Humanizing The Vacuum

Appreciating Criterion’s release last year of L’Atalante, among other goodies, I felt surprising undertones rumbling beneath the 1934 film’s talkiest, longest sequence: a conversation between boat captain Pere Jules (Michel Simon) and Juliette (Dita Parlo). This scene, just under ten minutes, unfolds, if you’re feeling pedantic, so that director Jean Vigo can eliminate several pages of expository dialogue that completes the portrait of Jules; he isn’t merely a dirty sea dog, he’s a man who has experienced pain but smart enough to regard it with salty irony. Although the scene plays as a gentle flirtation between a man and a woman — and, to be clear, it remains one — the ease with which Pere Jules admits that he can work a sewing machine struck me as odd until Pere Jules actually put on a skirt. Now you can argue that, like Jean Renoir did in a sequence in Grand Illusion where the prisoners danced in woman’s clothes, it’s an unhurried bit of subversive fun; Vigo after all has set up Pere Jules as being eccentric. But Jonathan Rosenbaum, in an masterful essay published to herald the definitive restored cut out in the early nineties, drew a different conclusion from this scene and a similar one a few minutes later:

In his cabin — where he introduces her to the exotic trinkets he has collected from all over the world on his sea travels –- she comes upon a pair of human hands pickled in a jar. Jules indicates that they belonged to a friend who died three years ago (we see his photo) and that they’re all he has left of him — a piquant line that suggests that the friend may also have been a lover. (Just before this, to demonstrate the sharpness of his stiletto, Jules deliberately cuts his knuckle and then licks the wound — at which point Juliette instinctively licks her lips.)

Those pickled hands, shot from the audience’s POV inside the chest, are framed like a silent film joke; the audience gasps and laughs before Juliette.

Careful not to ally himself with the surrealists, Vigo’s work is suffused with their anarchic spirit — spiritual, sexual. The greatness of L’Atalante rests in part on Vigo’s generosity towards impulses: it includes the greatest erotic dream in film history. Try to imagine your favorite actors playing it. Imagine your favorite director staging it. How many of them would get that sex is often funny — that sex is best when it is funny? From him Renoir learned how the gratification of these impulses can lead to a kind of well-meaning thoughtlessness. We don’t have to read the paper to understand how well-meaning and tragic are blood brothers.

Charade is one of those movies whose pokey pace and self-infatuation haven’t kept me from watching it two dozen times since 1993. One of the more fascinating Grant performances, one in every sense. How does an actor play “Cary Grant” in his sixties? The answer: projecting genuine ardor for the idea of being an object of desire without exerting yourself one whit. I mean, Grant puts more energy into taking a shower with a suit on than pursuing Audrey Hepburn. I sympathize: I’m one of those men for whom Hepburn’s mystique is as inexplicable as Carey Mulligan’s. But her intellectual vacancy, by the way, has never been put to shrewder use. Director Stanley Donen makes a few harmless jokes at her expense, and she’s game, like Jennifer Jones in Beat The Devil: I always laugh at her asking “But what does this have to do with the CIO?” and Walter Matthau’s response through gritted teeth (after a five-second pause): “The CIA, Mrs. Lampert.” Wonder what James Coburn and Ned Glass thought about playing ethnic stereotypes.

As indelible as Jeremy Irons is playing pervy twins in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, Geneviève Bujold’s turn as neurotic actress Claire Niveau attracted to one of them has haunted me since I saw the film in spring ’93. Nick Davis:

Irons’s win was a great critics-prize moment, but I feel even more indebted to the Los Angeles crowd for gold-starring Cronenberg’s disquietingly sleek, hypnotic, technically virtuosic, scarlet-and-chrome direction as well as the distinctively strong impression that Geneviève Bujold makes in the crucial role of Claire Niveau, a part that could easily have been played as a misogynistic freakshow, a histrionic addict, or a disembodied “everyone’s addicted to something” placeholder within the script’s thematic architecture. Bujold takes a woman who could be boiled right down to a grotesque high concept—a pill-popping actress and bondage enthusiast whose mutated, three-chambered uterus is an object of horror and fascination for the Irons characters—and she makes her mordantly intelligent, frankly self-confident, and incongruously “normal” without being boring for a single second. She never seems like she’s not doing something for her scenes, whether inserting an unexpected pause or offering a smile when you expect a grimace or playing a confrontation as a seduction, and yet she never ever feels like she’s acting for a camera. She suggests a filthy mind, a fond self-image, and a feminine practicality all at the same time, with zero signs of strain

My favorite moment: an early table chat involving a uterus delivered by Bujold with such quiet intensity that embarrassing herself never occurs to her or me. As much as I adore her performances from this period, I can’t imagine Judy Davis doing the role justice.

Other than the inclusion of Manhattan (arguing for its omission is like trying to persuade someone born after 1950 that JFK doesn’t deserve the adulation), I like Matt Zoller Seitz’s list of Woody Allen’s “greatest films.” Sure, it includes Hannah and Her Sisters, and the prose isn’t all I’d want, but he does step farther afield (Deconstructing Harry!). Any list with Husbands and Wives, which might be Allen’s most coruscating film, has the right idea.

A reporter (Spencer Tracy) tries to land an interview with the widow (Katherine Hepburn) of a Great Man for the sake of a biography — a legend Hepburn calls him, but actually an amalgam of Mussolini, isolationist Republican legislators, and America Firsters like Charles Lindbergh (“I saw the face of fascism in my own home…I saw the enemy!”).

This George Cukor picture, written by Donald Ogden Stewart, has an air of crisis; despite the lethargic pace and mummified banter, the actors project a nervousness that dovetails neatly with the material. It’s not a good movie but it’s an odd one: people like Cukor, Stewart, Tracy, and Hepburn, distinguished by the seriousness with which they took light comedy for the first ten years of their respective careers, reacting to an incipient domestic fascist threat like they’ve been taught to by U.S. government propaganda films. Imagine a movie about Susan Alexander, Bernstein, and Jed Leland directed by Victor Fleming. William H. Daniels’s lighting swathes the sets in lacquer. We don’t doubt Tracy’s motives because he doesn’t act like the rascally journalists of thirties cinema, choosing instead to mutter his lines and talk kindly to a young boy who advises him on how to sneak into the estate. Hepburn’s voice is metallic and atonal; that’s how we know She Means It. She and Tracy are so miscast — these are Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon parts — that their peculiarities keep the thing going. In her climactic scene with Tracy when she declares, “I had to destroy the man to save the image,” she’s lit like Falconetti. This would all be too somnolent for words were it not for two moments: the Great Man’s claque tries to smoke out, literally, Tracy and Hepburn; and Margaret Wycherly as the Great Man’s mom, emoting so crisply during a Lady Macbeth-esque mad scene that she’s like an English twit miffed about missing tea time, pip pip.

That The New York Times‘ premier film critics consider the legacy of Pauline Kael contentious enough to transcribe a “conversation” between them as a preview/review of the Library of America’s edition of her work and Brian Kellow’s new biography affirms the collapse of the monoculture. Of course we will never know another figure as central to film appreciation as Kael; the Internet hasn’t made things worse for criticism so much as accelerated the apotheosis of certain trends, such as the impossibility of any serious daily newspaper tolerating more than a handful of one- or two-star reviews of big budget movies (the critic instead does more twisting in the wind than a weather vane) and the obsession of certain young scribblers with Metacritic scores. The only comparable personage is Armond White, bedeviled, if you’ll pardon the expression, by his own paradoxes.

If I’m supposed to believe Manola Darghis’ own subtle j’accuse, Kael suffered from similar deficiencies, namely “a pugilistic writing style” and “ethical lapses and cruelties,” none of which interest me as much as Dargis’ claim that at present Kael functions as “player and signifier in certain discussions about ’60s and ’70s American cinema.” As a distillation of Kael’s faults she adduces, of course, Kael’s review of Robert Altman’s Nashville (before its final cut!). “Hyperventilated,” Dargis sniffs. Her detractors miss the belabored point: context matters. By the time Nashville sent her into ecstatic convulsions Kael had dismissed, with varying degrees of sorrow, Brewster McCloud, Images, and California Split. After 1975 she saw little worth preserving in 3 Women (she never published, oddly, a full review) and loathed Buffalo Bill and the Indians, A Wedding, and several other enervated Altman productions in the eighties. Calling her style “pugilistic,” holding the Nashville review up to the light, Dargis turns Kael into a dingbat. Kael may have loved the possibilities opened by the best examples of that wobbly synecdoche known as Seventies Cinema enough to spend a brief, troubled spell in Hollywood, but it’s obvious to me she loved Jane Fonda as much as Barbra Stanwyck, George Segal as much as Joel McCrea (“a talented romantic comedian who because a fine, quiet, and much underrated actor,” she writes in “Notes on New Actors, New Movies”), and pre-Oscar validated Jonathan Demme as much as Preston Sturges. She had the sense to acknowledge when she saw an epochal picture and the wisdom to avoid mush, which is I still don’t accept the remark attributed to Richard Schickel. “Remember how it was in the ’60s and ’70s, when movies were hot, when we were hot? Movies seemed to matter,” she was supposed to have said, but can any admirer of Kael believe this drivel?

Here’s why the age at which you discovered Kael matters: even in the 1980′s, a decade whose dreariness made A.O. Scott pause in a published reminiscence last year, Kael wrote as if the movies she watched mattered and were hot, as if she stayed hot. This was the period when her style was at its most baroque and generous; this was when she wrote elaborate eight-hundred-word defenses of Club Paradise, Songwriter, and Moscow on the Hudson; of Debra Winger in an odd, not terribly good movie called Mike’s Murder; of Sissy Spacek, Diane Keaton, and Jessica Lange’s chemistry in Crimes of the Heart; of Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, an appraisal which comes closer than anything I’ve read to delineating how camp and high seriousness can enjoy a fecund interaction. She gave me the courage to love John Malkovich’s performance in Dangerous Liasons (“reptilian and fey make an odd combination”) and nurture a well-watered, ripe suspicion of Meryl Streep (“She makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast”). In full bloom was my favorite of her stylistic tics: the imperious declarative sentence, with a devastating aperçu waving its fingers on the other side of a dash or semicolon (Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People “uses his terrific comedy timing; he gets laughs and manages to pick up the pace, but he’s just doing wise, warm Jewish schtick”). Like Dylan, Neil Young, Ferry, Bowie, Reed, and other boomer icons, she struggled in the eighties; unlike most of them she triumphed anyway, wresting control from the studios sending her terrible and popularly validated Eddie Murphy comedies and Streep-baited Oscar catches.

These lapidary exercises — collected in volumes with ruthlessly affirmative titles like Taking It All In and Movie Love — are far from the bullying, “pugilistic” Kael of Dargis’ conclusion. She set herself the challenge of writing her most searching prose at the service of crap. Joel McCrea, Barbra Stanwyck, and Robert Altman understood.

I sympathize with Roger Thornhill’s plight in North by Northwest: all he wants  in the first third of the movie is to make his date at the Winter Garden Theater in Manhattan. After spending an anxious few minutes locked in Eva Marie Saint’s top bunk, he pouts upon realizing he broke a pair of snazzy sunglasses. The movie dawdles another few minutes so that Thornhill can crack a couple of okay jokes regarding a thumb-sized razor he insists Saint lend him (he’s got the faintest suggestion of bristle — unacceptable!).

This is the essence of Cary Grant: acting perfectly serious about frivolities. When I read David Thomson’s declaration in The Biographical Dictionary of Film that the actor was “the best and most important actor in the history of movies,” I nodded. In four decades, through indifferent movies, terrible ones, and several great ones, Grant showed actors how to incarnate desire; how to make oneself the tabula rasa on which the audience projects its lust and admiration. He was the most recessive of film actors. He was so self-composed that when he (quasi-reluctantly) let women seduce him it never feels like an example of his narcissism; it’s more like they’re doing him a favor. Self-mockery has never looked this easy.

Thomson, returning to Grant, examines Jennifer Grant’s puerile memoir. I link to an excerpt; the rest is behind The New York Review of Books‘ firewall.

I had the same experience as Jonathan Rosenbaum regarding Raul Ruiz’s risky adaptation of Proust’s Time Regained, except I hadn’t finished the novel at the time I saw the film:

The problem is, even if many of Proust’s long sentences are experienced as “movements” of this kind — and the musical meaning of the term also seems apt — this still doesn’t take one very far into Proust’s theories about the difference between involuntarily reexperiencing an instant of the past (which is what happens when the narrator bites into the madeleine dipped in tea or stubs his toe in Venice) and deliberately exploring the past through memory. Ruiz doesn’t exactly avoid this topic, but he treats it as an occasion for another jokey representation rather than for a serious discussion of the topic — which is no surprise given his cinematic options. It’s at moments like these when the stuffy old professors who insist that movies can never capture the density of literature seem absolutely right; in this case they can’t even capture the same sensual immediacy. And some of the same strictures apply to Proust’s subtle notations of the powerful investments of imagination and emotion in particular places.

In an interview by an earnest, floppy-haired Noah Baumbach included in the luxuriant Criterion edition of Blow Out, Brian De Palma explains at length the impact of the JFK assassination on his thinking, and I use the last word loosely. He doesn’t care about JFK so much as he does about JFK, the bonkers, magnificent Oliver Stone movie in which Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison envisions a mystery wrapped in an enigma at whose center is a New Orleans society fag (Tommy Lee Jones) whose leonine head is wreathed in cigarette smoke like FDR. The most piquant fact that emerges from the interview is how De Palma in essence stopped educating himself in 1964; maybe he saw Torn Curtain and Frenzy as a show of respect to Hitch. The conspiracy at the heart of Blow Out has no bearing on anything we’ve read about (the trenchcoat-sporting John Lithgow acts neither like Bernard Goetz or John Hinckley, Jr.; he acts like a failed pedophile).

Pauline Kael famously made great claims for Blow Out and Travolta’s performance, but it’s too sketchily written (by De Palma himself) to support them. On this, my third viewing, what affected me most are the scenes between Travolta and Nancy Allen, whose addled cuckoo of a prostitute is played and directed without condescension. A few years ago James Wolcott lamented the indifference shown by actors and directors to moving in character; in the Baumbach interview De Palma rightly admits that you can always tell which actors were trained as dancers. Although the guilelessness shown here augured boring iterations in White Man’s Burden, Phenomenon, Michael, and the other forgotten totems of his nineties comeback, Travolta is terrific here. His ovular, fleshy, pouty-lipped alertness to Allen’s evasions in their quiet bar scenes represent some of his most alert work. And, damn, does he hold a cigarette as well as Crawford or Davis.

Matt Zoller Seitz musters a defense of Sidney Lumet that I can’t muster.

Pauline Kael on Night Nurse (1930):

William Wellman directed this picture in his fast, unvarnished style; it has a grungy likability. Clark Gable is the sexy villain, a thieving gigolo-chauffeur in a black uniform; his specialty is socking women. Stanwyck gets it right on the jaw. But Wellman knew how to use Stanwyck for her unsentimental strength, and she does some no-nonsense slugging of her own that startled audiences at the time–and helped make her a public favorite.

Coincidentally, I had a brief discussion with a bright student today about the “inferiority” of thirties film. I would point him to this terse potboiler, in which the pieties — Stanwyck develops a conscience by challenging Gable over a pair of starving trust fund babies — for once elevate the material, and it’s largely thanks to a sensational Stanwyck, who like Joan Crawford made an awful lot of awful movies but is unforced and empathetic in every one. More than Katherine Hepburn, maybe more than Bette Davis, Stanwyck understood screen acting: economy, body movement, injecting sensuality when necessary (the one area in which Davis was deficient, although it wasn’t her fault), and the enjoyment of sin; it’s the sensuality of a woman who had to remind men she wasn’t attractive in a conventional sense. In their last scene (in the screen capture above), Stanwyck and Gable makes it clear that, were it not for the requirements of their parts, their characters would fuck the shit out of each other. Training won’t create these instincts.

EDIT: A brief example of Stanwyck’s uniqueness. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded her an honorary Oscar in 1981 (to its eternal disgrace, the four-time nominee never won), Stanwyck, in a rich smoky voice, devotes more words and enthusiasm to thanking the “electricians, property men, stagehands, camera men…and my wonderful group, the stunt men and women who taught me so well” than to her writers and directors. Her tribute to William Holden defines class. I can’t embed the clip, but here it is.

Francis Ford Coppola on plagiarism:

Is it important to veer away from the masters to develop one’s own style?

I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep,  he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.

And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.

He says more in this discursive interview.

(Hat tip to Simon Crowe)