Tangled up in bleu

Made a year before he died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six, Un Flic (‘A Cop,’ 1972) is an ideal finale to the unusual career of Jean-Pierre Melville. There have been claims that the guerilla tactics he employed while making Bob le Flambeur (1955) validate it as the first of the nouvelle vague; and both Le Samourai (1967) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970) provided themes and styles later to flourish in Hong Kong and America. Plus he was inclined to cast internationally recognized stars, notably Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Michel Piccoli, Simone Signoret and Jean-Pierre Cassel. But despite all of this, Melville’s pictures were immediately lost in the jumble of European pulp noir that flourished during the 1960’s, receiving limited distribution outside of France, and were generally overshadowed by the commercially viable (and decidedly less poetic) work of René Clément and Henri Verneuil.

    Constructing his scenes with the impartial serenity of a seasoned novelist, Melville imbues situations and characters with calculated detail, and handles both his good guys and bad guys with benign detachment. Using blue filters to amplify the pale, icy universe of Un Flic, a cop (Delon), a white collar thief (Richard Crenna, expertly dubbed in French) and the femme fatale (Catherine Deneuve, pictured above) move about like alabaster cadavers in search of their gravesites.

    Opening with a quote by the 18th Century criminologist François-Eugène Vidocq—“The only two feelings men give rise to are ambiguity and derision”—Melville moves from bustling Parisian streets to a deserted coastal village weathering a small hurricane. His camera quietly ponders a quartet of stoic bank robbers faced with an eager teller who sets off an alarm that can’t be heard over the wind in a town otherwise void of life. Between the trench coats, sunglasses and tension, Melville tips his Fedora to noir while establishing a reticent mood never to be abandoned for a moment, in a study of ambiguous figures and their varying degrees of contempt—for society, for rules, and ultimately for themselves.

    In the aftermath of the bank robbery and a nervy heist of narcotics from an organized crime syndicate, Delon’s character reiterates Vidocq’s assertion and uses it as a working tool for his investigation, interrogating suspects and tracking down anonymous gang members. Melville doesn’t milk the detective as a heroic figure, because the ambiguity and derision being discussed on screen also functions within the screenplay and direction, a smart, subliminal gimmick used to get a rise from the audience.

    When Deneuve is sent to silence a wounded accomplice, the deadly act is secondary to the clinical observation of her nearly vacant passivity. When the crooks rob the train, Melville opts to glean suspense from extended single takes of Crenna preening in the lavatory and unlocking a door rather than the actual theft itself. At the same time, the obviousness of the effects miniatures used for the railroad and helicopter underline the director’s literary underpinnings, and magnify the artificiality of a wholly cinematic universe. As Delon drives toward a noticeable studio backdrop of the Champs-Élysées, Melville cuts to a painted street scene hanging in a museum where hallways are meticulously detailed murals—art imitating life imitating art. (By the same token, Delon’s informant is a male cross dresser played by the actress Valérie Wilson!)

    Once a leading figure in the waning field of suave leading men, Alain Delon carries an innate understanding of Melville’s intentions in the three excellent pictures they made together. Some critics have noted that the director began repeating himself in these films, that Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, and Un Flic are virtually interchangeable. Such charges are not completely unfounded, but do reveal a degree of myopia in the accusers. There is certainly no way to distinguish which one offers a superior Delon performance over the others. Playing the cop in Un Flic, Delon—through his stately slouch and piecing blue eyes—wanders about this edge of the world “skeptical of skepticism,” a man well aware of impermanence.

    The character she plays in Un Flic at first appears to be an insignificant addition to Catherine Deneuve’s otherwise sterling repertoire. But during her two or three peak periods of international stardom, the actress has never been averse to taking smaller roles in low profile productions, part of a professional humility that fortunately continues to this day. If compared with her work in Jacques Demy’s series of breezy romantic musicals (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [1964], Les Demoiselles de Rochefort [1967], and the opulent Peau d'âne [1970]), Un Flic’s ‘Cathy’ seems incidental, perhaps disposable. Melville’s chilly motif benefits from her reticent peroxide blonde, though: eye candy whose scruples have been contaminated by the unspoken fears and losses considered throughout the script.

    Finally a word about Richard Crenna. Proficient at smooth arrogance, he was among the last of Hollywood’s sophisticated character actors, part of a dwindling bunch that included Robert Webber, Gig Young and David Janssen. When he was at last fêted for his performance as the doomed husband in Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a lot of empty talk among the tabloids and paying public made it seem as if the actor had been their perennial favorite for years. But Crenna was paying his dues in Europe with Un Flic, after two decades of secondary roles in mediocre American movies and television shows. With the real-time train heist and his cat-and-mouse game with Delon, Crenna is a fascinating example of Melville’s intuitive casting.

Cure for insomnia

Ever see Troll? It came out in 1986, directed by John Buechler. Horror movie fans tend to say “Ewwww!” when you mention his name. I can’t say that I know anything about Mr. Buechler, but when I came across Troll while channel surfing the other night, it appeared as if he were the poor man’s Larry Cohen. It wasn’t just because Cohen’s favorite star, Michael Moriarty, was in it. The film had a loose, funky feel to it, the kind I remember from Cohen’s work.

    Horror movies generally lose me in five or ten minutes—I’m no big fan. But when I saw Moriarty with Shelley Hack (!), Sonny Bono (!!), June Lockhart (!!!) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (from the Seinfeld TV show), I had to stay tooned. The movie is about this troll who takes the form of people he’s killed, and he grows a garden out of Sonny Bono’s corpse in Sonny’s apartment. (No, I wasn’t drinking.) Plus there was a crazy little girl running around possessed by the troll. If they remade this today, some quack would have her pumped full of Ritalin—toot sweet!

    I was also fascinated by two of the lead characters, Harry Potter Sr. and Harry Potter Jr. They were up against fairies and ugly pixies and all sorts of weird shit. Is this where the Harry Potter author got her inspiration from? Wow…does Buechler know about this? I don’t know what happened toward the end of the movie, because I dozed off.

Manoel de Oliveira x 2

At the age of ninety-seven, Manoel de Oliveira is the oldest active film director in history, and his output has ironically increased since the 1980’s. Although he began directing in the ‘30s, the family business preoccupied him with other matters, and between 1930 and 1980 he made fewer than fifteen films. Since 1981’s Francisca, however, he’s directed over twenty features, developing a style that reflects the values and lessons taught by history while remaining forever respectful of his Portuguese heritage. Since the international success of Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997), he’s evolved into a leading figure of world cinema.

    Whether Oliveira will appeal to fans of the chatty fashion of Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino is improbable, even though his scripts share their hefty word count. There’s no trumped up “attitude” in his work, no menace or threat lodged within barbed quips. But not one of those recent directors possess the patience to examine and capture the pure spirit of evil as Oliveira did in The Convent (1995), a quiet horror picture which subverts and ridicules flabby genre conventions. It’s a film that lulls poseurs to sleep.

    New to DVD, Oliveira’s Talking Picture (2003) is all that the title implies, some ninety-minutes of discussion as a university professor (Leonor Silveira) takes her young daughter on a cruise of ports in the Mediterranean. It’s her scheme to witness and experience the places that she’s been teaching out of text books—the ruins of ancient civilizations—while relating tales of historic cultures and wars and rulers to the open and inquisitive mind of her eight-year-old.

    When you begin to imagine that Oliveira is guilelessly documenting a talkative character without employing formal direction, he segues into an international discourse between the ship’s captain (John Malkovich) and three passengers (Catherine Deneuve, Stefania Sandrelli and Irene Papas), in a distinctively different and contemporary tone that uses nationalities and sexes as metaphors for (male) American imperialism and (female) European creativity. That all of these talkers miraculously understand one another despite language barriers isn’t a frivolous convenience, but a means to explore a shared idealism regarding past cultures and uncertain futures. Filmed in 2003, Talking Picture is consciously set in July of 2001, two months prior to the terrorist attacks in America and a sly eulogy to old-world European romanticism and whatever remained of its innocence after World War II.

    As part of Oliveira’s small stock company of players, Malkovich, Deneuve and Papas have taken lead and supporting roles at scale pay throughout the last decade, thereby assuring his prospective backers a degree of marketability. But his personal favorite has been the Portuguese actress Leonor Silveira. She gave an excellent performance as the Bovary character in Abraham’s Valley (1993), and provided a wry comic counterpoint to Marcello Mastroianni in Voyage to the Beginning of the World and Malkovich in The Convent. In Talking Picture she’s the teacher, a figurative character who’s intelligent without being imperiously intellectual, well versed in the past but generally clueless about the present, whether debating on saving a small dog from falling into the ocean or denying the captain’s invitation to dinner. She represents present-day Europe—bruised, ambiguous, nervously polite, and whose roots have become frayed strings attached to archaic myths and legends.

    Meanwhile, another Oliveira film is making the rounds on the Sundance Channel: Porto of My Childhood (2001). Originally released in Argentina at 92-minutes, it’s was cut by more than half an hour for its European release, and that’s the version Sundance is showing. Blending documentary footage with feature film clips and dramatic reenactments, the director looks back on his childhood and his early attempts at filmmaking. At sixty minutes, however, I’m not sure if a proper evaluation is possible. While ‘any Oliveira is better than none’ prevails for some, viewers who aren’t familiar with his work may lose interest within seconds.

Footloose-Lautrec

The earlier mention of my niece who claimed that Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! was “the greatest movie musical of all time” prompted me to place it on the top of my Netflix queue. There are dozens of movies that I let slip by, and this was one of them. Having now seen it in its entirety (no small feat, mind you), I can say with authority that it is not the greatest movie musical of all time.

    Sitting there trying to keep up with the jackhammer editing and swirling cinematography (decoys to distract me from the trivial characters and situations), I could only imagine the things I knew to be shortcomings had the opposite effect on my niece. It’s a film void of concentration, where anything goes—provided it goes there quickly. It reminded me of the lyrics to that Edie Brickell song, “Choke me in the shallow water before I get too deep.”

    The film shares nothing with John Huston’s Moulin Rouge, not even the title if you consider that superfluous exclamation point Luhrmann tacked on. Both have characters named Toulouse-Lautrec. Huston stuck with the French poster artist; Luhrmann transformed him into a blustering backstage kvetch.

    Does my niece believe that Toulouse-Lautrec was a blustering backstage kvetch? Does she care that he was an artist who knew more about mixing colors than Baz Luhrmann will ever know about music and filmmaking and choreography? Probably not: the generation raised on reality television constructed a wall to safeguard them from anything not of their moment. At this juncture I should ease up on the niece, even though the chances of her visiting this blog are a million-to-one. And I should proceed with caution, because the scores of complaints I have with this film run dangerously close to Old Fogeyism. As in: am I whining because I can’t keep up with the new language of mainstream American film? Do I harbor an unhealthy, myopic attachment to the past?

    Objectivity becomes a slippery slope, especially when Moulin Rouge! offers dance numbers in which the “dancers” are filmed from the chest-up. (Think about it.) Plus they’re cut at a blinding rate, leading me to wonder if any actual dances (or dancers) were filmed at all. These fleeting shots—like the rest of the movie—are from nervous tension, hyperactivity and a cry for decaf. This is a sick, ugly beast.

    Deriving its dramatic nuance from Looney Toons and the Road Runner, the film has no human characters. There’s nothing concerning them that needs to be addressed here, other than a curiosity of why their faces are so often clenched. (Luhrmann dwells obsessively on exaggerated facial expressions.) After that, it’s music and art direction. For the latter, I thought of how Josef von Sternberg would have adored digital filmmaking, so enrapt was he with the artificial world. Which gave me a pause from thinking about Baz Luhrmann. As for the music, it’s a collage of themes, bars and lyrics from many Top 40 songs, compressed like those hateful medleys spun by degenerate d.j.’s during wedding receptions. I’d hoped—frivolously, foolishly—that Moulin Rouge! would break for the Electric Slide.

I wish I had a gun, a widdle gun…

At a recent family gathering, the chat turned to movies, and long ago I taught myself how to feign interest and a straight face when loved ones go on about the brilliance of Ron Howard or how Tom Cruise is the closest we’ve got to Cary Grant, or Tom Hanks to Spencer Tracy. There’s absolutely no need to drag my baggage into the conversation, no purpose in pointing out things no one else apparently cares about. If watching Apollo 13 two or three times a month makes them happy (which they do and it does), then I’ll admit envy. How I’d love to experience such a thing without the preoccupation of its flaws and mediocrity. How much simpler life would be.

    As a trio of middle-aged sisters went on about “growing up” with the Rodgers & Hammerstein extravaganzas of the 50’s and early 60’s, musicals became a topic for mindless discussion as “what’s your favorite” went from person to person. I didn’t expect anyone to share in my adoration of Rouben Mamoulian’s splendid Silk Stockings, just as I didn’t expect myself to question some of the wretched titles I was hearing. Admittedly no great fan of Rodgers & Hammerstein, I see most of their film adaptations as mildly entertaining diversions—except South Pacific, a terrible waste of Mitzi Gaynor and otherwise appallingly cast, yet a title regarded by my surrounding cognoscenti as “classic.” When someone mentioned Yankee Doodle Dandy, I refrained from pointing out the obvious, that when Cagney’s not dancing the picture falls to thumpingly bad melodrama, as wretched as Night and Day (both were directed by Michael Curtiz), though the latter picture is habitually slammed while Cagney’s is not. Go figure.

    A niece in her twenties let it be known that Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, not John Huston) is “the greatest musical of all time,” an obvious indication of . . . Well, let’s not go there. Suffice it to say, she doesn’t know of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, nor does she believe it’s worth the time to find out.

    Too bad for her, because right now she’s missing out on the beauty and splendor of The Band Wagon, in a sharp new DVD release. It was directed by Vincente Minnelli, written by Comden & Green (with Alan Jay Lerner), and choreographed by Michael Kidd. Made some years after Fred Astaire’s heyday, he plays a passé hoofer joining a white elephant Broadway production, a musical comedy mutation of Faust. Subtext abounds—remember, Minnelli molded a frilly celebration out of Gigi, a tale concocted in the pit of depression—but the comedy works and the numbers are often magnificent.

    Astaire and Kelly winced when paired with Cyd Charisse, because they knew who the audience would be watching. A mediocre dramatic talent (“Her acting is like the songs in Marx Brothers films,” quipped David Thomson), Charisse may be the finest female dancer in the history of film. (To these eyes, she steals Singin’ in the Rain, even though sixth-billed and onscreen for a few sultry minutes.) She was perfect for Astaire, glorious when photographed from head to toe, graced with innate poise and charm, the antithesis of Ginger Rogers who labored over such things.

    Astaire and Charisse create an exotic dreamscape of Central Park in The Band Wagon’s “Dancing in the Dark” number, and manage to overcome the hyperactivity of “The Girl Hunt Ballet,” an homage to Mickey Spillane that tries too hard to be a showstopper. But Astaire is golden in “A Shine on Your Shoes” and “By Myself,” two of his best solo numbers. And then there’s “Triplets,” bizarre and funny with a visual gimmick that still works. I’m sure my niece would find it all very inferior to Moulin Rouge, but, hey, what do I know?

Kind of Brew

At eighty-seven minutes—half interview, half concert performance—Murray Lerner’s Miles Electric—A Different Kind of Blue (2004) provides a clean and simple understanding of jazz-influenced music of the late 1960’s, a sound that perplexed Ken Burns in his woefully deficient final episodes of Jazz. To be fair, Burns spent too much time gushing over Louis Armstrong to comprehend the death of classic-style jazz or appreciate the rise of a new form which essentially defied categorization. His anemic history also shortchanged Miles Davis (among others), who had six or seven distinct periods throughout his career and a lot more flexibility in his art than old Satchmo ever did.

    The centerpiece of Lerner’s film is Davis’s performance at the Isle of Wight rock concert in 1970, where his band loosely tied together notes and themes from the album Bitches Brew, though at one point I recognized parts of Sorcerer in the mix as well. It’s the kind of thing that irks the masses—off the cuff improvisation, concocted in a transcendental state shared between the musicians. Davis was in the process of one of his many crossovers, after spending the best part of the 60’s recording with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Ron Carter. That work was a bridge from his brief interval with Gil Evans, to the ethereal “fusion” material that got him booked in places like the Fillmore.

    Critic Stanley Crouch tells Lerner that Davis did it for the money, and while that undoubtedly played a very large part in his decisions, the Bitches Brew era (which also includes the excellent Big Fun) may have been the only logical step for jazz. People like Davis and Coltrane had extended the style and milked it for every last nuance, and there was nowhere left to go.

    Miles Electric—A Different Kind of Blue is less concerned with critics and editorializing than with the formation of art through music. Grouchy Crouch is on his own, while other Davis bandmates and friends reflect back on his methods and explain his techniques. (“There’s supposed to be a ‘back beat you can’t lose it,’” Joni Mitchell says, “but he lost it!”) Thirty years after the fact, it’s still a vibrant sound emanating from a fire within the soul.