By D.K. Holm
December 6, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Silverman, Superstar
SARAH SILVERMAN: JESUS IS MAGIC
Sarah Silverman is funny and sexy. She has an aquiline face, in the best sense of the phrase, with lustrous black hair, striking eyebrows, and impossibly white, straight teeth. She also has that which is a comedian's premiere asset, a mobile comic's face, a flexible instrument that can range freely across manifold emotions, and register irony, self-parody, and legitimate sadness all at once, at her command.
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Pundits compare Silverman to Lenny Bruce because she apparently seeks to shock, but really she is more in the tradition of the meta-comics of the 1970s, performers such as Andy Kaufman, Albert Brooks, and Steve Martin. As with their material, her routine is an extended essay or performance piece on audience expectation and comic-auditor interplay; and Silverman's harsh statements aren't hard won truths, like Bruce's jokes and polemics, but meta-jokes that expose the disparity between real events and her comic persona's short-sighted and vain reductivism. It's also a part she's also played, from WAY OF THE GUN to SCHOOL OF ROCK in delicious cameos in studio release comedies on the big screen, the harsh rebarbative girlfriend. In the face of national disasters, her self-absorbed take is like that of a typical headline in the DACRON REPUBLICAN-DEMOCRAT: "Two Dacron Women Feared Missing in Volcano Disaster: Japan Destroyed."
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Her routine works much better in long stretches. I've seen Silverman do short stints on various Comedy Central shows, but if the crowd is unprepared they don't know what to make of her. She can bomb pretty fast, and there is nothing worse than bombing on Comedy Central, in front of an uncomprehending audience and with the camera and lights bearing down on you, because you know the fucking thing is going to be repeated on the channel for the rest of time.
Thus Silverman's concert film, SARAH SILVERMAN: JESUS IS MAGIC, showcases her talent beautifully. She's got all the room she needs to move and stands before an appreciative audience that makes her feel at home on the stage. Silverman comes across as loveable, funny, sweet, and caustic all at once.
But is she good for comedy?
After seeing the film a few weeks ago I spent the next few days talking about it with people and retelling some of the better lines: racist, sexist jokes that normally I wouldn't or couldn't say in mixed company. Silverman had freed me, in a sense, to be a racist. I had permission to be vulgar and hideous in circles where normally such things aren't said, but because they were twice removed — a memory of a quote in a film — they were morally laundered for me, repeating her crack about her grandmother's personalized concentration camp tattoo, or her fear that there aren't enough Jews in the porn industry, and her dismissal of Martin "Loser"
King, and "Strippers should be role models for little girls, if for no other reason than that they wax their assholes." She agrees that Nazis are evil — except when they're little. "They're so cute then!"
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Irony (if I may be permitted to misuse that word for the billionth time this generation — eventually the cretins win and we must all speak their illiterate language) is a difficult comedic style. You can appreciate it intellectually, but it is never fun. You can't return to it over and over for replenishment. For example, I never got into Andy Kaufman. I understood the trick of what he was doing. But laughing along? It wasn't built for laughs. It was meant to make us uncomfortable, make us question our sense of humor. It wasn't really even comedy, it was performance art, hanging the audience out to dry under the guise of seeing the performer, Kaufman, dangle.
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What is the point of Silverman's shtick? When she is exposing the vanity and ignorance of the character she is playing, what is her goal exactly? When she traffics in casual sexual and racial stereotypes what are we suppose to get out of it? Relief? Catharsis? A defusing of racial epithets? Or some evidence that such epithets remain untrue and harmful? Or just a reminder of what happens when someone goes too far? It's difficult to wend one's way through the "irony" of her routine.
And it's not as if Silverman, in the course of her act, doesn't make some riveting, true observations. In her riff on midgets, she makes the glorious point that the supposedly harmless synonym "little people" is actually worse than the "racist" designation it is suppose to replace. But she also goes on to note that there is a reason why we feel free to make fun of midgets. "We're not afraid of them." Silverman then seemingly steps out of "character" to relay how she censored herself of a racial joke one night during her act when she noted that the front row consisted entirely of African Americans.
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She's on to something here, something about the difference between wit and written humor and stand up, "out loud" comedy and jokes. Stand up comedy is mean. It comes from anger and frustration and the direct observation of hypocrisy. Written humor, such as that of Laurence Stern or Robert Benchley and even Woody Allen in the NEW YORKER, is born of whimsy, of observations on the "human comedy," the parade of types. "Mean" written comedy, such as the polemical satires of Swift, are really stand up acts that just happen to be written down, stand up acts in search of the new art form.
Like a really good performance artist, Silverman is out there, exploring the boundaries of sense, taste, and reason. "Is that an 'edgy' joke or is that a 'racist' joke?," she likes to ask. There is no answer, but she also likes to add, "I don't care if you think I'm racist — I want you to think I'm thin."
Fox Home Entertainment has issued another trio of films noirs and it's a good batch, much more officially "nourish" than some entries in the previous three releases (the next issue, Nos. 13 - 15, is in March, I believe, with FALLEN ANGEL, HOUSE ON TELEGRAPH HILL, and NO WAY OUT).
This release includes one of the premiere noirs of all time, KISS OF DEATH (Fox Home Video, Fox Film Noir No. 11, 1947, $14.95, Tuesday, December 6, 2005). This is a great film that, from its fedoras to its Venetian blind shadows, from its compromised hero to its descent into moral ambiguity, is one of the signature noirs of all time. Nick Bianco (Victor Mature) is a small time thief who is pressured by the DA (Brian Donlevy), to infiltrate the realm of hood Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark). As in every TV cop show since, the DA's claims of protection for Bianco and his (new) family are in vain. In the end, Bianco decides to take matters into his own hands.
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KISS OF DEATH was Richard Widmark's feature film debut, and something of a distorting one, as he doesn't really sound like Tommy Udo or laugh in his high pitched giggle. But a lot has already been written about the great Widmark. He steals the movie from Mature, which causes sensation-seeking viewers to miss the fact that Mature gives a fantastic performance. Mature was something of a precursor of the kind of beefcake Henry Willson would later specialize in with hunks such as Rock Hudson and Rory Calhoun. He has such visual, masculine beauty that you overlook it when the part and the man are perfectly married, both here and in Ford's MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. Mature was also something of an ur-Stallone, the kind of performer who could succeed only in movies, where the visual trumps the audio and where audiences don't care how dumb you are as long as you entertain them and have a sense of humor about yourself (the lineage is confirmed by the fact that Stallone and Mature were at one time thinking of remaking RED RIVER together). Mature's beauty is almost too much, a visual ambrosia, and it is easy to see how on the one hand even he couldn't deal with it or get past it as a performer, and secondly how easy it was for him to descend into sword and sandal films, which dominated the second half of his career. Even his voice couldn't keep pace with his looks, and as with other "visual" actors, such as Gary Cooper and Tom Selleck, he is convincing in action but is usually awkward and amateurish vocally. When not simply monotonal, he is wholly unconvincing, except for the rare project such as KISS OF DEATH.
Fox's disc of KISS OF DEATH is excellent, with a fine full frame transfer and adequate DD Stereo and mono (along with Spanish mono, and subtitles in English and Spanish). Extras consist of a stills gallery, the trailer, and an audio commentary track by noir specialists Alain Silver and James Ursini. Contrary to some of their previous commentaries, they are excited by the film and contribute a rich and detail annotation. At one point Ursini does what I thought heretofore was impossible: makes a case that Henry Hathaway was a director with an artistic personality rather than just a studio hack. Certainly HH's films are technically accomplished, if frequently staid and lifeless, but Hathaway was a man raised in the world of performance, and usually evinces a conservative timorousness about style and except for his noir work, which is anomalous and in some cases even progressive. One of the strengths of KISS OF DEATH resides in its husky script from Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, who contrive to bookend their script with two shooting scenes with Bianco/Mature as the target but with different moral implications. Ursini points out that there are indeed recurring thematic elements in HH's career (though that still doesn't make the director of TRUE GRIT and THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER all that interesting outside of his noir work).
It would have been nice if Fox had restored the two deleted scenes featuring Bianco's raped and suicidal wife, the credited Patricia Morison who ended up on the cutting room floor. In Barbet Schroeder's underrated (though still outlandish) remake from 1995, these plot elements are restored and serve to flesh out the film. Incidentally, KISS OF DEATH was also remade as the western THE FIEND WHO WALKED THE WEST.
Meanwhile, though highly touted as an essential entry in the genre, THE DARK CORNER (Fox Home Video, Fox Film Noir No. 10, 1946, $14.95, Tuesday, December 6, 2005) proves to be a lesser noir, derivative of previous noirs such as LAURA, and mostly miscast. It's also a film that ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions.
He should be a vet tormented by war memories, but Brad Galt (Mark Stevens; is this the character where Ayn Rand got the last name for her famous character?) is a framed ex-con, now in New York trying to make a go of it as a private eye. His secretary Kathleen (the utterly miscast Lucile Ball, who hated working on the film and with Henry Hathaway) takes a liking to him, and, like my beloved Ella Raines in PHANTOM LADY, sets about to get him off the hook when it all happens again, i.e., Galt finds himself the fall guy for yet another crime. Also in the cast are William Bendix as a muscle man following Galt around for mysterious reasons, and Clifton Webb, back in LAURA mode, fussing around a painting that in this case resembles his unlikely wife.
THE DARK CORNER isn't horrible. Webb's character is somewhat more complex here, where he is trying to pull off a scam of Brian De Palmian proportions, than it is in LAURA, and it has some beautiful shots, thanks to Joe MacDonald. In one image, which has Bendix laying in wait for Stevens, MacDonald uses surrounding blackness to frame Bendix within the frame, and a sensuous shot of Cathy Downs, as Webb's wife, getting into bed. But the central hero is mostly a passive complainer through much of the movie, rather than a man in the vise of fate, and the plucky secretary is a fantasy of what the studio execs through women viewers wanted.
Fox's disc of THE DARK CORNER is excellent, with a fine full frame transfer and adequate DD Stereo and mono (along with Spanish mono, and subtitles in English and Spanish). Extras consist of a stills gallery, the trailer, and an audio commentary track by noir specialists Alain Silver and James Ursini. The duo make perhaps a tad too much of this film as fitting into noir's tradition of portraying protagonists unable to escape the machinations of fate (this film strikes me as anomalous from that tradition), and Silver and Ursini have been gabbing about noir in one forum or another for so long that here they come across like an old, bickering married couple unaware of how they come off to others. Silver is contrary and competitive, Ursini uncertain. Still, they know more about noir than anyone else and their insights and detailing of minutia are welcome.
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After two Hathaways, it is a pleasure to dive into an Otto Preminger film, and a Fox noir batch is incomplete without one. WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (Fox Home Video, Fox Film Noir No. 12, 1950, $14.95, Tuesday, December 6, 2005) may be lesser Preminger (the director told Gerald Pratley, who compiled an interview book with him, that "I remember nothing about it"), but lesser Preminger is better than most directors' best.
WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS, from a script credited to Ben Hecht, touches upon two burgeoning threads in noir. It tells the story of rogue cop Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews). In the course of a murder investigation he accidentally kills a suspect-witness (Craig Stevens) and then tries to pin it on a gangster (Gary Merrill) who does happen to be guilty of something while falling in love with the woman, Morgan (Gene Tierney) who had been unenthusiastically dating the murdered suspect.
WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS was probably box office magic at the time because it reunited Andrews and Tierney from LAURA. But much had changed, and it shows in their faces. Andrews looks as if he could be very well drunk in a few scenes, and Tierney was on the verge of a breakdown. They were probably not entirely enthusiastic about the project but today we can see it as a harbinger of future films, when not fully compatible with previous noirs.
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A large part of the middle section of Hecht's script dwells on Dixon's attempt to hide the body and cover his tracks. In that it resembles THE BIG CLOCK, or several past and future Hitchcock films. It also has a plot that is ambiguously sympathetic to the bad cop, linking it to ON DANGEROUS GROUND and DETECTIVE STORY, among numerous films that Eddie Muller mentions on his yak track. As in KISS OF DEATH, not to mention NOTORIOUS and other Hecht tales, this ambiguity serves as a great narrative engine, causing the viewer to sympathize with someone they would dislike in normal circumstances. Also in the tradition of some noirs, Dixon is father obsessed, and his police career is one of trying to make amends for the criminal deeds of his dad.
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Fox's disc of WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS is excellent (is this beginning to sound familiar), with a fine full frame transfer and adequate DD Stereo and mono (along with Spanish mono, and subtitles in English and Spanish). Extras consist of a stills gallery, the trailer, and an audio commentary track by noir specialist Muller. He's done this many times before, and Muller is relaxed and almost comical in his chat, full of trivial about the movie and its role in noir. He's especially good on a guy named Don Appell, who appears as a weasel named Willie Bender. A friend of Preminger's from the New York theater, this was Appell's only movie. Appell, who looks like Jeff Corey, plays a character whose descendent is the Shmatte, Bernie Bernbaum from MILLER'S CROSSING. Unfortunately, Muller also spends some time promoting his noir preservation foundation and his own mystery novels. Fox seemed to take a dire view of Muller's track — he's cut off at the end before he's finished.
DVD QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From the beginning of WAY OF THE GUN: "Hey, dickless, get off the fucking car. Hey, fucksuck, get your slippery fucking ass off the car. Listen to me, get off the fucking car with your fucking ass. You're gonna wish you never fucking got up this morning asshole because my boyfriend's gonna fuck you up. And then after that, while he's fucking up your gay uncle over there, I'm gonna cut off your cock and mail it to your mother, you fucking faggot bitch, Gaylord fucking bitch. How do you like that? You like that a lot, you fucking faggot? You like to ass fuck? Fontanella fucking baby head fuck. You like to fuck baby heads? You like to fuck boys? He's gonna fuck you in the ass. How do you like that? He's not even gay but he's gonna do it just to fuck …" — Sarah Silverman lending support to her character's boyfriend at the start of WAY OF THE GUN.
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And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
I've got a new book coming out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, December 14, at 9 AM.
COMING SOON:SAW II, numerous Alfred Hitchcock films, the 3rd Annual DVD Tray of Terror, FLIGHTPLAN and REDEYE, DEAD AND BREAKFAST, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, and more!
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