Summer wishes, winter dreams

From All Movie Guide: “Shot on location in California and Australia, Crystal Voyager (1975) follows American surfer, filmmaker, and inventor George Greenough on his search for the perfect wave. This documentary focuses specifically on Greenough's attempts to build a camera that would capture the majesty of surfing. The film follows Greenough's several abortive attempts to build a camera light enough to sit on a surfboard. The film also discusses Greenough's other innovations, such as the flexible fin which made surfing "in the tube" possible. The film builds to the final, famous 23-minute "Echoes" sequence comprised of footage shot by Greenough from his board. Stunningly majestic, the footage allows the viewer to experience the ocean as never before and occupies the middle ground between early Lumiere films and today's IMAX, all to the music of Pink Floyd. A major critical, popular, and experimental success, Crystal Voyager was lauded at Cannes and by American critics. Greenough went on to work on a number of later surf films including John Milius' Big Wednesday.”

George Greenough on surfing: “You might be in there for only a few seconds — in real time — but in your head it goes on for hours. It is an experience that's hard to describe, riding inside of a big, grinding wave. Often you're riding so deep inside the tube, you don't make it out. You take a terrible wipe out. What matters is when you're in there, it's the time interval when you're inside the wave. Time enters space, a zone of its own. The only reality is what's happening right then.”

An excerpt from Crystal Voyager set to Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”:

Part One: 9:28


Part Two: 5:35


Part Three: 7:24

A pillow of winds

French Windows (1972)
Film by Ian Emes, featured in The Fantastic Animation Festival
Music, “One of These Days” by Pink Floyd (vocal by Nick Mason)

The white lady

Emmanuelle Seigner, Harrison Ford and Lady Liberty

Grade ‘b’ Harrison Ford action fodder…or a catalog of sly, subversive Roman Polanski/Gerard Brach clichés? Friends usually draw a blank when hearing of my appreciation for Frantic (1988). Certainly not Polanski at his peak — Knife in the Water and Chinatown are forever, and Bitter Moon is in a class by itself — but who else would take such delight in satiating a by-the-numbers thriller with overt anti-Americanism and sadistic barbs at the bourgeois nuclear family? In Frantic, every scene picks at Ford’s withering pride and crumbling vanity until humility knuckles him under. Stepping out of Le Grande Hôtel before the neon lights of Burger King, Ford walks a global village indifferent to the debacle at hand, the mysterious disappearance of his wife. As he sweats and his eyes dart for a nonexistent safe corner, the script hones secondary characters to fine detail: the wheezing vagrant asking for a smoke, the hotel manager pursing his lips, the disparaging desk clerk fluttering his eyebrows, the police detective’s sarcastic, “yeah, Paris, city of lights!”

For the music, Ennio Morricone provided an interesting blend of themes, plucking bass notes, strings ascending to a sizzling peak, and a haunting squeezebox mocking the American’s touristy daydream of Parisian bliss. Released at a time when vinyl records were on their way out and the compact disc was just establishing itself, the soundtrack to Frantic had a fairly short shelf life. Indeed, over the last decade it proved to be as unavailable as a widescreen copy of the film itself. (Warners has inexplicably opted to market it as a pan-and-scan DVD, despite Polanski’s measured blocking and the breadth of Witold Sobocinski’s cinematography.) Thanks to the folks at Morricone Lover, here’s the score: zip file.

Swept Away…again!

Back by popular demand, Piero Piccioni’s soundtrack music to Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away…by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974): zip file.

Watch it on YouTube! The entire film, dubbed in English, full frame, on view at Subterranean Cinema.

Crazier than a June bug on a polecat

A ghost story as transparent as the specter of its title, The Other gave me the willies when it first came out in 1972. I was an easily amused fourteen-year-old, too distracted to notice plot holes larger than Kansas. Nearly thirty-five years has removed any real or imagined sheen from Robert Mulligan’s film of Tom Tryon’s one-time bestseller, but it’s as fun and satisfying as greasy take-out on a Friday night. Just keep the antacid handy.

Tom Tryon began as an actor but never elevated beyond the role of the poor man’s John Gavin: handsome, stalwart furniture. He inched toward stardom in Preminger’s The Cardinal (1963), but ended up with marginal cult celebrity for playing the possessed husband in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). The Other was the first in what would become a lucrative second career as a novelist. One of Tryon’s short story collections, Crowned Heads, used creative license on a hodgepodge of true Hollywood stories — among them “Fedora,” wherein a producer attempts coaxing a reclusive star out of retirement. Billy Wilder made it into a movie in 1978, and more than a few people noticed the similarity to Sunset Boulevard (1950).

I’ve never read The Other, but judging by what’s on the screen it surely must have appealed to Mulligan, whose penchant for the paint-by-numbers aesthetic of Norman Rockwell Americana — the sunny jerkwater idyll where happy-go-lucky rubes dig shoofly pie and brush off adversity with a hearty ‘pshaw’ — has permeated his work for years. After a stint in television during the early 1950s, Mulligan formed a partnership with Alan J. Pakula as his producer to do a string of low-key dramas: Fear Strikes Out (Anthony Perkins preparing for Norman Bates; 1957), To Kill a Mockingbird (widely, and not unjustly, regarded as the director’s best picture; 1962), Love With the Proper Stranger (1963), Baby, the Rain Must Fall (1965), Inside Daisy Clover (showcasing a ripe Natalie Wood; 1965), Up the Down Staircase (1967), and The Stalking Moon (1969). Pakula, of course, graduated to direct a handful of pictures and had a knack for paranoia: Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976). (Pakula died in a car accident at the age of 70 in 1998.)

Opening with the prerequisite spooky song signaling our detour away from normalcy, The Other turns its soft-focus eye on vexed twin brothers (Chris and Martin Udvarnoky in their simultaneous screen debut and swan song), a deer-in-the-headlights mom (refined beauty Diana Muldaur, who made her mark as Dennis Weaver’s main squeeze on TV’s McCloud), and a grandmother from the old country who spouts supernatural red herrings (Uta Hagen doing Maria Ouspenskaya; they initially offered it to Ingrid Bergman, but Ingrid’s no dummy). Plus there’s the obligatory Tobacco Road clan (including a young John Ritter), an illiterate farm hand (Victor French sporting an uncanny resemblance to Giancarlo Giannini in bib overalls), and a dotty spinster you know is going to get snuffed before the third act. As dumb as a box of rocks, they’re blind to the warning signs popping up all around — unexplained deaths, freak accidents, an old lady swooning into a trance, and a traumatized kid having long conversations with a wall.

At the time, Mulligan was riding high on the box office take of Summer of ‘42 (1971): produced for $1 million, it grossed over $25 million in the United States alone. While that’s no indication of any picture’s quality, it’s certainly a bargaining chip in the board room. (Admittedly no classic, Summer of ‘42 survives as a guilty pleasure among middle-aged guys fixed on tawdry adolescent dreams and the Ivory Girl loveliness of Jennifer O'Neill.) That film had clarity and purpose, whereas The Other is scattered, a frivolous mix of genres, patented Jerry Goldsmith musical clichés, and actors in search of motivation. Past the references to pickled infants and Bruno Hauptmann, we’re expected to raise the bar on our suspension of disbelief and allow for a great deal of shenanigans. Fortunately, it’s far less painful than it sounds.

Available from Amazon

Soiled plaid slacks

Barfly
Directed by Barbet Schroeder. Produced by Tom Luddy, Fred Roos, and Barbet Schroeder. Written by Charles Bukowski. Cinematography by Robby Müller. With Mickey Rourke (Henry Chinaski), Faye Dunaway (Wanda Wilcox), Alice Krige (Tolly Soreson), Jack Nance (detective), J.C. Quinn (Jim), Frank Stallone (Eddie). Released in 1987.

Barbet Schroeder’s involvement with Beat icon Charles Bukowski netted four hours worth of The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1983), a video interview in which the hard-drinking wordsmith pontificated on anything he fancied, be it real or imagined. Was the bourgeois, globe-trotting Schroeder merely awestruck by Bukowski’s slacker indifference to middle-class ambition, or had he found truth and wisdom in those slurred diatribes?

Perhaps a little of both. Four years later, Barfly was Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical account of a full-time lush and back-alley brawler. The ‘semi’ refers to when he’s propped up as a charismatic ladies man and poet laureate in waiting. The benefit of casting Mickey Rourke — whose punchy élan endears the black eye, greasy hair and probable b.o. — substantiates an attraction for some women, but Barfly shortchanges its own assertions to the bard’s brilliance. Fortunately, we’re subjected to his soporific prose in sparsely narrated digressions.

Swaggering through his favorite haunt, a bucket of blood called The Golden Horn, Rourke’s Henry Chinaski is the alcoholic dream of bottomless drinking without the pesky aftereffects of blackout, DT’s or jail. Yes, this is a comedy. Always game for sparring with barkeep Frank Stallone (a foe who represents obviousness), comfortable in poverty (penniless is ‘back to normal’), Henry’s hailed as a brilliant author (classic skid row romanticism) and, despite stalled hygiene, manages to attract women of a league with Alice Krige and Faye Dunaway (in her best performance since Network). Rolling his shoulders and lifting his jaw in slouched grandiosity, Rourke works from Brando’s catalog of underlined gestures, tics and sighs, yet it’s difficult to imagine another actor committing the role with such wobbling panache.

To ALL my FRIENDS!

Bukowski and Schroeder sidestep the moralizing that plagues the juicers of The Lost Weekend and The Days of Wine and Roses, stories that knew alcoholism as slavery to the bottle. By considering the conflict between conformity and anarchism, however, Barfly understands alcohol as a means to transcend societal norms and expectations. The misinformed may believe such laissez faire empowers one to live by free will — yet how ‘free’ if it necessitates the drink? The steep price includes the sacrifice of nearly all creature comforts (Henry’s dilapidated apartment consists of bed, nightstand and radio), affording one free reign to . . . well, get drunk.

Schroeder wasn’t the first filmmaker to see the potential in Bukowski. There were earlier short student films, and director Marco Ferreri made the barely-released Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981), which suffered the anomaly of casting an inherently urbane Ben Gazzara in a role better suited to late-period Sterling Hayden or Michael J. Pollard. But Barfly was the mainstream’s first dose of outré Los Angeles fleapit sleaze, and Schroeder’s American debut. (Legend has it he threatened to saw off his finger if Canon Pictures wouldn’t bankroll the project.) Its soft lighting barely concealing jaundice, the film taps into a very private and arcane Eden. It has several unbelievably bad supporting performances (some of the cast literally wandered in off the street), and is often dramatically challenged. But as the camera glides through the front door of the Golden Horn to the jukebox rhythm of Booker T. & the MG’s “Hip-Hug-Her,” we’re offered something quite extraordinary — provided one appreciates the comical irony which floats in the dregs of tragedy.

Yo, barkeep — draught beer, a bag of pork rinds and a shooter of Fleischmann's, please. The comment left by Cineaste (at the bottom of this post) made me realize that you really should be hearing Barfly music right now. So, for your listening pleasure (and to all my friends): Hip-Hug-Her by Booker T & the MG’s.

Note from Flickhead: This review originally appeared on Flickhead.com. Because of a book I’m attempting to write, I won’t have as much time to devote to this blog or the website. While I’ll occasionally contribute new pieces (two are in the works right now), there will be the sporadic ‘reprints’ like the one above. I’ve approached several online writers to see if Flickhead can be kept alive through their kind efforts. If you’d like to write for Flickhead in exchange for free DVD screeners or book review copies, write me: flickhead @ Comcast dot net.

Look back at Anger

An excellent preview of the upcoming Kenneth Anger DVD:

Hi-def 480p trailer

Small trailer

Available from Amazon

Rio Angie, Bravo Hawks

Nearly a year too late for the Angie Dickinson Blogathon are these cool stills of Angie and Howard Hawks on the set of Rio Bravo. Click each one to enlarge the image.

Order from Amazon

Contemplating contemplation

Above: Michel Piccoli in Je rentre à la maison.

Twelve years older than Eric Rohmer, twenty years older than Agnès Varda and Jacques Rivette, Manoel de Oliveira first astonishes us with his longevity. Born in 1908 in Oporto, Portugal, he once dabbled in acting (Fátima Milagrosa, directed by Rino Lupo, 1928) and documentary filmmaking (Douro, Faina Fluvial/Labor on the River Douro, 1931), but spent most of the next thirty years away from the cinema involved with the family business. It wasn’t until Acto de Primavera/Passion of Jesus (1963) when he resumed full time and began attracting attention on the festival circuit. And twenty years after that he entered something of a golden age, a stream of excellence that shows no signs of remission: Belle toujours, with Michel Piccoli and Bulle Ogier, was released in 2006, its director ninety-eight-years-old.

    For this week’s Contemplative Cinema Blogathon, I thought of de Oliveira and his 2001 film, Je rentre à la maison/I’m Going Home. It’s concerned with the issues closest to him: age, time and mortality — themes which were used to great advantage in Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo/Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997), where he found an eager accomplice in Marcello Mastroianni. (An inspired union, it’s unfortunate they made only one picture together.) That film also continued de Oliveira’s predilection for actors playing actors, and stage drama reflecting real life situations, themes he first used in O Passado e o Presente/The Past and the Present (1972).

    Opening on a stage performance of Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King, Je rentre à la maison gradually reveals the main character, an actor played by Michel Piccoli. In this introduction, de Oliveira films most of Piccoli from behind, with his back to the camera — a technique both jarring (depriving us of seeing the star) and informative (recognized and respected, the star owes us nothing). It also distances us from Piccoli’s character, a man emotionally estranged from most of the people in his life.

    At his advanced age and with the losses he’s endured, the character’s aloof manner — he calls it his “solitudiné” — earns our respect. In a restaurant with his agent (Antoine Chappey), their superficial banter is exchanged over an impassive, prolonged shot of Piccoli’s shiny new shoes. Chatting with fans on the street or with the waiter at this favorite cafe, voices are blocked by the windows we’re peering into. And as the seventy-six-year-old actor weathers the jumble of cuts and multiple takes of an English-language film production, playing Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, we sense his disenchantment through the strain on the face of his director (played by John Malkovich).

    In this last scene especially, Je rentre à la maison studies the progressive nature of humiliation, while other areas of the film underline the rewards of living in the moment. At peace in banality, joyous when playing videogames with his great-grandson or treating himself to simple pleasures, the actor becomes his own man, much to the chagrin of those who believe he’d be happier doing something else. But he no longer chooses to perform that role in life, opting instead for a plain, unhurried existence.

Above: Michel Piccoli and Manoel de Oliveira.

    There is no finer actor for this than Michel Piccoli. From a long and varied career, working with everyone from Renoir to Buñuel to Hitchcock, he has given a number of outstanding performances, recently as the blocked artist challenged by La Belle noiseuse (Rivette, 1991); as the father of film itself in Varda’s charming Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma (1995) — a DVD that belongs in every fan’s collection; and in de Oliveira’s Party (1996), where he got along fabulously with Irene Papas. On the Je rentre à la maison DVD commentary, Richard Peña, Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, makes an interesting connection between Piccoli’s character in the de Oliveira film with the screenwriter he played in Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Mepris/Contempt (1963): Godard had him pursuing The Odyssey, de Oliveira places him at journey’s end.

    Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve (appearing in the Exit the King segment), have lent their support to several of de Oliveira’s films, notably O Convento (1995), a dark meditation of evil and a cool satire of the horror film. Leonor Silveira, so effective as the Bovary character in Vale Abraão/Abraham’s Valley (1993) and as the mother in Um Filme Falado/A Talking Picture (2003), is the director’s most frequently used player and shows up briefly in Je rentre à la maison as an actress.

    An effective visual gimmick in Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo is the observation of life passing by through a camera mounted on the back of a moving car. As the present becomes their past, the characters regress into primitivism, questing for “home.” In Je rentre à la maison, Michel Piccoli’s actor has found home, wisely choosing rest over performance, a primitive in a world rushing to nowhere.

Manoel de Oliveira on DVD:

    

    

The bird is the word

“Producer/director Steve Anderson interviews a cross section of scholars, journalists, entertainers and people on the street to survey what Bill Maher calls ‘the ultimate bad word.’” A review of Fuck, a new documentary on DVD — now on Flickhead.