By D.K. Holm
July 12, 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.]
A Minority Report
WAR OF THE WORLDS
Even though it was one of the two or three films I was really looking forward to seeing this year, I'm only now getting to WAR OF THE WORLDS, thanks largely to the distraction of a huge project I was trying to wrap up during the last few weeks. I was on a diet of one advance screening a week, and no books or magazines to read outside the subject. Now finished with that enjoyable burden (I hope), I can play catch up. There are stacks of unwatched DVDs on my desk that urgently need attention, and with luck the prose of this column will improve.
So I saw the film with civilians on a Sunday afternoon, and for once they sat rapt, not chatting among themselves as if they were at a brunch.
It seems to me that there were two big problems with WoW from its conception. The first was that Spielberg and Co. had INDEPENDENCE DAY lurking in the background. Though it was nine years old (a couple of lifetimes in movie fad years), it's become something of an iconic presence, a definition of excess, a benchmark for how far a movie will go in the world destruction stakes. Since most of that movie is set within the realms of government officials, scientists, and soldiers, however, there is a certain reassuring safeness conveyed to the audience. Spielberg and credited writers David Koepp and Josh Friedman, in keeping with the source novel, wanted to avoid all that, as is well known from numerous interviews. They wanted to tell the story from the ground level, so to speak.
But that opened them up to the second problem, which is the precedent of SIGNS. The whole premise of that film, at least as advertised, was that aside from the occasional news broadcast, none of the main characters know what's going on, they are as mystified by what's happening around them as any citizen would be in the real world (was Shyamaylan influenced by Wells in this aspect of SIGNS? I don't recall that coming up in interviews).
So Spielberg was in the odd position of hoping to avoid having his epic bear resemblances to films by his two main imitators. What's funny is that WoW ends up most like another Emmerich-Devlin film, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. Both deal with a sudden disaster. Both are set in the northwestern United States. Both chronicle a father on a quest to reunite his family.
WoW has been criticized by a number of reviewers for this aspect of the film. Why does the son run away in the third quarter? How does he manage to get home to a pristine town house untouched by the rampaging aliens? What is the point of all that? I think there are valid answers to those charges. Clearly, the son runs away because — he is like his father. Both dad and son have abandonment "issues." In fact, one of the first things the son does at the start of the film is take off with his dad's muscle car. It's something that runs in the family. The crisis, however, makes at least Cruise's Ray want to change. The very end, the last few shots, evokes THE SEARCHERS, one of five films Spielberg has said in interviews that he watches before he embarks on another shoot.
One of the most influential movies ever made, Ford's THE SEARCHERS is about a guy with dark motives seeking out the remaining member of a family slaughtered by Indians. It isn't until the very end that the John Wayne character, Ethan Edwards, decides not to kill his charge. Ray is Spielberg's variation of Edwards. A modern version. A weaker man, who somehow finds strength in crisis, a post-911 man, so to speak.
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It is true that Cruise doesn't seem very convincing as a parent. But then you realize, that is the point, he is supposed to be awkward, unhappy, unsuccessful, alienated from his offspring. That is the key motivation for his character's remarkable little-man, worm-turns mission or quest.
Today's parents over-protect their children, supervise them, regulate their lives and orchestrate their "down time" which is a slightly renamed or refigured educational experience. They are chauffeured to school, escorted to sports practice, watched at the park, and kept from the television. The adults in their houses are live in guards rather than parents. WoW is an essay from an exhausted parent (Spielberg) about the pressure and horrors of raising kids.
Another criticism, one made by Ebert among others, is that the tripod machines that lay waste to the land are clumsy and awkward, that in this case Spielberg should have modernized the source book completely. One doesn't want to get into a fight with Ebert, as he is usually the smartest guy in the room, loves to argue, and always wins, but fidelity to the book runs deep in this movie despite being set in modern times.
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Herbert George Wells's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS appeared in 1898. A socialist and associate of G B Shaw's in the Fabian Society, Wells suffered the same kind of logorrhea as Shaw, an inability to not write (or have sex either, as it turned out, much the opposite of Shaw). WoW was his third novel but not a bestseller, though he attracted readers (he didn't become a "bestselling" writer until after the turn of the century). Although viewed today as one of the founders of science fiction, Wells considered himself more as a political activist bringing scientific rationalism to the problems of the day. Thus, WoW the novel is really about colonialism, showing the British what invasion is like by subjecting his characters to its devastations.
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The premise proved alluring to other media. Orson Welles was the first to adapt it first, famously to radio, during Wells's lifetime. There has also been a musical in the form of a concept album, a computer game, a 1988 TV series, an unofficial adaptation in the form of Alan Moore's LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN volume 2, and two other screen adaptations around the time of Spielberg's film (one from Pendragon Pictures directed by Timothy Hines and starring Anthony Piana, the other from Asylum, directed by David Michael Latt and starring C. Thomas Howell and Jake Busey, both going straight to video).
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The previous feature film on the book, released by Paramount, which continues to own the rights to the title outside the United States, was the 1953 version by George Pal, starring Gene Barry (who has a nanosecond cameo in Spielberg's film). Pal's film is a sentimental favorite among sci-fi buffs, and one very early issue of CINEFANTASTIQUE was devoted to the film's making, but really, the best that can be said about it is that the film is a piece of shit.
Utterly tied up with the common anti-commie fear mongering of its time, it is also a gung ho America-God-apple pie tale that in the end demands a literal dues ex machina to save mankind, its remnants huddling in a church. It should be needless to say that this is utterly antithetical to Wells's concerns, interests, and beliefs. Plus the special effects are crap.
It's a fun Ed Wood style Saturday night laugh fest, but that's it. In the book the narrator, a philosopher, does make the occasional reference to God and the Angles of Death. But in fact, the cause of the Martians' sudden demise is left ambiguous, unexplained. Their collapse is as sudden and mysterious and devastating as their arrival. It appears that the Pal movie introduced the notion of specificity regarding microbes knocking off the non-immune aliens.
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With WoW, Spielberg completes a rough trilogy of sorts that began with MINORITY REPORT and continued with THE TERMINAL. These films show Spielberg engaged intellectually with current events, a far cry from the attributions his early films endured as the work of a naïf, an apolitical animal, a geek barely raising his head from the techno-gizmo in front of him. This strikes me as an erroneous underestimation of his early films, since there are political elements to SUGARLAND EXPRESS, JAWS, and even 1941. Nevertheless, he frequently stumbled when he made explicitly political or social cause movies, only to rebound with the next seemingly mindless techno-thriller. Now he has integrated the political with the technico in three films that focus on the post 911 world as one of isolation, desolation, uncertainty, intrusion, and separation.
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Dakota attributing the attack to the "terrorists" reminds me of me as a kid worrying about the commies dropping the bomb. Every time a jet would roar its engines at the nearby base I would freak out. But you can't live under that level of fear forever. Exhaustion sets in. Spielberg manages to make a movie about the idea of 911 without exhausting the viewer. The only explicit reference he makes to that event is when Ray is covered with "people dust."
For one thing with his usual command of visual cues Spielberg buttresses the action with the visual equivalent of similes. For example, when we first meet Ray, he is at work, lifting a "can" from a tanker. But his labor at the huge crane is a pale imitator of what the aliens can do when they finally arrive.
There is also the bravura sequence of Ray zooming in and out through stalled traffic. This sequence too has been criticized for the unlikeliness that the other cars would be conveniently stalled in such a way that Ray can get through the traffic jam. But again Ray's ease in maneuvering the freeway is a visual analog of how the aliens can so deftly navigate the earth in their human hunting and gives a hint that ray's survival skills might just see his family through the crisis.
I'm not a Cruise hated, as my defenses of some of his past films should make regular readers painfully aware. I think he's good here. As with the other Tom — Hanks — Spielberg has come to rely not only on Cruise's superstardom but also on his accessibility to the audience, which is also what Hitchcock sought out in James Stewart and other top draws. I don't really want to comment much on Cruise's public antics and public courtship except to say that the media seems to be going after him the way they dismantled Howard Dean, another vocal and "excitable" public figure. The fact of the matter is that psychiatry is a racket regardless of why Cruise says it, and most Americans would probably agree that every therapist except their own is a quack. Frederick Crews has spent many a page in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS and in subsequent books decrying in lucid, beautiful prose the astounding bankruptcy of Freudianism.
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In my humble estimation, WAR OF THE WORLDS is a great film and a great example of popular entertainment that can be taken seriously. M. Night and Emmerich -Devlin must be quietly shaking their fists and going, damn he still does it better.
Media Notes From All Over
Here is what I want from a book about Sergio Leone: a detailed account of where the director got his visual and narrative imagination. What did he study? What paintings did he like? What did he read? What were his favorite movies? Whom did he study when he was about to embark on a project? Where did he get the idea for extreme close ups? The stately pace? For dragging out most of his scenes for millions of minutes?
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I'm having a hard time nailing down this information in the few books about Leone I've read so far (maybe I should learn Italian and dive into some bios of Leone). The latest is ONCE UPON A TIME IN ITALY: THE WESTERN FILMS OF SERGIO LEONE (Abrams, 240 pages, $40, ISBN 0 8109 5884 8), by Leone biographer Christopher Frayling. In his earlier bio, I remember appreciating the exploration of the early years of Italian cinema and Leone's first decade in the industry but being frustrated by the accounts of six major films, which become production histories. This volume, done in collaboration with Estella Chung, associate curator of popular culture at the Autry National Center's Museum of the American West, who curated the show of the same title as the book, to which this volume is more or less the catalog.
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On the one hand it is a compilation of posters, stills, and production sketches for the Leone westerns. On the other, it is an addendum to Frayling's Leone bio, with interviews, lists, and essays. The book's first section is a series of short essay production histories of the six westerns associated with Leone, including My NAME IS NOBODY, which he produced. In the second part, Frayling runs interviews with Leone himself, Ennio Morricone, actors Eastwood, Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, and Claudia Cardinale, crew Carlo Simi and Tonini Delli Colli, and writers Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Donati, and Bertolucci (whose name is misspelled on the contents page). Most of the interviews with the actors are from the 1980s, while the rest are from the 1990s, with a few more recent than that. Frayling also includes an essay credited to Leone himself, on John Ford, and a long essay by Frayling himself on Leone's legacy. Finally, there is an interview with Scorsese on his evolving relationship with the films of Leone and the director himself, a concluding "scrapbook" of pix, and a filmography. Probably the most immediately useful part of the volume is a six-page list of some 60 references to other movies in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (did you know that Jill McBain's staying up all night her first evening at the ranch comes directly from Ford's SERGEANT RUTLEDGE?). In his interview, Bertolucci, who co-wrote the screen treatment for WEST with Argento, takes credit for including most of the references to westerns from the 1950s and earlier.
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Unfortunately, at 40 bucks you have to be a Leone fanatic to add it to your collection, since it is essentially a picture book in which the text is there to support the images. But if the interested Leone fan wants to check it out of the library, or wait a year for a paperback version, it does convey some interesting information.
For example, the Scorsese, probably the most interesting in the book, makes the point that WEST and the other Leone westerns are really based on commedia dell'arte and opera rather than on the genre itself, and that FISTFUL is derived not only from YOJIMBO (and RED HARVEST before that), but from Budd Boetticher's 1958 BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE. Page 26 of Frayling's intro offers some insight into Leone's approach to narrative, the he viewed the cinema as the telling of fairy tales ("Focusing on convincing detail, making a concerted effort to keep the fairy tale as realistic as possible, putting an emphasis on the unpredictable, pulping up 'the spectacle,' and creating a hero in tune with the times could bring some of the enchantment back"). Meanwhile, the Leone interview is interesting but oriented more toward business and reputation issues rather than style and meaning (and Leone differs with Bertolucci on certain matters relevant to WEST).
This information, and other tidbits, is useful, but at such a hefty sum, the book has priced itself out of the hands of the typical cash-strapped fan. Come the revolution, all books will appear on the Internet, and you can print out just the parts you want to read.
In other matters, I'm still wondering how television commercials manage to sell consumers on their products. Take the new Blockbuster ads. Some of them show African-American renters bragging about the freedom of being late with returning tapes (i.e., being "lazy" about it) and complaining about stuffy English films (being philistines). Is that what Blockbuster wants to say to the public about African-Americans? Then there is the shoe ad. I don't really understand this commercial. A guy jogs down the street and everything he passes blows up: some waterbeds, truck tires. I don't get it. Are the shoes doing all the destroying? If so, why am I invited to be interested in these shoes through their destructiveness? Is that a selling point? Shoes that kill? I am so confounded by this commercial that I can't even right now recall the name of the product, surely the worst thing that a commercial can fail to so. I just saw another commercial, again without being able to remember the product, in which a new SUB is so modern that it leaves other cars it passes turned to dust. I guess that is a new metaphor for keeping up with the Joneses.
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There is a small group of fascinating movies united by only one usual characteristic: though made in the modern era, they were shot entirely in a studio. Films of this time include the French film about the saint, THERESA, as well as in part THE NASTY GIRL, and most of the films of Guy Maddin, which stray only rarely into sunlight. Earlier examples include Von Sternberg's ANATAHAN. When asked why he traveled all the way to beautiful Japan just to shoot his film in a studio, Von Sternberg replied, "Because I am a poet."
Another example, previously unknown to me, is Visconti's LE NOTTI BIANCHE (Criterion Collection, No. 296, 1957, $29.95, Tuesday, July 12, 2005). His fifth fiction feature as a director, NOTTI was released in 1957, probably at the height of American's burgeoning obsession with European art films. But it was a tad different from his first international hits, OSSESSIONE and LA TERRA TREMA, which were lodged deeply in the new mode of Italian neo-realism, postwar films that went to the streets in order to find stories, cast with amateurs and shot in a gritty and influential style.
Here Visconti embraced the operatic side of his aesthetic (it should come as no surprise, but it did to me, that Visconti was an important influence on Leone). NOTTI tells a simple story, as simple as an opera, loosely based on a tale by Dostoyevsky. Visconti's film stars Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell, both beautiful, as a young middle class fellow new to town and the bashful woman he meets on a bridge. The man falls in love with the woman and tries to free her from a dreadful relationship — but over the course of four nights and four meetings on the bridge, fails.
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The entire film, exteriors and all, was built inside a sound studio, where it was shot by Giuseppe Rotunno. The main reason for a filmmaker to do this is to control the environment, control the light and the image and the movement. But this is quite a leap from Visconti's neo-realist roots. In fact it is retrograde. It returns to the studio manner of filmmaking from before the war, the height of the "classical "period. The "simplicity" of the story also seems retrograde.
There are two problems with viewing Visconti as a "betrayer" of neo-realism. The first is that many famous neo-realist films are far from the gritty style of Rossellini's films, which set the style. LA STRADA and THE BICYCLE THIEF are highly theatrical and sentimental in their style. Neorealism was not always "realistic," just as many dogme films fail to adhere to its strictures. Second, it should have been clear that there was something grand and operatic about Visconti's work right from the beginning, from the first few frames of OSSESSIONE. But third, despite the theatrical trappings, Visconti is still faithful to the spirit of neorealism, focusing on "simple" people normally ignored by the public and the media.
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The other thing to note about Visconti is that he was gay; nearly openly gay it seems, at a time when homosexuality was still horrific to ordinary folk, if they could even imagine it. Visconti was cushioned from infamy, it seems, by his wealth and his politics. That didn't prevent him from subtly turning some of his films into gay subtextual narratives. Here the very premise could be construed as a mask for a gay street pick up. Like the plays of Tennessee Williams and the stories of Truman Capote, it's a coded tale that can work on the surface level and in its subterranean level. In her book on women in cinema, FROM REVERENCE TO RAPE (probably viewed as hopelessly out of date by most contemporary theorists), Molly Haskell interestingly explores the "tilting" or bias such subterranean movies exhibit. By contrast, Gore Vidal did a few explicitly gay-themed novels and so didn't feel the necessity to do covertly gay tales disguised as mainstream fiction.
My point is simply that you can enjoy the subtext or the main text and leave the other behind. In that regard it is a moving, poignant tale beautifully done, with a vivid take on the importance of music and dance to ordinary people. In its broad movements laid over a simple story, the film is truly operatic.
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The Criterion Collection edition of LE NOTTI BIANCHE is equally beautiful, with an excellent widescreen transfer (1.66:1, enhanced). The film can be heard in the original Italian, with optional English subtitles. Supplements consist of Dostoyevsky's original short story read by actor T. Ryder Smith, which also is downloadable as an MP3 file (1:54:00). There's no audio commentary track, but its equivalent exists in the form of the featurette "Visconti's Collaborators" (17:00), in which Rotunno, screenwriter Suso Cecchi d'Amico, costume designer Pierro Tosi, and film critics Laura Delli Colli and Lino Micciche discuss the film, its making, and Visconti's career. Besides the trailer, the last supplement is rather unusual: screen tests for Mastroianni (2:00), Maria Schell (2:00), and the two together (1:00). Finally, there is an 10-page insert with cast and crew, chapter titles, DVD credits, transfer and restoration information, and an essay from Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, author of the groundbreaking critical study of Visconti's films, which places the film in context of the director's career and analyzes the studio bound set, which contrasts two different worlds on other side of the film's central structure and symbol, the bridge.
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Criterion tends to release its films in pairs. But though NOTTI came out on the same days as UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (Criterion Collection, No. 292, 1948, $29.95, Tuesday, July 12, 2005), it is really paired with Bresson's AU HAZARD BALTHAZAR, while the disc of the Sturges film should be paired with HEAVEN CAN WAIT (both to be reviewed here next week). Just so you don't get mixed up.
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Sturges's comedy, released in 1948, was the first film the writer-director made for Fox, which he went to briefly in the twilight of his career after a disastrous interlude with Howard Hughes (who was on the brink of buying RKO), and with only three more films left in him. UNFAITHFULLY YOURS doesn't quite have the brio and sparkle of Sturges's Paramount pictures, and has a darker edge, understandable in a film about a conductor (Rex Harrison) who fantasizes murdering his wife in different scenarios, each inflected by the music through which he is leading an orchestra during a concert. Essentially, the bulk of the movie takes place in his head (because his suspicions of his wife's infidelity are false), which is an unusual place for the dynamic, hyperkinetic Sturges to reside.
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This is a comedy in which the high point is the main character slashing his wife to death with a straight razor. Be that as it may, it is a comedy, about love and marriage, one born of Sturges's vast experience of both (he was married four times). Sturges came up with the idea way back in the 1930s. When a first project with Fox (MATRIX) wasn't working out, he exchanged it with the premise for UNFAITHFULLY YOURS, called SYMPHONY STORY at first. The premise always remained the same but in the course of writing the script for Zanuck he significantly reconceived the story, making the infidelity charge false and creating elaborate and excellent scenes between the conductor and the private eye who is the third person to try and give him the (misinformed) news about his wife (played by Linda Darnell). This information comes from Brian Henderson's thorough, indispensable book, FOUR MORE SCREENPLAYS (University of California Press, 975 pages, $35, ISBN 0 520 20365 8) [Hint to the U of Cal Press: there is a third Sturges anthology that includes THE POWER AND THE GLORY, EASY LIVING, and REMEMBER THE NIGHT, but you could easily squeeze out a fourth volume in the Sturges series by doing a book with the unfilmed SONG OF JOY, which Diane Jacobs says is one of best scripts about Hollywood, THE BEAUTIFUL BLONDE FROM BASHFUL BEND, and if the rights are ever unleashed, THE SINS OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK.] Henderson's essay on YOURS is well worth reading either just before or just after seeing the film.
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Criterion doesn't include Henderson's introductory essay on its disc, but it has the next best thing, Henderson himself, as one of three audio commentators, the others being Diane Jacobs, who wrote one of three different bios of the director, and James Harvey, who has written books on film comedy and movies from the 1950s. It's an excellent track because the trio so delight in Sturges's film (though they don't always agree: there is a division of opinion about the complicity of Darnell's character, some thinking that she is a strayer, a notion that I find absurd, like claiming that Zembla is a real place, or that John Shade is the creation of Kinbote).
The full frame transfer is excellent, and the restored DD mono audio is inevitably adequate. Other extras include the trailer, an "intro" by the slightly under-informed Terry Jones, a video interview with Sturges's widow, and a stills and correspondence gallery. Finally, there is an eight-page insert with cast and crew, chapter titles, DVD credits, transfer and restoration information, and an essay by novelist Jonathan Lethem, which I didn't read.
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A few months ago I wrote about my childhood based affection for the Hardy Boys mystery THE MYSTERY OF THE APPLEGATE TREASURE serialized on the MICKEY MOUSE CLUB, which I was only able to see in its entirety finally when the run of episodes was broadcast on the then-new Disney cable channel in the late 1980s. When the DVD WALT DISNEY'S THE BEST OF THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB (Disney DVD, numerous years, $14.99, Tuesday, July 12, 2005), alternatively called WALT DISNEY'S THE BEST OF THE ORIGINAL MICKEY MOUSE CLUB, I was curious to see if this disc would include any of that Hardy Boys mystery.
Now that I've seen it, this releases raises different questions. I seem to recall reading somewhere that it is actually a DVD version of a videotape of the show released some time in the past. I haven't been able to track down that reference, however (and by the way, when is the IMDB going to include videotape histories on its website?! That would be most helpful in researching just how far back a particular transfer goes, such as in the case of the Russ Meyer films; another thing that the site could do is also create a category for DVD audio tracks, since they already include everything else that stars and directors do, down to fleeting appearances on TV shows).
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Because I don't see how this is the "best" of the MMC. For one thing, this isn't an anthology of bits of the shows. It is five whole programs, uninterrupted. For another, they aren't even in chronological order. And worse there doesn't seem to be anything especially better about these episodes than some of the ones on the set released last year of the show's first several episodes.
As with that earlier set, I'm not sure about the target audience of this disc (especially if it was already out already once on tape). Seemingly random episodes with a collection of kind of mediocre guest talents, including an Olympic skater who dresses up as a girl, a fireman jazz band, and some African-American kids who dance. If these are the highlights, the best of the MMC, then you have to slog through a lot of unnecessary footage, such as the credit sequence five times, to get to it.
There is a bit of the Hardy Boys on the disc, however. It's a preview of THE MYSTERY OF THE GHOST FARM, the second serial featuring the two boy detectives, played by Tommy Kirk and Tim Considine. It's a summary of the whole serial, which was to commence the next day, introduced by the two actors. The serial was originally aired in 1956, but the intro appears in a show from 1962, so this must be a repeat of the serial, but this time using Annette to present the intro.
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If Disney wanted to take the time, they could do a really good job of presenting the true best of the series, which would serve as an alternative to the expensive Disney Treasures series initiated last year. For one thing, someone would have to sit down and watch all the shows and pluck out good guest performances, perhaps people who went on to be even more famous. Second, you could do a featurette on just the various openings: how many different ways Donald Duck gets blown up when he rings the gong, and a sampling of the different ways that the Club members "sound off," which would also serve as a way to summarize all the cast members over the years. You don't need to show any of the cartoons (a Disney adaptation of FERDINAND THE BULL appears in this disc) because they were aired in black and white anyway so why bother. Instead you'd want to concentrate on the serials, so on a second disc you could capture the complete run of either APPLEGATE TREASURE or GHOST FARM, or the one with Annette as the lead, or one of the SPIN AND MARTYs. For supplementary stuff about the making of the show and nostalgia interviews you wouldn't have to shot a frame of new footage since obsession with the program was rife while it was still on and there have been numerous retrospectives over the years from which one could select numerous interview snippets. If Disney really wanted to be candid the disc could include material featuring fans revealing the real reasons they watched the show — to chart Annette's chest size.
I doubt if they would go that far. It would get too close to acknowledging the silent pact between kid show makers and viewers. Still, there is a lot of material to draw from if someone wanted to make a true "best of" the MICKEY MOUSE CLUB.
On a side note, it occurred to me while watching these five episodes that SEINFELD is in several ways a recreation of the Mickey Mouse Club in sit-com form. Mickey is Jerry, the master of ceremonies, the host, the catalyst; George is Donald Duck, forever frustrated and angry; Elaine is Daisy, dangling just outside the realm of marriage; and Kramer is Goofy, destroying everything he touches. But I don't think this is conscious. Seinfeld is more influenced by SUPERMAN; if the show resembles the MMC, it is only a measure of how much the Disney program plugged into the national template.
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Vince Vaughn could be the new Bill Murray. In his early roles, such as SWINGERS, CLAY PIGEONS, PSYCHO, and later MADE, Vaughn was in danger of slipping into a sort of post-ironic funk, mocking characters as he played them, or being a tool of gay directors "revising" old classics. As Norman Bates, for example, Vaughn simply didn't have the endearing fragility of Anthony Perkins, with which Hitchcock challenged his viewers. But the camera likes him. The crowd likes him.
Billy Bob Thornton appears to have filled the gap left by Bill Murray's infrequent comedies. But Murray was never a slob. He was never a lush, or a con man, or a predator, as Thornton is in the semi-Murray influenced BAD SANTA and the forthcoming BAD NEWS BEARS remake.
Instead, it's Vaughn who has the tone right. In MR AND MRS SMITH, Vaughn pulls a Murray by squeezing a complex and funny character into a few minutes of screen time, the way Murray did in TOOTSIE. He has the right neurosis, the sarcasm, the observational powers that Murray's characters always have. And he makes DODGEBALL: UNRATED (Fox, 2004, $29.95, Tuesday, July 5, 2005), which would really be a very different movie without him. When he is 60, I'm sure that Vaughn will have a sad clown's face like Murray's, scared by years of being "funny."
Vaughn has the amused confidence that Murray showed in his early, funny comedies such as STRIPES or GHOSTBUSTERS. He is a reassuring, fun and funny figure whom you can believe the other oddball characters can gravitate to without him necessarily being one of them. Vaughn would be great in an updated remake of MEATBALLS, solidifying the link between the two generations of comic actors.
These ruminations are evoked by the new second dip of DODGEBALL, which was simply the funniest film from last year. I watched the whole thing for the third time, on this DVD, even though, as far as I can tell, it is exactly the same as the "rated" DVD that came out earlier this year. I couldn't see anything that was new in the film itself and the running times between the two discs are the same.
In addition, all the extras seem to be the same, but for the presence of B-Roll footage of the Dodgeball Dancers. I'm not quite sure how Fox thinks it can get away with this, but there you have it. Instead of releasing a new film, say another in the noir series, the company's resources were put into re-releasing this film, asking in effect that the fans of the film pay $50 for DODGEBALL rather than just $20 or $25. Shameless. If the disc is coming out solely to lure Vaughn fans in anticipation of THE WEDDING CRASHERS, I doubt if that will work.
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When I was a kid I read a mass-market edition of Harold Robbins's THE ADVENTURERS in the back seat of the family car during a road trip to California. I'm sure other people have done worse, but now it embarrasses me. I actually took the book seriously as literature: after all, it was over 500 pages long. Worse, though, I was also rather crushed when I got to the end of the book to find the hero and his pal both killed. It never occurred to me that this was manipulative, barely literate tripe like the porn in Orwell's 1984 mass produced to appease a simple, ignorant public. Robbins's books had the reputation for being racy, so I thought they were of the same caliber as art filth like LOLITA or had the cultural equivalent of the imprimatur of Judge Woolsey on ULYSSES. But then, in my naivety, I also considered the magazine sections of the local supermarkets "book stores." Hey, it was all I knew. Thus is a middle class kid kept ignorant and under educated, ready for mass-produced smut.
What I didn't realize at the time was that Robbins was part of a small group of pop novelists who based their books on real people. Just as his previous book, THE CARPETBAGGERS, was inspired by a then-still living Howard Hughes, Robbins's THE ADVENTURERS was allegedly based on the life of Porfirio Rubirosa Ariza, the international playboy, serial dowager wedder, and possessor of reputedly the largest penis since Dillinger.
Sadly, Rubirosa's member does not figure in the cinematic adaptation of THE ADVENTURERS (Paramount, 1970, $14.95, Tuesday, July 12, 2005). That's unfortunate. Surely the wide screen is big enough to encompass that legendary tool. Could it not span the wide screen with domineering ease? Could the feminine cast, which includes Candice Bergen, Leigh Taylor-Young, Olivia de Havilland, and Jaclyn Smith, not be caught with parted lips eyeing that legendary appendage? Ah, what Ken Russell might have done so operatically with this material.
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Instead, it's Lewis Gilbert, and his dreadful film keeps the organ tightly zipped up. References are made, however, to the heavenly prowess of Dax Xenos, as he is now called. Played by the somnambulistic Belmondo-lookalike Bekim Fehmiu (a Yugoslavian actor still making movies as of 1985, including BLACK SUNDAY), he is more or less what Robbins set forth in his book: the son of a diplomat in the revolution torn country of Corteguay (famous internationally for the cut of its corduroy pants) who spends most of his youth in Paris, becomes a disillusion playboy and clothes designer, before returning to lead what he hopes is the final revolution and reunite with the true love of his life, the simple girl of the people, Amparo (Taylor-Young), although the real love of his life appears to be Fat Cat (Ernest Borgnine), the Bernstein to his Kane, his lifelong aide de camp.
A lot of people like to throw out lightly the phrase "the worst movie I ever saw." They apply this motto to such disparate films as 8 HEADS IN A DUFFLE BAG, PUCKER UP AND BARK LIKE A DOG, or PLAN 9. Even SITH has been called one of the worst movies ever made. But shouldn't such a designation be reserved for movies of such monumental ineptitude as to defy logic, to sear the brain, to make one thing he has gone mad? If the true criteria for worst movie ever made include the ridiculous embedded in the dull, in alien acting, in long scenes of nothing intercut with short scenes of pathetic substance, and gratuitous everything, then I nominate with absolute confidence THE ADVENTURERS.
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The most screamingly funny moment occurs when a pregnant Sue Ann Daley (Candice Bergen in her sixth movie, so she might have known better), Dax's wife, asks him to push the swing she is on harder, higher, more, more, so that she can further enjoy the Mediterranean vista all around her, and then the swing breaks, sending her flying and her unborn baby to heaven. I howled with laughter, nearly falling off the couch. I love these moments of absurd excess in movies. The moment was made richer by the agonizingly bad hospital room scene that follows, and the logical absurdity of Daley becoming a dyke shortly thereafter.
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Another definition of a truly bad film must be that it resurrects some fading star for one last humiliating foray into cinema, one in which he or she should be hopelessly out of step. Hence, Olivia de Havilland, who used to spar with Errol Flynn in the 1930s, must do a bedroom scene. She even does brief quasi nudity, but also does the trick of holding a bed sheet up over her tits come hell or high-water, dialogue or intimacy.
THE ADVENTURERS is one of those "arrival and departures" movies. Every single scene begins with someone arriving somewhere, and ends usually with the same person or someone else departing. With rare exceptions the scene ends with someone dying. This is also the kind of movie in which the camera pans and zooms in on a building's window that is about to blow up. There is nothing of Kubrick's photo-realism in the battle scenes of DR. STRANGELOVE in Gilbert. His zooom-lensed camera anticipates every tedious and expensive special effects explosion.
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The film is exquisitely badly acted all around. Particularly precious is the late Alan Badel as El Presidente Rojo. Badel was one of those hawk faced, smooth voiced guys like Anthony Zerbe and the late Nicolas Coster (Markham in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN). Badel had previously played the shoe fetishist to Sophia Loren's puzzled spy in ARABESQUE. Here he really does try to take the ludicrous material seriously. But it is so cliché-ridden, such an ignoramuses view of Latin American life, that there is nothing to be done with it.
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.
Not only that, I've got a new book coming out in October (fingers crossed) 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).
COMING SOON:THE ISLAND, MY SUMMER OF LOVE, REMINGTON STEEL, a whole bunch of STAR TREKs, and more!
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