Lovely Rita

Rita Moreno

Rented due to my lifelong, long-distance, one-sided and woefully imaginary love affair with Rita Moreno, Black Rebels (1960) is a b-movie proposing to expose racial tensions percolating in a California high school. That it segues into a lame back story about pot trafficking and a series of incongruous nude scenes (with an entirely different and ungainly cast) brings any lofty ideals down a notch for the Saturday night crowd it was tailored for. Too bad for us, because there’s a good picture buried in the mix, and Rita, just one year shy of West Side Story, is excellent under the circumstances.

    As the daughter of a motherless Mexican family, she’s having a clandestine fling with an ‘Anglo’ boy…or, rather, man. The actors playing the teenagers in this movie are all pushing thirty. (Rita was a ripe twenty-nine at the time.) Two undercover cops sign up for her social science class, one a half-black who makes a pass. We’d like to think that her lack of interest has something to do with him being the blue-eyed, white beefcake b-actor Mark Damon looking absolutely ridiculous in semi-blackface.

    Producer William Rowland, we learn from the IMDb, was involved in all sorts of mishegas, including one movie claiming to be called Curse of a Teenage Nazi (1948). Although Richard Bare, a TV vet, is credited for directing Black Rebels, it was Rowland who shot the stag movie inserts. There are some people who howl over stuff like this; we fumbled with the fast-forward button.

    Included on the new DVD from Something Weird Video is a co-feature, Murder in Mississippi (1965), in which white supremacists duke it out with civil rights activists. Pungent, in-your-face exploitation features everything from rape to castration, filmed on a budget of about thirty-nine-cents by director Joe Mawra, known in smoky back rooms for White Slaves of Chinatown (1964) and the randy Madame Olga’s Massage Parlor (1965).

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American roulette

A challenge has been circulating around the internet to list ten films “that you could use to explain the U.S.A. to a foreigner who has never been here. Not the best American films, and not ones that give a direct history lesson, but the ones that say something about us.” For what it’s worth, here are mine (in no particular order, other than the one that’s already on top):

Thunder Bay (1953, Anthony Mann) The organized rape of the ecosystem and James Stewart drenched in oil, ringing his hands with champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

The Crowd (1928, King Vidor) Utopian dreams gone to shit for an idealist unable to knuckle under to The System.

Slither (1972, Howard Zieff) People with names like Kitty Kopetsky and Dick Kanipsia dodge black vans — these would be gas-guzzling SUV’s if made today — in the name of wealth beyond their wildest dreams with “Mary Had a Little Lamb” rocking on the soundtrack.

Click to enlarge

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Alexander Mackendrick) The coagulation of hearts and minds. Humiliation and contempt in the school of hard knocks, via Ernest Lehman as filtered through Clifford Odets.

The Next Voice You Hear (1950, William Wellman) God pulling in big ratings on radio. We Americans take our media very seriously.

Thelma and Louise (1991, Ridley Scott) The ceaseless twenty-four-hour assault of pumped and persuasive machismo.

The Hucksters (1947, Jack Conway) Advertising and sexual con games, and an early prediction of David Mamet.

Lord Love a Duck (1966, George Axelrod) I’ll bet that you never knew Holden Caulfield once made a movie in Hollywood.

Fury (1936, Fritz Lang) Knee-jerk reactions and mob mentality. For more Langian despair, see Human Desire (1954).

Intruder in the Dust (1949, Clarence Brown) Faulkner asks, are all men created equal? See also: The Intruder (1962, Roger Corman) in which William Shatner takes a cab to “Nigger Town.”

…What are some of yours?

Imitation of strife

Miles away from the intense and claustrophobic worlds he helped to create for Body and Soul (1947), Johnny O’Clock (1947), All the King’s Men (1949), and The Hustler (1961), Robert Rossen’s Island in the Sun (1957, new on DVD) is a Caribbean soap opera making an obvious bid for profundity. That it fails so terribly has less to do with Rossen than the guy whose name is above the title, producer Darryl F. Zanuck. One of the last moguls left from the studio system, Zanuck was a blustery man with simple tastes. Though he recognized the box office potential of the torrid interracial sex circulating through the Alec Waugh novel the film was based on, he was also wary of scaring off less liberal-minded paying customers.

    Shot in CinemaScope and on location, with an all-star cast that includes James Mason, Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, Dorothy Dandridge, Joan Collins, and Michael ‘Klaatu’ Rennie, Island in the Sun teases with the promise of ‘jungle fever’ but pulls back before anyone has time to blush. All in all, the pairings seem a tad strained, if not downright odd: Belafonte with the older, spinsterish Fontaine, and Dandridge with the older and visibly withered John Justin (once so dashing in Michael Powell’s Thief of Baghdad [1940]). That no one gets to kiss on camera was a concession to a scissor-happy censor intolerant of ‘mixed blood.’

Dorothy Dandridge

    Back-stories that may have worked to flesh out the novel appear as superfluous padding on the screen. Indeed, it often feels like there are three movies going on at once. A middle-aged man gagging on his silver spoon, Mason’s unpleasant poor little rich boy becomes embroiled in a Dostoevskian nightmare that’s explained by the island’s chief constable (played by John Williams) in a verbal recounting of the plot of Crime and Punishment. At the same time, Mason, a descendant in a long line of white supremacists, runs in a local election against the ‘colored nobility’ of Belafonte’s working class hero. I’m not sure what the public’s reaction was back in 1957, but there’s a ring of fascism in Belafonte’s diatribe which could have branched off into a very different (and far more interesting) picture.

    Paralyzed by conservative morality, Island in the Sun squanders the opportunity for glossy schlock. Despite all the panting libidos working overtime (lest we forget, Joan Collins’s single socialite gets knocked up by Stephen Boyd, fumbling graciously with his British accent), there’s nary a hint of titillation. Dorothy Dandridge, taking this thankless assignment in between Carmen Jones (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1959), is criminally underserved and overdressed…even in a limbo dance that should have had the thermometers popping. Nevertheless, that’s the image Zanuck used to sell the picture.

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Village of the damned

Celebrate January 11:
International Showgirls Day!

Above: Elizabeth Berkley (Click to enlarge.)

Showgirls (1995 — 131 min. — UA) Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Joe Eszterhas. Cinematography by Jost Vacano. Edited by Mark Goldblatt and Mark Helfrich. Starring Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Robert Davi, and Lin Tucci as Henrietta ‘Mama’ Bazoom.

Asked in an interview what films and filmmakers he admires, director Jacques Rivette said something I didn’t expect to hear:

“I've seen [Starship Troopers] twice and I like it a lot, but I prefer Showgirls (1995), one of the great American films of the last few years. It's Verhoeven's best American film and his most personal. In Starship Troopers, he uses various effects to help everything go down smoothly, but he's totally exposed in Showgirls. It's the American film that's closest to his Dutch work. It has great sincerity, and the script is very honest, guileless. It's so obvious that it was written by Verhoeven himself rather than Mr. Eszterhas, who is nothing. And that actress is amazing! Like every Verhoeven film, it's very unpleasant: it's about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that's his philosophy. Of all the recent American films that were set in Las Vegas, Showgirls was the only one that was real — take my word for it. I who have never set foot in the place!”

    The image of Rivette, creator of such modest, low-key works as La Belle noiseuse (1991) and La Bande des quatre (1988), enthralled by one of Verhoeven’s frenzied, mega-budgeted popcorn movies seems strange…until you realize the qualities shared by the people in their films. One step out of reality, wandering in a fog of wishes and ideals, they’re dismayed over the prospect of a life in banality. Rivette often deals in actors or painters or magicians or spirits for his characters; Verhoeven’s are the intolerant, aggressive bourgeoisie, often the products of caustic, unfriendly environments, people who know where the guns are hidden and how to use them, and rarely with a concern for consequence. Call it the cinema of impulse.

    After doing some intriguing work in his native Netherlands, Verhoeven proved his box office mojo in American action fare: Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992). He made a fortune, and was the best thing that ever happened to Sharon Stone. Total Recall benefits enormously from her haughty sensuality, as does Basic Instinct, Verhoeven’s first unabashed foray into glossy kitsch with an ice pick at its center. Both of her characters exemplify the adolescent male fear of independent, mature, beautiful women as vampires, using the promise of sex to drain the life from men who are, to the director’s understanding, innocent and hapless victims of circumstance.

    When casting was underway for Showgirls Sharon was approaching forty — some fifteen years (and a few pounds) beyond the film’s naïve, star-struck lap dancer Nomi Malone. The part went to statuesque wetdream Elizabeth Berkley, Sharon Stone Lite. All things considered, she does remarkably well in the role. (Up to that point, her biggest gig was the TV show Saved By the Bell.) Seemingly oblivious to such overripe dialogue as “You look better than a ten inch dick,” Berkley’s completely immersed in the vacuous persona, even poignant at times, often charging like a bull in a china shop to points beyond the Method. A total fantasy figure, her Nomi maintains a radiant complexion and a firm twenty-inch waist on a steady diet of cheese fries, potato chips and Big Macs — undoubtedly Eszterhas’s kind of woman.

Above: In any other film dealing with deceit and subterfuge, this image could stir up all manner of metaphysical ramification. In Showgirls, she’s simply putting on her makeup. (Click to enlarge.)

    There’s nothing inappropriate about the character as far as Verhoeven’s punch-drunk Vegas is concerned. Less a realist than a caricaturist, he milks the setting as a microcosm of consumerist decadence rotting from its own avarice and adrenaline. There’s no doubt that this was unintentional, since he’s admitted to approaching the script from a radically different perspective (in an interview supplied on the DVD, Verhoeven claims that it’s “a musical”), but Showgirls is littered with the sins of contemporary Sodom underlined by thumping Wagnerian techno pop.

    The media-fueled preoccupation with youth and appearance, gluttony and expensive toys, the loathing of middle-income people (characters here either own mansions or live in trailers)…greed, power, fleeting success, ego, vanity, manipulation, instant gratification…to say nothing of ferocious acrobatic sex that would land most of us in the hospital…these sundry elements permeate Eszterhas’s ludicrous scenario, which draws liberally from the well of 1940’s and 50’s backstage melodrama — specifically All About Eve (1950), this time with an exotic dancer gyrating her way up the ladder, stepping over the bodies in stiletto heels.

    It was slapped with an NC-17 rating for nudity and simulated sex in its cheesy stage shows and austere dance numbers. Berkley and Gina Gershon (playing the Bette Davis part) look fabulous in and out of their clothes, but the pounding repetition of bare, wrinkle-free skin punches lust and desire into numbness. Lacking the acumen for successful and stimulating erotica, Verhoeven manages to flatten their magnificent physiques into meat. Clenched facial expressions, hyperactivity and the arrogant sense of entitlement euphemistically called “attitude,” so fashionable in the 90’s and prevalent among the pinched and modish cast, sours the senses, causing physical beauty and the mere thought of sex to seem vulgar and redundant. (Not that it’s completely asexual: Berkley’s lap dance with Kyle MacLachlan and the lesbian tease sessions with Gershon do have their moments.)

    A case of the dragon consuming itself by the tail, Showgirls transcends the limitations normally set by genre and dramatic convention — and comes to embody every foul, odious thing it professes to abhor. That it evolves into a compelling (and very funny) reflection of western culture spiraling out of control for lack of dignity and shame was surely an accident. The picture was a box office bomb, killed by its MPAA rating and the reluctance of exhibitors to show it, causing Berkley’s film career to go south and sending Verhoeven back to the boot camp sci-fi of Starship Troopers. However, when Showgirls won a ‘Razzie’ award for worst picture, Verhoeven was on hand to collect the prize…even he thought it sucked. Perhaps too myopic to see, he may be unable to fathom it as an indictment of culture tainted by the very boorishness that made films like Total Recall and Basic Instinct hits.

Above: After it tanked in its initial run, United Artists tried hawking Showgirls as a so-bad-it’s-good attraction on the midnight show circuit, but no one was buying it.

Showgirls Trivia Contest: In a nightclub scene in the film, a DJ plays a 1990’s dance mix that borrows music from the soundtrack of what 1960’s movie? Send your answers here, with “Showgirls contest” in the subject box. Prizes will go to the first three correct responses. (Prizes will be sent only to addresses in North America.) Please have responses in by January 18; answers will be posted on January 20.

Furthermore…
Bloggers celebrating International Showgirls Day:
The Whine Colored Sea
Girish
Fagistan
Drifting
Obsolete Vernacular
Long Pauses
Hell on Frisco Bay
Elusive Lucidity
Cinephiliac
When Canses were Classeled
Supposed Aura
Nilblogette
Coffee, Coffee, and More Coffee
Cinematical
Video Watchblog
GreenCine Daily
Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule
Bitter Cinema
Self-Styled Siren

…and…
Official site
IMDb
Showgirls screen grabs
Gina Gershon gallery



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The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

It was a pretty strange science-fiction double feature, two films that none of us had ever heard of — and we thought we’d heard of everything! Out into the heart of a blizzard, we drove to the theatre across several miles in blinding snow, a severe winter back some thirty years ago. And other than ourselves there were just four people in the audience, a man and woman with two children who ended up leaving half an hour into the first movie, Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1965). Perhaps they were expecting Forbidden Planet.

    But Watkins’s existential parable paled in comparison to the second feature, a chilling Czech import called The End of August at the Hotel Ozone (1966). I tried researching it beforehand but to no avail. This was the real deal, a true obscurity that escaped the notice of even the most ardent SF fans.

    The opening credits claimed that it was produced by the Czechoslovakian Army (!). Like good soldiers, we remained at attention for ninety-odd minutes as a group of barbaric young women are led by their mother across a land wiped out by nuclear war. The old woman keeps speaking of the glories of the past, as if to instill a sense of values into her daughters. But all they want to do is kill. And kill. And kill. Animal lovers be forewarned: live creatures were sacrificed for the sake of the scenario. It isn’t pretty.

    During the credits, I’d scribbled down the names of the director and writer, but could find very little on them back then. Director Jan Schmidt had received good notice for his short film, Josef Kilián (1963), while Pavel Jurácek had written the screenplay for Ikarie XB 1 (1963), which made it to America under the title, Voyage to the End of the Universe.

    The film fell out of sight for decades. A bootleg DVD surfaced a couple of years ago, though without English subtitles. Anyone unfamiliar with it couldn’t catch the poetry of the old woman’s narration. Hopefully, that’ll soon change: Facets Video plans to release it on DVD on January 31.

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List-O-Mania

Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon
(Click to enlarge)

Ten reasons why I love the movies

In the flurry of year-end ‘best’ (and ‘worst’) lists, Flickhead admittedly comes up short. One’s imagination boggles at the amount of wit, savvy, arrogance and ego necessary to compile such a thing, as if taste were universal. Yet a pang of hollow obligation brings me to the keypad, hence the mishegas below. It’s not definite nor complete…and any of it is subject to change in a moment’s notice.

Cyd Charisse
Specifically “Dancing in the Dark” from Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953), and the jazz rendition of “All of You” in Mamoulian’s Silk Stockings (1957), both instrumental and pure transcendental eroticism. Serviceable as an actress, Cyd was peerless in dance…and legs — which may count as two reasons why I love the movies.

Orson Welles
The genius of Citizen Kane (1941), yes. But also the nervous entertainer making a bid for TV in Around the World with Orson Welles (1955) — his encounter with Raymond Duncan (eccentric millionaire brother of Isadora) and charmed by the elderly English ladies are alone worth the price of admission. And then there is Henry Jaglom’s Someone to Love (1987), something to love…or hate, depending on where you stand with its creator, a jabbering hybrid of Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer. Welles is quiet through Jaglom’s psychodrama, but wraps things up with a rousing soliloquy about sexuality and evolution.

Agnès Varda
Self-proclaimed Grandmother of the New Wave. Her material may be slight, but Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961) is particularly haunting; and A Hundred and One Nights of Simon Cinema (1995) is a matchless valentine to the movies.

Buñuel doting over Catherine Deneuve,
Flickhead’s favorite actress
(click to enlarge)

Luis Buñuel
Where to start? Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina playing ‘Conchita’ in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), after Maria Schneider made it clear he’d need two actresses to play the two-faced demise of Fernando Rey. Stéphane Audran and Jean-Pierre Cassel jumping into the bushes for a midday quickie in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)…foot fetishes (Diary of a Chambermaid [1964], El [1953]), dislocated body parts (Un chien andalou [1929], The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz [1955]), and the endless jabs at class and Catholicism. Which brings us to…

Alfred Hitchcock
Manner and poise in the face of ruin. Called ‘the master’ for good reason. There are works of high art (Vertigo [1958]), pulp noir (Strangers on a Train [1951]), bizarre experiments (Rope [1948]), half-baked attempts at Freudian surrealism (Spellbound [1945]). In the end, though, no one can touch him; Sir Alfred has been in a class by himself since time began. Given the choice of seeing any one of his pictures, I’d opt for To Catch a Thief (1955) — no masterwork, but endlessly enjoyable.

Jacques Demy
If his Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) is the greatest movie ever made, how is it that Lola (1961) is Demy’s best film? Such perplexing thoughts take Flickhead well into the wee hours…

Ava with one hundred pounds of cock
(click to enlarge)

Ava Gardner
Very heated with Burt Lancaster in Siodmak’s The Killers (1946); juggling husband (David Niven) and lover (Stewart Granger) while clad in a grass skirt in Mark Robson’s The Little Hut (1957); her gleeful boast of Sinatra as ‘ten pounds of guinea and one hundred pounds of cock’…these are things to remember when seeing that face, the smile, the teeth, the eyebrows, the eager and welcoming eyes, the strong, perfect body built for vigorous, hearty sex. Why, she even made Grace Kelly look downright dowdy in Ford’s Mogambo (1953).

Jerry Goldsmith
Bernard Herrmann’s the best, Miklós Rózsa has even made me cry. But Goldsmith’s score for Polanski’s (and Towne’s and Evans’s) Chinatown (1974) hits me like no other. Which brings us to…

Chinatown
Arguably the last truly great adult film made in America, and something that finds its way before my eyes every six months, a ritual that’s been going on for nearly twenty years. I believe David Thomson equated John Huston’s hissed line readings with the mist that rises from fresh cow pies. How true, how true.

Claude Chabrol
I cannot explain my attraction here. Suffice it to say that Chabrol has kept me going for decades. While he’s made some bad films, and some very good ones that I didn’t care for, there have been waves of excellence (Les Biches [1968]) and brilliance (La Cérémonie [1995]). Although he’s been chipping away at class conflict since the beginning (Le Beau Serge [1958], Les Cousins [1959]), lately the films have become increasingly focused: Merci pour le chocolat (2000) and especially La Fleur du mal (2003) insinuate that the bourgeoisie must inbreed to insure its survival — for who else would have them?

…What are some of yours?

L’Ivresse du pouvoir

L’Ivresse du pouvoir is the new film by Claude Chabrol. Currently in postproduction. For more information, go to IMDb or Google it.

Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert on the set
(click to enlarge):








(Images copyright © Moune Jamet - H&K)