work of art! Her masterpiece! (more here - Siren)

 And from la Siren:

I always wait for that staircase, for Gene hurling herself down it after carefully leaving one slipper on the top step, like a psychopathic Cinderella. It's a wicked act, but she tells Ruth just before she does it, "sometimes the truth IS wicked." Along with Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven dares to go down some dark maternal byways, into things some may feel, but no one wants to admit--in this case, pregnancy as a cage, one that's about to slam shut for oh, about 21 years. Ellen's on bedrest, its own kind of "Yellow Wallpaper" hell. (Those insipid posies on Ellen's dressing-room wallpaper could drive a lot of women to the brink.) Look at what she's doing beforehand. She's talking to her own sister about the stroll the girl just took with her husband. Couldn't Richard be upstairs talking to his wife? Making sure she isn't bored and terrified, instead of taking it for granted for that she's rubbing her belly and practicing lullabies? So she grabs her most beautiful robe, and re-applies her lipstick, and she even puts on perfume--because she's about to go back to Ellen, the beauty, and leave behind Ellen, the terrarium. (More here / Sunset Gun)

"Psychopath Cinderella" - awesome. And here's something I wrote (link here) on the same subject for Bright Lights in March of 2010 when Film Forum screened LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN for a special week-long revival screening:

Wilde's straight-edge kid brother gets killed first after he decides to hang around the lodge like a third wheel albatross on Ellen’s neck. The way Stahl frames this event in the peace and quiet of the lake makes a great ironic comment on the production code-approved craze for “discovering the great national parks” that was going on all over cinema in the late 1940s, early 1950s. I always root for Tierney in these scenes. I too know the frustration of having to run a cock-blocking gauntlet of resentfully undersexed friends and relatives every time you want to get your lover up to bed, or having to drag your urbane self out to buggy campsites to pacify your spouse’s yen for convention.

The drowning of the brother is nothing compared to the glorious moment when Gene throws herself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage (Wilde must have waited until she was ovulating to slip her one). That's incredibly hard to do, and I think it's heroic, in its own twisted way, symbolic of her yen for flight and mastery over her own self-preservation instincts (I tried to throw myself down the stairs every week as a kid, to avoid soccer practice, and just physically couldn't--my body wouldn't let me).  Meanwhile if Wild had bothered to pay attention to her in bed and maybe even give her an orgasm, none of this mayhem may have been necessary.

If we, living as relatively relative free as we do today, were suddenly stuck in a post-code extended family Americana hell hole like Gene's in HEAVEN, would we act any different? Or would we just quietly disappear–like Lea Massari in L’AVENTURA (1960)– before the bores could catch us and smother us back into Stepfordville? Maybe I’m just unusually squirrelly when it comes to the sorts of color schemes at work in the film; as Village Voice scribe Melissa Anderson notes, the color scheme “redefines mauve.” I hate mauve. It's telling that  Gene, whom Anderson calls “one of cinema’s most chilling psychopaths,” grew up in a situation outside the claustrophobically chipmunk cheeked tedium of “sanitized” American family values, with an intellectual, adventurous father. No wonder she can't adapt, like those poor heroines who had to give up their jobs the moment, get married, and dutifully cook, clean, and obey, once the code took effect in 1934.

Where I’m going with all this is to analyze the ultimately corrupting nature of post-1934 cinema’s phony morals; the “as long as you feel bad about it, it’s okay to kill” sort of compromise with the censors. You can see this in two roles played by Winona Ryder: HEATHERS, with Winona's refusal to 'enjoy' the killing of the evil jocks and janes nonetheless orchestrated by herself and Slater; and SEX AND DEATH 101 (which I decried in "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise - Bright Lights 4/10/08), where she only drugs her sleazy would-be lovers into a restful coma from which they awake at the happy ending. We need more LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN-style sociopaths, by which I man girls with cajones enough kill those who would hobble and baby them with prefab beige rusticity, and critics with the cajones to applaud this, and to see the purveyors of mauve domesticity as just as deserving of death as cannibal rapists. We had THELMA AND LOUISE to inspire us in this way for awhile in the early 90s, but somehow the drippy third wave feminism of Sex and the City gourmet shopping swept over that fire like a flood of designer bottled water and bland has returned. 

Figures like Gene are essential because they blur the line of good and evil, and help us extoll revenge using art --a murder in the movies is not the same as real life, so let it be cathartic and wild. In this sense Ellen is an artist, a frustrated panther goddess trapped in the hell of some L.L. Bean adman’s pre-presentation nightmare and busting out through any means necessary. It’s just too bad she couldn’t take a few more of those little bastards out before the inevitable mauve ocean swallowed her.

*****
That may sound hardcore, but I embrace the Camille Paglia/ Nietzschean vantage point beyond good and evil. So how about a LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN remake, directed by Darren Aronofsky, starring Vera Farmiga as Ellen/Gene Berent? And thank God that there are still women out there like Kim and la Siren who aren't scared to call a spade a spade, and then bury you with it; who aren't afraid to see beyond the 'chilling psychopath' to the artist and human within.  Sometimes when life gives you lemons it's far more noble--well, not noble, but certainly more exciting and cinematic--to put them in a pillowcase and beat someone up with them than to make lemonade... especially if you're all out of sugar. Ellen is all out of sugar, and so is America.

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Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #7: The Nordics ONLINE Now!

The Fall 2011 issue of Acidemic Journal of Film and Media is now active, on-line, and considered harmed and dangerous.We've got awesome work from an array of deep talent and warped visionaries. post-theorist Steven Shaviro (The Cinematic Body, Connected); Sweden's Daniel Ekeroth (Swedish Death Metal, Swedish Sensationsfilms); revered L.A. film and rock critic Kim Morgan (Sunset Gun, MSN); beloved film historian David Del Valle; sharp-eyed Budd Wilkins (That Obscure Object of Desire); the haunted Steve Tweed; the celestial Lucy Blodgett; sharp newcomer Molly Marie Wright; rising painter Audra Graziano, and topics ranging from the sleazy sex-snuff apocalypse of the Balkans and Swedish cinema's trailblazing sexual openness to the 'kicker' phone booth vandalism of mid 1980s Stockholm; 21st wave 70s feminism via German DEFA science fiction and the 1976 TV show, Star Maidens; Bob Hope meets Thriller: They Call Her One-Eye;  Let the Right One In vs. Twilight; Thor in the Gardens of Sebastian Venable, and of course some Nordic alien theory! Come and See, and behold a pale blonde horse and the name that rode on it was Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #7: The Nordics...

And also check out the August issue of Bright Lights Film Journal #73 also online, Acidemic's two-fisted older brother! 

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Pre-Code Capsules 8: THE NARROW CORNER, WEST OF BROADWAY, HEADLINE SHOOTER, THE CROWD ROARS, TOP SPEED

THE NARROW CORNER (1933)
Directed by Alfred E. Green - ****
Finding this on TCM (part of Ralph Bellamy day) cemented the proof that 1933, not 1939, was the best year for movies. You never know what classic authors are going to ferment into wine and which to vinegar, but the South Seas commonwealth parables of W. Somerset Maugham have become a very potent wine and THE NARROW CORNER is the good stuff you keep for yourself during dark nights of the soul. Why is it so forgotten compared to, say, the self-absorbed modernist whining of THE PETRIFIED FOREST?  Where Leslie Howard's maudlin rambling smacked of self-pity in that film, Maugham's dead-eyed stare into the riptide, where life is wrest from us as a berry from a branch by a half asleep Mexican gardener, is admirable, heroic, and damned hilarious in this one! Cheers! Tape it and save it forever.

The story of a wan Brit boytoy who has to take it on the lam out of Australia when he kills... ahem... her husband, ahem, fits its star--a very young man of Hollywood royalty--Douglas Fairbanks Jr.  to a 't.' We can see in him the natural actor who's absorbed everything he saw and heard as a spoiled child in the thick of his famed father's silent era decadence and brought it to bear on his character, a peevish dork who hates the women who fight over him because then he has to kill their jealous husbands and fiancees, which here include Ralph Bellamy as the good-hearted Dutch plantation owner. And the best character is a debauched doctor (Dudley Digges) who tells his trusting Chinese servant how many (opium) 'pipes' he'll have that night, "Seven pipes tonight, no more no less," rendering him useless at critical junctures but leaving him always very droll and self-effacing and clear-eyed in his into-the-void stares; he's the type of character who no longer exists ins a cinema too busy fighting and blowing things up to ever have time to address mortality head-on.

There's also Henry Kolker as a mean old Swedish sea captain, who boasts to Arthur Hohl that he used to pilot slavers, and that he wants to gut his son-in-law (Reginald Owen) with a scaling knife. Patricia Ellis is the hot daughter, who's engaged to good-hearted Bellamy and it all makes Fairbanks feel the heel, but you can't argue with the beautiful scenery and sense that once upon a time it really was possible to buy passage on a boat from Sydney Toler pre-Chan and run out on your past, and immediately repeat it.

WEST OF BROADWAY (1931)
Dir. Harry Beaumont - **1/2
Here's a curio starring former-matinee idol John Gilbert, caught like a fly in the amber of the sound era: when he tries to sound manly and tough he just sounds hung over, speech halting awkwardly like he's sending a morse code S.O.S. in the spaces between the words of his dialogue, hoping his buddies off-camera will translate and rush... to his aid. In the early sound equipment days they were taught to take long pauses and say words... clearly.

But it's worth seeing for the brave way Gilbert captures the art of the shaky rebound. His character comes home from the war with four bullets in him, to find Ann (Madge Evans), his sweetheart off with some slime ball and his hired rebound girl Dot (Lois Moran) merely a bit 'pretty in a trashy sort of way.' "Dot the I and cross the Ann," he says, while introducing them to each other at the swanky nightclub. "Double cross."

And it's worth it for the sly way the waiter says "your package sir," and slips Gilbert a fifth wrapped in a white towel, low under the table at the club, so the prohibition cops don't see it. We here in America don't have a scene like that anymore: we do our drugs at home, except for crack. The crack den is our modern speakeasy but the class of people you meet is so much less sparkling, wouldn't you say? Hmmm?

And it's worth seeing for the sleazy, no holds-barred details of life as a hired girl who's brave enough to refuse Gilbert's hand-out (her and her girlfriend owe ten days' back rent), even as she notes of Gilbert's party there were "hands all over me." as she gropes herself in a resigned way.

Also, Gilbert's shakes are incredible. The morning after he marries the hired girl, he's got the Saint Vitus dance. And for her part it's great when she gets all furious, racistly barking at the Chinese cook, or settling down into a chair to shoot the shit about Jerry with his high class friends who come calling. And when he tries to quit drinking the cowboys are singing outside and suddenly you tap into RIO BRAVO's scene where Dean Martin almost takes a shot of whiskey while the Mariachi death song plays down the street from the jail. Moran is a little firecracker but her pal is no Joan Blondell, and when we see Gilbert ponder whether or not to keep her after their marriage's been annulled you may tap into that ambivalence Frank Sinatra had with Shirley MacLaine in SOME CAME RUNNING. But Gilbert, he was almost all the way tapped out, and it shows. Those shakes are something else.

And Gilbert's a good enough actor to use his personal desperation in a scene: you can feel his desperate stiff upper lip trembling as he finds out Ann's moved on. She could be standing for his entire female silent film fan base, which was once substantial and just as suddenly nonexistent. Like Barrymore's drunken has-been in DINNER AT EIGHT, there's a feeling of being outdated and too drunk to care, and seeing the only way to go is to get drunker and plunge into the void like a cock-eyed  W. Somerset Maughm kamikaze. All else is vanity.

HEADLINE SHOOTER (1933)
dir. Otto Brauer - ***
Frances Dee is a swell little half-pint, nearly a decade away from becoming the woman we all fell in love with in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1942). How can any girl ever make sobriety sexy? Dee can. She exhibits some serious chemistry with the main, taller star of this 1933 'press corp.' action-comedy, the briefly beloved Will Gargan as a newsreel cameraman. Lee Tracy is relegated to wingman and wryly notes: "They want you to chase 'em, and once you catch 'em they hang on ya like a ton of bricks." Then he gets crushed by a ton of actual bricks while filming a warehouse fire. Ralph Bellamy is again the jilted fiancee who's really a swell guy hoping to lure Dee home, where the heart is.

This is an early example of tough-ass Warner Brothers action, with an obligatory climactic gangster shoot-out and a quite a few real-time floods, fires, and even some 'collateral value' shots lensed during the Santa Monica earthquake. It's startling how at ease the actors are around these real-time calamities, with reporter Dee offering comfort to shaken witnesses as she makes sure to get the signature on the release statement, showing that solid mix of sexy warmth and maternal compassion that would in 10 years make zombies walk with her through whispering cane fields of admiration.

THE CROWD ROARS (1932)
dir. Howard Hawks - ***
The cars are game and Cagney's explosive, but it's kind of tough to care because he's also such a shit to his women. I know how it is from being in a band: the self-disgust side effect of  being adored by people who don't know you; you come to hate them the way Dean Martin hates his girl in SOME CAME RUNNING, or Clark Gable hates Jean Harlow in RED DUST, or Cagney hates Mae Clarke in PUBLIC ENEMY.

He flips; he leaves. Ann Dvorak chases him down to the Indy 500, and we get some great scenes of Cagney asking for jobs and being turned down by various outfits, because he's lost his nerve. Lost his nerve? Cagney? A laconic, very interesting parade of Hawks-types has to say no to him, and it's here more than anywhere else you can feel the Hawksian touch in its infancy, and when Cagney finally tells Ann about the crash and the smell of McHugh's burning corpse, he cracks up in her arms, from then on it's racing with style and you know it's not just Cagney's macho racer that has to learn women are ten times wiser than men, it's Hawks too. And he does, and maybe Dvorak and Blondell are the ones that taught him, like they teach Cagney. Maybe? Maybe nothin'!

TOP SPEED (1930)
dir. Mervyn Leroy - ***
An early sound comedy-musical (with most of the music numbers cut) starring the rubber-mouthed comedian (willing to 'adopt some' with Jack Lemmon in SOME LIKE IT HOT), and a daring chronicle of the years before the Depression, this is a last gasp of college letters and class resentment. The passing era of sexual repression lingers lines like, "I'm so modest I won't allow lamb chops on the table unless they have those paper pants on." Both suggestively lewd and comically moralist, the film sums up the only sane response to the draconian, near fundamentalist level of sexual repression endured under the watchful eye of hotel detectives, chaperones, and social reform-minded wives. Herein we also learn the origins of now forgotten phrases like "over a barrel" (it's a protean kind of CPR) and "counting sheep" (apparently it was a big fad like Atkins is today, and Brown explains it complete with hand gestures). And since 1930 was such a ' scandalous' time, well, it was very easy to be scandalous. Just being caught in a hotel room with a woman not your wife could earn you a public flogging, and from thence we get those boudoir comedies of sneaking around fire escapes in one's underwear, hiding under beds while the house dick peers through the doorcrack. It's hard to get that kind of naughty steam going in our more permissive age, but here's a world where men can't show their torsos on the beach and have to wear full body swim suits. It explains a lot... about Saudi Arabia today.

Coming off like a primordial Jim Carey, Brown is a surprisingly manly presence, and when his character pretends to be a  millionaire so he can get a room at a posh hotel he sounds just like Walter Matthau, or did Matthau emulate Brown as a kid, catching films like TOP SPEED on matinees while anti-Semite bullies skulked the streets? Footage of the climactic boat race is ridiculously mismatched to Brown's rear projection drunkenness but Edward Arnold disparages the news his future son-in-law took a bribe, but in true financial savvy the pal just takes the money and screws his briber, bets it on himself via his stooge buddy Joe E. Brown, and then pockets the profit. Oh to be alive in an age where millionaires were made so effortlessly. Oh, but we'd have to get married first.

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Bride of Bogartstein: IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)

Spousal abuse is so demonized these days that not a single redeeming characteristic is allowed to remain in our violent men of drama. Gone are the magnetic brutes like Stanley Kowalski, gone deep but abusive artists like Dix Steele in IN A LONELY PLACE (1950). It's not surprising then that we're unprepared for how hard it has become to adapt to these characters and their sudden brutal displays. We've become accustomed to not having to think about violent men in any way other than as cardboard action targets, as objects first for derision, then hate, then vengeance, and lastly more derision. No more can they seem sexy, or have good qualities.

But Bogart is Bogart, he could play a serial killer and we'd have to like him, and since he's playing a famous Hollywood screenwriter his tantrums and blinding rage white-outs (1) go unchecked save for police intervention which his studio then works to keep out of the papers. This is the kind of guy you should just get away from, the minute you meet him, but can't since he's famous, witty and charming in a bleak sort of way --he's Bogart! He's inescapable. His fist has a gravitic drag. Thus a brute is allowed to stay brutish as a side effect of his Hollywood success, when he should be in jail, or the ring: "I've had hundreds of fights," he says to Gloria Grahame as his concerned neighbor, as if that's some sort of mark of the martyr, some mark of courage.  Many other successful men in Hollywood must go through their whole adult life without throwing a real punch, especially with the proximity of lawyers never in doubt.

While Bogart looms like an electric golem gone to gray suits, Grahame flexes her beautiful face into a Hollywood glamor death mask as she tosses and turns in bed, worrying that she's sleeping with a raging egotist who could fly into a homicidal rage over the slightest thing she does wrong; this keeps her awake and she starts taking pills to sleep. He might not like that, so she worries more: "This one's not going to let you go that easy," snaps her masseuse, who it is implied has given her more than one happy ending over the years. Grahame's sad eyes show that for all his violence and bossiness, Dix is the last non-loser she's likely to run into before her happiness clock expires. But he's worse than a loser, he's a thug with an expensive tux and a case of the eternal shakes.

Bogart doesn't even allow us the comfort of falling back on his Bogart charm. Instead he lets himself get creepy, and his dark self-effacing wit seems strained. The Bogie we know is too sharp not to know when those around him are turned off, but Dix has no clue. Bogart is brave enough to show the angles by which even his actorly charisma can be exposed as vain antipathy. Even Dix's "A simple yes or no will do very well" proposal of marriage comes off like a threat. He sees marriage as providing any lady her luckiest break (or fracture) like signing a deal with a confused white tiger, or an arm-rending chimp, temporarily cute and calm but... really, the rest of your life with this thing? The only way out is to cultivate a penchant for servile masochism. As if to illustrate, Dix's battered agent exclaims to Gloria in the least coded of gay double entendres: "He's Dix Steel, and if you want him you've got to take it all" Rationalizing the hurt, he notes: "People like him can afford to be temperamental."

Any self-respecting woman would have left Dix the moment he first snapped, just as Krasner should have left Pollock when he made his first embarrassing scene at the dinner table. But such are those few unlucky moths that are so blind enough they can only see the most brilliant light, the light of charismatic madness, and so become stuck on the bulb of an ego that has swollen mercilessly with the pumping eternal handshake current of exploding pockets and the bloody war-like business of making pictures.

I'll admit the first few times watching IN A LONELY PLACE I got a headache, partially from the unpleasant frisson of seeing Bogart so messed up, but mainly from all those ringing phones! The road to Hollywood heaven must be paved with nonstop telephone calls. I guess in L.A. they are like music.  The best phone calls I ever had were from a girl in L.A. They went on for hours, for days! It's the very breathing of the biz, and you can tell Dix's never stops ringing. Ding Dong, indeed, the dead witches are in the making. The infernal bells are enough to drive anyone mad.

Director Nicholas Ray loved his insane abusive geniuses, and the link between Dixon and James Mason's tyrannical father in BIGGER THAN LIFE is clear: Hollywood is (or was) the place where white rage fights, shooting, drugs and casual sex are wantonly indulged in, thought about, and depicted for the enjoyment of the world. Certainly Ray indulged in these things, but his love makes him different than the poseurs of violence and despair. His forgiveness of his fucked up protags is his way, perhaps, of trying to forgive his own trespasses. Like Sal Mineo's tortured puppy killer in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, or Mason's most unsexy madness in BIGGER THAN LIFE, Bogart's illness has a groovy poetry. Both BIGGER and IN A LONELY PLACE show a man who thinks you are swooning at his brilliance and fearless spending instead of cringing in embarrassment.

Perhaps only natural bullies can make it in Hollywood, can climb the chain of intimidation. Or maybe all these are just excuses. Of course it would be damn nerve-wracking living with someone so violent, but Bogart was always a little menacing anyway, that's what gave his heroes their punch, the sudden eruptions, the "that means one of you is gonna get a beating for nothing!" climax of TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, or that cruel mirth in his eyes when he knocks out Joel Cairo in MALTESE FALCON.

I just gave some strange writerly advice to someone: "never give it your all unless your paid less than it's worth." Was that my dyslexia, or was this apparent paradox part of the sick queasy feeling created by seeing what financial overcompensation can do to a man like Dix Steele? When MALTESE FALCON followed LONELY PLACE on TCM (for Bogart Day), it seemed like a twisted freakshow out of Todd Browning; I've seen FALCON a trillion times but suddenly the camera angles seemed beyond bizarre. Long takes of nothing: a phone gradually reached for and talked into offscreen; a phone on the night table, the lit cigarette. I finally realized I should be wondering if Bogie's in bed with Mrs. Archer, or alone reading a racing form. When we finally see him again it's from low angles, looming around big hotel lobbies or taking his maternal support on the sly from Effie. He's a terrifying bully, all of a sudden, just from the proximity to Ray's film on the TCM schedule.

In other words, Bogart seen after IN A LONELY PLACE is a monster no matter who he's playing. He's a Universal horror monster figure who escaped to Warner's to be a gangster and then rampaged his way up to stardom and romantic protagonists. He and his first wife were known as "the battling Bogarts." This was never a man to fuck with. Such a man is maybe too quick to violence even in WW2 approved locales, but Ray is able to locate the monster underneath all the heroism and the sweet poet soul underneath the monster. Once the war is over and there's no one left to legally kill, the monster in the Bogart persona starts to crack through the detective/war hero/romantic lead mask, right along the crow's feet, and his dormant Frankenstein monster starts trying to reach out to crush someone.

The fourth time through PLACE, gone was my headache over the phones, and to the floor was my jaw at the sheer intense brilliance of Bogart's slow burns and sudden lashings. When something doesn't go his way, the anger begins, and then every attempt to quiet him is regarded through progressively more paranoid eyes. In the end the murder mystery is solved and yet Dix has almost started a whole new one. Dix's ego is such that he shouldn't be allowed to be in a movie, any movie, but Nicholas Ray never gives up on any character, even when they're so foul we recoil in shock that we're seeing them at all, let alone as protagonists. His love for dangerous maniacs is contagious; their lives are his downfall, and our redemption.

NOTES: 1. I had a rage white-out once, and I can tell you it's exactly what it sounds like - you literally go blind; a kind of dissolving white noise signal clouds your vision, and you start lumbering towards your prey like a drunk Frankenstein.

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One Pill Makes You Corporate: LIMITLESS (2011)

LIMITLESS, or AMERICAN PSYCHO-PHARMACOLOGICAL, is about that drug so popular amongst investment bankers, Adderall, disguised as a wonder pill that turns its taker into a super genius, based on the idea that we only use 10% of our brains, so what if we could use all of it? And have total recall of even the most mundane moments in memory? Such is the gift of the magic pill, which then our hero sleepy sad sack novelist Bradley Cooper gets hooked on and needs more of, and so do a lot of other (bad) people. The chase is on and the hangovers begin, paranoia steps up, loose ends are tied behind people's backs, and sheer stupidity rears its head.

The problem here is that Bradley Cooper and the filmmakers are afraid to go full AMERICAN PSYCHO, so a hinted at black-out murder is just a plotline dropped in time for the big climax of battling the usual baldheads. So instead of some bitter downward spiral wherein Cooper -- who plays a self-absorbed novelist initially too stupid to take an offered pill from his ex-brother-in-law--goes insane, we have him become a Tom Cruise-style action star. Once he does make the grade, so far so good, but on his big day presenting his portfolio to Robert De Niro's power-talking tycoon, he decides not to take a pill, like dumbass, so he's sick from withdrawal, and almost throws up on De Niro's thousand dollar loafers. Turns out he has a stash of pills at his girlfriend's house, but of course never dreams of getting it, because that would be too easy. Instead she (Abbie Cornish) has to get it, on her lunch hour, while he shivers like a crackhead in her office.

Trust me, no addict is that unprepared.

Don't doubt that I personally am similar and as we say in AA, had a lot of identification with Cooper's rise and fall. I was once a horribly blocked writer, tortured with longing, until my shrink put me on Effexor, and now I'm super-human on the keypad, writing so damn much my fingers fall off, smoking Camel Lights and guzzling diet coke and staying otherwise sober, for the kids, but always riding that low throbbing train of chemically-enhanced motivation and focus. Drugs have been overcoming writer's block since the dawn of pencils, of course, but that's not Bradley's problem. What sinks him and what is most unbelievable is that his girlfriend could be so dismayed that his newfound confidence isn't 'real,' since it was boosted by a substance. Listen lady, substances are the core of existence! We wouldn't even have civilization if not for coffee. We'd still be asleep, and cranky, in our thatched huts, hoping and dreaming that someone else will bring us some breakfast. But Cooper's refusal to remember he has pills around until it's time to try to take them to fight Russians is just not believable.

Imagine Popeye spending hours trying to open a can of spinach, his hands shaking, finally needing Olive to do it while he stammers through his teeth, an empty pipe in the corner of his clenched mouth. Not good. Popeye needs an open can ever at the ready, and so he has it. Has Bradley ever tried spinach? From a can? No, too cool for that; his spinach is fresh from Balducci's - all he needs is a little pill, and he's such a genius he can't even remember he's dead in the water without one.

 

I won't give away the ending, but I will tell you its needlessly happy, a validation of Hollywood's fetish for solipsism's comely victims. What the story cries out for is a finale reflecting the terrifying loss of control and sanity that comes from tampering too long with your brain chem--as in the endins of, say, AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000, top, bottom), where in the vapid clutches of Reese Weatherspoon, Bale comes to the realization that he has absolutely no idea if he's been dreaming or actually living all his murders, and she'll never even stop talking about herself long enough to notice if anything is ever wrong with him. Instead of that kind of ambiguity, LIMITLESS bears out the creepy douche bag feeling I used to get hanging out on certain Upper East Side AA meetings listening to a certain class of rich snobs fawn over their sobriety like humility is the very latest Coach bag. Why doesn't our super-enlightened Bradley figure out a cure for AIDS, or how to levitate, or remote view alien worlds, or make some draconian decision to wipe out half the population in a plague he's designed, carefully by hand, in order to make the world less crowded, ala LATHE OF HEAVEN? No, he drops the pen and goes right for the long green. What a tool.

In the end, this drug just kind of turns you into Tom Cruise, and for the Los Angeles power worshippers, assertive narcissism and total fearless confidence is everything. We love that trait like we love gangster movies, or mad scientists, or Hannibal Lecter, but you can't have your face and eat it too; you can't expect that Bradley alone is rising in the ranks in the realm of pill abuse. Where are all the others struggling for their smarty fix? In reality, pills like this come along all the time, but trouble is, everyone finds out about them and within a year taking it doesn't give you a leg up on the competition so much as barely keep you in it, hence steroid testing as a kind of treaty.

Fact is, Cooper's character seems pretty stupid to begin with, but he loves his drugs and we're supposed to be in awe of him irregardless of Abbie Cornish's disappointment. In the end we come away from the film perhaps angry at our own sloth and trapped potential, but there's a reason we shuttered the upper rooms of our brain mansion: there be monsters locked away up thar. Tread lightly, and bring a good therapist, or sponsor, or sword, or suffer the consequences. Unless, of course, you're Bradley Cooper, for not even the darkest demon can compete with the gravitic drag of such black hole vanity.

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