But for those who wish to seek beneath the surface, the point is fulsomely made: a man may win his freedom, even through endless flight, if he never turns his back on living, if he insists on saying Yes!
The players are all uniformly well-cast, with Warren Beatty"s Mickey possibly the best work he has done to date. Even the labored pseudo-Method shticks do not rankle, this time. There is a pathetic quality, a feisty helplessness that Beatty brings to the role that fits glovelike.
Hurd Hatfield plays the club booker with a dash that forces us to wonder why we have seen so little of this brilliant performer. There is just the right nuance of h.o.m.os.e.xual attraction for Mickey on the part of Hatfield"s Castle.
Franchot Tone is wasted, both in appearance and in this role, yet his professionalism and dignity manage to illuminate the few minutes onscreen in which his Ruby Lapp mysteriously a.s.sumes the mien of a Delphic Oracle.
If there are carps with the film, they are two, and minor. The sound recording is less than good, and with Beatty mumbling and murmuring, many of his pertinent lines (and even the comedic throwaway lines) are lost on the wind. The ending: while I cannot dispute Penn"s option to go for artistic integrity, he might have saved this film for the slob mind, had he made Mickey"s ultimate release more largely-written, more easily palatable. But this is a strictly commercial objection, product of this reviewer"s having worked in the arena and having come to accept much of the totem and taboo as realistic thinking about what an audience will swallow. It has nothing whatever to do with the heart, soul or intent of the creator, and as such, here in these pages, is suspect and invalid.
There is an infinitude of other things to say about Mickey One . . . that it is a peculiarly American film, that it could not have been done in any other country with this sort of fidelity and verve, impact and message. That Penn has incredibly become something of an American Fellini, dealing with purely subjective subject matter in a totally objective posture. That the screenwriting is consistently impressive, sometimes almost blindingly so. That the word "pretentious" will be predictably used by every reviewer who cannot summon up enough freedom of horizon to plunge full up to the cerebrum in what the film tries to do. That . . .
Suffice it to say that Mickey One is more than an entertainment, more than a happening. It is a very personal experience, created out of honesty and a sense of purpose. Even were Arthur Penn to proclaim publicly that he hadn"t the faintest idea what he was doing, that the entire company merely winged it, the film would still stand unscathed, for I suspect this picture came as much from the dark and mysterious terra incognita of the subconscious as from a Hollywood soundstage.
Cinema / December 1965 THE WAR LORD.
When I was twelve years old, I walked out on a movie. It was Wuthering Heights, in its second reissue, at the Park Theater in Painesville, Ohio. I didn"t understand it. I am considerably older now, and last night I walked out on my second motion picture. It was Franklin Schaffner"s The War Lord. I understood it too well.
There are films that enlighten, that point a moral, that enrich and beguile. There are films that make one think, that tell one something new about the world, that explore a viewpoint fresh and different. There are films that merely entertain. Nothing more is expected of them. But when a film bores, that is the cardinal sin. The War Lord, categorically, is the single most boring film I have ever almost seen.
Almost. This review is being written on half a film. I could not endure sitting through any more of it. As it will be my intention here to convince any reader to avoid this abomination, I will not go into great length, save to explain that the plot concerns an 11th century feudal baron (Charlton Heston) who is awarded a dank and ugly little duchy of swamps and fens on the Normandy coast. He spends half his time fending off the barbarian raiders from across the sea, and the other half trying to roll a local pig-girl in the hay.
It is the most obstinately endless film ever made. It has all the appeal of attendance at a snails" convention. Heston looks ten thousand years old in the roast-beef-red color Universal has filmed him. (One gets the distinct impression Heston makes a film a week; last week I saw him in The Agony and the Ecstasy and he was brilliant.) Here, he is carved from granite, and about as expressive. Circling Heston"s Mt. Everest of impa.s.sive taciturnity is a sun about to go nova called Richard Boone. The ex-Paladin stalks about muttering tomfoolery in a very Robert Ruark hairy-chested tone of voice, and never cracks a smile. He is so loud and unappealing, in a role of no merit whatsoever, that one wonders why he took the part. The pig-girl is played in truly underwhelming fashion by Miss Rosemary Forsyth, a creature of pale blue eyes and very little visible talent. Even when she is naked.
Maurice Evans is a shock, Guy Stockwell barely manages to survive, the plot is guaranteed to induce tunnelvision and highway fatigue, the camerawork is uninspired, the sets (built on the back lot at Universal for a staggering sum) are ludicrous, and in all it is a cla.s.sic example of bringing Universal"s TV techniques to the big screen. (How long has it been since you saw that faint flickering purple line around an actor, when he stands in front of a process screen?) They attempt to give the impression of a big budget film, with nine hors.e.m.e.n, seven peasants and a horde of pigs. By moving them around and s.p.a.cing them out, they have cleverly managed to give the impression of a struck set just before the stragglers sign their chits and go home for the day.
It is possible the film gathered steam in the second half and roared on to be one of the great cinematic presentations of our time, but I will never know. When I found myself yawning, spilling popcorn just to have something to do, and praying for the next scene, any scene, I asked myself a question all filmgoers should ask themselves: "Why should I subject myself to this?"
Consistent with the film, I got back an empty answer.
Cinema / December 1965 THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE.
In sunny Burbank, California, where Pa.s.s Avenue intersects Warner Boulevard and Olive Avenue, there is a gra.s.s-covered traffic island on which stands a large billboard.
The legend on the billboard reads as follows:
THE HOME OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES.
"Combining Good Citizenship With Good Picture Making!"
-N.Y. Times A screenwriter of my acquaintance, who had worked at Warners early in the Forties, when that sign was already long a landmark, several years ago (on a return to the lot) happened to mention to Jack L. Warner that the slogan really no longer applied, in that Warners was making "safe" films. Warner"s reported reply was, "Let the young ones take the risks; we"ve got the quote."
The sign is a paint-peeling relic, twenty and more years outdated, a bit of memorabilia that suggests Jack L. Warner has a tendency to live in the past; to let the times pa.s.s him by. But for those out there in The Great American Heartland who may never get to that intersection of Burbank thoroughfares, Mr. Warner has seen fit to release an all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing epic of modern filmmaking so tuned to the whispers of the dead years, that any who wish may draw their own conclusions as to his harkening-back to the good old days.
So hear ye! Hear ye! Gather "round and listen to the drum rolls, the rah-ta-tah, the tintinnabulation of patriotism, the gospel of war, according to Jack L.
And at a ma.s.sed cost of $6,000,000, one might even vouchsafe that World War II was Mr. Warner"s own private imbroglio. For surely no one man has made more bucks off our third most recent firefight than the vociferously vocal patriot who has caused The Battle of the Bulge to be made.
As the credits brochure handed out at the screening informs us, "Mr. Warner viewed the making of Battle of the Bulge as an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct one of World War II"s most terrifying battlefield engagements, and at the same time he looked upon the picture as a vivid adventure for film audiences, as well as a resounding tribute to the Allied Forces which partic.i.p.ated in those fiery days and nights combating the German invaders in the Ardennes."
What the brochure does not bother to tell us is that this is yet another example of Warner"s view of Men At War, through gla.s.ses which may not be rose-colored, but certainly use a prescription that is thirty years outdated.
There is no need our dwelling at length in these columns on the dishonesty of the picture in terms of historical verisimilitude. The Department of the Army has already made its feelings public, and the shriek of the eagle may be heard abroad in the land. Nor any need to belabor the point that the film was obviously made not because it was "an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct one of World War II"s blah blah blah," but because it filled a large hole in the Cinerama production schedule. Make one fantasy, they said, so The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was made. Make one comedy, they said, so It"s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was made. Make one western, they said, so How the West Was Won was made. Make one war picture, they said, so The Battle of the Bulge was made.
It is unfortunate no one has said, "Make a good film; forget the Cinerama tricks; forget the roller coasters and the onrushing tanks and the plunging trains and the flung spears; just make a h.e.l.luva good picture, about people."
There is no need to hammer these points, for they are self-evident in the production. The Battle of the Bulge is no more than a 1940s-style soap-opera shoot-"em-up of the type Warners released during the war years. It is bigger, bra.s.sier, louder, more colorful, but in the final a.n.a.lysis, it is easily dismissed because it proffers a brand of thinking that is only rational these days for Birchers and dogfaces who look back on WWII as a pleasant experience.
This is not the face of war. The unifying facet of humanity is missing. There are great clots of armored Furies rolling across Belgian terrain, there are the usual stock cliche characters mouthing the usual stock cliche lines (not to be believed: General Grey to Lt. Col. Kiley as Hessler"s panzers overrun them, "Looks like he"s succeeded this time." Kiley: "He made one mistake." Grey: "What was that?" Kiley, with steely glare: "He got me mad."), and the attempt to convey a sense of order to an engagement that stretched down 85 miles of front and was fought in such a riot of disorder and counterthrust that even today Army historians are still finding missing pieces of the combat picture that explain why we won.
But worse than the Philip YordanMilton SperlingJohn Melson screenplay that gives us a ludicrous answer to why we were not ground beneath the treads of those elite tanks, is the ancient and creaking philosophy of "propaganda" that suffuses the film, the swindle of hackneyed ideas wrenched whole and corrupt from films made to engender a fighting spirit in a nation at war.
It is a script filled with sound and fury, and like most of its ilk before it, this too is a tale told by an idiot. For Warners has eliminated the people in the war, and concentrated on the dubious joys of the spectacle of combat. It is the glorification of madness, without even the saving grace of being able to relate to the motivations of the men involved. Robert Shaw, as the German panzer leader, is wasted in a faceless color-me-rabid portrayal essentially as deep as a dish of tapioca pudding. Fonda, Ryan, Dana Andrews, the incredible Telly Savalas . . . all! Stick men! You drew them with wide, vapid smiles or beetled brows in your high school notebook. Comic book representations of flesh-and-blood men who lived and feared and came out the other side of the war with character in their faces. Character: something this film lacks in its totality.
A totality that mirrors the Warner slant on war and its fascination for the common man. Every film that spurred us to more and better bombsights, flying forts, M-1 rifles and the firm belief that G.o.d was on our side . . . all the films that said Democracy, Mom"s Apple Pie and The American Way Of Life were the answer. The films that lied to us, but served (I suppose) a necessary purpose in their time. But their time is past. Like the aging gunslinger in a settled frontier town, the citizenry does not want to hear how n.o.ble it is to die in combat. Or if they don"t want to hear, they should be forced to hear. To hear the messages of Paths of Glory-that men are cannon fodder-to hear the shriek of Dr. Strangelove-that total war is total insanity-to hear that if we must make war, let us make it quickly and as humanely as possible . . . perhaps the arteriosclerotic leaders of the major powers out there in the arena, equipped with arbalest and mace, banging each other into senseless surrender. They must be told that we are a poor, puny race not one-millionth as old as the great lizards who died out with each other"s fangs in their throats.
They must be told the truth, not the candy-whip fantasies of the Jack Warners, who served their countries in good faith, but must now learn that the time of the gunslingers is past.
Or, to sum it up emblematically: in a cutaway scene in The Battle of the Bulge, we are told that Bastogne was an important facet of the battle, and we see a bomb-blasted wall with a sign on it. The sign says THE BATTERED BASHERS OF BASTOGNE. No, Jack L. Warner, with your happy thoughts of bold strong men in combat, they were not called the battered bashers. They were called THE b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.dS OF BASTOGNE and that, that is where it"s at.
Truth is the only weapon that will save us. This film is a lie, and, as such, is a disgrace to the men who died, and the men who made their story.
Cinema / March 1966 JULIET OF THE SPIRITS.
Fellini"s Juliet of the Spirits is a hysterical act of confusion. Having so stated, I will address myself to comments of other critics, who have been in this elevator before me; and having done so, I can go on to some personal specifics I have not seen elsewhere in print.
Ray Bradbury, who reviewed this film for a California newspaper, and conveyed his opinions in conversation to me, made the valid point that, in previous Fellini films, the maestro dealt with hurricanes at the eyes of which were human beings. Cabiria, Zampano, Marcello-each was a fixed centerpost around which all the madnesses danced. But the reactions were those of the princ.i.p.als, and what happened to them mattered a great deal. In Juliet, as Bradbury phrases it, "The gargoyles have taken over." The horned G.o.ds have deserted Notre Dame to caper and cavort, while the priests are outside in the rain, staring in. Giulietta Masina as Juliet wanders semivacuously through a Hieronymus Bosch landscape, grinning gamely and praying for sudden sunshine. What happens, happens; not to her as much as to the film itself.
Another critic (whose name, I"m sorry, escapes me) made the comment that an overuse of technique does not represent expertise and boldness, but an escape into flummery and flapdoodle. That the best art, the most carefully-constructed art, is that which does not look like art at all, which looks effortless (e.g., Fred Astaire dancing, Walt Kelly drawing, Vonnegut or Sturgeon writing) until you try it. The technique should not be apparent to the eye. The bones of method and construction should not show through. Another valid point, in the light of Juliet, for there the technique is constantly omnipresent-Fellini somewhere in the projection booth reminding us this is his first color film, and look at the coy uses of same.
While I almost entirely accept this point of criticism as bravely and succinctly tendered, in its aspects of truth, I reserve a caprice or two of dissenting opinion on grounds of past love.
Fellini has delighted and moved me too often to suspect him of total bravura, and nothing else.
But having only recently seen Modesty Blaise, with its surfeit of Losey technique . . . The Ipcress File and Darling and Help! and The Knack with theirs . . . I am compelled to accept the truth of the comment. Trick technique is on the rise; and while there may be those who contend A Thousand Clowns was flawed because it was a stage play filmed as a stage play with occasional returns to "the filmed portion of our show," I agree that crotch shots through keyholes as in The Ipcress File cannot hold a klieg to straight-on filming of Robards and Barbara Harris discussing the ethical structure of the universe.
To be precise, I am not really sure what I think of Juliet, which is not really the way to come away from a film. The fault may well be mine, even though it isn"t confusion, merely indecision. But this I do know: Fellini has come too far away from the writer as a necessary tool of the film medium. All well and good to say one is setting his innermost psyche down on film, very nice: but where is the story? It is still-and always will be-the job of the storyteller to communicate a pattern of events, a progression of character development, a sense of order and ethic. No matter what medium, the storyteller is the minstrel. He must tell his tale, not merely dazzle with pyrotechnics. Fellini seems to have fallen into the trap (though there are four credits listed for screenplay) of plot-by-committee. He shoots as he goes along, and as a consequence what he has told here is a traditional soap opera: the cheating husband, the wife on the verge of psychosis, the search for meaning, and the eventual realization that life alive is better than life half-dead, living in delusions and dreams. Stella Dallas did it regularly on the radio, and the chief difference between Stella and Juliet is that Miss Masina had the benefits of a charming Nino Rota soundtrack behind her.
To address myself to the acting, for a moment, much of it seems to me of the "momentary impetus" school. People couple and grin for apparently whimsical reasons, having very little to do with the continuity of the skimpy plot. And this is unquestionably not Miss Masina"s kind of picture. In earlier films she was the compleat gamine, a street urchin with a wry and winning smile. Here, she is a weary middle-aged woman, and the revelation is not a charming one. I do not care to see her standing there empty as a.s.sorted noxious fluids and vapors are emptied into her.
In a way, she represents in this film what Mia Farrow represents on Peyton Place: a necessary vacuum whose removal would impel the instant implosion of all the other hysterical elements spinning around her.
One can never dismiss Fellini. His work is too important. Even when failing, he does so brilliantly. But I would like to offer the suggestion to Fellini, with all due respect, that the time for self-indulgence has pa.s.sed. He has plumbed his own libido, and sucked out his own id. We have seen his secret dreams and fantasies. We have seen his wife"s secret world. I pray to G.o.d he has no children, for if he does, then we may look forward to their adolescent fantasies. Or, lacking offspring, perhaps we will see the dream life of Fellini"s housekeeper, his agent, his barber.
There is too little pure genius doled out in an eon to allow its waste on essentially unworthy projects. Yes, Fellini uses color brilliantly; yes, he knows film as few other directors ever have; yes, he is still the maestro and one cataclysm is not sufficient to sink Atlantis. But there is a cautionary note sounded by the direction and att.i.tude of a film like Juliet. It is a discordancy, apparently tuned to the Lesters, the Schlesingers, the Furies, and Fellini.
It is a back-turning on the past, on the validity of already proved methods. It is a losing-touch with the roots of the medium, with the lessons learned by men who were neither afraid nor untalented. And to scoff, as this film seems to do, is to play the clown.
Fellini is too good for that. And to quote Lautrec: "A man may play the fool once, and be excused the role; but if he play it more than once, it must be a.s.sumed he enjoys the part."
Cinema / July 1966 YOU"RE A BIG BOY NOW!.
Ten thousand times I have said if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck and goes steady with ducks, chances are it"s a duck. Recently, I was wrong. I saw something that looked like a duck, but it"s really a turkey.
Fully aware that I am a hostile minority in the country of the blind, I refer to You"re a Big Boy Now! which will undoubtedly make twenty-two billion grupniks at the box office and garner for writer-director Francis Ford Coppola all manner of future a.s.signments. I believe the operable phrase is "bright young man." Wrong. A genuine no-no.
AUTHOR"S FOOTNOTE, 1988: The motorist who has been driving erratically and at excessive speeds for years, flouting the law and endangering others, who finally gets pulled over by the Highway Patrol and is ticketed, complains at the injustice because this time s/he really didn"t do anything wrong. There is, however, a kind of cosmic justice at work. The insensate universe struggling toward some kind of balance. It is, how shall we view it . . . fair. In a c.o.c.keyed way. Publication, at last, of this piece I wrote in 1966 is similarly . . . fair. It is a genuinely dopey review. Apart from the sterling inept.i.tude I demonstrated here, by managing not to review the film at all-can you figure out what the movie is about?-I was dense enough not to perceive any value whatever in the early efforts of Coppola. Somewhere in the latter section of this book, I go off my chump completely and say something like, "I have loved every foot of film Coppola has ever shot." Never having had this earlier piece published, I was able to get away with the panegyric. Unlike politicians running for office, whose soph.o.m.oric plagiarisms in college are dredged up to throw mud on their character twenty years later, I got away with it. I can no longer live with the guilt! I was shortsighted and seven kinds of a dolt. Which is not to say that You"re a Big Boy Now! is much better a film than I said it was (time has not been kind to it, as verified by a recent Late Show tv viewing). I blow the whistle on myself (the slaphappy tone of all this being merely a surface candy-coating) as part of an ongoing need to keep my "credentials" credible. I"ve written elsewhere about the imperatives of an essayist having no guilty secrets. No matter how small. The urgency of confessional writing. It is the pathological dedication to being non-blackmail able. Especially by oneself. The parallel most applicable, in my experience, is this: once upon a time not that long ago, I was a guest on a national tv talk show. The host is a man whose name is common coin in households where Kafka, Conrad, Paul Muni and Sojourner Truth are unknown. In the course of his oncamera "conversation" with me, I became aware of an animus toward me and what I was saying that perplexed me and seemed unmotivated by what we were actually talking about. I won"t be more specific than that, but when next you and I get together, I"ll play the videoca.s.sette of the show, and you"ll see what I mean. It was easily the most awful of the hundreds of such talk show encounters I"ve had in the last twenty years. And it perplexed me, the more intensely each time I re-ran that tape to attempt some penetration of the mystery. It was not until a friend of the host-whom I met some time later, and with whom I discussed this matter-let me in on the Secret Agenda. Which was that the host is both a seriously practicing Catholic and a practicing h.o.m.os.e.xual intent on staying in the closet. Understand: neither of these aspects of the man"s life, in my view, is a topic for discussion or the judgment of others. Neither as an Atheist nor as a heteros.e.xual do I think being Catholic or gay is something to hide. But in the public spotlight, it is obvious why he feels the need to protect his privacy. And as a result of the ongoing cultural prejudices against either or both of these life-choices, can you imagine the h.e.l.l in which he dwells every day? He has to pretend to be straight, lest he suffer the h.e.l.lfire of his religion; and he has to conceal both from a viewing audience that might well become less enamored of him. And because of this need to keep his secrets, his on-camera att.i.tudes toward many guests and many philosophical positions become tortured, even warped in their logic. He is, sadly, innocently and tormentedly, a man who self-censors because he is blackmailable. In protecting his "guilty secrets," which in a sane world would produce neither guilt nor opprobrium, he produces "work," i.e., conversation, that is dishonest. For a writer, such guilty secrets can be crippling. The more one has to conceal about oneself, the more often one shies away from writing the burning truth about those dangerous areas, either consciously or unconsciously. The only way to insure that the writer goes as close to the fire as s/he can, is to hold nothing back, to tell it all, to reveal one"s pimply a.s.s to the world. This is considered suspect in many literary circles, and at least an act of gauche tastelessness. In England, for instance, when my short story collections are published, the UK. editors insist that the introductions and sometimes the foreword be dropped. On the well-founded belief that such revelations of personal involvement with the fiction will offend critics and even readers. I"ve ceased arguing with them, having indeed suffered scathing negative reviews from English critics who spent the bulk of their copy on what an impertinent self-server I am, without spending much copy actually addressing the quality of the stories. Nonetheless, I believe to my shoe-tops that it is imperative for my "credentials" that I try to conceal nothing that will compel me to slide past a difficult subject. I am as weak and as strong in this respect as you, and I know how easily our species twists reality to make ourselves look good. As Olin Miller has written: "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory." (Miller also said, "Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators," but that"s quite another matter.) So I try not to give myself the opportunity of concealing even the few personal flaws that are not enormous enough for the most casual reader to perceive without a road map. This rambling footnote-size 20 triple-E by this time-thus goes directly to that auctorial policy. You might never remember, by the time you get to my praise of Coppola later in these pages, that at age thirty-two, more than twenty-two years ago, I wrote such a dippy a.n.a.lysis of one of the great film directors. But you might; and if you didn"t, I would. This is why murderers who"ve gotten away with it for a lifetime suddenly rush into a police station to confess.
Mr. Coppola"s comedy of awakening s.e.xuality and the loss of innocence in Big City U.S.A. is straight Catcher in the Rye derivative, by way of a castrated Tom Sawyer. The words precious, artsy-craftsy, overblown and juicy come to mind. The color is overwhelming.
There is little fresh or innervating in either the screenplay or the attack of this film. It covers ground so heavily tilled the best that can be harvested is corn. Yet audiences leap and bubble for it. I think the phenomenon is a sad one. Films such as 10:30 PM Summer and Mickey One and even in an alarming number of instances Blow-Up are regarded by an American cinemagoing audience with suspicion, hostility and outright confusion, while such films as this, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! and The Fortune Cookie touch the proper nerve-endings and are rewarded with accolades. They are the common denominator films. They are the idiot comedies, in which no one demonstrates a modic.u.m of intelligence, perspicacity or style. They demand nothing of the viewer. They are merely palatable.
That You"re a Big Boy Now! is so popular is strident testimony to the accusation that we have become a movie-viewing nation of systematically corrupted taste.
To this echoing tune, Coppola has added his own personal contrapuntal variation. I will not belabor the point nor enumerate the tedious twirls of the plot that compel me to this conclusion, save in remarking that any film that casts Julie Harris as a character named "Miss Thing" is so obviously slanted for the cute and cuddly that it cannot be considered seriously.
Since the film is entirely the work of Coppola, all blame must be laid at his talent. I have heard Mr. Coppola speak on several occasions, stating his thesis of filmwriting, and he makes no secret of the fact that he will write hack in an effort to produce "quality" films of his own design. Mr. Coppola "hacked" on such monumental atrocities as Is Paris Burning? and This Property Is Condemned and so by action/reaction we should expect a "quality" film of his own vision to be as spectacularly good as the hacks were bad. But we get more of the same, except on a slightly smaller scale.
Rip Torn and Geraldine Page are hideously miscast, and their posturings in parts of little more than imbecile caricature are painful to witness. Elizabeth Hartman doesn"t really have the kind of legs needed to wear miniskirts. Michael Dunn is wearing awfully thin indeed, not to mention grating. And poor Peter Kastner, who has some stuff going for him, is weltered down in a quagmire of nonsense and random murmurings that make him appear to be little more than a bifocaled epileptic. Tony Bill . . . well, the less said the better.
And all of that pseudo-Resnais walking through the streets of Manhattan, culminating in a 1930s off-into-the-sunset being dragged by a s...o...b..ring nitwit of a dog, was more treacle than my doctors will allow me to consume.
The only saving grace of the film is the brilliant and youthful score by John Sebastian of The Lovin" Spoonful. The songs are memorable, they capture the mood that Coppola may have intended but thoroughly failed to inject into his film, and they are well worth going to hear. But as I said in a recent record review of the soundtrack alb.u.m, the Spoonful"s music is so good it shucks one into believing the film has merit, when in truth it is roughly akin to having a Rolls Royce grill braised onto the front of an Edsel.
Written 1966, previously unpublished AUTHOR"S FOOTNOTE, 1988:.
The motorist who has been driving erratically and at excessive speeds for years, flouting the law and endangering others, who finally gets pulled over by the Highway Patrol and is ticketed, complains at the injustice because this time s/he really didn"t do anything wrong. There is, however, a kind of cosmic justice at work. The insensate universe struggling toward some kind of balance. It is, how shall we view it . . . fair. In a c.o.c.keyed way. Publication, at last, of this piece I wrote in 1966 is similarly . . . fair. It is a genuinely dopey review. Apart from the sterling inept.i.tude I demonstrated here, by managing not to review the film at all-can you figure out what the movie is about?-I was dense enough not to perceive any value whatever in the early efforts of Coppola. Somewhere in the latter section of this book, I go off my chump completely and say something like, "I have loved every foot of film Coppola has ever shot." Never having had this earlier piece published, I was able to get away with the panegyric. Unlike politicians running for office, whose soph.o.m.oric plagiarisms in college are dredged up to throw mud on their character twenty years later, I got away with it. I can no longer live with the guilt! I was shortsighted and seven kinds of a dolt. Which is not to say that You"re a Big Boy Now! is much better a film than I said it was (time has not been kind to it, as verified by a recent Late Show tv viewing). I blow the whistle on myself (the slaphappy tone of all this being merely a surface candy-coating) as part of an ongoing need to keep my "credentials" credible. I"ve written elsewhere about the imperatives of an essayist having no guilty secrets. No matter how small. The urgency of confessional writing. It is the pathological dedication to being non-blackmail able. Especially by oneself. The parallel most applicable, in my experience, is this: once upon a time not that long ago, I was a guest on a national tv talk show. The host is a man whose name is common coin in households where Kafka, Conrad, Paul Muni and Sojourner Truth are unknown. In the course of his oncamera "conversation" with me, I became aware of an animus toward me and what I was saying that perplexed me and seemed unmotivated by what we were actually talking about. I won"t be more specific than that, but when next you and I get together, I"ll play the videoca.s.sette of the show, and you"ll see what I mean. It was easily the most awful of the hundreds of such talk show encounters I"ve had in the last twenty years. And it perplexed me, the more intensely each time I re-ran that tape to attempt some penetration of the mystery. It was not until a friend of the host-whom I met some time later, and with whom I discussed this matter-let me in on the Secret Agenda. Which was that the host is both a seriously practicing Catholic and a practicing h.o.m.os.e.xual intent on staying in the closet. Understand: neither of these aspects of the man"s life, in my view, is a topic for discussion or the judgment of others. Neither as an Atheist nor as a heteros.e.xual do I think being Catholic or gay is something to hide. But in the public spotlight, it is obvious why he feels the need to protect his privacy. And as a result of the ongoing cultural prejudices against either or both of these life-choices, can you imagine the h.e.l.l in which he dwells every day? He has to pretend to be straight, lest he suffer the h.e.l.lfire of his religion; and he has to conceal both from a viewing audience that might well become less enamored of him. And because of this need to keep his secrets, his on-camera att.i.tudes toward many guests and many philosophical positions become tortured, even warped in their logic. He is, sadly, innocently and tormentedly, a man who self-censors because he is blackmailable. In protecting his "guilty secrets," which in a sane world would produce neither guilt nor opprobrium, he produces "work," i.e., conversation, that is dishonest. For a writer, such guilty secrets can be crippling. The more one has to conceal about oneself, the more often one shies away from writing the burning truth about those dangerous areas, either consciously or unconsciously. The only way to insure that the writer goes as close to the fire as s/he can, is to hold nothing back, to tell it all, to reveal one"s pimply a.s.s to the world. This is considered suspect in many literary circles, and at least an act of gauche tastelessness. In England, for instance, when my short story collections are published, the UK. editors insist that the introductions and sometimes the foreword be dropped. On the well-founded belief that such revelations of personal involvement with the fiction will offend critics and even readers. I"ve ceased arguing with them, having indeed suffered scathing negative reviews from English critics who spent the bulk of their copy on what an impertinent self-server I am, without spending much copy actually addressing the quality of the stories. Nonetheless, I believe to my shoe-tops that it is imperative for my "credentials" that I try to conceal nothing that will compel me to slide past a difficult subject. I am as weak and as strong in this respect as you, and I know how easily our species twists reality to make ourselves look good. As Olin Miller has written: "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory." (Miller also said, "Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators," but that"s quite another matter.) So I try not to give myself the opportunity of concealing even the few personal flaws that are not enormous enough for the most casual reader to perceive without a road map. This rambling footnote-size 20 triple-E by this time-thus goes directly to that auctorial policy. You might never remember, by the time you get to my praise of Coppola later in these pages, that at age thirty-two, more than twenty-two years ago, I wrote such a dippy a.n.a.lysis of one of the great film directors. But you might; and if you didn"t, I would.
This is why murderers who"ve gotten away with it for a lifetime suddenly rush into a police station to confess.
BEAU GESTE.
Universal"s re-remake of Beau Geste, the venerable P. C. Wren tale of derring-do and swashbucklery at Fort Zinderneuf, will no doubt be summarily dismissed by the "serious" critics of cinema, both here and abroad. Such dismissal is not entirely unjustified. It is a well that has long-since run dry. But in the interests of fair play and offbeat comments guaranteed to startle, this reviewer would like to dwell on four points. Perhaps someone will take note.
First. This started out as a well-done version of the h.o.a.ry old story of the brothers who wind up in the command of a s.a.d.i.s.tic Foreign Legion sergeant. It was a gratuitously emasculated version of the original story, done brilliantly not once, but twice before. One entire brother was omitted, the theft of the jewel was omitted, plot twists were omitted en ma.s.se. But nonetheless, it held the interest. It was nicely mounted. Until Doug McClure walked on the screen. Everyone in the theater laughed. Now before there is instant a.s.sumption that I am going to pan McClure, let me a.s.sure the readership that he performed more than adequately. He did all that could be done with the part doled out to him, a role whose dimensions were as vast as the horizon line in Bosnia. But McClure was laughed at. People smiled as he tended the sick brother lying in his bunk. They snickered and found the corners of their mouths turning up. It ruined the mood of the story. The reason for this unrestrained mirth contains a key to the senseless casting currently being done at Universal, and it contains a dire warning to either Mr. McClure or his agent, since his studio obviously cannot see what is right in front of them.
McClure is the most natural, most certain, most exquisite comedic talent to come along since Cary Grant grew gray in the service. He is what Rod Taylor has tried to be, what James Garner has failed miserably at being, what Tony Randall grows too raucous really ever to be, what Jack Lemmon does very well indeed. He is a funny man. A handsome, athletic, all-around leading man with a built-in laughmaker. When McClure walks onscreen, people sit up and want to laugh. To cast him in deadly serious roles where his grimacing and Superman good looks are incongruous is in the nature of a capital crime.
Had Universal one whit the intelligence they pretend to possess, they would launch McClure instantly in a series of big-budget sophisticated comedies, sit back and rake in the dividends. A word to the wise . . .
Second. The film inevitably falls before the derision of the audience, because it is fifty years out-of-date. It devolves on points of "old school tie" honor, of stiff-necked patriotism to hollow causes, of the sort of "into the valley of death" horse manure no audience of 1966 is going to accept. Not when they are faced full daily with a dirty, and some say immoral, war on the front pages of their newspapers. No one is going to accept the n.o.bility of dying in the saddle (a scene Leslie Nielsen, who is far better than that, should have refused to play) when they can see newsphotos of bombed-out schools and churches with innocent civilians napalmed and disemboweled. No one really believes, any longer, that war is n.o.ble, that the esprit de corps is excuse for atrocity and stupidity and following atrocious, stupid rules of combat. Which brings us inescapably to the most important point about this film, which is Third. The practice-often lamented in these pages-of remaking films that were made as cla.s.sics originally. Stagecoach, She, Room for One More, Mutiny on the Bounty, Rash.o.m.on, and now Beau Geste: each of these was made the first time out as well as it could ever be made. Each has had a new edition released in the last few years and each one, without exception, has been an artistic disaster. The strangling stench of venality behind these remakes is so gagging that only the horse-blindered producers who have fostered them could hope to accept the hypocrisy of their being brought into being. And only these same men could hope to swallow the rationalizations used to ballyhoo weak excuses for their latest incarnations.
If the film industry does not stop this ceaseless, senseless cannibalization of its own body, it will disenchant the filmgoing audience beyond hope of recall. How much longer can audiences be expected to swallow the patent lies of four-color lithography and slanted Coming Attractions? How much longer can people be expected to invest their trust, their ticket money, their time and their sense of wonder in shabby redone warhorses butchered by second-rate visionaries? What dreadful ghouls imagine they can match the marvels wrought for us first time out by Kurosawa, Ford, Laughton, Gable, John Wayne or Thomas Mitch.e.l.l? What front-office callousness can be deemed even remotely acceptable for the production of inferior versions of treasured cla.s.sics held dear in memory by movie lovers; films whose discovery by younger generations has been irrevocably lost or mutilated by the release of witless surrogates, merely for the money to be gained from a shameful resort to the reputation of the former version?
It is a disgrace the industry continues to flaunt in the faces of cinemaphiles who have deplored it for many years.
And fourth. Sympathy is herewith extended to Nielsen, McClure, Guy Stockwell, Telly Savalas and a fine supporting cast, who have been made to play a microcephalically written screenplay of sheerest inept.i.tude. The cliches roll off the typewriter of this film"s Phantom Author like squares of toilet paper.
There are few excuses suitable for a scenarist who has turned out a script of this caliber. If he is a wise man he will spread the rumor that he was hammerstunned drunk throughout the entire period of scripting. In which case someone ought to offer him a better grade of panther sweat.
Cinema / December 1966 UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE.
It certainly didn"t begin with Mr. Luce and his bogus posed photograph of "beatniks in their natural habitat"-nor even with Harriet Beecher Stowe"s fraudulent Uncle Tom"s Cabin, purporting to be the gospel on how it was for de darkie way down South-but it was that particular Lucely manifestation of yellow journalism that surely brought it to its fullest flowering. (And he"s still at it; a recent issue of Time features a ghastly slanted takeout on the hippies, once again ornamented by posed photographs purporting to be accurate representations of the hippie life and ethic, and are no more representative than Mamie Van Doren is representative of the Average American Housewife.) What I"m plodding toward, of course, is the strange and frightening tendency adrift in the land, lo these last eighteen years, for nature to imitate art. Life ran the phony beatnik photo, and within months, everyone of Kerouac"s proselytizers-people who had not lived that way prior to the publication of the photograph though they might have subscribed to the "beat philosophy"-were existing in squalor that could have been a Doppelganger for the Life environment. (And though the author of Uncle Tom"s Cabin had never been any farther South than Ohio, Americans everywhere accepted her view of conditions and acted upon it, thereby precipitating, in part, the Civil War.) Nature imitating art, rather than the reverse. An artificial reality accepted as an existing condition, rather than truth based upon observation. Nature imitating art, a flagrant warping of a natural state traditional since man first observed the wild dog and scratched its likeness on a limestone wall. (And spare me a.n.a.logies of primitive man exercising his imagination on those same walls. He may have envisioned a seven-headed Cerberus, but that didn"t poof! call one into existence.) Now we subsist in a world molded by show biz; predicated on the huckster"s image of us; preshrunk and plastic packaged. Everything that does not conform to this insanity seems bogus to us. It seems sometimes that believability is inversely proportional to the amount of bulls.h.i.t suffusing it. The boundaries of shadow and reality have blurred, thereby causing us to wander terrified through a truly schizoid culture. Shadow, reality, they are now one and the same.
So who is to say: is the reality Up the Down Staircase or is it The Blackboard Jungle?
Who are the real kids in the schools? Bel Kaufman"s tragic and somehow strangely winsome Alice Blake, her feral Joe Ferone, her demeaned yet n.o.ble Jose Rodriguez? Or Evan Hunter"s stereotyped Negro, Greg Miller, his cliched psychopath, Artie West (who could have been written for the young Vic Morrow, so pat was the image of a teenaged giggling killer; a post-p.u.b.erty Johnny Udo as seen by Widmark)? Which image is more relevant of teachers today? Richard Brooks and Glenn Ford"s Mr. Dadier, or Robert Mulligan and Sandy Dennis"s Miss Barrett?
In the answer to these questions-and they"re all the same question, obviously-we strike to the heart of the nature of responsibility of our cinematic creators. In the answer we can judge whether our universal prurience is being jellied or our spirits uplifted. The answer tells us whether we have become a filmgoing nation addicted to the cheap, the sensational, the fraudulent . . . or if we are capable of recognizing truth when it is presented to us.
It also indicates a safe path down which we can pa.s.s to discover which films are "good" and which are "bad."
That Evan Hunter"s novel, on which Blackboard Jungle was based, was entirely a product of the author"s imagination (as was his North Trades Manual High School, a creation that resembles not at all the New York technical high where Hunter put in a scant few weeks as a summer replacement) is not terribly relevant. The authors of the film could have opted for realism, rather than accepting the whole cloth presented to them. There was an option at the time. Now there is none. So the relevancy of the basic source"s verisimilitude is academic, even as the authenticity of Staircase"s Calvin Coolidge High School is irrelevant. Pakula and Mulligan chose to go where it was happening. They employed auth.o.r.ess Bel Kaufman-seventeen years in metropolitan school systems as opposed to Hunter"s brief and unhappy stint-as technical advisor. They did not cast Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier and a host of overage Hollywood character types in T-shirts and jeans more suitable to lounging around Schwab"s than slouching schoolroom desks. They interviewed school kids in New York, and hired them. They did not shoot on soundstages outside which the California popcornland lay drowsing dreamily; they did not shatter their illusion when lunch break was called and the finger-poppers dashed to phone their agents. They shot among the scrawled walls and rotting stairways of New York schools.
Some things are relevant. Others are not.
The inevitable product, of course, is what must finally furnish the answer we desperately need. By now, with late late movies doing the saturation for us, we have all seen The Blackboard Jungle. We remember the shapely teacher straightening the seam of her nylon beside the staircase, and then the attempted rape. We remember Glenn Ford"s fight with Vic Morrow at knifepoint in the cla.s.sroom. And we remember a somehow incongruously overage Sidney Poitier doing the best he could to look heroic and n.o.ble with Ford as sort of a Black Man"s Burden. We remember violence, a touch of s.e.x, some phony pittypat dialogue, a school filled with psychos, junkies, prost.i.tutes, Machiavellian teenaged blackmailers, vandals, imbeciles and a.s.sorted rejects.
What story does Up the Down Staircase tell, by comparison? There is blessed little violence. Nothing a healthy peruser of Playboy could call s.e.x. The talk is everyday, even as you or I, so that don"t get it. And the kids who pa.s.s through this story seem like individuals, not archetypes. So what is there to remember about this film? And in the memory, do we find our answer?
The most repet.i.tious memory, the one to which the mind turns without volition, is the feeling of helplessness for the children. They are boxed in. They attend school but learn only by chance, almost-it seems-despite the System. They come to the world wide open, and find it closed to them. The teachers they encounter range from inept and outright criminally untalented to devoted, dedicated and brilliant. But the film denies us the flight of fancy offered by most artless creations in this genre: there can never truly be a happy ending. If they learn by wild chance, by happenstance encounter, then the conclusion is inevitable: most of them will never learn. They will come away from the school encounter perhaps even less equipped than when they began.