JULY-AUGUST 1989/$3.00 08 J
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•Sl•ssue published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 25, Num.ber 4 July-August 1989 America's New Wave ............ 12 Midsection: The Good Old Days ...29 Three filmmakers burn down Ted Turner and his plucky the playhouse, poke the American underbelly for signs band of entertainment law- of new life, and put a new lens on love. Marlaine Glicks- yers are the new raiders of the J man lets Spike Lee have his lost archive, paying back the iJ' day at the races in Do movie purists after coloriza- th~ Right Thing (12). Jim tion by coughing up every- Jarmusch mixes' aliens and thing in the MGM and Warners Americana again, and Marcia Pally hails his Mys- pre-'48 catalogues . FILM COM· tery Train a gem of simultane- MENT'S Buffs-R-Us, a.k.a. the ous narrative (19) . And a 1\\vo Richards , jump for joy. coupla new sensitive white boys, Harlan Jacobson and Richard Jameson blasts off Steven Soderbergh, sit around talking about sex, lies , on TNT, Turner Network Tele- and videotape (22). vision's film fare (page 30) , memos Ted himself re: improvements (31), and sub- mits a Top Ten Wish List for more (44). He also sam- ples the post-silent era arcana to be found in TNT'S early King of Pools. . . . . . ....53 sound film selection (38) . British artist David Hockney And Richard Corliss recalls (he of the swimming pool paintings and photo-collages) the pride of Warners, reaf- meditates on the Hollywood POiJ Life in !lis work. David firming auteurism in the face Thomson contemplates the freeplay of film form and fan- of recent critical revisionism tasy that imbues the Hockney world, and traces the outline that says the Moguls Dunnit of cinema through key works. All (40). Finally, Gregg Kil- day reviews key mogul mani- fe sto, Thomas Schatz' The Genius of the System , which venerates the Desk Set (47). Also in this issue: War and Repentance ........ .49 Industry: The Harvey Brian De Palma and David Rabe con- and Bob Show ..............72 Journals ....................2 spire on Casualties of War-this year's I scream, you sc ream , we all scream Casting coup of 1989: Traci Lords gets The Accused crossed with Platoon and for Weinstein. The Brothers Miramax the Rikki Lake role in John Water's My Lai. Gavin Smith considers its ate everything in sight this year. Are Cry-Baby. RJ Smith visits Traci , who strong medicine, muscular moviemak- their eyes bigge r than their stomach?, is no fool 's body. And Marcia Pall y in g, and the bold performan ce by wonders Anne Thqmpson. appreciates Truffaut's last film, The Lit- Sean Penn. tle Thief, realized posthumously by his Orbits: Leone the onetime assistant, Claude Miller. Festivals: Cannes ............66 One and Only ..............77 Mary Corliss finds the gap between Bernardo Bertolucc i co-wrote a film Jones Toon ..................9 cinema and real life getting wider even wi th the maestro of th e Spaghetti as film tries to bridge it, and Harlan Western. He recalls Sergio Leone. Stephen Spielberg plays hit and myth Jacob so n files a New Wave report from with history and pulp adventure in the plage. Back Page: Quiz #38 .........80 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Armond White is all raves. Cover photo by Masayoshi Sukita, courtesy of Orion Classics. Editor: Harlan Jacobson. Editorial Director: Richard Corli ss . Senior Editor: Marlaine Glicksman. Ass istant Editor: Gavin Smith . Art Director and Cover Design: Elliot Schulman. Advertising and Circulation Manager: Tony Impav id o. Business Manager: Doris Fellerman. Production: Deborah Dichter Edmonds. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson. European Editor: Harlan Kennedy. Resea rch Consultant: Mary Corli ss. Con troller: Domingo Hornilla , Jr. Executive Director, Film Society of Lincoln Cente r: Joanne Koch. Copyright © 1989 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All ri ghts reserved . The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represe nt Film Society of Lincoln Ce nter policy. Publication is made possible in part by support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. This publication is full y protected by domestic and international copyright. Subscription rates in the United States: $14.95 for 6 numbers, $26.95 for 12 numbers. Elsewhere , $37 for 6 numbers, $70 for 12 numbers, payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zi p codes. Distributed by Eastern News Distributors, Sandusky OH 44870. FILM COMMENT (ISSN 0015-119X) is published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, 140 W. 65th St. , New York NY 10023. Second- class postage paid at New York NY and additional mailin g offices. Postmaster: se nd address changes to FILM COMMENT, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, N J 07834·9925
ounlals Bad Girls ,,GUYSLoRD'S PRAYER F ive years ago, when she was 16, boyfriend were given thousands of dol- are petrified of me,\" Trac i Lords wasn't wavi ng pom- lars and a car, with instructions to go to says former sin strip oda- pons in gym. She wasn't cramming for a France and make a film. Months later, lisque Traci Lords on th e test. Lords was making films with Traci and the stud returned-with no set of John Waters' Cry-Baby. \"Men are obscure, elusive titles like Talk Dirty to money, no car, and no film. Big trouble so afraid of me it's ridiculous. I have that Me III and New Wave Hooker. It's hard in a business reputed to break arms like bombshell thing without even tryi ng:' to say how many films were made, or breadsticks. It's possible then, that She pouts, then says, \"Listen , I'll answer how many \"scenes\" were shot, but she Lords called the feds for protection , yo ur questions, but let's go to my dress- estimates she's circulating in about 70 even becoming a secret witness against ing room first. These mosquitos are kill- film s. \"There's one film , three cameras, those who wouldn't understand that she ing me.\" Lords stand s up . She pull s and you end up in fi ve movies. That's spent the money on French bread . dow n a halter strap, slathers on some just how it is.\" bug juice. I follow her into the traile r. When Lords coolly describes her Until one day in 1986, when the FBI plans for the next five years , it's like lis- knocked on her door. It was 6 a.m. \"I tening to somebody twice her age. And The door slam s. was half-naked. They came barging into when she talks about her past, which In Cry-Baby, John Waters' musical the house, put me up against the wall, she does easily, nothing slips that isn't about the birth of rock and roll , Lords and left me standing there for at least 20 supposed to. The FBI didn't come at her plays Wanda Woodward , trailer tras h minutes. They trashed my apartment to request , her mom doesn't run her busi- queen , a hell-raising Fifties she-cat in hell , then drove me around in a car for ness. To this day, Lords claims she short skirts whose parents are as L-7 as about two hours. They were trying to doesn't know who tipped off the FBI. \"I an Eisenhower jacket. Or so it \"\"auld scare me, to find out who I was. I wasn't have no idea to this day who, when, seem . Although she loves to make the saying. They were trying to find out how why. 1 have no idea what happened ;' she squares squirm by flirting, you find out old I was. I was petrified. I was freaked says. that-big joke, this-Wanda's a virgin . out chemically anY'vay...\" But the ensuing publicity ended a When Lords reached the tender age It's rumored that Lords' mom owned successful career-established wholly of 2 1, the cast-which includes Iggy the rights to all her pictures. Perhaps when she was underage. And the bust Pop, Patty Hearst, Mink Stole and Joey Lords , by calling the FBI herself, was landed her in headlines across the Heatherton-and crew of Cry-Baby cel- able to take the film s off the market , country. ebrated. They gave her a c ho co late jack sky-high the underground price, Say what you will (others have) about cake, and in a way, they gave he r high and make her mom extremely rich. And her past-that it got her into Random school years back, too. there's another version: Lords and a Notes or made her a household name bigger than AI Goldstein's. Lords is attempting to do something that's not been done before: to cross over from porn film stardom into the mainstream . John Holmes always wanted to. So did Seka. First there was Warm Up With Traci Lords , a tame workout tape. Then there was last year's remake of a Roger Cor- man vehicle Not of This Earth (it wasn't), her first non-porn vehicle. And with Out of the Blue: The TraGi Lords Story being developed by NBC and with negotiations underway with a major label for a recording contract, Lords isn't going to disappear. John Waters had not seen any of her movies when he sent Lords his script, nor was he concerned about her legend. Trac; Lords crosses over to legit via John Waters' Cry·Baby. \" Believe me, in my world, nobody's background is a problem ;' says Waters, 2
Victor Sjostrom: His Life and His International Film Guide 1989 The Screenwriter's Guide (Second Work Peter Cowie, ed. The 26th edition Edition). Joseph Giltis For current Bengt Forslund of the world 's most respected film and would-be sc reenwriters . here IS This thorough biography chronicles annual features reports from 60 an up-tO-date gu ide to film and televi - the life and work of Victor Sjostrom countries. This treasure for every film sion sales with valuable tipS on how whose influence on Ingmar Bergman buff and filmmaker includes over 300 to present . market . and protect your and the Swedish screen and stage is photographs . \" The International Film work. With an annotated list of ove r unparal leled. It is a history of the actor, Guide is about the best annual world 2100 producers. agents. d istributors . the di rector and the man revealed survey there is,\" writes Derek Malcolm in and industry contac ts in NY. Hol- through interviews, analyses and The Guardian. 496 pp. Paper. $15.95 . lywood . Canada . and Europe Fea- excerpts from Sjostrom 's own letters. tu res a new section listi ng screenwrlt- 324 pp . Cloth . $24 .95 . tribut es ~~~~'?~~~\\&'~o~~; R f:St f;;~~~;'~ Ing so ftware plus an Intervi ew with a do .'.;;er SOVIET CINEMA NOW prominent sc reenwr iter The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows 160 pp Paper $9 95 David Schwartz . Steve Ryan . Fred Wostbrock Th is entertaining and fact- Who's Who in American Film Now fille d reference features ove r 550 rare [Updated Edition) photographs and covers more than 450 James Monaco. ed Who d id what. and shows Each listing Includes a brie f when . In re cent Amer ic an cin ema ThiS history. hosts. announcers . celebrities . updated and reVis ed edition Ilst·s the show descriptions . ch ronology and lots key people who make movi es today II of amusing anecdotes and tri via features thousands of cast and crew Introduction by Mark Goodson members from the past decade In 13 600 pp Cloth $39 95 separate categories - each an al- phabet icailis t of names With Ihe title The Laser Video Disc Companion: A and date of their film c red its A running Guide to the Best (and Worst) Laser commentary on today 's movies . Ih ls Video Discs Douglas Pratt. gUide IS an Invaluable resource for Features a complete listing of over 2000 libraries . profeSSionals . film historians American discs and a selective listing of and fans alike Illust rated c600 pp 1900 Japanese discs released in the Cloth $3995 Paper $19.95 U.S. from 1979 to the present. Over 1200 films , music videos , imports, and Movies Made For Television : The Tele- educational discs are reviewed for the feature and the Mini-Series, 1964-1986 quality of the finished transfer. Also [Updated Edition) AlV in H Marrll Up - included is a guide to forthcoming dated to Include entries from the '84-85 CD-Videos . and '85- '86 seasons . thiS giant volume 432 pp . Paper. $16 .95 . lists over 2000 telefeatures and mini- se ries Titles are listed In alphabetical Louise Brooks: Portrait of and ch ronological order. each Including an Anti-Star Roland Jaccard , ed . cast. product ion cred its . plot synopSIS . Translated by Gideon Y. Schein . Louise release dates . and notes by the author Brooks - the legendary actress who A comp rehenSive companion to teleVISion rebelled against the idolatry of Holly- viewing wood to preserve her independence and individuality. Illustrated with over 90 Illustrated 500 pp . photographs. Cloth .$39 95 Paper $19.95 160 pp . Paper. $19.95. More Ihan 11.000 peopl, - Over 1.000 movie' ----------------- ------------~-------- A special 20% discount for Film Comment readers! o Please send the following books . 0 Please send me you r free catalogue . Enclosed is the proper amount plus $1.50 for postage ($200 for cloth & NAME _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ orders of 3 or more books) . ADDRESS _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ Or call 1-800-C HAPLIN (in NY 212-420-0590) Visa . MC , Ame x accepted . Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ZIP_ _ __ NY residents must add 8'/4'7'0 sales tax . New York Zoetrope 838 Broadway Dept FC New York . NY 10003
Lords (center) in Cry-Baby. schoolgirl innocent whatever she was arettes, grass-people were sayingfuck. doing. Lords isn't dirty . She's camp. \"I was so rebellious. I was so angry. I the man who cast Sonny Bono in Hair- spray and Patty Hearst as Wanda's mom Though Waters disagrees. \"The peo- didn't have a dad or any male in my life, in Cry-Baby. so I went looking for a father figure. I Doing X-ratedfilms is found it in the wrong guy. And from \"I think she looks like a movie star;' nothing like doing real there it's just the classic Star 80 he says , a little wild-eyed on the Cry- syndrome:' Baby set. Yes , but, can she, you know, films. lOu don't get act? \"I think she's funny. I think she fits royalties and there is Lords took her fake 10 to a bar and the part. She's a hard worker-every- met a 23-year-old 'Jerk boyfriend.\" She thing that I want somebody I hire to be. no unlon. ran away. Mom called the police but She wouldn't have gotten the part if sne Lords didn't want to be found. \"When I hadn't done so well with the screen test: ' pIe I cast are not camp at all. They are was in high school , I started doing my dream all-star cast. I got everybody I uppers, downers and speed. I loved If Lord s successfully crosses over, it wanted to get for this movie, except speed. And then when I was 15 , I got might be because she really was a child Mother Teresa. I think of them as stars. into freebasing cocaine. That was my porn star. She always looked Catholic And I'm impressed by everyone of worst enemy and my best friend all at them. I'm starstruck by them . I'm not once.\" Lords says she made movies only starstruck by AI Pacino. Nothing against for a little over a year, though she was him , but I like what they politely refer to \"in the business;' doing centerfolds for as 'creative casting.'\" men's magazines, before that. W hen she was 12, Lords came to Typically, Lords' movie contracts Southern Cal iforn ia from were signed under the influence. And Steubenvi lle, Ohio, with her mother on she didn't make as much money as peo- a Greyhound bus . Dad was a steel- ple think. \" I maybe made about worker, who stayed behind. Lords was $80 ,000 the whole time I was doing shy, the quiet kid who rarely shows up in everything. Which is nothing. But peo- class. And then one day, she got wiiiild. ple don't understand that doing X-rated films is nothing like doing real films. You \"L.A. was so different from anything don't get royalties and there is no union. I'd ever been near. I was from this dirty There's none of these things to protect littl e town. I knew everyone in the you. They get these stupid little girls off whole school. Then, all of a sudden, I the street that are 15 years old and have was out there. People were smoking cig- run away from home. They say, 'We'll give you 300 bucks to do this: And the girls do it. That's all there is to it. The Trust me, I'm a doctor: Traci Lords gets the needle from director Waters. 4
• '~j::(~\" - ,. ',J.r ,\"~ ---- ~) ~ Discover the World of Great Films vWN1J?4 Yolln,LQ~.\"£l!Jor·8\"oI5\",\"mer Paul Verhoevn's Love comes of age in Ingmar Bergman's bittersweet story of an 01 H.pplJlu In In~mlu S.\",mllfl', A young Dutch girl, adrift in 1881 idyllic affair and its dramatic after- ND/or/ow £,olle \",am• . Amsterdam, rises from a life of pov- math. A sultry young girl and a shy erty and prostitution to become a boy share a summer of love together woman of means, education and before experience clouds their joys attainment. This bawdy, tough and with pain and betrayal. \"The cinema- delightful film from the director Paul Verhoeven (Turkish Delight, tographic event ofthe year... Only Spetters, The Fourth Man, Robocop) Bergman can film men as they are is a Cinderela tale for intelligent adults. loved but hated by women, and Starring Monique van der Yen, women as they are hated but loved Rutger Hauer. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. by men.\" -Jean-Luc Godard In Dutch with English subtitles. 1975/104 minutes/Color Starring Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg. CVC-10251$79.95 Directed by Ingmar Bergman. In Swedish with English subtitles. 1952/82 minutes/B&W CVC-1022/$69.95 'EiMax Ophuls' Paul Leduc's ngs % arne fRJIR 'De ... She risked her life for her art, and became one of the dominant paint- A spoiled socialite, married to a ers ofthe 20th century. Frida Kahlo's general, flirts with an amorous dip- story,told in surreal flashbacks reminescent of her own canvases, lomat. As the affair escalates, her is astirring tribute to the spirit and passion rips through the glittering determination of awoman who shallowness of their privileged ex- made herself into a great artist, a istence, plunging them into disas- cultural leader, a political activist, ter as they risk everything for love and in many ways a prototypical modern woman . and honor. From director Max Ophuls (La Ronde, Lola Starring Ofelia Medina, Juan Jose Gurrola, Max Kerlow. Montes,Letter From an Unknown Directed by Paul Leduc. Woman). this dazzling display of In Spanish with English subtitles. cinematic style is a classic roman- 1984/108 minutes/Color CVC-10241$79.95 tic tragedy. =~ CONNOISSEUR VIDEO COLLECTION Starring Charles Boyer, Vittorio de _ 8436 3rd St., Suite 600 - Los Angeles, CA 90048 Sica, Danielle Darrieux. Directed by Max Dphuls. ™ Tel. (213)653-8873 Fax (213) 651 -0555 In French with English subtitles. 1953/105 minutes/Black and White CVC-1026/$69.95 VOLUME 6
girl,~ never see a dime. It's sick, actually. herself to the romance of Rita Hayworth soned man telling tales of youth. Truf- and Aly Khan , Oior costumes and Miss faut died at 54 in 1986 before he could I wo~e ~p one morning and people Eiffel Tower contests, she learns the direct this last script, and Claude Miller grand pleasure of film that propelled took over the project. The Little Thief th at I dldn t even know were sitting Truffaut through 35 years of directing was produced by Claude Berri, who in movies. 1985 adapted the two-volume Marcel arou~d In my livi ng room doing drugs, Pagnol novel , »ilter ofthe Hills (Jean de Florette and Manon des Source) , to the ?urnIng holes in my brand new couch. I screen. Ju st had to get out of there. I started Ironically, Miller's style transforms The Little Thief into more of a memoir walking.\" than Truffaut's would have. There are the characteristic Truffaut moments- Not everybod y wa lks away. John There have always been shadings of the kitten lapping milk in front of a hotel room door while lovers embrace behind Holmes, who died of AIDS AinID1S98ha8~ a~toblO.graphy in Truffaut's work, begin- it appeared in Day for Night and The didn't. \"He died. I didn't die. Man Who Loved Women before The ning With The 400 Blows in 1959 and Little Thief-but Truffaut's penchant for abrupt edits and fast juxtapositions cre- always been a fear of mine. I've been continuing through Shoot the Piano ated a distance between film and viewer. You ~ould never quite slide into dreamy tested a million times. I don't hbaovtetoit~ Player, Jules et Jim, Fahrenheit 451 , Identification with the hero, no matter thank God . But I hit my rock how much of yourself you recognized in The Bride Wore Black, and The Man him-or her. This is not the stuff of memory, where for a moment you relive when I was 17. He hit hi s when Ihwe aws ass~ Who Loved Women, among others. the hero's life. Miller's more lyrical like, 40. That's a big difference. rhythms are. About a boy from a broken home who His scenes are seamless, one passage young, I could heal. tries to weather the world's hard knocks of Janine's life tumbling into the next as though they were the meanderings of \"One of the things that appealed to and keep his dreams alive, The 400 the mind and no director calculated how to cut and paste them together. The me about playing Wanda was that she Blows parallels Truffaut's ambition to frequent wipes, fade-outs and irises, in other contexts intrusive reminders of was 17 . And in a big sense, I've gotten to rea~ize his visions in cinema. Putting it the director's hano, here augment the sense of peering into the past. Miller has go back and be 17 , which I never was. I plainly, Truffaut later said , \"I make films painted his film in soft, blue-grey tones and cares for every detail like a man get to do all tho se sce nes in school. I get th at I would've liked to have seen as a fondling mementos; soon viewers see their own pasts in Janine's efforts and to fide around in the car and scream out yo ung man.\" Almost 30 years later, Truf- frustrations , her impishness and stri- vings , her peculiar mix of energy and the wi ndow. I get to be silly, to be this faut wrote the same story, this time with baffled ignorance. The soundtrack is genius. Miller has chosen several choral young, stupid kid! It's been so much fun a girl in the lead and after a lifetime of works, each with a pressing enthusiasm that gives The Little Thief naive eager- for me. I never got to do that. Since I've filmmaking . ness. been 15 , I've been pretending; I was Like The 4o0r0pBhalonwasn' dAnitsoilniveinOgoiwnitetl~ In the end, The Little Thief never Janine is an moralizes about Janine's mistreatment always trying to be 22. I was very good by the world or about her own misbe- poor, sometimes rough , relatives in haviors. We watch the sundry episodes at it. I've been acting all my life:' of her life the way we recall our own, postwar France. Every time she tries to and we rarely chasten our memories. -R J SMITH Truffaut's bequest to his audience, this is grab. hold of some girlish fantasy, she storytelling at its best, a yarn raveled with disinterested fervor. Charlotte gets Into trouble. Her affair with a mar- Gainsbour.g, daughter of actress Jane Birkin, plays her role with guileless, if ried man ends in bitter collapse because impatient, desire and is another of this film's pleasures: seductive and petulant, he, like the lingerie she must return to she goes for what she likes and then is not sure she wants it. Her smile opens the shop, can never be hers . Trying to slowly, like surprised eyes. be the demure secretary he wants, she -MARCIA PALLY rebels and then fails. Janines affair with a boy her age also ends badly because he steals for money and she only for the dreams inside her head. Each time Janine tries to live out the fantasies of others she comes to a dead end until she stumbles on the idea that she must make one of her own. In the film's final section, Janine, pregnant and without a sou, pays an abortionist with her camera and is told • to return the next day for the operation. Janine (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in The Little Thief. As sh~ has broken into so many others, ENCORE, THE 400 BLOWS that night she breaks into the abortion- S he steals dreams . Janine, in ist's shop-this time to steal back her Franc;ois Truffaut's last script, The Little Thief, shoplifts her 16- chance to give fantasies life. With cam- year-old fantasies. Silk slips, panties , stockings, cigarettes , and fox stoles find era and baby in tow, Janines decision is niches under her bed; not that she can use any of it-except for the high heels more pointed than Ooinel's, who ends that she slips on as she sneaks into town and into the movies-but it's impossible The 400 Blows by escaping from a for her to resist them. Stealing admis- sion to the cinema is her most important reformatory and running ambiguously to theft. Skulking into a seat and losing the freeze-frame by the sea. In 1959, Truffaut was not yet sure that putting stories on film would work as a balm to life's bruises , much less be a way of life. Three decades later he could give Janine the benefit of his years . T he 400 Blows is autobiography; The Little Thief is memoir, a sea- 6
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Keeping Up With oneses by Annond White sagebrush sentimentality from Sam there's no need to tolerate that misused Peckinpah's anti-Hollywood revisionism. virtuosity when films like A Chinese When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. -a Hollywood curse In The Last Crusade, Spielberg repu- Ghost Story can , miracle by miracle, diates the very genre conventions and step on Temple of Doom's feats , while D iviners of popular culture who moral infractions he himself perpetrated offering an authentic picture of a foreign once celebrated Steven in the two previous films of his George culture. The Last Crusade redresses the Spielberg for his ingenious Lucas-produced series. It was the thin- issues of culture and imperialism that extension of the Hollywood film tradi- nest material Spielberg worked on since Spielberg and Lucas previously ignored . tion (\"A new generation's Howard Jaws. Complaints that this final , third This film doesn't need to be paced a;)y Hawks\") have deserted him when he installment lacks zest disregard the faster because, now, everything that hap- needs them most. Spielberg's last three extraordinary enhancement Spielberg pens around Indiana Jones is something films , The Color Purple , Empire of the has effected. In place of the melodra- to think about. The mind races along Sun and Indiana Jones and the Last matic Freudian suggestions that Irving with the heart. Crusade are transitional landmarks in Kershner used to spike the pulpy The Hollywood's ethos. They attempt to Empire Strikes Back, Spielberg makes a expand the cultural awareness of com- clean, funny, close-to-structuralist analy- mercial films, struggling with generic sis of narrative practice. Insight about form while improving their political myth, not speed, is now the series' implications . This is nothing less than point. Hollywood glasnost but reviewers expect aesthetic reform and cultural The sensational timing and stunt revision to come from Young Turk inde- work in the second of the Indiana Jones pendents outside the official institution, trilogy, Temple of Doom , could not be: or to be neatly differentiated by an praised as anything but a dispassionate: acceptable passage of time-i .e. the exercise of craft; the increased speed generations that separate John Ford's and smoothness were at the expense of sensible, responsible cultural expres- sion. It was an infantile jamboree. But Now, everything that happens around Indiana Jones is something to think about. The mind races along with the heart.
This improvement is, doubtlessly, River Phoenix as Young Indiana. humorously explaining the oflgms of more instinctual than calculated , yet it's Indy's mythic characteristics - his also a rare sign of folk-pop development Carrying hisfather's scarred chin, his fear of snakes, his dex- in Hollywood. Spielberg's extraordinary diary, Indy comes terity with a bullwhip and his trademark mastery of formula and of structural face-to-face with fedora. (Spielberg audaciously casts tropes seems , on its own , to tend AdolfHitler in the Richard Young, an actor who resembles towards cultural inclusion, a global egali- middle ofa Nazi himself and Harrison Ford , as Indy's tarianism-the opposite of \"classical\" book-burning rally. amoral alternative role model.) This Hollywood's aesthetics. Back then , the western-cum-circus-train sequence gives perfection of escapist forms was a sys- knowingly constructed with allusions to Indy his first quotable dialogue of the temic social reflex-an expression of the the ' self-aggrandizing parochialisms of trilogy-''That belongs in a museum!\" country's political ideology. Films like the adventure film genre. There's a satir- The phrase describes his motives and Gunga Din , Lives of a Bengal Dancer, ical element in seeing white male Amer- tenacity, but it also reverberates as a Beau Geste, Drums Along the Mohawk, ican derring-do written so large. It statement of western acquisitiveness- The Four Feathers (and countless oth- becomes simultaneously tumid, neurotic as applicable to the Elgin Marbles as to ers) roused motor responses at the same and comic. But unlike Temple of Doom the pretend goodies, the Cross of Cor- time that they sanctioned belief in white and parts of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's onado and the Holy Grail, fought over in superiority and Western imperialism. never insulting or oppressive. the film. After E. T, the era's great popular Instead of presenting the opening Linking American adventure movies film , Spielberg tackled two \"minority\" sequence (with River Phoenix playing to the crusades shows a shrewd under- projects: The Color Purple, where he the teenage Indy) as a prologue, standing of what adventure movies are adapted Black American iconography to Spielberg compresses this antecedent designed to do culturally and politically. the Hollywood fantasy styles previously information into the main story. Manip- They're ideological war machines. reserved for white fiction ; and Empire of ulating narrativity this way is the pre- the Sun, where he showed absolute rogative of a famous showman - he's T his makes good on the Joseph empathy for both the Chinese and Japa- tweaking the audience's awareness of Campbell influence that Lucas nese positions in World War II. (It was, storytelling, stoking the engine of his botched in his Star Wars trilogy and in perhaps, less Sino-sympathy than Sony plot. The locomotive set-piece is a the little-people-as-the-third-world-mak- savvy.) These creative experiences must metaphor for narrative momentum , a ing-their-own-history in Willow. The have sensitized Spielberg to the differ- visceral anecdote economically and allusions to the big screen history of the ent, third-world readings that a non- American West are connected to the white viewer might give to Hollywood Middle East pursuit of the Holy Grail by genre films-consideration that never way of pre-Renaissance Italy. The occurred to old moguls who simply global/historical sleight of hand is pure wanted to conquer world markets. The philological wit. We see the Grail as an nationalist and racist biases in Holly- artifact that, like westerns and adventure wood cinema are appalling if viewed movies, confers beauty, power and intelligently today. The entire history of divinity upon its owner. These historical Hollywood fantasy reveals its corruption referents in the Menno Meyjes-Jeffrey in the persistence of white male heroism Boam script expose the fascist, quasi- and Western domination. Yes, Spielberg religious fervor that's been a part of the should have known better when he American adventure film from D. W. began the Indiana Jones series, but the Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and John general enthusiasm for Temple of Ford's The Iron Horse to Out of Africa Doom's overwhelming kinetics and and Mississippi Burning. shoddy anthropology also proved that most critics neither knew better nor Spielberg's formal expertise makes cared. The Last Crusade a beautiful title, unlike Temple of Doom, which suggests T he Last Crusade's full-color, wide- an amusement park ride-one of the screen shots of Monument Valley in the opening sequence are brilliantly most sophisticated adventure films ever clever revisionism: the setting, familiar made: its parts snap together with pre- from John Ford westerns , is the locus cise, dry cunning. It's the wised-up razz- classicus of American cinema's solip- matazz of an adult playing within the sism. Spielberg sums up the process of acceptable boundaries of world politics patriotic indoctrination with a joke: the and subverts the globetrotter caprice figures we see commanding this locale that the Indy series revives . Finally, in are a horseback Boy Scout troop. The The Last Crusade, the interplay point: American action in the primeval between Indy's boyish spirit and (his West is, essentially, child's play. But father's) scholarly, political rectitude movies that are proud of their national dramatizes the creative impulse thread- and racial biases are not kid's stuff, ing its way through this era of dwindling they're dangerous. The Last Crusade is western superiority. One response is to make a lovely but wan little myth study like Caleb Deschanl':!'s smart revision of 10
Spielberg directs Harrison Ford (center) and Sean Connery (r.) Daniel Defoe, Crusoe . Spielberg's ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ existence is a type of un co mfortable recent cinema, however, remains boldly truth that must be dealt with in all our fantastic while adjusting to global reali- Linking American perso nal versions of history. The anti- ties ; his transitional films confront and adventure movies to the Spielberg critics are all little Hitlers - cinema burners- who don't wa nt movies rewrite historical fiction . crusades shows a to tell the truth . Realizing how moviego- shrewd understanding ers turn legend into \"fact; ' Spielberg will \"M ovies and TV programs like no longer simp ly film the legend people The Jewel in the Crown and want to believe, because hi story is more complicated than movie myth s allow. A Passage to India are what I call ofwhat adventure 'Easterns ;\" Hanif Kureishi once told me, movies are designed to Regarding the sexist charges: Unlike citing the European counterpart to the do: They're ideological Raiders' Karen Allen or Temple of historical inaccuracies and political con- Doom's Kate Capshaw, Alison Doody's ceits of American westerns. Kureishi Elsa is the ser ies's first fema le who is not helpless ly feminine. In the larger was di sgusted at the imperialist arro- war machines. historical framework her \"villainy\" is as gance that only recognizes third world ambiguous as Indy's \"heroism.\" They're psycho-political peers. The comic use of cultures as things \" that belong in a Nazis surpasses Ernst Lubitsch's in To Be or Not to Be. It's historically apt for museum\" for the first world's delecta- technique without political conscious- Indy to say \"I hate those guys\" matter- of-factly; the film eschews sentimental- tion. The Last Crusade is in agreement: ness. When the once \"liberal\" Village ity on this subject, too, yet s how s prescience (with the benefit of hind- as Indy maniacally reaches for the Holy Voice recently printed film reviewer sight) in a closeup of an indestructible Nazi insignia. That shot forecasts the Grail his archaeologist father cautions, Georgia Brown's blithe admission of her next probable development and final so lution of the Indiana Jones saga: the \"Let it go: ' antipathy to and impatience with films War, which was on ly entertaining in the movIes. That advice, morally inspired , is also about people of color, it's clear that our Born a Jew and consecrated a film- politically enlightened. And it gains sig- film cu lture is mired in barely under- maker who's taken on the task of enter- nificance coming from Sean Connery, stood racism. Brown instead glossed taining the world , Spielberg has to who, 14 years ago in his best perform- over The Last Crusade's political themes maneuver between a personal political ance, as Danny Dravat in John Huston's to make knee-jerk accusations of sex- agenda and a respect for both Christian The Man Who Would Be King, acted out ism-the only ethical issue most white and non-Jewish , American and interna- tional cultures. Few men in the history the racist-colonialist vanity of the British critics seem to care about. of Hollywood have attempted this hon- empire-the cu ltural tradition Indiana The most audacious moment in The estly. Sp ielberg closes off a racist film Jones inherited , via James Bond . Of form with The Last Crusade because course, Huston's film updated Rudyard Last Crusade deals impudently with the today no one can conscientious ly make significance of history and myth: carry- movies the way they used to. ~ Kipling by making it a working-class fan- ing his father's diary, Indy comes face-to- tasy trapped inside the psychology of face with Adolf Hitler in the middle of a colonialism. Ultimately, the movie failed Nazi book-burning rally. Hitler-a media to break completely away from it. star and he knows it-autographs the Spielberg distances himself by riding the diary rather than burns it. By inscribing genre into the sunset. He's not looking the text that Indy has been using- for a Tequila Sunrise, the sour, decadent almost religiously-as a reverent guide renewal of Hollywood's past. for survival, Hitler puts his mark on a This \"letting go\" upsets people who historical record. This scene is worthy want to believe in John Wayne and the of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime: Hitler's raj and in the fast deployment of film graffito intrudes on a subjective text ; his 11
Spike Lee's - Spike L ee interviewed I t's the hottes t day of summe r in Fo r hi s role as Moo kie, the meande r- by Marlaine Glicksman Bed-Stu y, Broo kl yn, whe re the o nl y ing young bl ack m an who is th e film's thing hotte r are peopl e's te mpe rs pi vo tal c haracte r, and w ho cares less 1989 a number, another summer! Get and a ghetto blas te r not o nl y rocks the about his girlfrie nd and yo ung so n than Down. .. house but burn s it dow n. W hile Spi ke getti ng paid , L ee do nne d a fade-out fl at L ee's prev ious film s looked at the under- top and a go ld too th. C ine matographer WhiLe the bLack man 's sweatin , and crosscurre nts of m ale /fe male and Ernest D ic ke rso n o nce aga in stood loy- In the rhythm I 'm rollin ' light/dark-skinned bl ack inte ract ions, in ally behind the le ns while the d irecto r's hi s third feature, Do the Right Thing, bro th er, Dav id L ee, shot more of the Got to give us what we want! Lee takes a magni fying glass-unde r-a- e nigma ti c st ill s we saw in Lee's Sh e's Got to give us what we need! hot-sun loo k at black/white re latio ns and Gotta Have It. the result- no surpri se- is fire. Our freedom of sp eech is freedom of L ee's film co mes at a tim e whe n death Do the Right Thin g stars O ss ie New York C ity is a rac ial tinde r- Dav is, Ruby Dee, Danny Aie ll o, John box. T he alleged bl ac k ga ng rape of a ~ got to fight the powers that be. .. . Turturro, Ric hard Edso n, and L ee vet- white Wall Street wo man thi s Apr il in e rans Jo ie L ee, Bill N unn; Sa m Jackso n Central Park ange rs whites , smears From the heart it 's a start a work of and G ianca rl o Espos ito, alo ng w ith new- blac ks and trigge rs Do nald T rump to art co me r Ros ie Perez. It was shot in Bed- take o ut a full-page ad in Th e New York Stu y using an alm ost all-bl ack crew (a Times calling fo r rei nstateme nt of the To revoLutionize make a change. . . rarit y in th e fil m indu str y) d ur ing a death penalty (yet th e re was no such ~ are the same, no we're not the record breaking heatwave. o ut c ry whe n M ic hae l S tewa rt a nd same Elea nor Bumpurs -blacks to who m L ee 'Cause we don 't know the game. . . . To pave way fo r the p roductio n, L ee ded icates hi s film-di ed at the hand s of rejec te d th e usual p o li ce sur ve ill ance NYC police in separate co ntroversial inci- I'm hyp ed , pLus I'm amped from the Mayor's Office of Moti o n Pic- de nts). Th e Amsterdam News , favored Most ofmy heroes don 't appear on no tures and in stead in stalled me mbe rs of stamp th e Fruit of Islam . W ith th e m , he also SampLe a book that you Look and find cleared the block of three crack ho uses. nothin ' but rednecks Sets we re reco nstru cte d from gutte d buildings; be hind th e film's Korean fruit For 400 years if you check. . .. stand stood an empty shel l. A pizza par- lo r was e recte d , murals p a inte d , th e What we got to say, power to the peo- street cleaned up, a block party th row n pLe, no delay, and th e shoot was under way. T he Anti- oc h Bapti st C hurch served as ca nteen , Make everybody see, in order to fight whe re lunch o n so me days co nsiste d of the powers that be.. . . ribs and asso rted Loui siana hot sa uces. - \"Fight the Power\" by Public Ene my, [R adio Raheem's th e me in Spike L ee's Do the Right Thingl 12
as always, L ee's film s are to pical. A case befo re the Atlanta Fede ral Co urt high- lights th e he retofore unme ntio nable: a wo man is suing he r fo rm e r e mpl oye r, alleging di sc rimin ati o n based o n skin color. Both the wo man and he r e mployer are bl ack ; th e plaintiff, however, is light- skinned . There's a complete loss offaith in the judicial system, and so you want to hurl the garbage can through the window. by a bl ack readership, like ned th e han- Mookie and Sal (Aiello) have aman-to-man. D o the Right Thing , like L ee's other dling of the C entral Park rape to the film s, is a black inside r's perspec- Sco ttsboro boys , wh o' were falsely co n- L ee is no stranger to co ntroversy. Th e tive on th e co ntradictio ns and celebra- victed and nearl y executed for th e rape MPAA rated She's Gotta Ha ve It with an X tio ns of Africa n-Ame rican life. But L ee's of a white wo man in Alabama 50 years -later redu ced to R after it was recut- tale nt lies in creating characte rs that tran- ago. One mo nth later, afte r a 25-year-old beca use L ee in c lud e d a love m aking scend race and eco nomi c statu s and black man died in police custody, one scene with nude blac k bodies . In School speak to us all. Hi s Bed-Stu y co mes alive black wo man told The New York Times, Daze , L ee broke th e co nspiracy of with ne ighb o rh oo d people we kn ow : \"This is crazy. The re's go ing to be a riot. sile nce about prejudice between light- M o th e r S is te r (Dee) , m atr o n of th e So mebody is go ing to get killed and it'll and dark-skinned blac ks in his depictio n bl ock ; D a Mayor (D avis), block philoso- probably be us.\" of an all-bl ack co ll ege ca mpu s during phe r; Sweet Dick Willy (R obin H arri s), homecoming. School Daze also probes Coco nut S id (Frankie Faiso n) and M.L. Do the Right Thing takes up th e mes- blacks' attitudes toward aparthe id- (Paul Be nj amin), the Greek-cho rus tri- sage. No body wins whe n oppress ive heat inco me from So uth Afri ca he lp s keep the um virate who seek shelter from the sun and Raheem's radio causes a me ltdow n in sc hool running. And in o ne poignant in beer and be neath a beach umbre lla; Sal's Famous Pizzeria . Wh at bubbles up is sce ne L ee clas hes Afri ca-id e ntify in g and even the Pue rto Rican hel ado \"ieee\" not mozza re ll a but th e bad fee lings hid- co-eds with the ir Je rri-C urled , shower- man carting his big block of ice and syrup de n be neath . The film , which explores capped , local \"brothe rs;' who spout ani- bottles . It is a bl ock where Engli sh inter- th e bl ac k und e rcl ass, e nd s with two mos ity like ke tc hup : \"We're no t yo ur mingles with Spanish, wh ere salsa meets qu otes , the first by Dr. Martin Luthe r brothe rs. H ow come you college moth er- Raheem's rap and the air is radio-active King in favo r of non-viole nce, stating, fu cke rs think yo u run everything? You with Se no r Love D add y's We-L ove \"The old law of an eye for an eye leaves co me into our tow n year afte r year and show, as he does \"the nasty to ya ears\" everybody blind ;' co unte red by Malcolm take over. We were born he re, been here, with \"da pl atters dat matter;' with bl ack X's \"I am not again st viole nce in self- will be he re all of our lives, and can't find music ranging from rap and juju to reggae defe nse. I don't even ca ll it viole nce whe n wo rk 'cause of yo u.\" and soul- a bl ock where mu sic is a main it's self-defe nse, I ca ll it inte lligence.\" It is characte r. o n thi s q uote th at th e film cl oses . School Daze was criticized by fellow blac ks who did not want lo ng-hidde n N or does this film shy fro m hot topics dirty laundry o n view fo r white eyes . But within th e community. The triumvirate express anger and jealou sy over the Kore- ans' ability to establish a successful bu si- ness in the ir ne ighborh ood : \"Eithe r the m Korea n moth erfuc ke rs are ge niu ses or you black asses are just plain dumb! \" M. L. decl ares. It is also whe re, in a hilari- ous but biting scene, \"Yo u dago, wop, gar- lic-breath pizza-slinging Vic D amo ne\" is co unte re d by \" Yo u go ld-teeth , go ld chain-wearing, fried-chicke n-and-biscuit- eatin' mo nkey\"; whe re \"You slanty-eyed , me-n o-speak-Americ an , Ko re an kic k- box ing, son-of-a-bitch ,\" is me t by \"You Goya bean-eating, 15 111 a car, 30 in an 13
apartm e nt , meda-m e d a, Pu e rto Rica n what I'm say ing, but th e m ost important get tired of blac ks be ing k ill ed by cops, coc ksucker\" and \" It's cheap, [ go tta good th ing is to d o w hat's ri ght. If [ write ju st murde red by cops. And whe n the price fo r yo u, B'nai Brith , Jew ass hole !\" [t so m e thin g, a nd it co m es o ut in cops are bro ught to trial, they know is where the batte ry-powered message re hearsals th at so mething el se is bette r, carrie r Rad io Rahee m (N unn) blas ts the we change it. no thing's go ing to happe n. The re's co m- wo rd: \"Fight th e Povver;' a nd rules - ple te fru strat ion and hope less ness. alm os t to the e nd. Every time [ do a film , people as k me, 'Did yo u have full arti sti c co ntrol?' I T hey've see n it so m a ny tim es : L ee's film s d iffe r no t o nl y in th e ir mea n, She's Gotta Ha ve It , School Daze H owa rd Beac h , M ic hae l S tewa rt , bl ac k perspecti ve -in an indu stry whe re and Do the Right Thing - we m ade the l awana Braw ley, E lea no r Bumpurs . few bl ac ks have a vo ice -but also in th e ir film s we wa nte d to m ake. Nothing hap pe ns . T he e ight cops th at ability to look at both sides of th e co in at murdered M ichael Stewart-th at's where o nce. As in real life, his charac ters are I'm always true to what we got th at Radio Raheem stuff. Th at is ne ith e r all good nor all bad. And th e re in lies the ir- and L ee's -p ower: th e m inute I'm saying, but the th e M ichael Stewart cho ke hold. Except he es tab li shes our ide ntifica tio n with a we didn't have his eyeball s pop out of hi s characte r, L ee turn s hi m inside out to most important head li ke M ic hae l Stewart's did-[the reveal th e dar k side in us all . police and med ica l exa min e r! greased thing is to do his eyeball s and tried to stic k th e m bac k Lee's film s are un m istakabl y Spike: what's right. in the sockets. Th e re's a co mplete loss d irect , outspo ke n, no-h old s-barre d , te ll it of faith in the judic ial sys te m . And so like it is, po inted and hard-hitting. H e How did th e character of Smiley, the whe n yo u're fru strate d and th e re's no app roaches his subj ect matte r w ith out Dostoyevskian \"village idiot,\" develop ? hes itatio n, ea rn ing hi m a rep utati o n as oth e r outlet , it'll make yo u wa nt to hurl both aud ac io us and arroga nt. Do the H e's not in th e script at all. It came the ga rbage ca n through a wind ow. Right Thin g is not o nly an asserti on of about because R oger Sm ith , th e ac tor, black life b ut , im portantl y, of filmm ak- ke pt h o un d in g m e. So we we nt fo r If you read about an in cident like the ing . It str ikes yo u with th e speed , co lor so mething th at wo uldn't seem like it was and style of graffiti : an urba n, in-yo ur- just an afterth ought. one in Central Park in the Amste rdam face dec laratio n. ews and then compare it with T he Roger Smith , who plays Smiley, L ee's pro du c ti o n co mp a ny, Fo rt y doesn't have cerebral palsy in real life ? New Yorl-. Ti mes coverage there are two Acres and a M ule F ilm wo rks , 'is yo ung different perspectives . . . and bl ac k and located in the hea rt of No, th at was an act. We ju st wa nted Brooklyn , amid st Jam a ica n patty and him to be a diffe re nt charac te r. A co uple days later a bl ac k wo man spice pa rl ors and o th e r bl ac k-ow ne d was fo und rap e d a nd murd e re d in a businesses. earby, L ee run s film wo rk- Is Smiley a symbol of the black man park. No me ntio n of it- yo u didn't see shops fo r minim al fees fo r th ose who as handicapped. .. no thin g -n o head lin es in th e Post , ca n't affo rd th e tuit io n and bureaucracy of Newsday, Tim e , New York Tim es, o r film sc hoo ls b ut still have a dream . [ wasn't thinking abo ut th at. Wh o is Mookie, the chara cter you - M .G. play? His relationship with Tina , the mother of his child, is unresolved. We H oW did D o the Right Thing come don't really know what his hopes and his about ? dreams are, except wanting to get paid. [t s tarte d beca use of th e w ho le Th at's all it is . Ju st live to th e next H owa rd Beach in c ide nt. [ wa nte d to d o day: H e ca n't see beyo nd th e next day. so meth ing to add ress th at and rac ism. Mookie is an irresponsible yo ung blac k It's been reported several places that thi s yo uth . H e gave Tin a a b aby. H e fil m is the rete lling of H oward Beac h. changes, but up to th at po int he does n't T hi s is a co mpletely fictional thing. We rea lly care abo ut hi s so n or he r. too k four things fro m it : th e baseba ll Th e end of the fi lm is very powerful , b at , a b lac k m a n ge ts kill e d , th e and yet, somewhat ambiguous. How do pi zzer ia, a nd th e co nfli c t be t wee n you reconcile the two quotes, one from blac ks and [tali an-A me ricans. Dr. King and the other from Malcolm X? Well , I do n't think it's ambiguous. [ How did the ideas develop f or the think yo u reall y have to co nce ntrate o n film , and how were they influenced by what th e fin al cod a of the film is: the logistics? It 's hot material. Ma lco lm X qu o te, no t th e Ma rtin Luther King quo te . [ wa nted it to be o ne 24-ho ur pe riod , Malcolm X said , \" I am not against the hottes t day of th e summer. [ wa nted using violence in self-defense. I don't the film to take place on o ne bloc k in even call it violence... 1 call it intelli- Be dfo rd-S tu yvesa nt. So th at's all th e gence.\" Is the riot then, doing the right stu ff [ needed to wo rk w ith , to start thing? with . Fro m the re I could ju st go ahead [n that specifi c case it. is, becau se and do what I had to do. Moo kie and the people around him just Th e script d oes n't co me to life till yo u shoot it. Th e fini shed film's always go ing to be diffe re nt. I'm always true to 14
What's really troubling to some white has a point , because let's turn it around critics is when Mookie throws the gar- and say, 'L oo k, Sa l, you make all yo ur bage can through the window. Because money off black people, why don't yo u Mookie's one of those \"nice black peo- have enough se nsitivity to have at least ple:' I've heard a lot of \"\"hite friends tell one photo up on the wall?' So th at's the me, \"You're a nice black person, yo u're way the film is to me. Everybody has a not like the rest.\" They really followed point. Mookie, they liked Mookie. He was a likable character. [L augh s .] They feel And are you advocating the riot at betrayed when he throws the garbage the end? I'm not advocating anything. These are just characters , and thi s is how they Anytime you hear act. This is how they acted. And if we turn that around again, I think Sal has a Ed Koch talk about point , too: When yo u black people get 'savages\" and together and have yo ur own businesses , you can do what yo u want to do. ,'animals,' , you know I don't think that blacks are going to see this film and just go out in the he's talking about streets and start rioting. I mean , black young black males. people don't need this movie to riot. They've been doing it already. Just look at what happened in Miami the week before the Super Bowl, when those cops can through the window. Can't trust killed people. Now some people be them. The Moulan yan . Telling him to killed in New York City in summer by get a spear. [Screams. Laughs.] the cops, and this movie's not going to \"Moulan yan\" means eggplant. help. But it's going to be tense here in Haven't you seen any Martin Scor- New York anyway, with this whole may- sese movies? oral e lection coming up. And it's going to be hot, yo u know. That was the M~th Buggin Out (Esposito, r.). W ere the events leading to the riot whole premise of the film , that in 95 a way to say that even the \"nice\" degrees people lose it anyway. New York Daily News. That's a devalua- whites are willing to hide behind the Do you think that the \"wilding\" inci- tion of a black life. It's like black life doesn't mean anything, doesn't count for colonial power structure? dent in Central Park will affect the film's anything. Sal says, \"These people love my reception ? As long as they see, well, it's niggers killing nigge~s, they're animals anyway, pizza:' I mean, any time yo u hear some- I never even heard of the term \"wild- it's no news. But if a young woman-a young white woman, on top of that, one say \"youse people;' you know what ing\" before this movie came out. It's like from Wall Street-is raped in Central Park, you might as well spit in the face that is. they got this thing, they made it up, you of Jesus or something, because, you know, a great atrocity has happened. Although he seemed proud that know. I'm very sorry that the young This [black] woman was raped four everyone grew up on his pizza... woman got raped . It's a terrible act no or five days after the incident in Central Park. Raped and murdered! Nobody Yeah , but look, as soon as the shit matter who it happens to. But I think said nothing. Didn't see no outcry. I didn't see Donald Trump taking any started to happen , all of a sudden he the whole thing was blow n way out of fucking ads out behind that shit. starts saying, ''I'll break yo ur fuckin' nig- proportion. The media just whipped The fight in your film was between the most sympathetic white, Sal, and the ger ass.\" That didn't come out of thin air. white New York into a frenz y, and two least sympathetic blacks. For instance, Buggin' Out, the activist, It was there. It just had to be provoked . Donald Trump wasn't helping, taking couldn't get any people on his side except Radio Raheem. John Turturro's But it's still there, though. out them ads: bring back the death pen- openly racist Pino would have been his most Likely counterpart. Why provoke the fight in a seemingly alty-they're code words. Anytime you See, that's what Holl ywoo d would safe civil arena , a gathering place, hear Ed Koch talk about \"savages\" and have had . But that's too easy. Pino didn't pick up that stuff out of the air. Some of rather than on the street ? \"animals; ' yo u know he's talking about it had to have been taught him by his father, Sal. Well , th at's where a fight like that yo ung black males . It was the whole would start. In the public eye. Buggin' Bernhard Goetz thing right away. And Out's character is a direct reference to a definitely this is being tied into the may- couple days after the Howard Beach oral race. It'll come up again: a vote for incident. Some black leaders got [bl ack candidate] David Dinkins is a together and wanted all the black people vote for wilding. I ca n see a campaign in New York City to boycott pizza for a like that for sure. day. It was one of the most ridiculous White people fear that you are advo- things' I ever heard in my life. It was cating violence. stupid . Look, all they have to do is read the I mean , Buggin' Out has the right last quote of the movie. I'm not advocat- idea. But what's going to be the value of ing violence. Self-defense is not vio- having one black photo up on Sal's wall lence. We call it intelligence. People are of fame? Is that going to do anybody any full of shit. Israel could go out and bomb good? But on the other hand , he also anybody, nobody says nothing. But 15
Mookie and Mother Sister watch it all go down. I'm not advocating Stuy is like that. 1• It would be a fallacy to say that lower- when black people go out and protect violence. Self-defense i themsel ves, then we're militants, or income people always live in burned-out we're advocating violence. is not violence. u-e call buildings. These are hard-working peo- It seems you almost glossed over the it intelligence. ple, and they take pride in their stuffjust death of Radio Raheem. When Mookie like everybody else. So there's no need goes to see Sal at the end, he just says, When there were riots in New 'rork City, for the set to look like Charlotte Street \"Radio Raheem is dead.\" they were never on Fifth Avenue. There's never been looting in Lord & in the South Bronx. Yeah, but that's Mookie's character. Taylor's or Saks. It was on 125th Street. Another thing people ask: \"Where What happened that night was tragic, So, in a way, we do lose out. But people but Mookie's who le character is not don't feel they lose out, because they are the drugs?\" Drugs is such a massive going to change overnight. And the rea- feel they lost already. People have noth- subject, it just can't be dealt with effec- son why he's there that morning is ing to lose. tively as a subplot. You have to do an because he wants to get paid. He's been entire film on drugs. This film was not saying that the whole movie, yo u know, Before the riot they had the pizzeria, about that. This film was about racism. get paid, get paid. whatever that meant. But now, the street's the same except it's filled with The people in the film are very intelli- No, I don't think I glossed over it. debris and they don't have a pizzeria gent. The most ignorant person is Pino. What's the last thing that Love Daddy anymore. Is there a difference between violence in says? ''The next record goes out for the hands of the ignorant and violence Radio Raheem. We love you, brother:' They felt better about it , though. in the hands of the intelligent? They felt that for once in their lives, When Mookie breaks the window, it's they'd taken a stand. And they felt that Intelligent people will use violence to his decision to get off the sidelines, take they had some kind of say. They felt their advantage and ignorant people just a stand and really explode the situation powerful. use violence for violence's sake. . . .. Is that you? It's brought up several times in the But if you had really ignorant people We've always tried to take a stand no matter what. All creative filming does. I film that \"it s a free country. \" Your char- fighting back the riot would have car- don't think that we're going to change ried a different weight. anything. This is just a more explosive, acter brings it up at one point; Clifton, volatile subject matter. the yuppie who moves into Bed-Stuy, No. I think that it is good these brings it up. It's a very ironic statement. Is Mookie symbolic of art taking a people were intelligent. Because then it stand? Well, yeah. That was no accident. shows this is not just a case of random The street in the film-that was the violence. People knew exactly what they Of art? No. I leave that up to yo u cleanest street I've ever seen in New were doing. journalists . York. I made that choice because any time And if they had jobs? Mookie says A fter the riot, the only people who yo u hear people say Bed-Stu y, right lose out at the end of the film are away they think of the rapes , murders , several times, \"Get a job.\" the people who live in the neighbor- drugs. There's no need to show garbage He gets that really from working for hood. piled up high and all that .other stuff, because not every single block in Bed- Sal. \"Get a job\" - that's really a state- That always happens. Look at the ment on your manhood. Because every riots in '67, '68. Anytime there's a riot, the National Guard, police- whatever- man should be able to hold his own they always make sure they contain that weight. And what's the first thing Pino riot to the ghetto. And so the buildings says to the guys who are heckling him, they burn down will never be built back. whe n he's beating up Smiley? \"Get a job!\" Because a lot of these guys don't have jobs. Therefore, in Pino's eyes it means that they're not men. '~ II the Moulan yans are on welfare anyway.\" 16
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Mookie tells it like it is to Vito (Edson). conversation between M.L., Sweet Dick Willy, and Coconut Sid about the Y our screenwriting and filmmaking spoon-fed everything. Korean fruit stand. aren 't strictly narrative. They bear When School Daze was released, it a strong resemblance to a musical was lumped together with . .. No. How is that going to be \"my per- ception\" if black people were taken from score. Each character is a note that you Shoot to Kill and Action Jackson. Africa as slaves? I'm not imagining that. You must acknowledge that, but not use play and then bring all together for a They all came out on the same day. that as a excuse. crescendo at the end. They just think that the black audience When I was becoming a filmmaker I knew it wou ld be harder for me to be a We just don't like to have narratives is just one monolithic audience and has black filmmaker-to be a filmmaker because I was black. But I realized that that show. They're there, but we just no diversity at all- which I think is v<::ry you just have to be two or three-four- times better. The same thing as any don't want to be out in front, because disrespectful. There's no way Shoot to black athlete. They got to be better than the white boy to make the team. You when narratives are out in front , the Kill is a black film. Very few black peo- don't sit there and brood about it. This is something you just know, growing up audience will be able to guess from ple went to see that film. Sidney Poitier black. It's a given. The problem starts when people say that's a given and then watching the first ten minutes of the was the on ly black person in that movie. use that as the excuse. movie exactly where you're going to go. In your book, Do the Right Thing, I was reading an article in Premiere about blacks in the film industry. And We like to keep them guessing, just let you say that blacks can't be held respon- one person was quoted as saying Holly- wood films are hased on the premise there be work. I think that for the most sible for racism , that they're victims. It that a black man or woman can't lead you anywhere. Which is to say that part, not enough respect is given to seems that one's self-perception as a vic- whites' moral/psychological identifica- tion can't be with a black person. audiences' intelligence. They're just tim reduces one's power-as seen in the I truly believe a lot of people-a lot of executives -believe that. There's an age- old axiom in Hollywood that black is death at the boxoffice. Except for very few exceptions- Eddie Murphy being one. Look at Time the week they had Mississippi Burning on the cover. Alan Parker said the realities of Hollywood today demand that this film have two white leads. And I'm not going to hang Alan Parker about that statement. I think that he's just echoing what a whole lot of executives feel, the people who get pictures made. No matter what you do-you can be as big as Michael Jackson-they still look at him as black first. So, you really can't get around it. But it doesn't bother me. A t Cannes, the jury, led by Wim Out on a Wim Mookie wasn't enough of a hero. I think Wenders, gave no award to Do the that they saw Spike Lee throwing that Right Thing. Says Spike: When it comes down to between me and somebody else, they're going to give trash can through the window. \"We were robbed. it to the white boy. \"One day Wenders is going to get off ''Ten films received awards and we didn't get one. I feel we entered the best '?\\.t the party afterward, there's praise at the wrong stop on the A-train. He's of the festival. for [Soderbergh's] sex, lies and video- supposed to get off at 59th Street and \"Most people on the jury, minus Sally tape: 'Now we have the future of cin- he's going to miss the stop-it's going to Field-the biggest, most important film- ema: So I guess I'm not in the future- be exp ress -and get offon 125th Street. makers at the world's most important their future at least. And I'll be waiting for his ass. [Laughs.] film festival-I don't think they're ready for a young black filmmaker to get the \"Jim Jarmusch is a really good friend \"He's going to need wings 01 desire. Palme d'Or. I think that it's just reality. of mine. I love his work. But you know And you could say what you want, that Wenders gave him that award because I don't plaf'. to be in Germany because that's his protege. anytime soon:' ~ \" I heard that Wenders said that 18
larmusch s Triptych to Ride tery Train drops below par. This too, I'm afraid, is baloney. A triptych and last in what Jarmusch calls a trilogy with Stranger Than Para- dise and Down By Law, Mystery Train is the sort of finale that makes the entire body of work dance. Jarmusch's strug- gles, obsessions, favored camera angles and folk develop here in a way that bring the indications of the first films into focus. It is a lens to those earlier works, honing in on his fascination with emo- tions and events that happen simultane- ously, alone, in anyone place and moment. Mystery Train tells three stories that occur on one afternoon and night in Memphis, Tennessee: 1) A pair of Japa- nese teenagers with his-and-hers Walkmans (newcomers Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh) arrive to visit the Sun studios , where Elvis and other early rockers recorded their albums. 2) An Italian woman (Nicoletta Braschi , from Jarmusch's Down By Law) flies in from Rome to identify the body of her suddenly deceased husband and meets a young American woman (Elizabeth Bracco, from The Color of Money), who's just walked out on her British boy- friend. And 3) the boyfriend (Joe Strum- mer) and his two pals (Rick Aviles , host of TV's It's Showtime at the Apollo and Steve Buscemi , Slaves of New York), who get pukingly drunk, hold up a liq- uor store and impulsively shoot the clerk. Spending the night in separate, dilap- idated rooms of a seedy hooker hotel , each passes by the lulling radio of the night manager (a restrained Screamin' Jay Hawkins). As the drunk hooligans , last to arrive, stagger upstairs , the deejay (Tom Waits) drones the time, recalling the moments when we'd heard him announce the time over the Japanese All the Way to Memphis: )un (Masatoshi Nagase) in Mystery Train. kids' radio and in the room of the Italian and American women. With the radio as by Marcia Pally Simultaneity toys with a touchstone, Jarmusch makes the audi- ence replay and bear each character's I n 1984, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise dazzled audiences, our desire to get a story, a load none of the characters has winning the Camera d'Or at the handle on it. It taunts individually. It's a ploy he uses through- Cannes Film Festival and dubbing the you like a hooker you out the film. unknown director Young Turk of the Decade for a few months. His next proj- can't afford. A shot of the Italian widow looking at ect, Down By Law, suffered the usual the railway tracks down the street calls up both a shot of the tracks from the teenagers' window and through the fate of second films. (Permanent Jilca- windshield of the drunkards' car. When tion, an earlier work, remains a cult hit the American who jilted her boyfriend and relatively unknown.) Down By Law earlier one knee-jerked into the groin of considers having coffee in the diner had expectations to meet where Stran- poor Down By Law. Typically, after across the road, film audiences remem- ger had only surprises to offer. The well- Mystery Train premiered at Cannes, ber the diner from the inside and the known reflex of art observers to tsk-tsk many begin to cluck that Down By Law widow sipping her coffee. So it goes as that the new work is just not up to the is his best work-and that the new Mys- the drunks drive by an abandoned 19
movie theater that the Japanese kids ear- responsibility on the viewer. In a simpler Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi) and Dee Dee (Elizabeth Bracco): bedtimeltVY· lier walked past. Dramatically, Jarmusch narrative, we identify with one character sends a gunshot that jolts each room of or line of action; by pursuing one main because with each one, our need to get the hotel, marking a moment in early tale, the film creates at least the sooth- on top-or for a fantasy that puts us morning as clearly as the clock. The ing fantasy of order. With storytelling there-becomes more urgent. characters go about their lives sepa- like Nashville or Mystery Train, we inev- rately; we see them overlay each other itably try to contain all the strands being Thomas Pynchon, another master of without crossing. They all leave the next spun-though they may not weave into a simultaneity, uses it in works like V. morning having never met and on their coherent, much less comforting, pattern explicitly to terrorize his readers with own ways. -and our failure to manage them makes their powerlessness amid pervasive evil. us all the more desperate to keep trying. Less frightening but sadder, Faulkner is J armusch's fascination with simulta- In Nashville's final passages, the threads overwhelmed by our pathetic isolations. neity falls in the reputable obsessive of the story knit together, creating the Altman has the optimism of the Catho- tradition of William Faulkner, for illusion that the world is indeed a com- lic church, spooking viewers with the instance, in literature, and Robert prehensible, ordered place. Altman tumult of life and then providing relief Altman in film, most memorably in believes satisfaction in fantasy eases the both from fear and responsibility with Nashville . Both fleshed out their obses- chaos of life, an idea neither Faulkner the absolution of (apparent) order. Jar- sions by making audiences withstand nor Jarmusch indulge. musch is the gentlest of them all. He several concurrently running stories. offers us the simultaneous lives of his Unlike Akira Kurosawa's 1951 Rasho- Containing or managing unrelated characters with deadpan humor, as if to man, where varying versions of the lives is not a job we generally take on; say, it may be a nerve-wracking game same narrative are told, this is the telling directing the traffic among those closest but it is the only one in town. of different tales at times parallel, at to us is daunting enough. When we sit times crisscrossed. down to supper we rarely wrench our J armusch is first drawn to the rules of hearts wondering what the guy we saw the game in Stranger Than Paradise, Faulkner embellished the perspective on the bus half an hour before is doing when a distant cousin from Hungary of everyone in Yoknapatawpha County now, or what the cousin whose kid grad- (Eszter Balint) shows up at the dingy down to the mules; As I Lay Dying is uated from high school last week is up apartment of one very dry, sarcastic perhaps the most hair-tearing example. to at the moment. Such thoughts, if New Yorker (played with inimitable While characters flail in their individual they arise at all, are passing. Only lovers ennui by John Lurie). Together with a agonies, the reader watches them inad- torture themselves so, limping around friend of his (Richard Edson), they eat vertently drown each other and miss obsessed with their beloveds , absent for the same TV dinners at the same time cries for help for all the din each pri- the moment. Lovers tease themselves and travel around the country in the vately creates. The reader feels power- with the futile desire to know and some- same car but live almost opposing less. In a world so thoroughly out of our how hang on to every move their moments. She's having an Adventure in control, simultaneity toys with our beloveds make. It's part of passion's America while the guys sneer at it, con- desire to get a handle on it. It tempts us madness and, happily for our well-being, vinced that the country's gone to the with omniscience, with the possibility of is usually confined to that crazy state. dogs. The same differences of opinion grasping the whole picture, and then The storytelling we find in Faulkner or scrap their way to the surface in land- shows us up for having' no grip at all. It Jarmusch lures us into this madness. scape after landscape, like the predict- taunts you like a hooker you can't afford. Paranoid and desperate, we'll stay glued able spats of The Odd Couple. Not sur- to page or screen for the fantasy that we prisingly, Balint has the better time and Even before you know how Nash- may somehow direct the lives before us better luck on their travels. This is not ville's country-and-western singer will -and by implication, our own. We'll the frightening simultaneity of Altman collide with her fans, watching each life endure countless stabs of impotence or Pynchon but bemusement at con- ravel imposes an awful tension and current separateness. Jarmusch under- stands that if you think everything is rot- Are we having fun yet? Strummer, Buscemi and Aviles. 20
te n, it will be. pess imis m of th e Ameri can and Brit is h Wai ts and L urie out of the ir slum p. T he In hi s 1986 Down By L aw, a new ly- c haracte rs , creating the simultane ity and e nd of Down By Law is les s m e rr y. te ns io n in Jarmu sch's wo rk . A long li st of U nlike Strange r, the three sp lit ~p; no arri ved Ita li a n immi g ra nt ( R obe rt o morals might be draw n from this set-up fun in th e sun here. Be ni g ni ) a nd two n ati ves of New about cup s half e mpt y and half full , tak- O rleans (Tom Waits and Lurie) are each in g things fo r gra nte d , o r famili arit y Pop Amer ica na also s uggests a co m- framed for sep arate thuggeries and e nd breeding co nte mpt- but th ey wo n't do m on groun d for th e charac ters in Mys- up in th e sam e priso n ce ll. T hey e nd ure the film s justice. Jarmu sc h is no booste r tery Train , but i[ makes even less of a th e sa m e mi sca rri age of ju s ti ce a nd te lling di sp irited Ameri ca ns th at th ey bridge amo ng [hem th an in Down By make the sam e getaway from ja il , b ut as gotta have faith or to bu ck up and love L aw. Memphi s dr ips with Elvis me mo- in Stranger they live parallel, incomp ati- th e ir co untry, Go d bless it , or as k not rab ili a as tawd ry as Stranger's F lo rida ble lives. Be nigni , th e outside r, un stop- w hat it can d o fo r yo u. W ith out self- resorts . De ifie d like das hboard C hri sts, p abl y loves the U.S. w hil e th e two righteousness , he marvels at all the d if- Elvis hangs in every coffee s hop john Ame rica ns think it sucks. Like Balint , fe re nt sto ries go ing o n he re at o nce. We and ho[e l room, and our U.N. cas t of Be nigni takes the upbeat view of the ir ca n't change th e wo rld's ma ny crossed or charac te rs all recognize [he King. Fo r a travai ls and is the o nl y o ne to co me to a parallel purposes. moment i[ seem s [h at , however diffe re nt happy e nd . To ngue in cheek , Jarmu sc h [he ir experie nces, [hey s hare E lvis, artifi- has him meet a girl from the old country I n th e years sin ce Stranger, .J armu sch's (N ico letta Brasc hi , Be nigni's offsc ree n visio n has d arke ned -iro nica lly, sin ce c ial and ridi cul o us, ju st as Balint and wife)' get married and set up a ne ighbor- the foo tage, now in co lor, is b righte r. frie nds shared board wa lk k itsch . Yet [hi s hood Itali an restaurant. Hi s two frie nds Mystery Train is th e leas t hopeful of hi s bow to [he globa l vill age of pop culture re main vagabo nd s lost to separate roads. wo rks. In th e first of th e tril ogy, th e trav- soo n fall s on its face. e lle rs do manage to hoo k up with each Mystery Train , th e las t of the tril ogy, oth er, and Bali nt's plu ck rub s off a bit o n People do n't co me toge the r in Mys- preserves mu ch of the earlie r wor k. All he r g ru m pi e r fri e n ds . T h e fo re ig ner tery Train-'wi[hin eac h sect io n mu c h three film s, for instance, have charac- who's gung-h o for Ame rica gives a shot less ac ross segme nts of [he trip[yc h- te rs -like Lurie in Stranger and Nagase in the ar m to th e nati ves w ho aren't. unl ess one co unts [he fo rced cam arade- in Myste ry Train- w hose hum o r lies L aughing together, not mere ly co ncur- e ntire ly in th e ir insiste nt lac k of infl ec- re ntl y, at the kitsc h of F lo rida reso rts, rie of [h e escaping acc ide ntal vill ain s. ti o n . O th e r c harac te rs, th e impi sh th ey ope n up, and if th ey d on't prec ise ly Bu[ we know from Down By Law [his Be nigni in Down By Law and Kudoh in exc hange con fi de nces, Balint at least has no gri st. Certainly no o ne in Mystery Mystery Train , could charm gold from a chee rs he r b uddi es' spirits. As s he is Train cheers anyo ne e lse up. W he n [he le prec haun . In all three m ov ies , goosed by M iami-tac ky, so are they. In Jarmu sch's pe nchant for filming one shot Down By La w, Be nigni , Lurie and Wa its I[alian widow, for insta nce, in a breath- from several angles pe rvades, litera ll y also hit it off at mome nts, agai n by goo f- less m ome nt im agin es [h at s he sees s howi ng the audie nce how things look ing on America na, espec ially the silli- Elvis' ghost , he r Ame rica n co mpanio n from two or three simultaneous pe rspec- ness of idio ms and puns. At the outset , misses [he whole thing. T hey've shared tives . Be nigni is thrill e d at every new wo rd he learn s, while th e Ame rica ns groa n at not hi ng; ne ith e r fe el s less alo ne an d , A more impo rtant unity among the hi s infern al note-taking. L ate r, in th e unlike Stra nge r , [h e A m e r ica n ga in s m ov ies is th e ir e thni c mix . Like th e ab s urd , d eadp a n-d affy \" I sc rea m yo u nothing fro m he r foreign frie nd . Hungarian in Stranger and th e Italia n in sc rea m we all sc rea m fo r ice c rea m\" Down By Law, the Japanese teens and seq ue nce, Be nigni-d e lighted th at he In Mystery Train our jea ns, T-s hirts, Itali a n wid ow in Mystery Train are gets the joke - alm ost inadverte ntl y pulls Reeb o k s a nd roc k w ill no t unite th e seduced and delighted by Ame rica, and wo rld . In Jarmu sc h's earlie r wo rks, visi- so get the bes t fro m it. T he ir wac ky Jun and Mitzuko (Youki Kudoh) in search of Elvis. to rs showed Ame ricans w hat [hey see in e nthu siasm runs alongs ide th e mopey us, what is refres hing or inge nu o usly awful. T he characte rs in Mystery Train are bl ind and deaf to o ne ano[her-bur [h ey [rave l, happily or no t , in [he same frames of film . @ 21
Steven Soderbergh, King ofCannes Truth or Consequences Steven Soderbergh interviewed It was Soderbergh's first film, and at dent who had confidence to spare and a by Harlan Jacobson 26 he is Cannes' youngest winner of the honeymoon couple he didn't even know Palme d'Or. And yes , he came from and who looked like they'd only just met \"[ always think that everyone else is Nowhere (Baton Rouge, La.), and the at the wedding. They'd have choked on having a really good time, and I'm not film cost Nothing ($1.2 million). And their crust if only they'd seen what having anywhere near as good a time as the buzz has moved from the inside of Soderbergh does to young marrieds in they are.\" -Steven Soderbergh , in his head out into the world. the most stunning update from the Sex Cannes, before winning the Palme d'Or Wars front since Mike Nichols' weighed \"Now [ think that everyone else thinks Past Palme winners have been swept in with Carnal Knowledge two decades I'm the one having this really great time away in the blue sea of May to wherever ago. and resent me for it.\"-after winning the heroes dine in Elysian fields, not to be Palme d'Or seen again save for the next day's page In that film, Nichols drew and quar- one photos. Not Soderbergh. He hung tered the male psyche-the project was F ederico Fellini , La Do~c~ .Vita , out in the Majestic bar after the cere- limited to investigating the limited emo- 1960; LUIS Bunuel , Vzrzdzana, mony, looking like he was trying not to tional development of the educated, 1961 ; Luchino Visconti , The have the good time the sore losers were upper-middle class American male. On Leopard, 1963 , and Death in Venice , sure he was having. Gandhi swept ants the one hand was Art Garfunkel's sim- 1971; Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow- out of his path; Soderbergh apologizes pering worship of child-women; on the Up, 1967; Robert Altman , M*A*S*H, to water for drinking it. other, Jack Nicholson's fire-breathing, 1970. And so on and so forth goes the rampart-battering assault on the trusting parade of winners of the Palme d'Or at The next day he made the obligatory hearts of one Rapunzel after another. Cannes, the crossroads of cinema aspi- trek to the Colombe d'Or restaurant out Sixties men-meaning college boys- ration and art, right on down through of town (Yipes, grownups!), but that shuddered for their futures: the choice Coppola, Scorsese, the Tavianis, Olmi, night there he was havin'g pizza in a was either down on their knees to vir- Schlondorff, Kurosawa Wajda, Wenders sidewalk cafe with a Miramax vice-pres i- gins, or paying witch doctors to dance and Steven Soderbergh, sex, lies, and the hard dance. videotape, 1989. Soderbergh arrives on the scene 20 Soderbergh? years later to choreograph two men- Originally slotted to screen in the and two women . Each pair starts out on Directors Fortnight, the post-'68 sidebar different ends of the continuum that event meant to house the upstart kids runs between appetite and hibernation, outside the main competition, Steven between the truthful self and the deceit- Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape ful, between power and paralysis, not only ended up in competition , it between sex and love. Moreover, since staggered Cannes by stealing three top Nichols' time the Invisible Woman has prizes: Best Film, Best -Actor for James died: what women accept in lieu of inti- Spader and the international critics' macy is as important here as what men pnze. do to avoid it. The matched pair of scenes I liked best involve frigid wife Andie MacDow- 22
r Annie (Andie MacDowell) in sex, lies, and videotape: facing the truth. ell, slipping upstairs in the middle of the \"On the one hand, it Y our film is about the way peo- night to observe the sleeping form of her ple leave each other, the way husband's long-lost college friend, James they escape or drive each other Spader, precisely as she comes to realize away. Is this drawn from personal he has awakened something sleeping inside her; and her rising from bed to may seem like a risk. experience? confront husband Peter Gallagher with Yeah , 1 guess so. 1 drove the most her fears he's having an affair with her sister, Laura San Giacomo, whose voice On the other, we've got important woman in my life to leave sinks about three octaves lower than because 1 didn't want to be in the rela- legal and makes the blood run hot. four young people tionship but couldn't cop to it. I'm still sex, lies, and videotape sees the fron- tier of filmmaking not in the stars or the drenched in sexuality trying to figure why 1 couldn't just say, \"I sequels but in the small European and don't want to be in this. 1 want to be out sometime American independent tradi- tions of investigating the way we love in a film that can of it:' There was nothing wrong with the each other, or fail to. There's no room person that made my life uncomfortable. for space cowboys here; nice guys finish be madefor 1 just wasn't ready to deal wi th the with busted lips but whole beings. $1.2 million. .. \" responsibility. So I was very deceptive There are hits and misses in the about how I got out of it. And then once film-the character of the husband I was out of it I couldn't even allow it the seems more an idea of a depersonalized twit rather than the complicated force dignity to die properly. 1 kept stringing it that might attract one woman to the altar and her sister to bed. No dinner out and not letting it go and then 1 got could survive a husband saying about his wife, \"Usually, Annie achieves a critical very real. He has showed us our skin, involved with some other people and-it mass with the salt ...\" Their mismatch is too apparent, and so the dice seem too how it wants to be touched with truth was just a mess. I look back on it and loaded with dynamite to warrant sur- prise when the explosion comes in the and beauty and eternity, and the conse- I'm stunned that I had turned into the third act. quences of that time called our twenties . kind of person I despise. But if Soderbergh has knit the film together too tightly at times with lines of That is to say, it is about the end of the In the film I tried not to be judgmen- dialogue that set up the next move or visual signs that echo -in the pivotal first time, and the beginning of wisdom. tal. However you act, accept the conse- moment the wife shows up in the same black t-shirt and blue jeans favored by sex, lies, and videotape is not Bertoluc- quences . I don't have control over how the friend-he has tried very hard to be ci's Last TaY!go in Paris , which mixed other people act. And I don't like movies myth with the lure of redemption , but where a relationship, which has a lot of then what is? grey areas, is presented definitively as Perhaps what disarmed the jury in bad . If you're dealing with a cop movie, Cannes, chaired by Wim Wenders - maybe you need to have some definite whose own masterpiece, Wings of delineations . But then again, maybe not. Desire, is a hymn to the reunion of men J.tere there certain movies that served and women, of the two Germanies, of as guideposts ? the past and the present-wasn't simply No, not really. There were two prob- Soderbergh's mapping out a small square lems when we were trying to get the film of the terrain. But, like Wenders , he too off the ground. One was that it didn't wished aloud that in the end we find synopsize well. And there were no refer- each other and heal. -H.J. ences I could make to other films in that 23
classic Hollywood shorthand to bring an \"I looked for the bottom and realized there image to somebody's mind . I really wasn't one. It was just a spiral until I either didn't know how to describe it. There were films that I grew up with - The Last Picture Show or Five Easy Pieces- dropped dead or got hit by a car... \" about relationships , but they were about different things . It was interesting to see the male and female psyche put up onscreen and watch you chart the way for a meeting ground. There is a kind of movement in it.. . I'm a big believer in movement, any kind of movement, as long as you feel as though yo u're movi ng somewhere. There have been times in my life where the movement turned out to be back- ward but I needed movement. When we talk about women leaving men more often, maybe it's just a realization that they don't have to settle any more. I don't know how right it is for you to ask someone to change for you. You've either got to say, \"Fine, I can live with you;' or you've got to get out. I approach relationships now with a longer view than I used to. I didn't used to have a view at all. Each day it seemed to just spring into full bloom that day. And now I slow down-I used to get involved really fast. You know, sex clouds everything. It's hard to be objec- tive when a physical relationship is pleasing. I've been very conscious of James Spader: happiness is a warm video. I realized it could go on indefinitely. I keeping sex out of the early stages, and looked for the bottom and realized there I'm co nvi nced this is something substan- the first place ? wasn't one. It was just a spiral until I tial. It hasn't really worked yet. I don't know. The lies were specific either dropped dead or got hit by a car. That's what really woke me up. And I The film is , up to last August, the only to my personal relationships with put a very cold and abrupt stop to all of it. sum total of what I've been able to put women. If I'd been able to conduct my together and figure out. personal life the way I conduct my pro- How'd you do it? fessional life, I'd be in great shape, I confessed to everyone and quit hav- After we finished the film I went to because I'm ve ry straightforward ing contact with anybody. Gradually, New York to reestablish contact with professionally. when I started feeling a little bit better, somebody-the relationship that led me to write sex, lies. . . And it was good, we I can theorize for days about how I piece by piece I reestablished contact. I were able to be friends. We went to see was lying to the people that I was was sorry I had hurt them and put them Italian-American Reconciliation [writ- involved with. Part of the larger problem through a difficult situation that I was ten and directed] by John Patrick Shan- has to do with my relationship, or lack of trying to fix in private. It's taken a long ley. The people were all compulsively a relationship, with my mother, who is a verbal and emotional. That's very Ital- great lady, a nice lady, I just don't have a time. ian. By comparison my film seems so relationship with her. It's just not there. Did you do this on your own? repressed. It's all about people who will Yeah. I had earlier tried to go into not say what they're thinking unless I was very intent on getting accept- they're really pushed into a corner and ance and approval. And then once I got therapy and it was a mess. I lied to my poked. I realized how much I was like it, I went somewhere else and got it. I'd therapist. I went to three sessions and the film , how much I'm still struggling think , \"Gee, if I can get such and such walked in one day and said, \"Look, I've with the distance I feel between myself to like me, then I must be okay. I must got a handle on this. I'm making real and other people, and my feelings, and be attractive. I must be dynamic:' And, progress and I feel really good about how difficult it still is for me to feel and of course, once you hooked her you'd myself' I mean, I just lied my ass off. not instantly analyze. look for somebody else. It just fed itself. And he only charged me for 15 minutes. He said, \"That sounds great.\" What did you think would happen to And then I compounded it with stu- pid, romantic notions of self-destruc- Was this down in Baton Rouge? you if you told lies? tion . The starving artist phase is Yeah. Maybe the therapists aren't bullshit. You know, it is not- fun. At some good down there. I can't hold him Pardon me? What do you mean? level, I was interested in how low can I responsible, I lied to him constantly. When I told them what did I think? go, how far is this going to go? And then Why do you think you began lying in 24
TWENTY-SIXTH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL This year's New York Film Festival poster is a I enclose S lor _ _ _ _ _ _ 26th New York bold graphic statement from the well-known Film Festival posters. designer, Milton Glaser. Silkscreened in five SIGNED UNSIGNED colors, Glaser's design harks back to the Art Deco era. Name The poster measures 30I/x45~'., and is silk- Address screened on high-quality stock. It is suitable for framing. The signed, limited edition is $75; CitytStatelZip an unsigned limited edition poster $35. Price includes postage and handling. Daytime Phone Please allow 6 weeks lor delivery. Offer good in US only. Mail check or money order payable to : Film Society 01 Lincoln Center. 140 West 65th St .. New York. NY 10023 . You may use postage-paid envelope in this magazine .
Soderbergh (I.) and actor Peter Gallagher go to tape. How could he help me? How did you get it going? even though I think voyeurism, has Maybe he knew anyway. It was Bob Newmyer's at Outlaw Pro- mostly negative connotations. I guess it I hope so, for his sake. ductions contact at RCA-Columbia should. I don't know. It sort of becomes a game. Did you Home Video that got that deal happen- ing. And Nancy Tenenbaum negotiated That's show biz. think the women ever knew you were the deal with Overseas Entertainment. Well, yeah, I guess I always think of lying? The script was pretty much there, and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom [19601 .... John Hardy of Baton Rouge was going Yeah, but sometimes Spader had the Yeah, one of them did. The most to produce it. I'd taken the script first to annoying moral superiority ofa priest at important one did. But, boy I was wrig- Nick Wechsler. Nick took it to Musi- confession. gling, I was wriggling. I could backpedal film, but they dropped out. It was Bob I never thought of it that way. Only like you wouldn't believe. who thought maybe I had something because I had a complete lack of reli- that more than ten people would see. gious upbringing. My parents were both Whyii you start? His tastes are very commercial and lapsed Catholics and so I grew up I had great parents. My parents are mainstream in a good way. When he believing whatever I wanted to believe. divorced but it was not an ugly thing. I asked to read the script, I said, \"Bob , it's Did you live with your mother once had a very good upbringing. Yet appear- not that you're stupid, it's just not your they divorced? Or your father? Did you ances were important and things were kind of movie: ' He read it and said, \"I go back and forth? sublimated to maintain a certain image. couldn't put it down. I had to find out Well, kind of. My parents physically I told everybody what I thought they what was going to happen :' separated when I was 16, and when I wanted to hear. It was never consistent was 17 I graduated high school, so I left because everyone wanted something dif- H OW did you know that women get to go to Los Angeles for a while and I ferent. It got to a point where I thought up in the middle of the night and eventually came back but lived outside this doesn't work. It's stupid that one watch us while we sleep? the house. organism consisting of ten zillion cells What made you want to be a film- thinks it can relate to another organism I don't know. Even when I was being maker? that has ten. zillion cells. But that was a pinhead I still had my ears open. I'm I had seen a lot of films as a child. just in a particularly dark period and pretty observant by nature. My dad would let me see anything. now I understand how it can work. What does he do? Tell me a little bit about video and He's a professor of education at LSU. H oW were you able to get some- why you used it as a metaphor for And he enrolled me when I was 13 in an body to believe thatthis could be distance. animation class. I could draw really well a picture ? but it immediately became apparent that Video is a way of distancing ourselves it was too much work for too little result. Well, on the one hand it may seem from people and events. We tend to I made two things that were six seconds like a risk. On the other, remember that think that we can experience things long and said, ''This is bullshit:' And so we've got four relatively young people because we watched them on tape. For I just started shooting. drenched in sexuality in a film that can Graham [Spaderl this was an aspect of I'd take the camera off the copy stand be made for $1.2 million . It was a risk myself taken to an extreme measure. He and go shoot live action and I was good. only because we had no domestic theat- needs the distance to feel free to react I had four years of access to equipment rical distributor and the video was without anybody watching, which, I already owned, which is the big thing guess, is the definition of voyeurism, that you entice a distributor with. 26
doing all phases of everything with no But that 's not in the Chicago Man- ual. pressure. I feel bad for these people in \"People in film schools in L. A. have their What lowercase? They probably spe- film schools who get chosen to make a cifically rule against it. But I can go projects screened in either way on the comma thing, and in film. In L.A. they have their projects front ofthe industry. Your career could be sthis case I want two commas. screened in front of the industry. Your o is Cannes scary or fun or what? over before you're It is so weird . I can't explain to career could be over before you're a jun- aJ.un.lor... \" you how weird it is. ior in college. Are you scared? I learned at 15 that I can't make films I don't know. It was beginning to dawn on me this afternoon: Denys about other films. And after making a Arcand has a film here, Bertrand Blier, Spike Lee, who I like a lot. And then I couple that people actively hated, I learned by trial and error to make things that are more personal. Now the stakes are so high you can't learn. Super-8 was a great format. I'm sorry it's gone. I made things technicall y every bit as good as sex, lies ... when I was in high school. Did you rehearse a lot on sex, lies? Everything for the filmmaker, producer, actor & film buff We rehearsed for a week before we shot and I rewrote dialogue. I tried to make sure that I didn't let the camera dictate the performance. I'd walk on the Samuel French set, we'd block the scene, and then I'd decide the camera angles. Figuring out Theatre & FilIn Bookshops where to put the camera is just insanely easy-if you watch, it becomes self-evi- dent. To do it the other way around PLAYS, and BOOKS Hollywood: on filM, THEATRE and the 7623 Sunset Blvd. seems really stupid. MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY (213) 876-0570 You hire the best possible people and you let them perform. I tried to help. Most of the time they were doing things Business of Film Film History Studio City: 11963 Ventura Blvd. better than I could ever have thought. Documentary (818) 762-0535 There were a couple of times where I'd Screenplays Samuel French, Inc. just shut everything down and the actor Screenwriting Music Play Publishers and and I would sit there for a half an hour Professional Directories Video Authors Representatives and talk it through until we were both Reference Television comfortable about what had to happen Cinematography Opera and why. I don't know that I'll be able to Animation Dance do that on the next film. Special Effects _ Directing Some people say, \"Gee, I want to Directing Biographies know more about why they're the way Film Theory Film Genre they are.\" I kept their backgrounds to a Acting Largest selection minimum because there's a whole other of PLAYS film there. When John (Peter Gallagher) sits in the world down and watches the videotape of his ...and more wife, what does he see? You should ask Peter. John was the least well drawn of all the characters , and he was unafraid to look terribly unsympathetic. He came up with a lot WORLDWIDE MAIL ORDER of stuff-the plant bit, etc. phone: (800) 8-ACT NOW (US) (800) 7-ACT NOW (CA) Why did you lowercase the title? mail: 7623 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood,CA 90046 It just looked better. I looked at it in send for a copy of our current capital letters and it looked wrong. Also, FILM BOOK CATALOGUE (free) or BASIC PLAY CATALOGUE ($2 .25 postpClid) I have two commas in it. I'm with the VISA • MC • Am EX Chicago Manual of Style on that one. It really just looked better? It does aesthetically. It wasn't e.e. cummings? No, I just thought aesthetically it looked better. That's all I care about how things look. ' 27
True video confessions from Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). that the guy has completely lost it. And so now I have the fear that everybody flipped through the program and there are having more fun? else is having more fun than me. Maybe was our page with my name and, you I always feel like other people are I'll be at a party someday and acciden- know, it was in French. I began to really tally back into the room where every- shake. having more fun wherever I am. Espe- body is that's having a great time. cially at parties. Maybe they are. It's like It feels like it's more exciting happen- the Stephen Crane story about the para- Well, everybody needs to be mirrored ing to somebody else than me. I feel like noid poker player, thinks he's being and told that they did good stuff. Spike Lee's having a much better time. I cheated. He gets into an argument with feel like it mu st be much more exciting another guy, and the guy shoots him Too much of it's harmful. I realized I to be Spike. dead . And then we find out that he was could just do the festival circuit for the being cheated. But the point of view is next 8 months. You walk in, they treat Why do you think that other people you like royalty and everything you say- to your face anyway-is taken very seri- ously. And that's horrible. It's like being a rock star. That's why I'm trying to get out of L.A. quickly. Where are you going to go? To Virginia. Charlottesville. Louisi- ana is going down the toilet at an amaz- ing speed and I just can't go back and live there anymore. I have time to think . I want to adapt and direct this novel that we set up at Universal. What's it called? The Last Ship by William Brinkley. It is sexual tension taken to an extreme you can't imagine. It's about men and women on a Naval destroyer that sur- vives World War III. Once they find some place habitable, they start over again. But since there are three times as many men as women , the women have all the control and draw up a plan for how this is going to work. After sex, lies.. I thought, \"Where do I go with this subject now?\" Reading The Last Ship was great. It's perfect material for me to do, I thought. And so Bob Newmyer at Outlaw bought the book last year and was on the verge of signing to do it as a mini-series. And I said, \"Give me four weeks to get a big producer attached:' I met with Sydney Pollack, who had seen sex, Lies... and he agreed to be executive producer. He pitched it to Universal-it was like playing with Michael Jordan, and you're the rookie. You give Michael Jordan the ball and he dunks it. You know, I walked into the room, I said ten words, Pollack pitched for 15 minutes. The guy goes, \"Great , let's do it:' And we leave. And that was it. Do the men survive? Yes, they do. Although the American men are sterile, as we find out. They've been irradiated. But a Russian sub shows up at this island and they've been underwater the whole time, so they can .... They're pretty fertiLe. Yeah, and they haven't seen women in a long time. ~ 28
• ection
Life \",ith by Richard T. Jameson I t's 11 p.m., the home taper's witch- Zanuck, Jesse/ and Warner conference. lived in a rural Western Pennsylvania ing hour. Having spent the latter home with a tall antenna could pull in part of the evening weeding com- field. (Worse, it might be something channels round the dial: three each from mercials out of Flight Commander (i.e. unwatchably English.) Some of the Pittsburgh , Cleveland, and Youngstown, the original, Howard Hawks version of minors-Republic, say, or Eagle-Lion- plus acceptable-to-wonky signals from The Dawn PatroT) on Turner Network had turned out livelier fare, even the Steubenville, Wheeling, Johnstown, Television, the Paladin of the Lost Reel occasional memorably good film. But and, sometimes late at night, London, pops the cassette out of his VCR and pickings were slim till the major studios Ontario (birthplace of Jack L. Warner. considers a crucial decision: what to set released their pre-1949 holdings to TV in And did I mention that the Warner the timer to record overnight. the mid-Fifties. brothers opened their first nickelodeon A&E is running the great Black Power How green was my valley then. Hill- episode of Buffalo Bill. Sandra Bernhard top, actually. A nascent film critic who will be back to put the moves on Letter- man again. Siskel and Ebert may get down and dirtier in their latest interview with Bob Costas. The twilight bonus feature on AMC is an early Anthony Mann, Rebecca DeMornay is taking her clothes off on HBO, and Cinemax is offering a rare look at Jack Nicholson's Drive, He Said. All very enticing. Still, there's no con- test. At 1: 15 a.m. (4: 15 East Coast time), TNT has The Finger Points, (Warners-First National, 1931). Richard Barthelmess, Fay Wray, and Clark Gable midway through his Year of the Gang- ster. Script by John Monk Saunders, W. R . Burnett, and Robert Lord ; dir. John Francis Dillon. One of at least three 1931 movies to embellish on the gangland murder of newspaperman Jake Lingle. Definitely program it , and on both VCRs, because Juan-Carlos Selznick can't get TNT in Chico, Califor- nia , and he wouldn't want to miss this one. B ack when the earth was young and Dancing L:ldy (1933). cable was something they wove ~ uspension bridges with, most local TV stations showed a lot of old movies. Around the time Eisenhower became president, the late show-and the mid- morning movie, and the afternoon movie, and the dinner movie-was prob- ably a Poverty Row groaner from a defunct studio like Tiffany or Chester- 30
in my hometown of New Castle, Pa.?). \"movie channels:' MEMO To TuRNER Different stations bought different Still, the selec tion among vintage • Thanks for using vintage MGM film packages from Fox, Columbia, RKO films tends to be skimpy. Big-name clas- and Warners shorts to fill out feature Radio, and so on (though the RKOs had sics with across-the-board appeal-the time slots, instead of pruning the fea- had a \"C&C Movietime\" logo slapped in same older titles one has no trouble tures to fit a tighter grid. And the place of the Radio tower by a tire manu- finding at the video store-get prime- Academy Awards eve program of facturer who'd bought up the library). time treatment; scarcely an issue of TV Oscared featurettes was a nifty idea. One learned to anticipate which channel Guide comes with out displ ay ads for But how's about making the shorts part would repeat which movies from which Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Philadel- of the announced schedule? Some stel- studio. Hence, over the space of several phia Story , or Singin ' in the Rain. But lar directors-to-be (Zinnemann, Siegel, years, a fellow could see My Darling apart from this Five-Foot Shelf of Holly- Losey) cut their teeth in this area, and Clementine , Gunga Din , It Happened wood perennials , the vast majority of buffs would appreciate a better-than- One Night, and The Treasure of the studio holdings are given short shrift. It's random chance to see their work. Sierra Madre eight or nine times each, cheaper and easier for programmers to along with hundreds of other Old Holly- fill their non-Casablanca timeslots from • The 1927 Ben-Hur was a great wood titles less distinguished but the public domain pool, that Sargasso Easter offering. May we anticipate scarcely less important for the sense of Sea of titles that have slipped copyright some of the other classic silents at historical and aesthetic context they control in the interveni ng. decades and your disposal? Just for starters: Greed, become universally accessible. True, Noah 's Ark, The Big Parade , Show supplied. some of these movies (His Girl Friday , People, The Third Degree, Flesh and There are worse ways to acquire a It's a Wonderful Life , Detour, Scarlet the Devil, The Student Prince, White Street) are scarcely chopped liver -even Shadows of the South Seas, The Wind, film education. But by the time I started if, duped from a dupe of a dupe, they Love, The Unholy Three , The Crowd, to get official about it , in the mid-Six- often look like it. But a programming La Boheme. ties, the late-show cinematheque had menu predicated on nothing but the suffered severe cutbacks. Talk shows took a lot of former movie slots. • Programming different versions of the same property back to back is gutsy, but by what peculiar logic do you choose to show the remake of the film first-Summer Holiday before Ah, Wilderness!, say, or Rod Taylor's Trader Horn before Harry Carey's? Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and Hal Wallis (I-r) accidents of copyright law makes for a • A TNThr programs his VCR for a bizarrely skewed, ultimately repetitious favorite late-night film, goes to sleep, Old movies had become older still, and film diet. and wakes up to find that the movie of course most of them were in black- started ten , 15 minutes before or after and-white. Color had TV by the cath- E nter, to the strains of \"Tara's the appointed time. Or that another odes, and local TV programmers who Theme,\" Atlanta mogul Ted film has taken its place. Or that entire did still have movie slots to fill preferred Turner, announcing the creation of a late nights of programming have been to run last year's made-for-TV movies, new television network for the autumn shifted. Frustration is the lot of any even a \"feature\" cobbled together from of 1988. It is not, on the garish surface fanatic, but if you've scheduled a movie series episodes, instead of a venerable of it, a heartening proposition. Turner's for 3:25 a.m., why the heck don't you Hollywood original. All in all, it was a gap-toothed grin is affixed dead center show it at 3:25? good time to discover film societies. on every film buffs dartboard. This is the guy, after all, who hocked his two • We know you have to make Fast-forward to the recent past, just already existing networks (CNN and about a year ago. The home-screen cel- \"SuperStation\" TBS) to buy the motion money, and you know that all VCRs luloid situation is somewhat improved. picture and television producing arms of There are more late-night news and talk MGM in 1986 , promptly disposed of the have fast-forward buttons , but still ... shows than ever, but movie-movies have Culver City backlot, and set about a bar- recovered some of the ground from TV barous campaign to computer-daub five-minute commercial breaks? Your movies. Specialized cable services and even some local stations without net- 3: 1 ratio of programming to commer- work affiliation bill themselves as cials can make even a short drink of water like Fog Over Frisco seem longer than both Ben-Hurs. -R.J. 31
salmon flesh tones and fluorescent hab- smattering of old MGM-produced TV commitment to film preservation , erdashery onto some of the best-loved series, \"Our Gang\" one-reelers, and car- Turner has authorized the striking of black-and-white movies this country toons from Metro, Warners , and Fleis- new safety prints of many of the films in ever produ ced. Now he proposes to cher. Weekdays, romantics are assured his archive. This not only ensures the make the 3,500 title MGM film library of a \"Love Affair\" at 9 a.m. Eastern survival of endangered titles but also, in the programming base of his new 24- many cases, enables them to be seen to hour station , TNT. time, \"Song and Dance\" aficionados greater advantage than at any time since vicariously trip the light fantastic at they were first released. The very mention of \"MGM library\" noon , comedy buffs play it \"Just For raises purists' hackles. Th anks to corpo- Laughs\" at 2 p.m., and \"The Big Pic- Because of the comparatively poor rate mergers and transfers and redistrib- ture\" takes its pick among the genres quality of early telecasting, the contrast utions of the past decade, thi s collection at 8-often as not , something presti- range of many films of the Thirties and of film s includes not only movies made gious enough and/or familiar enough to Forties was routinely degraded to pro- at MGM but the output of RKO and (pre- warrant the attention of the demon duce more even broadcast results. Six- Fifties) Warner Brothers. In an era when colorizer. teen-mm film societies and film classes virtually any U.S. film is essenti ally an were stuck with the same compromised independe nt produ ction and the perso n- At $250,000 a pop, even Ted Turner prints. Films seen only through a gray alities and styles of the studios repose can't afford to colorize every one of smudge darkly by my and later genera- principally in th e ir publi city depart- those 3,500 films at his disposal. But tions are now available in black and ments, the lumping together of studio s Turner's not a man to waste an invest- white. The effect, even with an undistin- that really were studios- separate and ment. He bought those movies and, by guished Thirties program picture, can distinct kingdom s of cinematic imagina- God, he'll show those movies. Conse- be electrifying. (Harmless fantasy: tion and enterprise-seems tantamount quently, the cable is suddenly, gloriously Color-TV-bred viewers learn from TNT to cultural crim e. glutted with films of an age and range how gorgeous black-and-white can be. and copious variety effectively banished Colorizing swiftly becomes a quaint TNT makes its bow at the beginning from TV over the past two decades and anachronism, and a stumper answer in of October, with multiple show ings of its more. At the same time Rick of the col- Trivial Pursuit.) flags hip mov ie, Gone With the Wind, orized Casablanca has taken on the plus a brilliant feature-length documen- look of (in one TV critic's phrase juste) I t goes without saying that new movie tary on that film's creation (produced by \"a Century 21 salesman;' thousands of fans are born or born-again every day, David O. Selznick's sons, directed by other titles are spared such indignities and they need a venue through which to London's South Bank Show's David Hin- by their lack of salable celebrity. discover Citizen Kane, David Copper- ton, and written with great wit and field, The Adventures of Robin Hood, sc hol arl y diligence by our own David The good news doesn't stop with this The Thin Man, Bringing Up Baby , Thom son). Such epic offerings aside, an fortuitous truce between economics and Camille, et al. But classics-mongering average day of T T programming fea- aesthetics. Partly to protect his invest- isn't the headiest game afoot here. ''The tures eight or ten vintage film s and a ment, but also (give the guy the rhetori- Big Picture\" is all very fine, but the cal benefit of the doubt) partly out of a exotic sport sets in with \" TNT Over- night ;' the two, three, even four titles Hard to Handle with (I·r) Mary Brian, James Cagney and Ruth Donnelly (1933). hauled out of the dustiest recesses of the vaults to fill out the schedule between late evening and Fraggle Rock time. Regardless of what TNT publicists mean by the phrase, for the card-carry- ing cineaste, this is \"the good stuff.\" Movies movies movies without portfo- lio. Titles without household-word repu- tations . Movies by directors , some of them lively and prolific directors, who were never assigned a convincing (or any) slot in Andrew Sarris' The Ameri- can Cinema. Early, punch-the-time- clock assignments for actors who eventually would go on to superstardom, but arguably were never more winningly fresh and vigorous than when breezing through one pell-mell programmer after another. \" TNT Overnight;' then, is a chance to rediscover simultaneously the plea- sures of unaffected film-watching and the myriad, vagrant beauties of unpre- tentious filmmaking. One need watch only a few of the bustling 65- to 75-min- ute entertainments Warners knocked off 32
line aesthetics was first and foremost a function of fiscal realism as much as of Jack Warner's and studio supervisor Darryl Zanuck's penchant for gritty co n- temporaneity. Warners hadn't a prayer of competing with Paramount and Metro when it came to glossy production val- ues , so they staked out their own prole- tarian kingdom and ruled there. Warners became the studio of the brash comer, the streetsmart survival artist, the down-but-not-out dispos- sessed. It was the home of the whip pan and the galloping wipe, where transi- tional scenes (especially right before the climax) weren't written because there was n't money or time to shoot them , and where shadows fell not to be deco- rative but because darkness was cheaper than light. (In his uncannily evocative The Hollywood Studios , Ethan Mordden claims that the celebrated black-screen finale of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was the inadvertent byproduct of a missed light cue.) Joe E. Brown in The Tenderfoot (1931). T he energy of Warners' program- mers is explosive, but also remark- by the week to be put in touch with the ably co hesi ve. The tis sue of the Zeitgeist of a beleaguered yet vibrant Directors rarely rated a separate title cinematic organism all carries the same era, and the principle of the film factory card on early Thirties Warners films, . genetic code. By contrast , the higher- as triumphant ecosystem. being announced respectfully but non- budgeted product from Metro-Goldwyn- possess ively under the main title itself. Mayer was often flagrantly fraudulent, Credit sequences alone become It's possible to differentiate between the from the least convincing \"exterior\" sets minor joys in their earnest of communal house directors , in matters of technical of the era to the dismayingly tinny music continuity and repertory resilience. One assurance and degrees of liveliness, if can almost plot character configurations scarcely creative personality or recurring and anticipate the rough outline of the thematic interest. The names Lloyd scenario from the cameo introductions Bacon, Roy Del Ruth , and Mervyn of the contract players. After full-s creen LeRoy promise a certain brash vitality portraits of the featured performers and (Bacon in particular) brisk pacing. (James Cagney, Bette Davis, Edward G. Alfred E. Green usually spells solid per- Robinson, Joan Blondell , Kay Francis, formances but klunky narrative, whereas Pat O'Brien, Warren William, or Dick John G. Adolfi, who was entrusted with Powell), we get the supernumeraries dubious prestige assignments such as split-screened: fickle blonde temptress the 1929 studio vanity production The Claire Dpdd, Glenda Farrell, Alice Show of Shows and the up-on-blocks White, Patricia Ellis, or Noel Francis; vehicles of Mr. George Arliss, appears to moneyed power broker (and often father have had no feeling whatsoever for the of the aforementioned FBT, the alter- film medium. nately benign or predatory Berton Chur- With the qualified exceptions of chill, Robert McWade, or Henry Michael Curtiz, who brought a Mittel- O'Neill; buffoonish gunsel or hero's side- european expressionism and Gothic kick Allen Jenkins or Frank McHugh; perversity to his work, Raoul Walsh, all-purpose doofus Guy Kibbee, inveter- who didn't arrive at Warners till The ately bumpkin ish even with his coffers Roaring Twenties (1939), and William full of urban cash; honest cop or senti- A. Wellman (of whom more presently) , mental mobster Robert Emmet O'Con- the beatitudes of the WBs speak less to nor, frequently the heroine's father the distinctive talents and visions of the dubious about the hero's stability; and men with the megaphones than to the the studio ringer, the jowly David Lan- principle of the studio as auteur. dau, bringing the same mudlike glum- If Warners was the most brutally, ness and witless affability to victim and bracingly dynamic of early~hirties stu- Joan Blondell. villain roles alike. dios , its full-steam-ahead, banner-head- 33
scores of Herbert Stothman and Dr. under the monitoring of production and connoisseurs of indomitable style William Axt-a bewildering failing for chief and quality controller Irving relish every fatal angle and shadowed a studio regarded as the home of the Thalberg. stairwell Sternberg manages to insinuate Hollywood musical. into the bright, spanking precincts of A few eminent directors managed to Metro mummery. Film societies can't Take so well-regarded a specimen do polished, delicate, even identifiably draw flies with minor works of major as Dancing Lady , the 1933 showbiz personal work at MGM - King Vidor and romance with music and dance that fea- tured such lovingly coddled MGM stars Employees' Entrance with W!'Irren William and Alice White (1933). as Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and Franchot Tone, and incidentally intro- (later) Vincente Minnelli most conspicu- directors, and you can damn well bet duced Fred Astaire to the screen. Danc- ously, George Cukor and Frank Borzage that Flesh and Sergeant Madden are not ing Lady's plotline about the struggling, occasionally, and Clarence Brown, an high on the lists for video release. working-class starlet having to choose estimable craftsman amid the humdrum Where else but TNT are we going to see between a tough sub-Ziegfeld producer likes of Leonard, Richard Thorpe, and them? and a likable upper-crust playboy is ami- Harold S. Bucquet. W. S. \" One.:fake able enough, and Crawford and Gable Woody\" Van Dyke II kept up the energy Besides, every so often Mr. Turner's are worth every deifying highlight in level by behaving as if he were rushing bargain basement yields an authentic their love scenes . to catch the bus over to First National. find. The Stranger's Return (1933) is given short shrift in accounts of King But the director is Robert Z. Mostly, though, Pantheon types gen- Vidor's career, and Miriam Hopkins, Leonard, the most mystifyingly exalted erated sub-Pantheon results under the Franchot Tone, and Lionel Barrymore of MGM's house drones, and he hasn't a sign of Leo. John Ford made the anoma- are not marquee names on the repertory clue how to pull together the romance lous Flesh (1932), with MGM's sacred circuit. Yet this forgotten film (which I and the comedy, thd spectacle and the monster Wallace Beery as a beery Ger- almost passed up because of titular con- backstage. Slavko Vorkapich has a credit man wrestler with a lugubrious love life. fusion with a Tony Anthony spaghetti for the interstitial montage sequences, Howard Hawks contended with Craw- Western) is pure, if not quite prime, full of the usual \"Vdrkapich effects\" of ford in Today J# Live (1933; \"I don't Vidor. Hopkins plays one of the direc- hurtling camera and shock cuts. The remember a girl being in it,\" William tor's strong women in motion: adventur- only visual energy i~ Leonard's scenes Faulkner deadpanned when told he ous in spirit, unfazed by straitlaced is the initial picking-up-and-dusting-off would have to rewrite his bleak war morality, yet possessed of a bedrock of his establishing shots as his sedate story, \"Turnabout\"), and resigned in dis- sense of right' and wrong. A recent camera recoils from Vorkapich's last gust from Viva Villa! (subsequently divorcee, she returns from the city to caroming gesture. solo-credited to Jack Conway, 1934). her ancestral , rural home, gets em~ Josef von Sternberg was also handed a broiled in intrafamily politics, and falls in Crawford , here and elsewhere, comes Beery vehicle in Sergeant Madden love with the married farmer on the off less as a dancer than as a muscle- (1939), and saw his work on I Take This neighboring property. No duels in the bound career gymnast ready to kick ass Woman (1940) scrapped. Only Ernst sun here, nor swamp trotting, nor all if anyone interferes with her workout. Lubitsch managed to triumph (The that much in the way of raised voices- Yet that isn't what wrecks Dancing Lady Merry Widow, 1934; Ninotchka, 1939; just a quietly fervent story of people as a musical. The final big-show number The Shop Around the Corner, 1940), reassessing what matters most in their in which Crawford and producer Gable and did so by bringing his Paramount lives, and settling in to face it with matu- ostensibly triumph is a rough approxi- rity. Vidor shoots, much of the film on mation of the sort of onstage sequence style with him. the land, in more fresh air and sunlight Busby Berkeley was directing for War- Still, the die-hard Fordian will want ners at the time (1933). But whereas Berkeley seized his cinematic opportu- to see every movie John Ford ever made, nities , and made a daft, surreal joke of the proposition that any theater audi- ence could be watching his kaleido- scopic space odysseys within a proscenium arch, Dancing Lady simply fills the stage with more starlets than there are in heaven, ascends to some special-effects empyrean for Crawford's and Astaire's pas de deux, then plops back to stage level at the finale-flat- footed, overdressed, and dazed at its own ineptitude. Metro was the studio that perfected -more accurately, made a corporately effective policy of-filmmaking by com- mittee. The function of producer was invented there. Platoons of writers rewrote one another's material, some- times simultaneously, while directors were subjected to constant retakes 34
than found their way into all the other with Warren William's brusque late-night again becomes a pawn in William's game Metro releases of the year. rap on Bette Davis' door in the 1936 to impose his kneejerk-Vbermensch will Satan Met A Lady and Bogart's and on an irredeemably fallen environment, Such unanticipated discoveries are Astor's coded maneuvering around a and also to get at Wallace Ford in the among the major pleasures of TNT couch in the 1941 big one. By 1934, one way he clearly yearns to do. The watching-major in number and unanti- even the very married, manifestly mutu- male love affairs that loom large in War- cipatedness, if not always aesthetic heft. ally appreciative Nick and Nora Charles ners' gangster classics Little Caesar and There's considerable charm in simply were obliged to occupy separate twin The Public Enemy pale alongside catching Hollywood between Produc- William's explicitly articulated desire to tion Codes. beds. bond with \"so n\" Ford in misogynistic Perhaps no one better exemplified contempt for a weak, feminine world. Robert Armstrong flips Richard Dix (Amazing throwaway line, William to the bird in loving closeup in RKO's The the laissez-faire morality of the period Ford: \"Come to my office later, I want to Lost Squadron (a shot excised from ear- than Warren William, whose all-but-for- hear all about Men's Shorts:') lier TV prints, like Cary Grant's mari- gotten minor stardom at Warners in the bou-feathered \"I just went gay all of a early Thirties well deserves reappraisal. It's tough to say, of Warren William, sudden!\" in Bringing Up Baby). Pat Long, gaunt, wolfishly mustachioed, how much he was an underrated good O'Brien's standard riposte to dubious and mellifluous as a snake oil salesman, actor and how much a cinemagenically remarks in Bureau of Missing Persons is William effortlessly personified seedi- apt bundle of qualities and mannerisms \"Have you been smokin' hop?\" In The ness and aristocracy in the same preda- in the right studio at the right time. In Tenderfoot, out-of-town galoot Joe E. tory stride. The Mouthpiece (1932, his less well-machined vehicles (Bed- Brown hails a bar full of Broadway cow- remade as The Man Who Talked Too side, for instance, in which he becomes boys, who respond with a collective Much with George Brent in 1940 and as a society doctor after buying a sheepskin \"Yoo-hoo!\" (\"Those boys ain't from Illegal with Edward G. Robinson in and an identity from morphine-addicted Texas;' Brown judiciously soliloquizes). 1955) is his best-known vehicle, and its sawbones David Landau), he could shift portrait of a stellar shyster with a volup- manneristic gears with even less convic- Outright nudity was rare, fleeting, tuous regret for his own well-paid cor- tion than his characters. And in Satan and mostly long-distance (e.g., Trilby's ruption is probably his most nuanced Met a Lady, which is every bit as bad as art modeling in Svengali). However, piece of work. the pre-Huston vers ions of The Maltese MGM showed a commendable willing- Falcon have been said to be (whereas ness to take up the white man's burden Yet TNT freaks are forming a fervent Roy Del Ruth's The Maltese Falcon a/k/a of tweaking taboo in the outposts of cult for Employees Entrance (Del Ruth, Dangerous Female is a decent , straight empire: Myrna Loy's devilish Oriental 1933), William's ,definitive study of the adaptation), William is just ludicrous, halter in The Mask of Fu Manchu defies unregenerate heel. As the manager of a grinning nonstop with imbecilic glee the laws of physics as well as censorship, thriving department store during the while desperately trying to figure out while in The Sea Bat and Never the deepest year of the Depression, William what's supposed to be funn y. Until Twain Shall Meet, Raquel Torres and screws, savages, and backstabs any- and that comparatively late outing (1936), Conchita Montenegro, respectively, everyone within range, from his nominal though , he was a legitimate icon of conduct unscientific studies in opacity bosses to his hard-working department the age-a self-styled connoisseur of by wandering within range of surf spray heads to every target of sexual opportu- fragrance who could never shake the in precariously decorous peasant nity sighted in the crosshairs of his trail- ing eyebrows. Foremost among the last blouses. is Loretta Young in glowing urban-waif aura of cheap cigars. Back in the big cities, unmarried mode, whom he appropriates and dis- Occidental couples could forthrightly Scards in an absentminded admixture of indicate the extent of their involvement till , it's two more familiar Warners kindliness and rapaciousness. icons who dominate the TNT twi- by breakfasting in dressing gowns. Com- Young subsequently finds love and light: Edward G. Robinson and James pare Ricardo Cortez' Sam Spade and security in the arms of Wallace Ford, a Cagney. Although linked as totems of Bebe Daniels' Brigid O'Shaughnessy, in decent joe whom William is grooming as the classic gangster film, and imported the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon, his lieutenant; whereupon she once from the New York stage at roughly the .... ---= ::: MEN same dawn-of-the-talkies time, the two represent markedly different approaches JOBLESs to Hollywood stardom. The differences are memorably showcased in their one film together, an K~EP GOING Alfred E. Green melodrama from 1931 called Smart Money. In one sequence for anthologies, best pal and right-hand IE CANT TAK E CARE OF OUR OW man Cagney enters Robinson's quarters above their posh casino to tell him that a 1 lady patron craves an audience. I say tell , but nary a word is spoken. Cagney CHAMBER OF COMMERCE steps into the room, closes the door, leans back against it coyly, and panto- mimes the propinquity of a tremulous Richard Barthelmess in Heroes for Sale (1933). dame. Robinson's eyebrows go up. Cag- ney embellishes on a veritable glossary 35
of feminine fraudulence (the woman articulated burlesque of her stock in the woman enter with a deep bow. wants an open line of credit). Robinson trade. Robinson gives him the high sign, The scene catches both the tech- rises from his chair and gestures a broad twi ddling a cigar. Cagney sags with interrogation about the lady's endow- mock exhaustion , turns to open the niques and the souls of the two per- ments. Cagney responds with yet more door, and glipes erect so that he can bid formers. In the fluidity and encyclopedic particularity of his miming, Cagney is an James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson in Smart Money (1933). Ariel to Robinson's Caliban. He'll dimple like a water skipper across the surfaces of 30-some Warners contract assign- ments over the ensuing decade-Jimmy the Gent, Hard to Handle, Winner Take All-whereas Robinson will specialize as the earnest plodder, doggedly pursu- ing fortune and women who either get away or prove unworthy of catching, and finally settling into respectability as the lionized seeker after magic bullets and other humanistic goals in the studio's cycle of biopics. Cagney was a consummate actor, who surely considered every quicksilver move he made, yet he gives the impres- sion of being a force of nature fortui- tously tapped for cinema. Robinson would confess in his autobiography that he never delivered so much as a birthday speech without rehearsing every sponta- neous pause and digression beforehand . Put it in a Hawksian frame: Cagney comes off as the guy who's \"so good he doesn't have to prove it:' while Robinson -and his inveterately earthbound char- acters - worked at proving it all the time. In the hopelessly maladroit early talkie The Widow From Chicago (great title; wretched movie), Robinson alone succeeds not only in bringing a fierce concentration to his character, but luxu- riating in casual possession of several scenes. Yet he plays casualness, as he had to play everything else. I accept that in some fundamental way, Robinson was more limited than the most ethereal stars of the medium. Yet I almost always take large, affection- ate, and somehow heartened satisfaction in simply seeing him come onscreen (whereas Cagney, genius though he be, could be nerve-wracking as a gnat in those movies-the service comedies, say-when the script inadequately dem- onstrated why his rakehellishness should be found attractive). Unlike Caesar Enrico Bandello, Robinson could dish it out and take it. He was the definitive portrayer of heroes unmade for heroism (Fritz Lang subsequently enshrined him in his directorial gallery of doomed , fat little guys), and his unflagging profess ionalism became a monument to integrity. He would leave a sizable gap, but it's possible to imagine Warner Brothers- First National without Edward G. Robinson. (For all the virtues of Little 36
Director William Wellman. here's another inter-resting humane slant Roy Del Ruth. for yiz\"). Mary Brian, on the slide from minor stardom at Paramount, is tolera- bly spunky as Lefty's much-run-around leading lady, but she's partnered with Ruth Donnelly as a basking shark of a mother who aims to take out a copyright on the main chance. Dressed (without comment from the script) in sister outfits throughout the movie, Brian and Donnelly patrol the playgrounds of the rich and famous like twin scout cars for a division of gold-dig- ging panzers . Lil (Donnelly) runs hot and cold on Lefty's suit for Ruth (Brian), depending on whether he's just made the front page or trying to stay three steps ahead of a lynch mob. The movie's running tagline (few Warners films of the period lacked for one) crops up when- ever the frenetically enthusiastic Cagney kisses Brian too exuberantly. She'll yelp and he chirps , \"That's love!\" Caesar, Five Star Final, Two Seconds , I f Cagney was Warners' most conspic- retread , in 1933, of such previous Ruth Tiger Shark , Kid Galahad, The Amaz- uous onscreen dynamo, the guts-ball Chatterton vehicles as Madame X and ing Dr. Clitterhouse, The Sea Wolf, and action behind the camera had to be Sorrel and Son. On the other hand, no Key Largo, his arguably best films were William A. Wellman . (Curiously, the two one has seen those movies in decades , made elsewhere: The Whole Town's didn't work together after Public and the unblinking commitment of Talking , Double Indemnity, Lang's Enemy.) Wellman's eminence in Holly- Chatterton and director Wellman lends Woman in the Window and Scarlet wood has largely mystified post-Sarris ian this fable of self-sacrificing motherhood Street.} But Jimmy Cagney in the Thir- film buffs , who detect little in the direc- an astonishing moral and emotional ties was Warners. His blood kept pace tor's overblown Selznick pictures of his power. Chatterton winds up being prose- with the most hectic montages , his studiedly dull historical epics of the For- cuted for murder by the unknowing son lightning doubletake accommodated the ties or the vapid CinemaScope exercises for whom she has destroyed her own wildest script volte-face, his hoofer's feet of the Fifties to contradict his \" Less life. Wellman shoots the trial sequence took him out of the line of ricochet fire Than Meets the Eye\" pigeonholing in in what plays as a dizzyingly continuous and danced him back to the head of the The American Cinema. How much whip pan. parade. more galvanizing, then, is the impact for TNTers lighting on Wellman's annus There's no reprieve for Frisco Jenny, Hard to Handle (LeRoy, 1933) is the mirabilis of 1933, when he stormed whose resolute self-sacrificing continues prime rediscovery of the first TNT sea- through no fewer than seven movies, even beyond her death. Midnight Mary son. Cagney charges through the movie including two boldly bleak Depression (which, alone in Wellman's Warners as tireless promotor Myron \" Lefty\" road movies- Wild Boys of the Road period , was made at MGM) does admit of Merrill, who is variously seen running a and Heroes for Sale-and three cumula- a last-minute rescue for its similarly dance marathon (the prize money is tively astounding feminist fables, Frisco doomed heroine (Loretta Young fairly stolen by his partner) , publicizing an Jenny, Lilly Turner, and Midnight burning up the silver in the emulsion) , Mary . and of course Wild Boys suffers the amusement pier (his scavenger hunt for intervention of a kindly civil servant in money supposedly hidden on the pier In its account of youthful runaways the last reel who just might make every- leads to its destruction by an avid adrift between the laws and caste lines thing a lot nicer for the kids. Yet these Depression mob), turning non-vanishing of society, Wild Boys of the Road rivals hasty conclusions so flagrantly contra- cream into a reducing fad , and shilling the more prestigious I Am a Fugitive dict the logic and the express-train for a real estate deal called Grapefruit from a Chain Gang for some of the momentum of the films that preceded Acres (whose theme song has to be most uncompromising images of social them, one instantly writes them off as heard to be disbelieved) . injustice ever committed to the screen. front-office impositions (born of box- (Incidentally, the film is one of the most office sentimentality on Metro's part, Cagney's a whirlwind, running, talk- spectacular beneficiaries of Ted Turner's excessive New Deal enthusiasm on ing, and gesticulating a blue streak. But policy of striking crisp new reprints in Warners'). The \"Wild Bill\" Wellman who the movie's almost as energetic as he is , true black-and-white.) made these movies was as tough as his jammed so full of incident and idiosyn- legend and nickname wo uld have us cratic color that , to its credit, it seems One suspects that Frisco Jenny, believe. In highlighting such overlooked longer than its 77 minutes running time. which traces the trajectory of a girl done or forgotten virtues , TNT is helping Warners' most redoubtably entertaining wrong (by biology and the earthquake rewrite the history of a national cinema stooge and second banana, Allen of 1906) to madamhood and eventual that looks richer than ever. ~ Jenkins, has a one-scene gem as a radio martyrdom , seemed an opportunistic announcer at the marathon (\"Folks, 37
TNT's EARLY TALKIES presence, helping apprehend the mur- Itlve Vitaphone, Metro, and Radio (i.e., RKO) talkies on TN1~ that histo- W ho was Sojin? Nobody I've derer by means of a proverbial it's-all- rians' appalled accounts of the first asked knows, no film encyclo- years of sound were largely valid. Yet pedia I've consulted has an entry for done-with-mirrors trick that doesn't it's also true that the fitful dynamics of him. A skeletal Oriental with crazed the newly remade art-medium cast a calf eyes, wispy mustache, and an make sense even after he's explained it peculiar spell. These vault items are, if apparently permanent smile enforced not richer, undeniably stranger than upon him by a fanlike spread of protu- in unintelligible English. His fellow their collective dismissal in film histo- berant, rotten teeth , he turns up in two ries would suggest. late-night TNT offerings from 1929. cast members nod appreciatively all R hythm exists mainly by default. In The Show of Shows, he stands the same. I Most directors had scant bemused in boiled shirt and tux while recourse but to block the players the similarly garbed Chester Morris Perhaps the most esoteric cinemad- around the tyrannical mike concealed and Jack Mulhall trade laborious smart in a floral display, turn on the camera chat to demonstrate that the movies diction fostered by TNT's equal oppor- (confined in a stationary sweatbox to have learned to talk, especially Warn- mute the grinding of cinematographic ers' Vitaphone productions. In MGM's tunity programming is a fascination gears), and wait out the reading of the The Unholy Night (which might have dialogue. In Montana Moon (MGM, made a more appropriate title for The with the early talkies. We've all read 1930), Mal St. Clair feebly attempts to Show of Shows's amateur-night vaude- jazz things up by having the cast enter ville), he plays a sinister mystic holding the standard line on the coming of from behind the camera and then stop a seance in Roland Young's mansion. dead for their lines. Warners' metteurs He skulks malevolently on first sight, sound and its initial, aesthetically ruin- en scene settled into a pattern of open- but ultimately proves to be a benign ous impact on an art form that had just attained a matchless suppleness, fluid- ity, and visual poetry. Mostly, opportu- nities to view the films of this transitional period have been limited to the signal stylistic triumphs (which is to say, essentially, Paramount: Lubitsch, Sternberg, Mamoulian) and some classic gangster pictures, with their roaring town cars and the redemptive rat-tat-tat of Tommy guns. It's easy to see, from some of the prim- Sojln's seance for Ernest Torrence (1.) and Natalie Moorhead in The Unholy Night (1929). 38
- ing scenes with a back-row-of-the-the- (Monta Bell, 1932), after Gilbert's own There is no defensible reasol} why ater establishing shot, then cutting to storyline about a proletarian roue. this should occupy more than two medium shot for the scene proper.' hours' screen time, even with an apoca- The effect, in the heavily Oscar-nomi- O ne of the cardinal wee-hours rev- lyptic mine cave-in in the last reel to nated Disraeli (Alfred E. Green, elations of TNT's first season has force Johnson to choose between 1929), for instance, is to suggest actors Nagel and Bickford. Yet the damn playing out tete-a-tetes under the tall , been Dynamite , Cecil B. DeMille's thing is as eerily compelling as a slow- dead air of a fieldhouse. maiden talkie and the first of three motion train wreck. Such spatial anomalies were often Abetted by assistant director and matched by an eerie lack of time-space Kay Johnson and Julia Faye in Dynamite (1929). coordinates-and of real action-in the MGM specials he would direct before set designer Mitchell Leisen, DeMille scenarios. In Montana Moon, rich brat settling into 'godhead status at Para- builds the narrative around a series of Joan Crawford gets off a private rail- mount . No 'other early-sound artifact is lunatic set-pieces. Bickford's convic- road car in the middle of some on-loca- tion and sentencing is played against a tion nowhere, and wanders onto the so headily charged with the Zeitgeist of stark backdrop of tall windows giving booming soundstage floor of a Mon- the pre-Crash Twenties, and few other on .aheavenly blankness; shot princi- tana-moonlit clearing to warm herself DeMilles exhibit as much of the bra- pally from two different forced per- at cowboy Johnny Mack Brown's camp- zen, self-righteous craziness that certi- spectives , the scene .is a striking fire. By the time they ride (where'd her fies the director as an inimitable auteur. instance of the sort of raw, nerve- horse come from?) into a line camp wracking power that the long dialogue after an indeterminate interval, they've The storyline beggars belief and takes of the period occasionally (inad- been married (by whom, an itinerant defies one to look away. At the same vertently?) conferred. Johnson gaily preacher?). Although Cliff Edwards, time a burly coal miner (Charles Bick- wagers for Nagel's freedom by taking Benny Rubin (there was a brief vogue ford) is sentenced to death for the mur- on Faye in a preposterous country club for Yiddish cowboys in 1930), and the der of a rich man, heiress Kay Johnson contest-the two of them suspended other waddies ogle speculatively, learns that she must marry immedi- in ros y crucifixion inside gigantic Crawford and Brown bed down in sep- ately or forfeit the millions held in trust hoops that they somehow self-propel arate sleeping bags, and even after for her. Johnson's own true love, polo- down the polo field . This sport of they've moved into a shared room at playing dilettante Conrad Nagel, is swells is reported for the edification of the ranch house, the idea that newly- inconveniently still married to socialite a radio audience that includes Bickford weds might have honeymoon activities Julia Faye, and while all remain good and his fellow death-row inmates. in mind simply refuses to become an pals and companions in carouse, Faye Issue. won't divorce Nagel without a payoff of The death-row marriage is another $100,000. Johnson reads with her grim bread-and-circuses performance At a conservative estimate, there morning crumpets that Bickford has mesmerized between high-camp hor- must have been something like an 8S offered to sell his doomed body and ror and infatuation with the new arma- percent shift in onscreen population in brain to science for $10,000 (he has to ment of sound. Bickford and Johnson the years 1929-32. For every Doug provide for a kid sister, whose only join hands through the bars while Fairbanks Jr. and John Barrymore on asset is an outsized Jackie Coogan waif another prisoner (Russ Columbo!) parade in The Show of Shows, there are cap) .. She proposes the same amount croons a doleful love ballad and the half a dozen cinematic ciphers dragged as the fee for a death-row wedding. hammering of the gallows rises to cre- in from silent-screen prehistory (comic Bickford accepts this proposition after scendo, and then hangs there. Only in Lloyd Hamilton), the New York smart a proper display of proletarian disgust. 1929. And now, in 1989, only on TNT. set (Bea Lillie) , Broadway, nightclubs, Then he's cleared 13 minutes short of vaudeville. Most of these performers his execution, and drops in on the little -RICHARD JAMESON swiftly vanished from the screen, woman just as her fellow jazz babies inherently lacking in cinemagenic qual- are settling in for a night of Prohibition ities and displaced within the year by high jinks. such exuberant imports as Jimmy Cag- ney, Joan Blondell, and Frank McHugh. Then again, the tides of TNT Over- night have cast up virtually the entire sound-film career of John Gilbert, the most notorious casualty of the talkie makeover. TNT viewers have had ample opportunity to confirm long- standing suspicions that there was nothing wrong with this romantic star's pleasant tenor voice, and that his swift decline had more to do with poor film- making and lamentably flowery dia- logue writing than with any lack of cojones on the actor's part. In this con- nection, see especially Downstairs
Fair and Warner James Cagney and Mary Brian in Hard to Handle (1933). 14-Karat Oomph by Richard Corliss I couldn't have known then that, a orn's The Warner Bros. Story (1979) few decades later, I might be working for amassed credits and plot synopses for S ome kids give their hearts to myoid favorite film studio; if the pro- each of the studio's films. Ted Sennett baseball teams; I was a corpora- pos~d merger of Time magazine's parent spelled the names right in Warner Bros. tion fetishist. So in the mid-Fif- company and Warners (which already Presents (1971) . Rudy Behlmer ties, when my Ns deserted Philadelphia owns Mad) proves successful, I will be unearthed a trove of studio memos in for Kansas City, I formed attachments to writing movie reviews for a media mega- Inside Warner Bros., 1935-1951 (1985). E.C. comics, Specialty Records, and corp that the wags have dubbed War- It's full of meticulous rants that ~eveal Warner Bros. pictures . I rooted for these Time. (Or will it be Par:r'ime? Mind you how the studio of James Cagney and companies, bought their products, I always liked Paramount pictures too.) Bette Davis, Darryl F. Zanuck and Hal patronized their advertisers. E.C. was, Nor did I realize back in the Fifties that, B. Wallis, Busby Berkeley and Michael of course, the publisher of Mad and two decades earlier, Warner Bros.-First Curtiz, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck Vault of Horror, and Specialty the National had been cranking out terrific operated. Mostly, at gunpoint. stomping ground of Little Richard and movies like premium sausage. I had to Don and Dewey. But why Warners? learn that from Ted Turner (whose TV The past year has seen a quartet of Something to do with the studio's shield, empire Time Inc. owns a healthy patch books that addresses Hollywood studio perhaps , its WB brazenly embossed. Or of) and his TNT channel of job-lot style and personnel. Joel Finler's The with the inexplicably orange tint of antiques. So now I can tell you about Hollywood Book (Octopus) is a stats- WarnerColor, a petrochemical sunburst Turner's Warner classics in FILM COM- freak's delight, the chartiest tome- that suited my palette more than MGM's MENT (not owned by any of the above). profits , grosses, careers-since Bill silver and red, or Fox's DeLuxe blue, or James hung up his spikes. In The Genius UNs murky monochrome. It must have Others got here before me, and ofthe System: Hollywood Filmmaking in been Warners' great cartoons. It couldn't between hard covers. In 1976 James R. the Studio Era (Pantheon), Thomas have been their feature films, which, Silke compiled an eloquent oral history Schatz argues for the studio as auteur; with the exception of James Dean's, of the studio, Here's Looking at You, Neil Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: were pretty attenuated, flatulent fare. Kid: 50 ~ars of Fighting , Working and How the Jews Invented Hollywood Dreaming at Warner Bros. Clive Hirsch- (Crown) focuses on the moguls and their 40
sprawling clans . In The Hollywood Stu- type of story that made Cagney ~a nt to dios: House Style in the Golden Age of leave the studio\"; he recommended it as the Movies (Knopf), Ethan Mordden does something rare among these histo- a good vehicle for George Raft. In the rians. He watches the screen as well as next few years, Raft would decline High the bottom line; he knows these movies Sierra , The Maltese Falcon , and Casa- and their meanings . Mordden's and blanca-the three films that finall y yanked Bogart out of the featured ranks . Silke's are my favorites, but all these books cast a hot klieg on the studio that, Jack called his writers \"schmucks a half century ago, was the best in the with Underwoods\" - though Casey business. Robinson , who basically wrote Davis' oeuvre in her best years , said that War- ners scribes got more of their words on screen because \"Jack Warner was too JACK WARNER tight-fisted to spend additional money S orry: the best in the art. Because on rewrites:' John Huston, who spent a the business was an art. Schatz takes as his epigraph Andre Bazin's com- Bette Davis with Jack Warner. decade at Warners as writer and director, was surely thinking of J.L:s leaden hand on golden scripts when he told Silke this ment: ''The American system is a classi- wood's competitive market for talent favorite writers' joke: TIvo producers are cal art, but why not then admire in it meant Warners had to pay its stars good lost in a desert, dying of thirst. They see what is most admirable, i.e., not only money. In 1935 , according to Finler, Joe an oasis, with a tin of cold pineapple the talent of this or that filmmaker, but E. Brown earned $173,000 , Cagney juice sitting under the palms. One the genius of the system.\" Warners in the $ 150,000 , Kay Francis $115,000, War- producer lifts the tin to his parched lips Thirties seems a particular beneficiary ren William $95,000, Dick Powell when the other one stops him and says, of these arguments. Its stable of direc- $70,000. (Anomaly: In 1941, the year of \"Wait, let's piss in it first:' tors is also full of also-rans: Alfred E. High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon , Green, Archie Mayo, Lloyd Bacon ; Bogart made less than perennial side- the Williams Dieterle, Keighley, and man Allen Jenkins.) Harry Warner Wellman; the Roys Del Ruth and doubtless thought it a high price to pay Mervyn Le. Not a resident of Andrew for indentured servants, but the help Sarris' Pantheon in the lot. And none of still felt like a chain gang linked by Warners' house writers made the cut in golden shackles. Yes , Cagney blos- my book on screenwriters 15 years ago. somed at Warners, but he also fought I Sure, they had stars then , but so did hard-indeed, he went independent in MGM, and much of Metro's stuff was 1936-to win roles outside his type. I mush. No other answer: Jack L. Warner, Uust before he walked, Warners who ran the studio in Burbank while his announced he wo uld play Robin Hood.) brother Harry, ran the finances in New York, must have been the genius of this The same year, Davis wrote to Jack Davis and Cagney in Jimmy the Gent (1934). Warner, pleading to be loaned out: 'i\\s a system. happy person, I can work like hell-as Bathroom anecdotes flourish in the Like other moguls, Jack trumpeted an unhappy one, I make myself and Warners apocrypha, especially about efficiency over quality: \"I don't want it everyone around me unhappi ' She then Jack. If he ever sat for a portrait , it good, I want it Tuesdai' (Actually, he fled to England to avoid further strangu- should have been this one, painted by wanted it Saturday; Warners was a six- lation from minor roles and lame mov- Milton Sperling, a Warners writer and day-a-week studio.) But was he a genius? ies. Warners sued her and won. She later Harry's son-in-law. One day in 1932 Scan the Behlmer book and be dis- came back to a decade of creamy proj- he visited Zanuck's office, saw that the abused of that notion . His brightest idea ects, but at the same time she must head of production was not in , then was to recommend that Errol Flynn have thought about j. L. what she had heard Zanuck's and J.LS voices from keep his mustache. More typically he spat at Cagney in the 1934 Jimmy the nearby. \" I walked into the alleyway orders the harnessing of Davis' (and Gent, \"You can go down deeper, stay between the two offices;' he told Gabler, Joan Blondell's) \"bulbs\" to appease the under longer, and come up dirtier than \"and Warner was sitting on the toilet , censors. In one memo he wrote: \"Never any man I've ever known!\" let a man's hat brim obscure his eyes:' If taking a crap and pressing, and then I I that rule had been followed , Humphrey Not that Warners stars always knew heard the plop, and Zanuck, who ,vas Bogart would have remained a support- ing player for life. According to Warners what was best for them. In 1932 , talking to him, pulled the chain and Edward G. Robinson , then the studio's continued talking.\" top new star after the success of Little 1 cartoon director Chuck Jones, Jack truly Caesar, turned down Blessed Event thought his people made the Mickey (soon a hit for Lee Tracy) and Employ- DARRYL R ZANUCK Mouse cartoons. When someone told ees' Entrance (every TNTer's favorite M aybe Zanuck pulled the strings him they didn't, he closed Termite Warners \"discovery\") . In a 1939 memo, too. He was the one gentile who Terrace down . Cagney's brother William complained to headed a Hollywood studio (20th Cen- Wallis that the script for Torrid Zone, tury-Fox, from 1935 to 1956) , but \"No other lot,\" Mordden writes, which would become one of the star's before that the kid from Yahoo, Neb., \"remotely approached Warner's record most enjoyable escapades, was 'J ust the ran production for Jack Warner at what for disciplining and even suing its own top breadwinners.\" To be sure, Holly- 41
Mordden calls \"the only studio with a F rom a 1989 armchair, 1932 looks Director Alfred E. Green. like a vintage Warners year. To pick Jewish identity:' Warners made its fame just my TNT top ten from Zanuck's \"Come out and take it, ya dirty yella- with The Jazz Singer, the AI Jolson inventory: Blessed Event, the Lee Tracy bellied rat, or I'll give it to ya through weepie about a Jewish crooner in black- motormouth in high gear as a malign the door!\" face-a subject as exotic to most movie- gossip columnist; Cabin in the Cotton, ''I'd luv ta kiss ya but I just washed ma The Taxi! cast and writers know goers as the Polynesian rites of passage hair\" ; Crooner, a showbiz satire that they're on to something fresh in movies , in Robert Flaherty's Moana. (When The pre-dates A Face in the Crowd by 25 and they take pride in their status as Jazz Singer opened in London , the Pic- years ; Doctor X, Curtiz' two-strip Tech- usurper king. They make fun of other cadilly Theatre provided its patrons with nicolor spook show; I Am a Fugitive Warners movies and movie stars. Leila \"a glossary of Jewish terms\": cantor, Yom from a Chain Gang , Hollywood's scari- Bennett, as Stone's girlfriend, says she's Kippur, kibitzer, shiksa.) Under Zanuck est title O\\m\") and most haunting final going to see a film starring \"Lil Dagover. the studio pursued its Jolson agenda- shot (\"I steal!\"); The Man Who Played I like the sound of her name, it's got sex The Singing Fool , per Finler, \"could God, Arliss goes deaf, ditches God and appeal.\" Cagney, Young, Stone, and Ben- claim to be the single most profitable Bette Davis ; The Mouthpiece, Warren nett stand outside a Broadway picture movie of the Twenties\"-and even cast William slavers spectacularly as a truly show, and Bennett remarks, of John Mr. George Arliss as a Jewish prime criminal lawyer ; One Way Passage , Barrymore, \"I think he's copyin' Fredric minister. \"One can't imagine MGM mak- archetypal shipboard romance, witty and March more and more every day.\" ing Disraeli;' Mordden writes. But when Inside, they watch a movie of the fus- Zanuck left Warners he took Arliss with touching, 69 minutes of suave sentiment tian , falsetto type that Cagney's films him and had a hit with The House of and fluid camera work; The Purchase made obsolete-the brash new genera- Rothschild. Price, Barbara Stanwyck as a runt tion staring up at the genteel old. strumpet turned mail-order bride; and Loretta, cozying into her seat, observes, Zanuck had joined Warners in 1923 Taxi! , with the young Cagney in all his \"Gee, doesn't he know how to make and soon was cobbling scenarios for the brute glory. love!\" and Cagney mutters, \"Ya think studio's biggest star, Rin-Tin-Tin. In he's so hot? Get a load a this:' So he 1927 he wrote 13 scripts under his own gives her a big smooch, as if no girl could resist his boy-o brio, and 1932 was Michael Curtiz and Darryl F. Zanuck on the set of Noah's Ark (1929). the happiest year in history. name and three pseudonyms-Zanuck Two Chicago emigres, Kubec Glas- B ut for the brothers Warner, 1932 was clearly too prolific for one writer. By mon and John Bright, wrote Public was a disaster. Cagney, feeling his 1931, as production boss , he had estab- Ene~y , which made Cagney a star, and new-star oats, walked out on his con- lished the brash, city-smart voice of his next three roles: Blonde Crazy , tract; the Motion Picture Academy Warners talkies. It's precisel y at his Smart Money, and Taxi! (Alfred E. negotiated a settlement and a 750 per- urgent pitch. He hired every mug and Green). Here Cagney's an independent cent raise for the actor, thus triggering moll on Broadway and made them stars; New York cabbie out to smash the syn- two decades of arbitration acrimony. in one giddy week (according to Mel dicate while he keeps Loretta Young in Lewis Warner, Harry's son and heir Gussow's 1971 biography, Don't Say les check-body check. He yanks her face, apparent, died of blood poisoning after Until I Finish Talking) , Zanuck signed knees her butt, picks her purse. This is flying in an unpressurized cabin; he was Cagney, Blondell, and Davis. Warner's Cagney in a good mood. More often he 22 . The studio's banking patron, Motley opening credit sequences, which intro- executes a macho yammer to his pals: Flint, was shot dead in a courtroom by a duce each actor with a brief film clip 'I\\ah I wouldn't go f 'at dame if she was a disappointed investor. As if in sympathy, (the style used today on Dallas and L.A. last woman on oit-an' I'd just got outta Warne(s lost $14,095,054 in 1932. Law) are thrilling to the TNT viewer. da Navy:' Every insult is a grapefruit in Indeed, in the glory period 1931-34, the Cagney, Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Frank Young's lovely face. But Taxi! is still the studio dropped $30.8 million-a greater McHugh: The Crowd Roars!. But in berries, displaying a star at his early, 1932 this format served a utilitarian easy radiance. Cagney speaks Yiddish; goal: to identify for picture audiences he and George E. Stone do a cute clog the faces of actors who had been on dance; he and Young whirl around hand- screen for only a year or so. By then, somely in a dance contest with an Zanuck had created a stock company unbilled Raft. He even gets to stand at a from raw stock, and a studio style of raw murderer's door and spit out the line power. that made Frank Gorshin famous: 42
sum than they would earn in profits over Rogers and Alice Faye series, the west- thing you have to do is to get the story the next eight years. erns and empire-building costumers. No on the screen, and I don't care if you street sass, no dialogue with a school- play it in front of BLACK VELVET!\" The Depression hit the major studios yard taunt. So maybe the WB style But Wallis, a mogul in the mold (and hard. According to Finler's figures, MGM wasn't DFZ's after all. Certainly, when with the expertise) of those choleric turned a $14.7 million profit in 1931- Zanuck went to Fox, he didn't take \"his\" managing editors who inhabited every 34, but Paramount lost an identical style with him. third Warners film of the period , was amount and was declared bankrupt. interested in more than getting the Fox, $18 million in the hole, would HALB. WALLIS story. He advised on the costumes , the merge with Zanuck's new 20th Century. lighting, the arc of Davis' performance And RKO, which lost $20.8 million, was U nder Wallis, who ran production in Bordertown , the fog in a Marked put into equity receivership. Of the until 1944, Warners stayed War- Woman shot. He knew pictures. ners. The studio kept its proletarian ailing companies, Warners alone grudge while raising its sights and its Did Jack Warner know pictures? Did toughed it out. They cut production budgets. It expanded its product line to Warner Bros.? This is the question that costs, they sold off some of their the- include period adventures with Flynn the Gabler and Schatz books both raise aters, they ping-ponged stock between (The Adventures ofRobin Hood); Arliss- and beg: To what extent were Holly- Warners and Renraw, the bothers' hold- like, but grander, biopics with Paul Muni wood moguls the authors of their films , ing company. They were not always (The Life of Emile Zola); even a Max and not just the creators of their magnifi- scrupulous. A line of dialogue from Reinhardt Midsummer Night's Dream. cent factories? At an old studio, style Blonde Crazy might have been the The strategy worked. All three were was what you could get away with, and motto on the Warners aegis: ''The age of among Warner's top boxoffice hits of the the auteur was the boss who let you get chivalry is past-this here's the age of Thirties. The others were Davis' The away with it. OK, but who's you? The chiselri' But, by crook, they survived. Old Maid, Cagney's The Fighting 69th, you was the writer (Preston Sturges at and Flynn's Santa Fe Trail. Note that Paramount) or director (Orson Welles a·t And, in surviving, they lost the man Cagney appears in three of the studio's RKO) or actor (Cagney at Warners) who who had been their mainspring. In eight biggest grossers of the decade, but dared to stretch formula to breaking. 1933, Zanuck resigned his $5 ,000-a- none is a gangster film . And Casablanca Not the genius of the system, but the week job-not because his films had put will not be among the top eight WB hits geniuses within . the studio in deep red , but because, as of the Forties. It took posterity to rectify Mordden notes, \"Warners extended the those balance sheets. It happens that Sturges made his best [industry-wide salary] cut after Zanuck films-an amazing nine in four years-at had given his word that the studio would While Jack Warner worried about the Paramount, then fell pratward when he restore full pay when the others did: ' big stuff like contracts and cleavage, left. Could he have made these films at Before leaving, Zanuck dropped off a Wallis shot off memoes to such recalci- Warners? We can't say. But we know that couple of farewell presents: 42nd Street trant directors as Michael Curtiz: \"Let Paramount could not have made them and Footlight Parade, the studio's two [Flynn] look a little swashbuckling, for without Sturges. Ask again: Was RKO highest-grossing films of the decade. Christ sakes!. ..When you move into the genius behind Citizen Kane? If so, it Then he moved to 20th Century (later close-ups I want you to shoot the entire was responsible not just for giving birth 20th Century-Fox), and an odd thing scene in close-ups so that we can cut it to that fully-grown masterpiece but, by happened. He radically changed his closing down Mercury Productions in movies' style. Fox pictures were rural the way we want .... The most important 1942, for aborting the prodigies Welles and aw-shucks: the Shir.ley Temple, Will was bound to create. So the system tol- erated genius, or straitjacketed it. Once Wal isE;===~2~~Hal with the Lane Sisters. a studio like Warners decided what an artist's strength was, it stereotyped him. We made you , see, and we'll keep making you the same way. Or else we'll break you. Life was a little safer behind the camera. Wallis might scream memos at Curtiz, but he also tossed him the palmiest projects. Berkeley, who had minted his style at Goldwyn, dared to claim even more independence at War- ners. He cast, designed, choreographed, shot (way over budget) and edited his own sequences. As Schatz notes, Wallis might nix Berkeley's suggestion for a \"pussy number\" in Dames. But the dances were all his. Other Warners folk, like the Looney Tuners, at the cartoon ship, reveled in anonymity. Warners nei- ther paid the cartoon workers much, nor paid much attention to their work. They were unsung anarchists, left on their 43
own to devise animated versions of does well. So William gets our last laugh \"Warner is the only major studio that Cagney (Bugs), Guy Kibbee (Elmer), when, just before fadeout, he grabs a seems to know or care what is going on and Hugh Herbert (DaffY Duck)-rubes pampered pooch by the scruff of its neck in America besides pearl-handled gun- and farm animals who talked like touts. and dumps it in his wastebasket. play, sexual dalliance, and the giving of topcoats to comedy butlers .\" Busby Berkley making The Gold Diggers of 1933. This was social comment without sentimentality. And almost uniquely io In a stanza with the same cadences , the Thirties, Warners had a social con- Mordden writes: \"Leave it to Warners, science (this was a Zanuck legacy). Cru- in They Won't Forget, to counter Holly- sading with the canny stridency of a wood's traditional view of the American left-wing tabloid , the studio filmed South as a paradise of wisteria, juleps , exposes on prison atrocities, mob vio- and dashing gamblers. At Warners, at lence, union smashing, and the Bund least in the 1930s, the South is bigots movement in America. More important, and chain gangs:' In his 35-page essay, Warners made good drama out of good Mordden find s an electric fusing of sub- causes. A 193 7 Fortune article, reprinted ject and style. There are galloping hoof- in Behlmer, calls Jack's rule a \"bargain- prints across the page, and the cumulus counter dictatorship;' but asserts that afterim age of Chuck Jones' Roadrunner. ALL TOGETHER Now WHEN ARE THEY Berkeley's comparatively straight films but, except for 42nd Street and W hether he knew it or not, Jack was GONNA SHOW...? Dames , none of his legendary musi- getting the best comedy in Holly- cals. Footlight Parade is the only one wood out of his cartoon unit. And yet the 1. The Big House (MGM, 1930). that's as lickety-split surefooted in its few flat-out comedies Wallis produced Wallace Beery, heretofore pegg~d as a non-Berkeley sequences (directed by were weak sisters. Indeed , Warners' com- Lloyd Bacon at his most lowdown vig- edies were not nearly so funny as their comedian, rolls like a tank through this orous) as in its production numbers, melodramas-mainly in the Zanuck granddaddy of all prison pictures. A and the production numbers are mind- years , but also Casablanca and the '4 1 major breakthrough for sound as a blowing: \"Honeymoon Hotel :' \"By a Maltese Falcon , with its weird-sisters trio brute force in movies , and the signal Waterfall;' \"Shanghai Lil ;' of effeminate villains. Mordden tried to triumph of all prison pictures. George tell why: \"Screwball comedy, at heart , is Hill (director) and Frances Marion Footlight Parade (1933). about money and fun . Warners is against (scenarist). Incidentally, their and 4. Gabriel Over the White House both.\" Too, Warners knew that wit means Beery's subsequent gangster piece, The (MGM , 1933; Gregory La Cava). Graft- more when the odds are desperate, whe n Secret Six (with Harlow, Gable, and taking, mistress-keeping politico Wai- the stakes are higher than who-gets-the- Lewis Stone), is uncharacteristically ter Huston has anything but reform on girl. It was the little-guy studio, where a savage by MGM standards. pint-size torpedo '-ike Cagney danced with a noose around his neck ; where a 2. The Crowd Roars and Tiger runt like Robinson spat wisecracks at a Shark (both WB, 1932). Mightn't Mr. platoon of gangsters, their gats pointed at Turner have access to the 85- (as his chest. That's more than entertain- opposed to 71-) minute version of ment. That's exhilarating. Howard Hawks' auto-racing classic, featuring one of Cagney's most Today's TNT viewer watches as War- thoughtful performances of the period? ners films sneer at convention and laughs (TNT has already shown the retread, with the bark of surprise: They got away Lloyd Bacon's 1939 Indianapolis with that? Cagney, in Jimmy the Gent, Speedway, and the unrelated MGM called a short-haired woman \"Boyfriend\"? boxing movie The Crowd Roars .) Robinson , in The Man With Two Faces, Tiger Shark features Edward G. referred to his sister's beaux as \"group- Robinson as a Portuguese fisherman- ies\"? Stanwyck, when a man in Baby five years before Spencer Tracy in Face says his name is Pratt, replies, \"I Captains Courageous-and some know some prats where I come from\"? memorably bleak Hawksian musings And what of Employees' Entrance, about on love, death, and fatal triangles. the ruthless manager of a Manhattan department store (Warren William, of 3. Footlight Parade (WB, 1933). On course)? This unrepentant swine never the other hand , Warners was perfectly gets his co meuppance-because he's in character turning out this paean to good at his job. Compare Employees' the New Deal , cheerfully allegorized Entrance with Frank Capra's American in producer Jimmy Cagney's attempt to Madness (about another Depression cap- stage not one but three successful pre- italist, a banker based on studio finan cier views on the same night. For some Doc Giannini) and see that only Warners reason, TNT has shown many of Busby could dare to honor the bad man who 44
Sometimes Mordden writes high-like, land's, Raft eleven times Ann Sheridan's. men could be mean; strong women had well , like me on crack-then lands on a It had to do with the screen image as to be neurotic. Cagney was a hero when dime with something pithy and apropos. well; at Warners, ladies got in the way of he achieved something, Davis a heroine Like thi s, on Warners as a \" man's\" when she sacrificed herself. He could studio: \"Let's get this thing lit and shot, Where it mattered, dish it out; she had to take it. But few and yo u acto rs-shut up and do it. I Warners was a mans Thirties Warners women were dishrags mean , think of it-Walsh wore an eye studio: it valued and or punching bags, not even the lady of patch . Were talking maj or Tough Guys paid its men more the house, Kay Francis. And more than here, charged with bringing every film highly than women. a few of them could stand up to the big off with the efficient fury of a pirate raid :' boys. scenarios whose climaxes came quick T he subtext is certainly true. Where and often. The general line, as applied Stand above them, if she was it mattered, Warners was a man's to Cagney and Davis, was this: Strong Stan~'Yck. Watch her screw her way to a studio: it valued and paid its men more fortune in Baby Face-bo y, was s he highly th an wo men . At the end of 1939, 8. Safe in Hell (WB, 1931). According smart! With a profile cut by a hacksaw, Cagney was making three times Davis' to Clive Hirschorn's The Warner Bros. and a vo ice made for the talkies (both salary, Flynn four times Olivia De H av il- Story: \"a strange drama set in a tropical alluring and all-business), Stamvyck was rogues' sanctuary where extradition a female Cagney. Except she came first; his mind when he ascends to the presi- orders do not apply.... [Dorothy Mack- Capra made her a star in the 1930 dency. Then he rolls the presidential aill is) taken there by a sailor lover after Ladies at Leisure. And somehow she limo and goes into a coma. He comes she burns down a hotel in New was more persuasive than Cagney when out of it possessed by a zeal to right Orleans:' And so, luridly, on . This is dealing with mogul s. In 1931-33 she the wrongs of an economically blighted simply the most attention-getting of a worked at both Warners (eight films) nation, ensure peace through global slew of William A. Wellman titles as and Co lumbia (five). Then she bolted , disarmament, and stand his former yet unseen. Others calling out from never quite to be repl aced . gangland cronies up before a firing oblivion include Star Witness (with squad -literally. As weird an artifact as Walter Huston, 1931), Love Is a But there were plenty more where the Depression-or staunchly Republi- Racket (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. as a she came from. Davis, of course, forging can MGM-ever produced. Broadway gossip columnist, 1932), her mannerisms into an acting style, her and Central Airport (Richard willfulness into an independent spirit. 5. The Last Flight (WB, 1931; Barthelmess, 1933). And Blondell , with her exquisite comic William Dieterle). This Lost Genera- timing. And Alice White, a predator tion artifact may be more legendary in 9. They Won't Forget (WB, 1937). As with Betty Boop eyes, who cooed till her the breach than the observance; it savage and compelling now as then, men caved in . And Dvorak, who usually seemed more leaden than world-weary this fictionalized version (\"Death in stoked the domestic hearth, but whose the one time I caught it at a revival the Deep South\") of the Leo Frank eyes could glow like the tip s of two post- house. Still, the film boasts a certain case was possibly the best of Mervyn coital cigarettes. And, at the end of the literary cachet (script by John Monk LeRoy's films for Warners in the Thir- decade, Ann Sheridan. Forget Howard Saunders, after his The Sun Also Rises ties. Claude Rains struts a fine vulpine H awks' weepie babes in Only Angels one-off, Single Lady) , and who more line-and a credible Southern accent- Have Wings. Think of Torrid Zone , in apt than The Dawn Patrol's Richard as the prosecutor looking to parlay a which the pre-Bacallian Sheridan tangles Barthelmess to lead a cadre of flyboys sex-murder trial with overtones of with United Fruit plantation boss Pat lingering in Paris after the Great War? North-South hatred into a ticket to O'Brien and free-lance foreman Cagney. the statehouse. We're talking three major tough guys 6. A Modern Hero (WB, 1934). here, only two of whom wear pants. Georg Wilhelm Pabst's sole U.S. pro- 10. Union Depot (WB, 1932; Alfred duction, the story of a circus rider E. Green). For a while there, as the The script , by Jerry Wald and (Richard Barthelmess) who takes a camera travels, cranes, descends, and Richard Macaulay, respects the Sheri- flier in the joyless street of capitalism generally noodles its way around the dan character's resilience enough to let just before the market crashes. train station of the title, it looks as if the men toss barbs at her, confident she this 67-minute wonder aspires to be can hurl grenades back. \"Next time you 7. The Prizefighter and The Lady Warners' answer to Grand Hotel. It's get in my way;' he snarls, \"I'm gonna (MGM, 1933). The shade of Howard not , by a long chalk, but its seedy shoot right through ya .\" Sheridan: Hawks hovers over this fight-game charm is considerable. With Douglas \"That's one way you might hit someone:' movie-\"debut du tournage;' accord- Fairbanks, Jr. in his vagabond lowlife Later, she throws a plate of sandwiches ing to Jean Gili, though W.S. Van Dyke mode and Joan Blondell at her most at his head and just misses ; he picks up II, Metro's liveliest journeyman , fin- winsome, which is pretty damn win- one of the sandwiches, gives it a nibble, ished up and got the directing credit. some. and says helpfully;' Next time, a little At any rate, legit heavyweight con- more mu stard:' Sheridan offers plenty of tender Max Baer proved surprisingly -R.J. mustard , as a ballsy equal to Cagney and appealing in his acting debut, and as a handsome woman. The movie Myrna Loy and Walter Huston sup- knows she's both. And, at the very end, plied the other corners of a Hawksian so does Cagney: \"You and your 14-karat triangle. oomph!\" And Warners is both-both every- thing, a welter of Manichaean co ntradic- tion s. Home of the musical fantasy, 45
tenement of the undercJass melodramas. ad, scr. The Million Dollar Collar (D. Hazard (Green) sup. Flirtation Walk Tears in soap operas, harangues from Ross Lederman) st, sc r. No Defense (Frank Borzage) sup. Harold Teen (Mur- soap boxes. The studio with a con- (Bacon) st, scr. On With the Show (Alan ray Roth) sup. He Was Her Man (Bacon) science; the boss with a bull whip. The Crosland) scr. The Sap (Mayo) scr. So st, sup. Housewife (Green) co-st, sup. police state where the downtrodden Long Letty (Bacon) co-scr. The Time, Jimmy the Gent (Michael Curtiz) sup. masses got to crack wise, onscreen. the Place, and the Girl (Howard The Man With Two Faces (Mayo) sup. Like Talleyrand misting up about life Bretherton) st, scr. The Merry Frinks (Green) sup. The before the revolution , we can imagine Merry Wives of Reno (H. Bruce Hum- that working at Warners was as much 1930: The Flirting Widow (William berstone) st, scr, sup. Upperworld (Del fun as watching Warners movies. It was A. Seiter) sup. Hold Everything (Del Ruth) sup. A li?ry Honorable Guy probably more like. a sprawling, brawling Ruth) scr. Loose Ankles (Ted Wilde) (Bacon) sup. Wonder Bar (Bacon) sup. family, where Dad played dictator and sup. Other Men 's Wives (Clarence the kid s schemed to do almost what Badger) sup. Playing Around (Mervyn 1935: Black Fury (Curtiz) sup. Bor- they wa nted. Did Jack Warner know LeRoy) sup. She Couldn 't Say No dertown (Mayo) ad , sup. Captain Blood what he wanted? Either way, he got it. (Curtiz) sup. Dr. Socrates (Dieterle) And on TNT, we get to keep it. ' ROBERT LoRD R obert Lord (1902-76) was a grad- 1i\"acy and Davis in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932). sup. Golddiggers of 1935 (Busby Berke- uate of George Baker's writing ley) st, sup. Oil for the Lamps of China workshop at Harvard . But he learned as (Bacon) co-dial. Show Girl in Holly- (LeRoy) sup. Page Miss Glory (LeRoy) much about screencraft from his days as wood (LeRoy) sup. Song of the Flame an amateur boxe r; as he told James (Crosland) sup. co-scr, sup. Silke, \"Set your audience up to expect a right and give them a left:' In 1930 he 1931: Big Business Girl (Seiter) sup. 1936: Colleen (Green) st, sup. Give supervised (produced) First National The Finger Points (John Francis Dillon) Me Your Heart (Mayo) sup. The Singing product. Two years later, in an amazing co-scr. Her Majesty, Love (William Kid (William Keighley) st, sup. Stage burst of creativity, he and Wilson Dieterle) co-ad. Local Boy Makes Good Struck (Berkeley) st, sup. Mizner, the legendary restaurateur and (LeRoy) scr. The Reckless Hour (Dillon) raco nteur, w rote eight terrific films co-scr. The Ruling Voice (Rowland V. 1937: Black Legion (Mayo) st, sup. released within 13 months. Soon Lord Lee) ad. The Prinu' and the Pauper (Keighley) was producing for the A team: he sup. That Certain Feeling (Edmund anchored the studio's second wave of 1932: Fireman, Save My Child Goulding) sup. Tovarich (Anatole Lit- musicals , then ignited Paul Muni's series (Bacon) co-scr. It's Tough to Be Famous vak) sup. (Alfred E. Green) scr. Man Wanted of exposes, then handed a gun to Errol (Dieterle) co-st, co -sc r. Manhattan 1938: The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse Flynn (Dodge City) and Bette Davis Parade (Bacon) co-scr. One Way Passage (Litvak) sup. Brother Rat (Keighley) sup. (The Letter) . After war service, Lord (Tay Garnett) st *. The Purchase Price Dawn Patrol (Goulding) sup. Women Are produced indie dramas starring WB's old (William A. Wellman) sc r. So Big Like That (Stanley Logan) sup. contract pl ayer, Humphrey Bogart. (Wellman) co-scr. Winner Take All (Del Ruth) co-scr *. You Said a Mouthful 1939: Confessions of a Nazi Spy In this filmography of Lord's Warner (Bacon) co-scr. (Litvak) sup. Dodge City (Curtiz) sup. On Your Toes (Enright) sup. The Private Bros. work, ad = adaptation; dial = dia- 1933: College Coach (Wellman) sup. Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Curtiz) Convention City (Mayo) scr. Footlight logue, scr = screenplay, st = story, sup = Parade (Bacon) sup. Frisco Jenny sup. (Wellman) co-scr *. Goldiggers of 1933 1940: Brother Rat and Baby supervisor. A shared credit is indicated (LeRoy) sup. Hard to Handle (LeRoy) by co-. An asterisk designates Lord co-scr *. Havana Widows (Enright) sup. (Enright) sup. The Letter (William film s on which Wilson Mizner worked. Heroes for Sale (Wellman) co-scr*. The Wyler) sup. No Time for Comedy Titles are listed alphabetically for each Little Giant (Del Ruth) co-scr *. The (Keighley) sup. Till We Meet Again Mind Reader (Del Ruth) co-scr*. (Goulding) st [remake of One Way Pas- yea r. 20,000 1i>ars in Sing Sing (Michael Cur- 1927: If I Were Single (Roy Del tiz) co-ad *. The World Changes sage]. 1941: Dive Bomber (Curtiz) sup. Ruth) st, scr. A Reno Divorce (Ralph (LeRoy) sup. Graves) ad. 1934: As the Earth Turns (Green) Footsteps in the Dark (Bacon) sup. One Foot in Heaven (Irving Rapper) sup. 1928: Beware of Bachelors (Del sup. Dames (Enright) co-st, sup. Dark Shining Victory (Rapper) sup. Ruth) scr. Five and Ten Cent Annie (Del Ruth) co-scr. The Lion and the Mouse 1942: Wings for the Eagle (Bacon) (Lloyd Bacon) ad, dial. The Little Snob (John G. Adolfi) scr. My Man (Archie sup. ® Mayo) scr. On Trial (Mayo) co-scr. Pow- der My Back (Del Ruth) scr. Women They Talk About (Bacon) scr. 1929: The Aviator (Del Ruth) scr. The Gold Diggers of Broadway (Del Ruth) scr. Hardboiled Rose (F. Harmon Wright) scr. Kid Gloves (Ray Enright) 46
Can't Beat tIie\"OO~~F~\"~~W;\"(19311 'System by Gregg Kilday been recalled fondly in any number of tem from its beginnings in the eulogistic remembrances as the year Twenties-as the founding moguls N ostalgia for the good old, bad that Hollywood routinely manufac- struggled to impose order on the nas- old days of the studio system tured an astounding product line that cent film industry-through the heyday is in full swing. Gone With the ranged from ·Stagecoach to The Wizard of the smoothly-tooled film factories of Wind, on the occasion of its 50th anni- of Oz, from Dark Victory to Ninotchka. the Thirties and Forties, to their pass- versary, rises again-and though tech- Compared to the slim pickings served ing in the Fifties, victims of the rise of nically it was produced by the obsessive up by the film industry's current corpo- television, a shift in audience demo- David O. Selznick as an independent rate managers, Hollywood's ancien reg- graphics and the rebellion of actors and production, it now stands as the epit- ime has come to seem a profligate directors striking out as free agents. /)me of the studio era, Metro-Goldwyn- purveyor of glorious movies. l\\1ayeresque in spirit, if not entirely in Schatz interweaves the narrative of fact. For once,· the nostalgic impulse can three representative studios-the high- be trusted. -In his new study, The gloss MGM, with its emphasis on first- The rose-colored glow of its elegiac Genius of the System: Hollywood Film- run escapist fare, the tabloid-oriented sunsets casts a warm embrace over its making in the Studio Era (Pantheon Warner Bros., with its knack for birth year, 1939, which has lately itself Books, $24.95), Thomas Schatz recon- addressing the Depression head-on, structs the workings of the studio sys- and the low-rent Universal, with its 47
serials and B-features that bolstered the reviewer feels free to lecture everyone Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946). bottom half of double bills-along with from \"Marty\" Scorsese to \"Savage Selznick's rising career. Selznick Steve\" Holland , auterism has degener- story conferences in which Thalberg worked his way up through the execu- ated into one more cult-of-personality. expertly untangles the plot's dramatic tive ranks at MGM , Paramount and RKO, line, and of Rebecca, with SeLznick before pioneering the big-budget star A sserting that \"producers and stu- alternately cajoling and checking vehicles that were to become the proto- . dio executi ves have been the Alfred Hitchcock as he adapts to Amer- type for post-studio-era moviemaking. most misunderstood and undervalued ican mores. But for every case study he The elaborate system of creative figures in American film history,\" offers that underscores the system's checks and balances orchestrated by Schatz actually sets the stage for recon- \"genius,\" there's another that suggests the studio production chiefs and their sidering all the interconnecting forces , many movies succeeded in spite of that supervisory lieutenants, Schatz argues, chief among them market demand , that genius. Hal Wallis, for example, served the movIes well. affect film production. Loew's Inc. , dropped his plan to shoot a new tag MGM's parent company, controlled only scene for Casablanca only because the Working from a scholarly motherlode about 150 theaters at the start of the Allied invasion of North Africa necessi- of studio memos, financial records and Depression , and so Mayer and his lieu- tated rushing the movie to market. trade journals, Schatz portrays a system tenant, Irving Thalberg, were charged in which directors were protected from with producing high-end entertain- With the studio system itself now their own excesses by an army of sup- ments that could command long, urban relegated to history-despite attempts portive creative personnel, stars were runs-a charge which dovetailed nicely like Disney's to resurrect the studio assigned to complementary genres that with Thalberg's own luxe tastes and approach by mating house stars like guaranteed their appeal , and film out- Mayer's prestige yearnings. Warners, Bette Midler with corresponding put was regulated to take advantage of with 500 theaters to feed , adopted a genres like its Touchstone \"adult\" the demands of the studios' own theater· leaner, more contemporary posture, comedies-Schatz will be read for his chains. Though the occasional rebels with the Brothers Warner insisting their vivid and sensitive retelling of Holly- house directors turn out two-and-a-half wood's past creative battles. But he also Hitchcock directs Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960). minutes of film a day, which , in turn , offers an implicit guide to the future . favored a documentary urgency in their like Erich von Stroheim or Bette Davis work. Universal, on the other hand, Beneath the glare of personalities- may have chafed unCier ~he. bosses' with no theater chain to fall back on , whether they be stars, directors, or, at paternal guidance, Schatz InSIStS that, was reduced to churning out cliff\" the moment, corporate takeover- on balance, the talent was well served-:- hanging serials it could play off in artists-the coming byplay between especially in contrast to the anarchIC second-run houses in the stix. technology and the marketplace must and wasteful disarray that now rules. be factored in. Will the rising new Taking his title from Andre Bazin, mega-conglomerates insist on common- Schatz squares off against th~ sys- who, in cautioning the French auteur- denominator entertainments that play tem's replacement, auteurI~m ists , wrote , \"The American cinema is a to a worldwide market? Or will new \"adolescent romanticism,\" he smffs- classical art, but why not then admire avenues of delivery, which permit pin- which has labored for the past 25 years in it what is most admirable, i.e. , not pointing specific audiences, yield the to enshrine directors as the studios' cre- only the talent of this or that filmmaker, \"narrow-casting\" that gains in sophis- ative fountainheads. Of course, since but the genius of the system ,\" Schatz tication what it loses in scope? The Andrew Sarris first began tub- smartly presents detailed accounts of answer will likely have less to do with thumping for his favored pant?eon of the making of Grand Hotel , recreating the talent behind the cameras than the directors in the Sixties, auteunsm has both conquered and been vulgarized .. If Author Thomas Schatz. masters they serve. ® its underlying impulse was to r~c1alm commercial Hollywood movies as objects of serious study, ~ts mission w~s accomplished-Scha.tz ?I':llself doesn t have to waste time InSistIng that films as various as Frankenstein and Spell- bound deserve thoughtful attention. But now that any thumb-waving tube 48
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