February 26, 2011

Pungently, a noir classic comes to Criterion

What took so long? The Criterion Collection has at last released the acrid newspaper noir “Sweet Smell of Success,” a title that’s been crying out for the Criterion treatment and that’s been on my Criterion wish list for years.

It’s one of those cult classics of increasing merit (the worth of my original 1957 poster of the film rose 10-fold in a five-year spurt; its going rate today might bring tears to my eyes) that demands a restored print and a smorgasbord of supplements. It’s languished next to Kubrick’s blistering anti-war classic “Paths of Glory,” also from ’57, on my rather persnickety wish list. Criterion must be listening: That film was released earlier this year. (What next? “The Killing”?)

Cynical, swinging, seductive, “Sweet Smell of Success” is one of those consummately  good pictures — we’ll say it: perfection — that has you quietly cheering as you watch, savoring the frissons of superlative art. It’s pure pleasure; it carries you along, briskly.

I can say that about many movies, but the one that springs to mind as far as a crackling contemporary is “All About Eve,” not only because the movies share themes and an unrelenting tone. (Hell — why not a Criterion of that one?) In both: the acting, the direction, the scripts worthy of literature.

Burt Lancaster plays one of the great unsung villains of cinema, New York gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, a chilly, megalomaniacal monster modeled on Walter Winchell. (Critic Gary Giddins dubs Hunsecker a “golem of gossip” in his just-right essay included in the handsome two-disc box set, which features vintage documentaries on director Alexander Mackendrick and DP James Wong Howe, whose photography pops.)

Hunsecker, pathological, power-hungry, “prints anything,” snaps one of his repulsed rivals. He destroys lives with a key stroke. “He’s got the scruples of a guinea pig and the morals of a gangster.”

Tony Curtis is beautiful quicksilver as Hunsecker whipping boy Sidney Falco, whose loyalty to the grand man is fraying beneath his own ambivalence. Long regarded Curtis’ best performance (it is), Falco is a marvelous creation of shifting moral shading.

Much of what makes “Sweet Smell” so fun are the famous coruscating lines blurted like staccato shrapnel: “You’re dead, son — get yourself buried.” “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

Clifford Odets rewrote Ernest Lehman’s original script and punched it up with hot pepper — a fact Lehman didn’t want to discuss during an interview with me a couple years before his death in 2005. The words got rhythm, and they swing to the “crime jazz” score by Elmer Bernstein and the straight-up jazz of the Chico Hamilton Quintet.

With stylized control, “Sweet Smell of Success” is taut and speedy, mean and exhilarating. Mackendrick, with the celebrated assist of photographer Howe, captures the grit and glamor of nocturnal midtown New York like few before. The movie is directed like silk, with cigarette holes burned in the gleaming fabric.

Leave a Comment

Filed under movies

Tagged as

February 19, 2011

A quick bow to a couple of screen sex kittens

Betty Boop, that innocent, knock-kneed tart, goes all pink in a clueless coquette’s fluster, not quite aware of the sexuality she emanates like a woozy drug. “Oh, my,” she chirps, finger twisting into a dimple. Her itsy-bitsy skirt scarcely hides happy-to-be-glanced garters. Her huge eyelids are fluttering butterfly wings. All things male melt.

Boop, and we love her, was one of crackpot Max Fleischer’s bedazzling weirdos, something between human and funhouse freak — in her case, the mixed-message quintessence of the naughty naif. She was on exemplary, cooing display during a recent program at MOMA highlighting animation shorts by Disney, Iwerks and Fleischer from the 1930s.

Her kind of oblivious sexual heat came to mind watching Jennifer Jones’s plucky, peach-cheeked chambermaid in Ernst Lubitsch’s yeasty final film “Cluny Brown” (1946), which wrapped a run this week at Film Forum. Jones plays Brown as a free, shrewdly naïve spirit, cramped by brittle distinctions of British class on the eve of WWII.

Brown follows her bliss, just up and does what she likes, even if that means assuming the sleeves-up virility of a plumber on occasion. Sink’s plugged, needs fixing, she’s there, why not? (Only the cosmopolitan Charles Boyer seems to find this apt and charming, amid a sea of wrinkled noses and prim clucks.)

Jones’ own Betty Boop scene stops the show early on. It would be funny, as it’s meant to, if it wasn’t so unabashedly erotic. Buzzed on a pair of swiftly quaffed martinis, Jones’ Brown stretches out on a sofa and begins writhing and purring like a post-coital panther. She imagines she’s a cat, breathlessly “meeeoooowww”-ing, her dark eyes half-mast beacons of carnal lust, her figure squirming in heat. It plays, almost shockingly, like a steam blast of screen sensuality that feels positively pre-Code.

Meow.

Later, she and Boyer, during an extended and lively exchange presumably about plumbing, go on and on about “banging” “pipes” and the like.

It’s classic Lubitsch, slipping in sexual innuendo where he can, even when it’s less than inconspicuous. Betty Boop, who didn’t have to worry as much about the censors, would be proud. Blushing, but proud.

Leave a Comment

Filed under movies

January 8, 2011

‘Valentine’ blues

During a pivotal dramatic scene in the almost universally acclaimed romantic downer “Blue Valentine,” my eyes bugged a little and I leaned over and whispered to my companion, “Jesus, this is like bad Cassavetes.”

The movie, starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, indie darlings known for artistic risk, runs on the raw immediacy of a latter-day Cassavetes. It strives for the same emotional danger and scabrous truth that Cassavetes pushed so hard for, bruising himself and his fellow actors along the way.

But something’s off in this willfully naturalistic portrait of a relationship in bloom and, simultaneously, thanks to shuffled chronology, its tortured death throes. Writer-director Derek Cianfrance presents two vaguely conceived characters and tries to create depth by giving the actors free reign in meandering scenes that bear the wincing indulgence of labored workshop exercises. The acting is ragged, ugly, histrionic, mumbly, sometimes achingly honest, sometimes awful.

Cianfrance lets scenes that are clearly going nowhere to drag on simply because the actors are “in the moment,” riffing and roaring, but not necessarily achieving anything dramatically. In several key sequences, mainly blowups between the disintegrating couple, the director loses control by refusing to cut and shape the moment.

The movie, which could easily lose 30 minutes, is flabby with formless scenes in which Williams and Gosling struggle to sustain an emotional pitch, often flailing, repeating phrases that often don’t even make sense. (“Want me to hit you?” Gosling shouts over and over at a pained Williams during an uncomfortable sex scene for no apparent reason. His question doesn’t fit the moment or the character.)

While trying to nail moments of “transcendent truth,” the performers become more self-consciously mannered instead of more natural. They’re hard to believe much of the time, pulling you out of the movie and leading you to consider the rehearsal process over the final product, which is ultimately a series of underwritten sketches that don’t create the effect of a living, believable relationship.

 

1 Comment

Filed under movies

Tagged as

December 10, 2010

One artist to another: Greenaway’s oblique conversation with da Vinci

Over at the Park Avenue Armory they’re corralling visitors into a dark and mysterious space the size of a NASA hangar. The willing prisoners enter a kind of giddy unknown, not unlike the expectant huddles that are herded into the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland. It’s a bit spooky, but you take it on faith that astonishment will follow.

Once through the foyer’s towering old wooden doors, you’re inside the Armory’s 19th-century drill hall, an engulfing black space where forests of flickering screens fashion a panoramic tumult of light and sound. Music thrums and swells. Your head swivels as you both stand and stroll, eyes chasing a hyper-impressionistic visual tour of Italian cities and their famous epicenters of great art.

Your group is then ushered into the next area, erected as a precise replica of the refectory in the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan, where, past vaulting arches and columns, a high-tech copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous (and long-imperiled) 1498 mural painting “The Last Supper” is gigantically projected.

A life-size replica of the “Last Supper” table strikingly divides the massive space, its contents — cups, plates, bread rolls, pieces of chicken — painted frosty white like a canvas. At points during the presentation, the table glows orange underneath. If invited, viewers could easily sit down and fill the table like the painting’s familiar inhabitants.

This is artist-filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s grand multi-media meditation on “The Last Supper,” brought to thunderous life with layered projections, dramatic classical music, Power Point-like laser effects, scrolling panels of text and imposing details of the painting, all of it presented with Sensurround intensity.

Try as he might, Greenaway can’t extract himself from film, and the cinematic close-ups and fades, bowel-rumbling sound effects and orchestral timing make his spectacular a youth’s dream version of an art class — part movie, part high-tech symposium. It melds the shrewdly pedagogic and lushly phantasmagoric.

See it how you will, but this is not just a bewilderingly complex art installation; it’s a full-throated theatrical production, sans live performers. And it’s not the product of one man but a committed arsenal of sound, video, lighting and theatrical creators. Greenaway is the maestro.

Equal parts euphoria and education are its aims. What it means isn’t pressing; how it makes you feel — awe, ecstasy — seems more to the point.

After “Supper,” there’s dessert. The 45-minute journey concludes with a surprise epilogue, a jaunty and visually busy exegesis of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana,” whose connecting tissue to “The Last Supper” is another scene of Christ holding court at the center of a long and crowded dinner table. This time it’s the site of his signature miracle of turning water into wine for an overbooked wedding bash. Greenaway, using his taped voice, brings erudite humor to this kinetic exploration of a great painting. He asks questions of it. The answers are speculative jokes, but curiously plausible, only adding to the dizzying magic at hand.

(Details. Through Jan. 6 at the Park Avenue Armory.)

Leave a Comment

Filed under art

Tagged as ,

December 4, 2010

Laughter in the light

One of the eight Vermeers in New York lanced me at the Frick. It’s the one you’re probably thinking of, “Officer and Laughing Girl,” and if the girl in question doesn’t quite seem to be laughing, she is certainly enjoying herself, tingling robustly all the way to her bonnet.

Her creamy cheeks are blushing pink — strawberry milk — and her smile, disclosing teeth just so, is prim and natural. Delighted, she’s flush in girlish flirtation, responding to the caller at her table, regaled by heroic tales or purring flatteries. Again, I don’t think laughter is the sound she makes. Something finer and more self-conscious — a yeasty giggle, one that might even signal derision at the man’s pomp or presumption. But that’s unlikely.

The painting’s a grabber, keeping me coming back to it after just a few paces in another direction. The patented Vermeer light is mesmeric— the girl is aglow with emotion — and the charm and excitement of human connection suffuse even the shadows of the man’s mysterious back. Some things we will never know about others.

It’s amazing that eight of the 34 or 35 official Vermeers hang in NY — three at the Frick, the rest at the Met. Jon Jost’s tiny art house romance “All the Vermeers in New York” comes to mind, and then just as rapidly poofs away, mist.

A bit about the Frick’s fine trio of Vermeers is right here.

 

1 Comment

Filed under art

Tagged as ,

December 1, 2010

‘Tinkers,’ an exasperating jewel

Paul Harding and his debut novel “Tinkers” came out of nowhere. Early last year the book tip-toed in, making a quiet stir among literary critics and scant ripple across readers. It arrived with a tink. It should have been a small explosion.

Then it won the 2010 Pulitzer, surprising many of us (Paul who?), though probably not some of Harding’s famous writing instructors — Marilynne Robinson, Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken — who’ve ladled praise on the verbally thick if physically thin novel. Their generous effusions — “truly remarkable,” “exquisitely precise,” “brilliant … as tight and complicated as clockwork” — fill up most of the back cover of the new paperback.

“Tinkers” is a layered story about a long-estranged father and son in New England, their families, their work, their deaths. We meet the son at age 80 on his deathbed. We meet the father, the tinker of the title, on his rounds and among the family he will soon abandon. Chronology shifts and blows.

Harding, who’s called himself a “self-taught modern New England transcendentalist,” cleaves to descriptive nature leitmotifs — water and trees, wind and snow — and evokes scenes of homely domesticity with calm authority. Research about clock repair, seasonal and climate phenomenon, epilepsy (with which the father is stricken) and even sewing give the book staggering dimension.

Don’t let the hors d’oeuvre size of “Tinkers” fool you. Maddening and marvelous, the novel, at an attractive 191 pages, can be as heavy and elliptical and abstract as Woolf and Faulkner, both of whom I love. It sways between crisp concreteness and knots of high-flying poetics. A classic writer’s writer, Harding purposely mingles tones and styles, including straight narrative, overwrought excerpts from made-up books and cascading streams of consciousness.

At times it feels larded with lyricism; re-reading passages sozzled on simile and metaphor can be a rewarding chore, though sometimes not. Elsewhere it gleams with lucidity, the kind of crystalline precision that dazzles (“The house was gone. Kathleen stopped walking and looked around. The clouds that had colored the dawn copper had advanced and were now fastened overhead like a lid of stone. Flurries of snow spun in the wind. Kathleen surely stood in the right place and the doctor’s house surely was vanished.”)

I had a hard time getting into “Tinkers.” I got lost in the mandarin “book” excerpts. I was baffled by some denser descriptions that seemed to flitter about hither and yon in the cluttered junkyard of useless thoughts. And I was occasionally turned off by a creeping sense of contrivance.

I put it away at page 60. My mind, I thought, is too wild right now for a book demanding so much attention. (This has happened to me with Woolf and Faulkner.) Then I became weirdly attracted to it again, by its oddness, by its brambly, transporting language, its gentle pull of sadness.

I picked it up again and finished it in one sitting. Harding’s multiple styles carry you, then drop you. One moment they exasperate, turning art into toil. The next moment the words flow wonderfully and the challenge becomes the delight.

Leave a Comment

Filed under books

Tagged as ,

November 8, 2010

Another go with ‘Yojimbo’

I give most movies a couple of chances. Kurosawa’s great “Yojimbo” is one of them. It’s “great,” yes, but it has problems, unignorable flaws that keep me from joining the consensus on its station as an unblemished masterpiece.

I feel bad about this (I’m deficient, not the film), yet that doesn’t change the fact that my past two viewings of “Yojimbo,” isolated by several years, have let me down.

In today’s cultural shorthand, it doesn’t quite hold up. I’m not stupid — there’s plenty in the movie that delights and astonishes, and it’s certainly worthy of Kurosawa’s magnificent canon. Just some niggles, that’s what I have.

I watched “Yojimbo” (aka “The Bodyguard”) the other day as part of BAMcinematek’s “Kurosawa’s Samurai” series, which also includes “Ran,” “Kagemusha,” and, best of all, “Seven Samurai.”

Going in I knew that my last visit with the movie had been an anticlimax, that it was time for a fresh assessment on the big screen.

To the playful martial clonks of Masaru Sato’s charming score — one for your soundtrack library; lots of wood blocks — unfurl the opening credits over a tight shot of the back of Tishiro Mifune’s head as he walks.

He’s the “bodyguard,” the itinerant samurai, the mercenary Man With No Name. We don’t see his face, because this is about presence and carriage. Notice how he kind of galumphs. He’s graceless, even oafish, until, later, he unleashes his sword, felling six men in under 10 seconds. He does that often. He’s a goof, but wily and fatally efficient.

The opening’s a terrific uninterrupted take of Mifune’s bobbing head and shoulders, which finally pans to his sandaled feet in the dust as he approaches the film’s fated town. Once inside the small town, based on the one-horse, one-street towns of a thousand westerns, Kurosawa sets his story’s impish comic tone with a famous image: a greedy mutt trotting from long shot to close-up with a human hand in its jaws.

Mifune’s ronin, who calls himself Sanjuro, unwittingly arrives to a hamlet cleaved in two by warring factions that go at it almost daily with nothing to show for it. Sporadic violence keeps the place aquiver with slapsticky tension. Sanjuro works both sides of the street. He bluffs and manipulates the respective group leaders, depicted as dunderheads, with bracingly funny craftiness, ultimately forging a shrewd if bloody peace.

It’s a great though familiar story, with critics citing several sources, including “Seven Samurai.” And of course Sergio Leone poached its central conceit for 1964’s unofficial remake “A Fistful of Dollars,” with Clint Eastwood as the laconic Man With No Name.

But like another great film, “The Thin Man,” “Yojimbo’s” uneven pacing unravels it, making the 110-minute movie feel baggier than it should. Far from shapeless, the classically structured story hits the right beats, but does so slowly and with excessive air. Parts are boring. A lot of unnecessary business with lesser characters mucks up the tempo.

Laced with nimble comedy — Mifune, of course, was a crack comedian — the picture boasts as many clunky comic gestures, some of which are straight from old cartoons. You could say that they have aged, but even by ’61 a few of the gags would bear mold.

Mifune, while fitfully cartoonish, has soul. His Sanjuro cares. He plays with human lives, but morality lines his intentions. He’s complex. That doesn’t shake the sense that the movie’s good/bad balance feels old-timey and canned.

What holds up brilliantly, next to Mifune’s nuanced turn and so much more, are Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa’s visual poetics, dappled with expressive close-ups of people communicating and spectacular compositions of bodies at rest and in motion. Certainly drafting tools were used for each shot.

I love that Kurosawa loves the elements, rain and wind in particular. There’s a great shot of snowballing dust clouds, swirly puffs eddying around the pretty-boy fighter who appears mid-way in the film. Like he’s arrived from the heavens.

But this newcomer is a shit. He’s Mifune’s epicene antithesis, a smooth-cheeked peacock who hides behind his two-shooter pistol, which he regards and fondles like a fetish toy. That device is the unfair advantage of cowards in a blade-based warrior society.

Like the end of “Seven Samurai,” the conclusion of “Yojimbo” is bittersweet. But the overriding humor gives it a chipper tang. All that dust settles and in comes Sato’s music as Mifune shuffles out of the small town, the camera again at his back, following him to his next hard-earned meal.

Leave a Comment

Filed under BAM, movies

Tagged as ,