Ayn Rand, Hunt for the Wilderpeople and the 13th Amendment – Reviews #256

Hello there. Below you'll find some stuff about books and films, mostly focusing on The Fountainhead. I've also written a couple of blogs in other places. Here's one about legendary composer Elmer Bernstein, and this is a chat with filmmaker Christopher Nupen about Jacqueline du Pre. The 80-second film he made for BBC Music Magazine is truly beautiful too, it's here.



BOOK: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
FILM: The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Ayn Rand’s book, The Fountainhead, is absolutely fascinating: a strident, remarkable, often ridiculous crowdpleaser that lays out her philosophy of ‘objectivism’, in which self-interest is the driving force of progress.

It centres on a visionary modernist architect, Howard Roark, who wants to be judged solely on his work, without forging the personal relationships and making the compromises that he – and Rand – see as fraudulent and antithetical to great art. His counterpoint is Peter Keating, the golden boy of the architectural world, who excels at Stanton (from which Roark is expelled for insubordination), rises to fame and glory, and then receives an almighty comeuppance, as his nemesis blasts through society’s barriers to take his rightful place at the peak of the world.

Along the way, Rand fires spectacularly and relentlessly at social responsibility, at the masses and at socialism, the latter represented by Ellsworth Toohey, an apparent hybrid of Alexander Woolcott and Bernard Shaw: a hideous, brilliant bird of a man whose motives are kept murky until a stunning speech to the bereft, swollen Keating, 664 pages in. Charity is a way to absolve oneself of guilt or provide meaning to a mediocre life, the masses are revolting, stupid and feral, and socialism is a way to rob man of his individuality and thwart his potential, she argues.

While I find her polemicising utterly lacking in the empathy intrinsic to basic humanity (and perhaps informed by the Bolsheviks seizing her family’s possessions in the ‘20s), there’s no denying that her way of viewing the world is explosive and even revelatory, and it’s hardly surprising that this visceral but cerebral book has become a bible for libertarians. It is, above all, a hymn to individual freedom and a condemnation of society’s skewed priorities – which will fight for an unwed mother but not a beautiful building – with architecture a richly symbolic field in which to state the case for human progress rocketing skywards thanks to the work of a few great men.

It dips massively during two laughable, comically sincere sequences – the first dealing with Roark’s mutually sadistic courtship of journalist Dominique Francon, the second his love-in with Hearst substitute, Gail Wynand – and sometimes slips so deeply into a recounting of Rand’s ‘objectivist’ philosophy that it becomes a textbook rather than a novel (most damagingly during Rourk’s climactic speech), while inescapably featuring an idealised ‘great man’ who’s a rapist.

But it’s also enormously readable – far more so than I was expecting – with a patented contrariness and counterintuitiveness in its language and ideas, a starkly impressionistic vocabulary full of “smears” and “smudges”, “parapets” and “porticos”, and bursts of sudden, shocking violence: in its architecture, its relationship with an imperfect world, its characters’ creativity and cruelty. The first time that Roark reshapes a hackneyed, ignorant design by slashing thick black lines through it, you can’t help your heart beating a little faster.

Rand's contention that the point of life is to create is one that many of her critics will still be able to relate to, though she argues extremely persuasively that this is something one should do for oneself and not for others: anything else is a betrayal of the self, and that is the most heinous betrayal, the gravest sin of which man is capable. She elaborates in her introduction, written in 1968, by saying that religion too is an abuse of man, since it involves us apologising for and debasing ourselves before a higher power. In The Fountainhead, Roark's visionary design for the Stoddard Temple naturally causes outrage – stirred by Toohey, and Wynand's flagship tabloid, The Banner – because it is a temple scaled to man's proportions, which glorifies humanity, and not God.

Donald Trump has said recently that the film, and book, have been a huge inspiration for him. I'd say the chances of Donald Trump having read a 725-page book about philosophy are exactly zero. If I'm wrong and he has, then he must have missed the part in which Rand says that the worst of all the "second-handers", those inferior specimens whose self-worth is based on the approval of others, is he who seeks not just vindication, but power. Hilariously, he even sought to stress his similarities with Roark by quoting an unnamed journalist who thinks that he is terrific:

He then recounted a call he received from a liberal journalist: “How does it feel to have done what you have done? I said what have I done. He said nobody ever in the history of this country has done what you have done. And I said, well, if I lose, then no big deal. And he said no, no, if you lose, it doesn’t matter because this will be talked about forever.

His love of the book, he said, was because "it relates to business (and) beauty (and) life and inner emotions. That book relates to ... everything." As indeed do most books.



In 1949, the book was adapted for the screen, and the subsequent film is fascinating, though not in the same way. When I heard about it, my fear is that it would lose the ideological imperative in translation, but actually the opposite is true: only the ideology remains intact, characters just yelling political slogans in one another’s faces for two hours. When you realise that Rand adapted the book herself, and essentially took over the direction from King Vidor, that makes more sense. Even so, you’d think that a cinephile like Rand, who saw up to 200 movies a year in the cinema, might have learned how to write one. Gary Cooper is simply miscast as Roark: in the book, a gaunt, upright, red-headed, ferociously dedicated, single-minded force of nature who lives only to create, and eschews compromise, populism and personal ties in his pursuit of greatness. Cooper trials to dial down his ‘aww shucks’ charm and his inherent nobility, but there’s nothing in its place: his Roark seems slow-witted, shambling and lacking the enormous creative dynamism that typifies the character. Kent Smith is also spectacularly wrong as the banal but beautiful Peter Keating, playing the ethereal, ringleted fraud as a sort of desperate, sweaty jock gone to seed, while Ellsworth Toohey, the piece’s seductive socialist straw man, chrome-domed Robert Douglas has a few witty one-liners, but is a simple two-faced villain rather than the insidious reptile of the page. Rounding out the tone-deaf silliness is Henry Hull, whose rapidly receding Henry Cameron (Roark’s mentor) is among the worst of his many bad appearances in 1940s film.

There are two quite good turns, though: a disorientating, pained performance from Patricia Neal as Dominique – whose storyline poignantly and uncomfortably mirrors her real-life adoration of Cooper – and Raymond Massey’s imposing turn as self-made newspaper baron Gail Wynand, eventually stirred to start a public crusade he actually believes in, by the persecution of the film’s hero.



I don’t really mind that the film is camp and overblown to the point of hysteria. Even when junking much of the book’s first half and stretching the last quarter across the second hour, there is way too much plot and almost no credible dialogue, but that’s part of its batshit appeal. Instead, what I found most damaging was that it missed surely the greatest opportunity of all, which was to realise on screen the buildings that Rand could only write about. In true Roark style, Frank Lloyd Wright (the inspiration for his character) asked for $400,000 to draft the designs – a tenth of the budget. Baulking at the idea, Warner just did the best they could, producing results that Rand described as “horrible” and which architectural critics pointed out would be unable to remain standing for longer than a few seconds. By contrast, the gothic and renaissance reproductions are supposed to be revolting, but because they’re such cartoonish parodies, the exercise seems utterly fraudulent.

I find it fascinating – and a little terrifying – that in the HUAC era you had a man like King Vidor working on The Fountainhead. By 1949, he was a member – with Rand and Cooper – of the MPA, the red-hunting organisation that facilitated the Hollywood blacklist. Just 15 years earlier, he had directed unquestionably the most radical Hollywood film of its decade, Our Daily Bread, which despite featuring the ‘man of destiny’ not uncommon in his oeuvre, was also explicitly and proudly pro-communist. Even then, the film was considered too controversial for a major studio to handle, so he produced it independently and released it through United Artists.

To see Vidor, of all people, directing a hymn to individualism, a film with such vitriolic contempt for solidarity, empathy or even basic human decency, is absolutely shocking. At times, I found myself genuinely astonished at how sinister and terrifying The Fountainhead is, especially as an example of mass market entertainment. That it was bankrolled by Warner Bros, the socially-conscious studio responsible for the likes of Wild Boys of the Road, Heroes for Sale and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang tells you basically everything you need to know about late-‘40s Hollywood.

It isn’t, by any criteria, a good film, but it is a compelling social document, with a few minor artistic virtues: Neal’s performance, some avant-garde framing and set design, and a stunning final shot of sheer, jaw-dropping fascism. By contrast, the book it’s based upon is a genuinely important artistic and political statement, however repellent and ridiculous it may be.

Incidentally: halfway through the film, a guy in front grabbed the bloke next to me by his shirt and threatened to punch him in the face if he didn't stop kicking his chair. Typical Ayn Rand crowd.



Book: (3.5)
Film: (2)

***



"What's a Tupac?"
"He's just like this really cool rapper and he's pretty much my best friend."
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi, 2016) – A winning, unpredictable and disarmingly hilarious Kiwi comedy from writer-director Taika Waititi, about unwanted 10-year-old Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) going to stay in the country with a new foster family, only to end up on the run with grumpy, taciturn father figure 'Uncle Hec' (Sam Neill).

It's packed to bursting with brilliantly unexpected jokes (“Are you gonna manslaughter him?”, "Well, they got that wrong because you're obviously white”), balanced by moments of universality and deft sentiment, and accompanied by a lovely musical score, coming off as a sort of more genuine, less antiseptic cousin to Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.

The only shortcoming lies in the (admittedly amusing) climax, which narrowly misses the target, and a wrap-up that contains one soppy callback too many. It's a wonderful film, though. (4)

***



13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016) – This Netflix documentary about the prison-industrial complex argues, quite brilliantly, that the 13th amendment which abolished slavery never really did, since it removed human rights from those sent to jail, and then began to systematically imprison African-Americans, first to prop up the post-Civil War economy, then to undermine the Civil Rights movement, and finally – and most dangerously – via the ‘War on Drugs’.

Between 1973 and 2014, the prison population rose from 300K to 2.3m (while violent crime actually decreased, a point not made in the film); as bills backed by private prisons saw ever-harsher law and order measures, including ‘three strikes’, an accent on plea bargaining, and a drive to make offenders serve 85% of their stated sentences. Today, 1 in 3 black men in America will go to jail at some time during their life.

Ava DuVernay's film uses archive footage, and testimony from politicians, academics and activists (Angela Davies!), to make a strong polemical case that lacks some of the virtues of similar recent documentaries – The Interrupters’ accent on human stories, The House I Live In’s unerring focus on the drug issue – but offers greater context, more wide-reaching analysis and, crucially, an unfailingly African-American perspective, as those two earlier works, magnificent though they were, came from white documentarians.

Like Spike Lee’s recent Chi-Raq its use of on-screen hip-hop lyrics (in a kind of ‘dissolving chalk’ aesthetic) is a major boon, though unlike Chi-Raq it doesn’t include an incredibly boring central story about a sex strike. And the (slightly disingenuous) sequence in which Donald Trump's petulant speech about beating up protesters soundtracks a montage of Civil Rights-era outrages is simply a wonderfully visceral bit of filmmaking.

It’s also nice to see Lillian Gish’s consummate artistry being introduced to a new audience: that’s her celebrating with the Ku Klux Klan in D. W. Griffith’s abhorrent white supremacist masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation. I can lend you more of her work if you’re interested. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Janis Joplin, Suburra and an old man called the Mississippi - Reviews #236

A mini-update, with an iffy play, some disappointing films and one hell of a TV show.



Festival Express (Bob Smeaton, 2003) - Well this is highly underwhelming. In 1970, a bunch of rock and psychedelic heavyweights travelled across Canada by train, partying hand, jamming endlessly and playing three huge open-air shows along the way. Stuck in a vault for 30 years, footage of the venture was eventually spruced up and edited into a movie which went over big with the classic rock crowd. But while there are some incredible things in Festival Express, this frustrating, disjointed documentary is neither one thing or another, an unfortunate and shambolic melange of short-sighted social document, hagiography, backstage musical, corporate statement and concert film.

The good stuff is mostly on stage: the Grateful Dead doing an impromptu Friend of the Devil free in a park (a pragmatic move to stop kids breaking into the $14 Toronto show nearby), an explosive Buddy Guy introducing us to his brand of rock ‘n’ soul, and The Band playing three really great numbers – Slippin’ and Slidin’ (by Little Richard), The Weight and I Shall Be Released, Danko and Helm bringing it and Robbie Robertson playing some spectacular licks while showing off a beard that makes him look like he’s wearing a bad disguise. And then there is Janis.

I work in a music venue and have been to hundreds of gigs over the past 20 years, but she is simply the most exciting live performer I’ve ever seen, even just on the telly. Her voice, her sexual charisma, her oneness with the music, her ease in her skin once she’s centre-stage, her passionate presence: naturalistic yet stylistic, a hurricane of angst and renewal, occasionally finding tranquillity in the eye of the storm, but more often gripped by a sort of urgent, furious grace, her hair always twisting and blowing in the breeze, even when nothing else on stage seems to be moving. She’s both flat and mesmeric singing Cry Baby, probably pissed as she consistently fails to hit the high notes, which is noticeable because she’s commanding your entire attention, but obscured because everything else about her performance is so astounding.



I’d seen a clip of a jam on the train in the recent doc, Janis: Little Girl Blue, with the lovely Jerry Garcia telling her, “I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you”, after a boozed-up Ain’t No More Cane that’s kind of magical and kind of frustrating: miraculously talented musicians singing a great song, but so far gone that they’ve become irritating, incoherent buffoons. There’s precious else here that’s actually worth seeing, really just Garcia and Sylvia Tyson’s duet on Better Takes Jesus’ Hand, a beautiful old spiritual.

That footage is interspersed with contemporary talking heads who say nothing of note or historic value, most notably promoter Ken Walker, as a film about the counterculture gives endless time to a bitter, intensely dislikeable entrepreneur boasting about what a big (and generous) man he was (though the revelation that a lot of young people thought they had a right to free entertainment shows that there is nothing new under the sun, not even the justification for illegal downloading). While some of the festival footage is amazing, a lot of it’s not: a post-Gram iteration of the Flying Burrito Brothers play a mundane version of one of their least inspired songs, Lazy Days, enlivened only by “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow’s pedal steel, several of the Dead’s numbers are colourless and dull, and Sha Na Na’s Rock & Roll Is Here to Stay is fucking dreadful, a novelty item drowned in its own ridiculousness. How many great recordings were neglected so we could see that?

Then Janis sings Tell Mama, and you don’t care about anything else, the greatest blues singer of her generation working herself up into a frenzy and ripping the lid off her voice as everyone else on the Festival Express is simply left in the dust. The movie’s worth it for that number alone (and it’s worth picking up the DVD for two bonus Janis numbers, Kosmic Blues and Move Over), but the overall impression is of a massive missed opportunity, as a great story, documented almost endlessly, becomes an erratic, incomplete, self-serving and often not even particularly interesting film. Hard to believe it's from one of the directors of The Beatles Anthology. (2)

***



The Winning of Barbara Worth (Henry King, 1926) - A slow, superficial but good-looking silent Western, with wealthy easterner Ronald Colman turning up to help irrigate a desert, being predictably misjudged and then naturally having to ride to the rescue after much improbable plotting. E. J. Ratcliffe is his duplicitous mentor, insinuating his money-grabbing tentacles into every part of town life, Vilma Banky is Barbara Worth - the strong pioneer kid who still needs saving every now and then - and a young Gary Cooper plays the mopey suitor Colman’s trying to win her away from.

There’s some wonderful imagery – a makeshift cross shunted to one side of the frame; a Stetson crawling with flies; a heartsick Cooper standing disconsolately outside a dance – some technical ingenuity (King interrupting his overly static direction with a succession of dazzling tracking shots), and a truly flawless print in which to enjoy those efforts, tinted either orange or blue to stunning effect.

But while the story is fascinating as an indictment of corporate capitalism and has a couple of bravura moments as Colman turns from misjudged zero to matinee hero, it isn’t terribly inspiring, and nor are the performances: Banky has the best of it, but Colman is unexceptional, Cooper uncertain and Ratcliffe uninteresting. The famous flood sequence is also a washout: there’s some daring stuntwork in there, but it’s almost all done with miniatures, so you rarely see any people and any water in the same shot!

It's worth a look for fans of the stars or the era, but King's Tol'able David is infinitely superior, and for silent Westerns I'd suggest starting with one of John Ford's classics: The Iron Horse and 3 Bad Men. Barbara Worth's irrigation scenes too pale alongside those in King Vidor's enduringly controversial and radical independent film, Our Daily Bread (1934), the most left-wing movie to come out of classic Hollywood. (2)

***



*A FEW MINOR SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Suburra (Stefano Sollima, 2015) - A functional, uninspiring Italian crime film from the Gomorrah team, set against the backdrop of 2011’s political and religious turmoil. As the nation turns itself inside out, and the rains teem, Suburra tells inter-connected stories about a corrupt politician swimming in drugs and hookers, a brutal, up-and-coming immigrant crime family, an omniscient, unshowy veteran called Samurai, and a bald, tattooed young hood with a junkie girlfriend and a thing about individuality.

It’s reasonably diverting, but also over-familiar and lacking in distinction, recycling the aged tropes of its genre while delivering neither a bruising reality check nor the shimmering, pulsating artifice of a thriller. Its main problem, though, is that as an unstinting indictment of Italy, it offers no alternative and little humanity: these are dislikeable people doing indefensible things, motivated only by avarice or self-preservation.

There are three really good scenes: a showdown in a church in which psychopathic crime lord Adamo Dionisi asks callow club owner Elio Germano to betray the woman he loves, a brief, terse meeting between Samurai (Claudio Amendola) and Number 8 (Alessandro Borghi) – which the film doesn’t seem to regard as its climax, but which in thematic terms undoubtedly is – and a conventional but impressive sequence near the close, as exceptionally dodgy MP Pierfrancesco Favino fights his way through a crowd, towards a departing prime minister. The best thing about the film, though, is the magnificent synth score, reminiscent of Drive, which drenches everything in terror, foreboding and import, no matter how familiar.

Elsewhere it’s just grisliness and cliches, from an opening sequence set in the Vatican to a man being fed to a dog. (2)

***



TV

Life on Mars, Series 2 (2007) - I loved the first series, but this one is even better: more confident, more seamless and even more emotionally resonant, upping the ante and the eeriness as accidental time traveller Sam Tyler (John Simm) interacts with younger versions of his auntie, his nemesis and his mentor, gets sideswiped by uncertainty, and tries to keep afloat and alive while battling unreconstructed DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister), an unrelenting Manchester crime wave, and the incompetence of his medical team in the present day, a shortcoming that lands him in Camberwick Green (an outrageously brilliant diversion). There were a few false notes in the first series, but here Glenister is completely in control of his characterisation, Simm is in the form of his life, and both the overarching narrative and the individual storylines are extraordinarily gripping and immersive, as well as rooted in a completely credible, enveloping world. The first and last episodes are about as good as TV has ever got. Incidentally, I was concerned that a series wrapped up in '70s pop culture might contain some unfortunate references, viewed through the prism of Operation Yewtree, et al. For the longest time, it's reassuringly free of retrofitted clangers, then Simm pleads with Jimmy Savile to save him. (4)

***

THEATRE



Show Boat (New London Theatre, 27 July 2016) - This West End version of Jerome Kern's legendary 1927 musical sailed into London on a sea of five-star reviews before proceeding to die quietly on its bustled arse. It will close next month after weak sales that have seen ticket prices cut by more than 40 per cent.

Based on a novel by Edna Ferber - who wrote both pungent, celebrated comedy-dramas for the stage with famed wit George S. Kaufman, and also extremely long-winded family sagas in print, like this one - Show Boat is often heralded as a groundbreaking musical for dealing with issues like miscegenation and addiction, but its treatment of the themes is so brief, so muted and so melodramatic that these don't make any impact at all. It's a show that hints at the appalling conditions of black workers and the ruinous hypocrisy of prohibiting interracial relationships, but isn't really about those issues. In fact, it isn't really about anything at all.

The show's big numbers are spectacular, from a choked-up Ol' Man River - muscular, poignant and powerful - to a spirited, almost joyous Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man (an ode to the mystery of love that's probably my favourite standard) which brilliantly incorporates the black cast, perhaps unrealistically eroding the race barries of the time but paying off in spectacle. The staging is often vibrant, the choreography incisive and inclusive, and the singing absolutely out-of-this-world, from Gina Beck's exquisite, virtuosic soprano to the more jazzy, sensual treatments offered by Rebecca Trehearn, whose Bill is a tender, heartbreaking showstopper. When it needs to be rousing, it is, from Danny Collins' rubber-limbed hoofing to Alex Young's Martha Raye-ish delivery, and Emmanuel Kojo and Sandra Marvin's big-voiced characterisations as the African-American Joe and Queenie, melding cliche and a dynamic modernity. Those virtues, though, extend only to the musical passages.

The rest of it is a turgid, incomprehensible mess, full of terrible accents (special mention for Malcolm Sinclair's Captain Andy, whose sub-am-dram stylings include an accent best described as 'Donny Aussie'), laughably outdated comedy, and plot strands that are often just left abandoned. Characters act - or simply disappear - with no good reason, and since we don't feel we know or understand any of them (even in the unlikely event we're aware where they're living and working, or indeed with who), we also couldn't care less what happens to them. Intelligent settings, including a mamnoth moving boat set and monochrome projections onto slatted wooden walls, are all very well, but you need something else to put on them besides a handful of impressive numbers.

People may be staying away because the material is so old-fashioned, but if it was selling out I think it'd be leaving a lot of audience members nonplussed and perhaps even a little embarrassed. (2)

***

Thanks for reading.

Sergeant York, Andie MacDowell and a really, really bad film - Reviews #172

Nowadays I mostly just watch films on a little computer on the train. Like a boss, as I believe they say. That's how I saw most of these - as the director intended.



Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941) - If Ball of Fire is Howard Hawks' best film - his most enchanting, entrancing and affecting - then Sergeant York has a claim to being his greatest: an astonishingly ambitious piece of storytelling, with sweep and style and a tremendous universality, that's also rooted in the personal. Though the DVD cover features Cooper in full-on battle mode - tin hat on, revolver out, face fixed in stoicism, a hero for the Father's Day market - Sergeant York is much more than a mere war movie.

Its first half is a pastoral masterpiece (pastorpiece?) in the vein of Tol'able David, staggeringly shot in charcoal tones by Sol Polito, and chronicling hellraiser Alvin York's conversion to Christianity, within an isolated mountain community. The second follows Alvin (Gary Cooper) as he wrestles with his conscience upon being drafted during WWI, and winds up a war hero, via one of the greatest battle sequences ever filmed.

If you can stomach the film's patriotism and justification of war as a means to peace, and an unselfconscious sentimentality in much of its dialogue (some written by John Huston), then the film is nigh-on perfect, with even the "in the Army now" sequences possessing the absolute minimum of incongruous character comedy. The immortal Cooper does perhaps his best dramatic work in the lead - it was his favourite of his films - Walter Brennan's performance as the local pastor is another masterclass (pastorclass?) from one of the great supporting actors, and the 16-year-old Joan Leslie - probably the prettiest actress in '40s cinema - is extraordinarily effective as Alvin's fiancée, Miss Gracie, her naturalism and remarkable gift for reaction creating the usual alchemy with her leading man.

Beautifully conceived and rendered, from the stunning sets - at once stylised and realistic - to Max Steiner's astonishing score, the film is a triumph as Americana, as a character study, as a portrait of religious conviction to rank alongside Becket, as a romance, as an entertainment (it was the highest grosser of 1941) and as a - perhaps unwitting - piece of propaganda, its respect for pacifism and conflicted relationship with conflict barely registering with the thousands who saw it just after Pearl Harbor and headed straight for the recruiting office.

To modern eyes, the film may seem fanciful, hackneyed or hokey, but I found it spellbinding: an immersive experience that conjures up a whole lost world. A work of art. (4)

***



Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949) - Harrowing drama about Scottish people's reliance on alcohol. (3.5)

***



Green Card (Peter Weir, 1990) - An old-fashioned romantic comedy with a certain intangible, unaccountable magic. Andie MacDowell wants a greenhouse, Gerard Depardieu wants a green card, and so these strangers marry, then bid farewell forever, little knowing they'll be flung back together by suspicious immigration officials. Written, directed and produced by Peter Weir - an enduringly class act - the film isn't particularly funny, but it is a cut above usual romantic fare, partly because it's rooted in the real world and in credible characterisation, partly due to the chemistry of the leads, and partly because of Weir's skilful direction, which fails only in two regards: if MacDowell gives you a handful of wooden line readings, you ask her to re-take, and if you've got a flipping recurring musical motif inspired by a burgeoning love affair, you flipping play it over the flipping climax. While Bebe Neuwirth from Cheers is fun in support, casting off that unsmiling sternness in an infectiously vivacious performance, this is a movie that zones in on its leads. MacDowell comes in for a lot of stick, but she's often very good here, when not relying on that stock smile or fluffing the odd infuriated riposte. Depardieu's first English-language performance seems nothing special in itself - while those sorts of barbs aimed at vegetarianism and clean-living may have been old-hat when they were used in the 1916 movie, His Picture in the Papers - and yet the film is ultimately entirely winning, and its central romance unusually and comprehensively affecting. (3)

***



Man on the Moon (Milos Forman, 1999) - There are three basic ideas about stand-up comedy: 1) That it's about making people laugh, 2) That it's about hauling down the powerful, 3) That it's both an art and a science, a medium in which the element of performance is integral and the self-aware, post-modern deconstruction of comedy is funny in itself. The last one of those doesn't sound at all funny, but it can be in the hands of the right comic, as the numerous critical bouquets flung in the direction of Stewart Lee will attest.

Andy Kaufman thought a little of the first idea and a lot of the last. He thought that dying on stage was hilarious, that making his audience unsettled or outraged was at least as worthwhile as getting them to giggle, and that the only way to respond to requests for his TV catchphrases was to read the entirety of The Great Gatsby aloud on stage. He prefigured the "ironic" un-PC humour of Ricky Gervais by a couple of decades during a peculiar venture as a sexist wrestling bad guy, figured that if he found something funny that was more than enough, and took very much to heart the Wildeism, "I put all my genius into my life", a Withnailian get-out for those who lack the discipline to create anything of genuine worth. I'm rather fond of it myself.

This superior biopic, another portrait of a genuinely odd iconoclast from the People Vs Larry Flynt team, is, if not quite the film that Kaufman would have made of his own life (that doubtless would have been out-of-focus for the second half, which came at the start of the film), at least alive with the perverse glee of his comedy and the sincerity of his erratic artistic vision. Played by Jim Carrey with a level of complexity and dramatic intelligence that proved The Truman Show was no fluke, the film follows Kaufman from his discovery by super agent Danny De Vito, through Saturday Night Live and sitcom fame, onto a relationship with a one-time wrestling adversary (Courtney Love) and then down through professional disaster and failing health.

This standard narrative, shot through with about the right amount of Kaufman's own penchant for rug-pulling and getting somewhere close to an understanding of quite a strange man, is also cleverly bookended, kicking off with a frankly amazing mock-ending and climaxing in about the only way it can. My main criticism is that the film loses a little of its vitality and fondness for invention as it progresses - certainly there's too much wrestling and too much Tony Clifton (a one-joke character whose one joke is funny once) - and may have benefited from a more adventurous, non-linear screenplay: perhaps of the type that Andy's namesake Charlie might have provided. Despite the quality of the acting, despite Forman's gift for montage and comic timing, despite the erudition of the dialogue and the quality of the R.E.M. score, it all comes a little close to storytelling-by-numbers in the second half.

But while playing it safe wasn't exactly his style, a biopic that's often funny, sometimes infuriating and ultimately kind of brilliant does seem about right for Andy Kaufman. (3)

***



20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Michael Curtiz, 1932) - Golden Age legends Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis made their only appearance together in this powerful but deeply flawed prison movie from Warner Bros, based on the memoirs of Sing Sing warden Lewis E. Lawes. Tracy is an underworld big shot who gets sent down for 5 to 30 (they had vague prison sentences back then) after an armed robbery, leaving big-eyed Davis on her lonesome. Naturally she spends her newly freed-up calendar trying to spin nefarious fixer Louis Calhern around her finger, so Tracy can be sprung, but it doesn't quite pan out like that. The star - who had already been sent to prison in his debut film, Up the River - is superb when the part calls for him to play sincere, noble or troubled, but struggles with the malevolent material, seeming somewhat miscast in a role originally intended for Jimmy Cagney. The film's essential toughness is also diluted by weak comedy and studio gloss, while Warner's reputation as a progressive studio doesn't extend beyond a slightly cautious supposition that not all prisoners are evil; "You've got to be useful to live," says the warden at one point, which is the sort of thing Hitler might have said.

The film does get a kick from the stars, though, and includes a nice bit part for future Plan 9 alumnus Lyle Talbot as a complete psychopath, while the fast-moving story is diverting enough - despite a rather daft gimmick concerning Tracy's loathing of Saturdays - and there's one absolute knockout prison break sequence shot in vivid Expressionist style by Curtiz and journeyman Barney McGill: pure film noir, some eight years before the fact. 20,000 Years in Sing Sing can't compete with the bleak, grown-up I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, released by Warner Bros the same year, nor The Big House - one of the first great talkies and still the daddy of all prison films - nor even Cagney's own penitentiary pic Each Dawn I Die, but for a brief, low-budget programmer, it's pretty punchy, and all builds to a gutting pay-off. I still love that title too. (2.5)

***



The Flame and the Arrow (Jacques Tourneur, 1950) - A handsome Technicolor swashbuckler in the familiar Warner Bros style, with Burt Lancaster taking over from Errol Flynn, who was getting too old/debauched for this shit. Lancaster is a free spirit in 12th century Italy - with frankly resplendent teeth - who starts fighting for the little guy after his son is taken prisoner by the ruthless German tyrant who's married his ex. Virginia Mayo is Lancaster's sassy feminine foil (who spends a fair bit of the film with a chain around her neck, like a kind of sexy dog), Frank Allenby is the hissable aristocratic villain and Robert Douglas has a potentially interesting role as a duplicitous swordsman that he doesn't do a great deal with. The star's regular sidekick and former big top buddy, Nick Cravat, also gets a showy part, effective as the star's mute, fiercely loyal right-hand man.

The film is a bit too talky and the action is variable - half awesome circus moves, half bog-standard scrapping - but it's intelligently cast, frequently entertaining and builds to a very satisfying conclusion. At its best, such as in those exuberant opening scenes, it fairly throbs with energy and vigour - much like its leading man. It's also attractive to look at: while Tourneur was no auteur - and cinema is after all a collaborative medium - his films peg him as a fine visual stylist, especially when working with a talented cinematographer like film noir pioneer Nicholas Musuraca (Out of the Past, Cat People), Charles Schoenbaum (Stars in My Crown) or Ernest Haller (this one), who went on to shoot Rebel without a Cause. (3)

***



Tall Man Riding (Lesley Selander, 1955) - A formulaic but fun Randolph Scott Western, one of a pile of identikit offerings the oft-wooden star made from the late-'40s to the mid-'50s, before Budd Boetticher and Burt Kennedy made a cult figure out of him. The best of these is probably A Lawless Street, directed by B-movie wizard Joseph H. Lewis, while the interminable Coroner Creek must be the worst. This one's placed midway between the two, beginning in a confusing, slightly tedious vein, gradually improving, then getting hijacked by a silly twist that feeds into an unexpectedly strong triple-ending.

As usual, Scott is a quiet, stoic gunman, bent on revenge, who's suspected of various nefarious doings (including shooting his ex-lover's husband in cold blood) while finding that his thirst for vengeance abates as more important considerations intrude. That story is rather over-familiar and Scott is at his most oak-like, but the supporting cast has its compensations to atone for the mediocre males - the still-brunette Dorothy Malone is very forceful if clichéd as Scott's ex, and Peggie Castle (the femme fatale in the Mickey Spillane adaptation, I, the Jury) gives a decent performance as a saloon singer and gangster's moll who finds her essential goodness sparking up again - and it's a fast-moving, quite well-directed movie that's wrapped up in an appealing way. For all its shortcomings, Western buffs should find it an enjoyable enough ride. (2.5)

***



Walk, Don’t Run (Charles Walters, 1966) - A fittingly pedestrian remake of George Stevens' The More the Merrier - that classic comedy about an ageing romantic bringing together two young people during a housing crisis - updated to the sexually franker '60s and the hustle and bustle of Tokyo during the Olympics, and notable only as Cary Grant's swansong.

While Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton are no Arthur and McCrea, hers is actually the stand-out performance, beginning in an uptight, officious manner, then blossoming charmingly. The mahogany, lazily suave Grant - once the most gifted light comedian in screen history - is fairly good but largely coasting, as he so often did later in his career. He hadn't lost his timing (that "... then I'll stay" sequence is beautifully played) and he has fun belting out the theme songs of a couple of his most famous films before waving us goodbye at the end, but he's unable to summon the enthusiasm or the resources to breathe much life into the more trivial, sitcomish material, which mistakes endless repetition for humour (especially in the interminable "timetable" set pieces), thinks the volume of a TV being turned up is in itself hilarious and has characters constantly behaving in incredible ways: like climbing up the side of a building rather than waiting to be let back into an apartment.

There are a few laughs and a few nice romantic moments, while the curious homoerotic undercurrent in the early scenes between Grant and Hutton is sort of fascinating (Grant was long rumoured to be gay, a reputation he'd cheerily spoofed in Bringing Up Baby), but unless you're a Grant completist, distrust black and white films or resent having a good time, you'd be better off just watching the original. (2)

***



Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950) - Silly, arbitrarily-plotted Hitch film, set in London, his first British movie after leaving for Hollywood a decade earlier. Jane Wyman is a stage-struck kid who risks it all for the man she loves (Richard Todd) after he's framed for murder by his lover (Marlene Dietrich), getting entangled with the investigating officer (Michael Wilding) and going deep undercover as a maid, with the help of an extraordinarily bad Cockney accent. The story is so scatty that it seems as if they came up with the set pieces first and then just tried to tie them together - the director and his writers did sometimes work that way, successfully on North by Northwest - the balance of comedy and tension is never quite right, and rarely has Hitchcock's stairs fetish been so boringly employed as in the sequences of Wyman running up or down steps, trying not to let people see her face. It's a passable entertainment, though, thanks to a few directorial flourishes and a very special home-grown supporting cast, including Kay Walsh as a chain-smoking blackmailer, Wilding giving a masterclass in smitten but hard-edged suavity, and Joyce Grenfell playing her (incongruous) stock character of a toothy incompetent, this time in charge of a shooting gallery. Best of all is Alastair Sim as Wyman's rascally father, a man always in control despite his bumbling manner and disordered appearance: a sort of Boris Johnson for the suspense set. (2)

***



The Saint Meets the Tiger (Paul L. Stein, 1943) - This late, British entry in the Saint series starts and ends quite well, but has an incredibly boring, extended middle, full of secret passages, dull characters and awkward pauses. Hugh Sinclair is an underrated, enjoyable Templar - debonair and amusingly offhand - but no match for Louis Hayward's definitive characterisation. The supporting cast is mostly weak, though Jean Gillie isn't bad as the love interest, and Charles Victor has a fair scene in which he tries to frame the Saint for murder. All in all, though, this cheap, poorly-scripted comedy-mystery is a bit of a chore. (1.5)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
Ruby Sparks (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2012) - Oh fuck off. There's the germ of an interesting idea in Zoe Kazan's screenplay, concerning the collision between the adolescent ideal of a lover and the reality of sharing your life with someone, flaws and all. Unfortunately it's swamped by buckets and buckets of utter bullshit, a heap of ideas nicked from Stranger Than Fiction and The Purple Rose of Cairo and a veritable avalanche of manic pixie dream girl posturing.

Paul Dano plays a frustrated "boy genius" - a once-renowned writer who expresses the usual fondness for Fitzgerald and Salinger (a familiarly shallow way to imbue your screenplay with faux-intellectual credibility) while being hampered by block as he tackles that Difficult Second Novel. After a dream about an annoying ginger (Zoe Kazan) - sorry, a beautiful dreamer (Zoe Kazan) - who couldn't fit the MPDG stereotype more perfectly if she was wearing a Smiths t-shirt (I have several, but that's not the point) and scrawling Rimbaud verse on her arm with a sparkly pen, he begins to write about her, only to find that she has come to life, and is in his house.

The first 15 minutes is genuinely the worst opening to a film I've seen since Mamma Mia!, full of dreadful dialogue and risible acting. The opening exchanges left me slack-jawed in amazement. Does this kind of pointless writing, combining lazy juxtaposition (dreamy girl says mundane thing) with clumsy attempts to subvert non-existent expectations, honestly merit being filmed? Then suddenly the film seems to get a grip of itself - and so its audience - as Dano's brother (Chris Messina) delivers a neat little speech about the difference between a dream girl and a real woman. Ah, so Kazan's character is supposed to be shallow and ridiculous? Finally we're getting somewhere. Actually, no, the film's not sure. Let it just consider that for a moment, then completely change the subject.

After that, I'm not sure what happens. I mean, I watched it, but it passed in a cacophony of white noise, as deep as a trailer, the sort of wildly inconsistent nonsense that's very difficult to judge, as I've no idea what it's supposed to be, and Kazan has no idea what she's trying to say. Or else hasn't the skills to say it. The film embraces the one plot development you're urging it to, as Dano is overwhelmed by the desire to "perfect" his creation (again, a mature analogy for relationships in general), only for the results to be instantly sunk by gimmickry and bad acting, the "comic" scenes in which Kazan is consumed by joy being the more embarrassingly overacted since Ginger Rogers became a little girl in Monkey Business.

It's never clear whether the Ruby who appears is supposed to represent a real woman or merely a literary creation - surely the crux of the piece - or whether she grows apart from Dano because she has become more human or simply because he is unable to adapt to her inexplicable arrival. There's also a gaping great hole in the way that he is unable to correct her increasingly unrealistic flaws. I don't think it's a critique of perfectionism (if it was, surely he'd answer her request to start over in the final scene with, "It doesn't have to be perfect") and nor does it seem to be dealing with any lack of realism in literature. It's just a flaw.

Somewhere along the way there's also a fucking road trip, of course, with meaningless bit parts for Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas. Bening's character, the Incredibly Irritating Earth Mother familiar from just about every disappointing indie film of the last 20 years (Broken Flowers, Away We Go), handily represents nothing, serving only to inform us that people who excessively embrace a New Age lifestyle are probably quite annoying, which I think we already know. Steve Coogan pops up every so often too, as Dano's overbearing mentor, affecting an accent perhaps best described as "Americunian". There are a couple of laughs in there, Messina is good and the film occasionally alights on something more universal than "man fancies Zoe Kazan" - whether by accident or design, I'm not sure - the idea of a writer paralysed by his own success remains interesting, and certainly the climax to the "human puppet" sequence has a wonderfully manic energy to it, but it's not enough, not nearly.

The film's argument seems to be that we shouldn't try to change people, but that if we don't, they'll leave us. How life-affirming. And also that Zoe Kazan is Zoe Kazan's idea of the perfect woman, in all her cooky capriciousness. It's like (500) Days of Summer, but without the self-awareness or charm, and with all the flaws turned up to 11. Or like Weird Science for pretentious, posing tossers. (No offence intended if you liked it, though you are wrong.) Like I said: fuck off. (1.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Marie Antoinette, Mickey Rooney and real estate salesmen - Reviews #42

Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992) – David Mamet’s searing study of alpha males on the brink has one of the best ensembles ever assembled. Jack Lemmon is the desperate, pitiful Shelley “The Machine” Levine, hot favourite for imminent redundancy at a realty office that straddles the line between pushiness and con artistry. He’s one of four salesmen given a sobering ultimatum: buck up, and get a Caddy, or fall down and get the chop. Ed Harris is Monk, whose sense of persecution is getting of hand, and Alan Arkin the meek George, an obvious fall guy should a planned break-in go ahead, with Al Pacino rounding out the quartet as hotshot Ricky Roma – first shown putting the moves on scam fodder Jonathan Pryce in a brightly-lit bar. Their boss is Kevin Spacey – apparently in the post due to nepotism. One minute he’s superior, the next like a shamed child.

Mamet’s script is pungent, littered with acerbic one-liners, trenchant observation and four-letter words, while the sting in the tale elevates the film – adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play – to the level of epic tragedy. The highest praise I can think of is that it recalls Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which also ripped apart the American Dream, along with Barry Levinson’s fascinating Tin Men, though that work was more reconciliatory and less abrasive. The direction is claustrophobic if a little limited, relying as it does on just the one camera-manoeuvre, but it’s the acting you’ll remember, with exceptional performances across the board. If I had to pick a stand-out, I’d go for Lemmon. In this, and the following year's Short Cuts, he was faultless. (4)

***



The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown, 1943) is a wonderful slice of Americana about a small western town living in the shadow of war. Ray Collins is the fond father, two years dead, who introduces us to his family: wife Fay Bainter and sons Marcus (Van Johnson), Homer (Mickey Rooney) and Ulysses (the great child star Jackie “Butch” Jenkins, making his debut). Johnson is being shipped abroad to fight, while Homer has to shoulder new burdens as the man of the family - and isn’t sure he can cope. Ulysses, meanwhile, is confused about the disappearance of his father and his brothers, but finds solace watching the railroad. Homer’s night shifts at a telegraph office introduce us to soft-hearted manager James Craig and alcoholic operator Frank Morgan, along with Craig’s sometime girlfriend Marsha Hunt, as Marcus crosses paths with rootless orphan John Craven, who longs for his friend's sense of belonging.

The film effortlessly juggles its diverse elements, encompassing romantic comedy, coming-of-age tale and Home Front drama in its sentimental, episodic manner. Heady sing-alongs jostle for space with pre-marital patch-ups and scenes of school life, while a cinema trip becomes not just an escape from the every day - but from the horrors of war. Countless passages show the gutting, life-changing intrusion of conflict, and of the adult world it represents. The highlights are frequent and enduring: Jenkins’ opening scene, Rooney’s classroom spat with his love rival, Johnson and Craven’s night-time chat about Ithaca, and the heartbreaking ending, which recalls C. Aubrey Smith welcoming his son into Heaven in Beyond Tomorrow’s finest passage. Best of all is Rooney’s devastating chat with his mother about the pain of adulthood (“it seems like everything you learn is sad”), after he returns from delivering a telegram to a Mexican woman whose son has died in action. The movie's sole misstep is a drive-thru celebration of the many cultures within America, but you can see why it was included in time of war. There are few films I’ve seen that so poignantly, potently juxtapose light and dark, balancing knockabout comedy with crushing emotional blows. This is what we are fighting for, it says, but a lot of you are going to get hurt.

The characterisations are uniformly superb, with Jenkins at his most appealing, Johnson never better and Rooney delivering one of his two greatest turns (his other was for director Brown in the following year’s National Velvet, also featuring Jenkins). Morgan, who had a lifetime contract at MGM, is best remembered today as The Wizard of Oz in the 1939 film, but he was a staggeringly gifted, versatile performer, and he’s great again here. Among those turning up in small roles are an alarmingly young, short-haired Robert Mitchum – who resembles a seven-foot lizard – and Our Gang’s Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer, playing the leader of a small gang nicking apricots from an old man’s yard.

That exquisitely-judged sequence typifies this tender, richly atmospheric, superbly-observed movie, which qualifies for the top bracket of Americana alongside such exalted hymns to disappearing or imagined worlds as Stars in My Crown, The Vanishing Virginian (which stars Morgan), On Borrowed Time and One Foot in Heaven. Superbly-scripted, wonderfully acted and with transcendent use of music, it's an emotionally draining experience - and one I'll be revisiting many times over the coming years. (4)

***



One Sunday Afternoon (Stephen Roberts, 1933) is a small masterpiece, vastly superior to its better-known remake, The Strawberry Blonde – which starred James Cagney. Gary Cooper plays a dentist besotted with the flirtatious, hateful Fay Wray. When she marries his rival, Cooper weds sweet-hearted admirer Frances Fuller, but he’s unable to forget his great love. Then, years later, she walks back into his life. Cooper was a fine comic performer, adept at screwball fare like Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, but also able to inject humour into his straighter work. He’s ideally suited to this wonderfully-scripted movie, an incisive marital drama laced with irony that offers considerable concessions to character comedy. Stage star and future acting teacher Frances Fuller is arguably even better in a rare screen role: loving, faithful and stoic, though she knows her husband's heart lies elsewhere. As the other woman, Wray is only fairly good, possibly overdoing it in the last scene, though Roscoe Karns offers his usual combination of laughs and laconic sentiment in support. The film has a singular feel, with the plot concisely, intelligently handled, allowing each scene to play out effectively, despite the short running time. It is book-ended by contemporary scenes showing the greying Cooper plagued by his nagging wife, shown only in silhouette, making us complicit in his bitterness – at least at first. One Sunday Afternoon is short but not slight: delightfully played, perfectly-formed and with a lovely message somewhat atypical of ‘30s Hollywood. (4)

***



Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) looks great, and has some interesting directorial touches, like Coppola’s handheld camera following queen Kirsten Dunst backwards down a corridor, into her quarters and up against a door, where she stands, sobbing. Sadly the central conceit, presenting Antoinette as a simple, fun-loving teenager with no real concept of her duties to state or humanity, doesn’t really work and the script is extremely weak, engendering no empathy for its empty characters. With nothing invested in the protagonists and no clear dramatic tension in a story that should be loaded with it, Coppola’s film is ultimately completely disengaging, with just a handful of bright spots amidst the deadening, sparkly tedium. (1.5)

***



TVM: The Evacuees (Alan Parker, 1975) is a little gem from the pen of Jack Rosenthal, based on his experiences of leaving Manchester for Blackpool during the dark days of World War Two. Gary Carp and Steven Serember are the youngsters who are casually brutalised after changing the city for the seaside, but resolve to keep their unhappiness from their put-upon mother. The film has moments of levity and humour, particularly in the opening minutes, but emerges as a much darker and more troubling work than Rosenthal’s teleplay set in the aftermath of war: the joyous P’tang Yang Kipperbang. Its considerable impact is aided by acute observation and the sense it has been ripped from life, exemplified by the quietly horrifying scene in which the boys are forced to eat pork by their unthinking hosts. As well as being an insightful look at a phenomenon of wartime not ill-served by popular culture, the film doubles as a portrait of an inner-city Jewish community, with Rosenthal fashioning a gutting contrast with the plight of Jews being heaped onto trains in other countries – one of their orphaned children a recent arrival in Manchester. Such heavy subtexts are balanced by showing the story largely through the eyes of children, meaning we also get several scenes based around the older boy’s picture of a woman in a swimsuit and an escape sequence set to the strains of the Dick Barton theme, in which the boys wear one roller-skate and one shoe each. This intensely personal, doggedly unsentimental film, which grabbed a BAFTA for the year’s best script, is slightly disjointed and loses some momentum in the final third, but it’s full of lovely little touches and there are superb turns from Maureen Lipman – as the boys’ mother – and Paul Besterman, playing the boys’ resourceful pal Zuckerman. He cropped up in Parker's Bugsy Malone the next year, as Yonkers. (3.5)

***


Pretty good, eh? Imagine what it looks like in glo-ri-ous Technicolor.

Million Dollar Mermaid (Mervyn Le Roy, 1952), which gave splashy star Esther Williams the title of her autobiography, is a standard Hollywood biopic lit by several stupefying water ballet set-pieces. Williams is Annette Kellerman, the Australian swim star who became an international celebrity after first tackling the Thames and then outraging American society with her one-piece swimsuit. Victor Mature is the rough diamond of a promoter who takes her close to the top, then bails – wanting to prove it’s he, not she, who’s the architect of that success. Walter Pidgeon plays Kellerman’s supportive father, a music teacher who's dreaming of his own conservatory once more, while Jesse White is particularly strong in his sympathetic supporting part. Williams does quite well in a role that demands more than her usual pouting and foot-stomping, though to quote the script: “Wet, she’s sensational; dry, she’s just a nice girl who should settle down and get married.” The main draw, as ever with Williams' work, are the swimming showpieces. The ones here are particularly good, including a gilded number commencing Kellerman’s residency at the New York Hippodrome, and Busby Berkeley’s 'Fountain and Smoke', which is just spectacular. Berkeley, who pretty much invented the kaleidoscopic musical number in films like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 - each routine stuffed with surreal overhead shots of dancing girls moving in sync - is here employed as a sort of ‘specialty director’, contributing just one extraordinary number – perhaps because his eye-popping extravaganzas were so expensive to film. (2.5)