The Screengrab : fidel castro

Screengrab Review: "An Unlikely Weapon"

Nick Schager — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Susan Morgan’s An Unlikely Weapon: The Eddie Adams Story has an aesthetic blandness that would likely have turned off its subject, the famed photojournalist behind the iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1968 snapshot of Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong soldier. Many, including Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, contend that picture helped end the Vietnam War by bringing home the brutal, horrific awfulness of the conflict. And though Morgan’s non-fiction techniques are only serviceably straightforward, the director engagingly makes clear that Adams’ most renowned image haunted him but did not, ultimately, define his work, which eventually included photos from thirteen wars, of six United States presidents, and of virtually every notable culture figure from the past fifty years. A cantankerous “pain in the ass” who started with the AP and ended as an independent entrepreneur, he was an individual who lived life on his own terms, and whose career embodied the notion that greatness isn’t found in the attainment of perfection, but in the striving for it.

Forgoing background on Adams’ upbringing, Morgan begins her biographical story (narrated by Keifer Sutherland) in ‘Nam, where his brash, gung-ho, coach-like attitude endeared him to the troops and resulted in a series of stunning photographs culminating with the shot of the murder perpetrated by Loan, a picture he derided as not very good and whose impact he later claimed to not fully understand. As confirmed by the comments of friends, colleagues and admirers, others most certainly did comprehend the power and significance of Adams’ signature work, and also the abundant talent the man possessed. An Unlikely Weapon employs its talking heads, archival film clips, and both photos taken by, and interviews with, Adams (who died in 2004 of ALS) to paint a reasonably evocative portrait of the artist as a take-no-shit iconoclast. A contradictory personality drew him to both victims of combat and larger-than-life despots – in one amusing anecdote, he refuses to take guff from Fidel Castro and winds up going duck-hunting with the Cuban dictator – and, once he tired of covering wars, he segued smoothly into a more laid-back celeb-focused second career as a hired gun for, among other publications, Penthouse and Parade magazines.

An Unlikely Weapon’s reverence for Adams is complemented by a refusal to shy away from his often-difficult, combative personality and his habitual self-criticisms, the latter of which suggest the constant determination to be better that typically distinguishes the preeminent from the merely good. Though clips find Adams both discussing the Loan photo as well as describing his reunion with the officer years later in the man’s Virginia pizza parlor, Morgan never quite fully expresses the complicated central role that the photo played in Adams’ life, a shortcoming due in part to the fact that she’s forced to rely mostly on archival interviews for his first-hand thoughts. Still, touching upon the subsequent 1977 pictures that helped convince President Carter to grant Vietnamese refugees entry into the country, as well as the human rights book “Speak Truth to Power” he made with Kerry Kennedy, the film conveys the deep humanism of his work, an abiding compassion and respect that, ultimately, can be felt in everything from his close-up of a somber Vietnamese child to the back-turned photo of Clint Eastwood that graces the poster for Unforgiven.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Chevolution"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Trisha Zitt and Luis Lopez's documentary Chevolution may be the closest thing you'll ever get to see to an episode of Behind the Music or E! True Hollywood Story about an image. The movie stars the face of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, as it was captured in a photograph taken in 1960 that was mass reproduced in poster form on its way to turning into an iconic fashion and advertising image. (One of Guevara's most sympathetic biographers, Jon Lee Anderson, appears in the film sitting at a table with a coffee mug adorned with Che's kisser.) The most fascinating information in the movie is about the man who got this avalanche rolling, Alberto Diaz, popularly known as Korda. Korda had been a high-flying fashion photographer before developing a political conscience during Castro's war against the Batista dictatorship, during which he became a photojournalist vowing to use his skills to serve the revolution. (He wound up serving as Castro's personal photographer.) But he retained the eye and the instincts of a fashion photographer, and that's what made his news photos continue to stand out. They were certainly in evidence in the photo of Che, which was taken when Guevara showed up at the docks after an explosion aboard a Belgian cargo ship delivering a load of munitions. One of Korda's old colleagues says that he doesn't believe that he realized that he'd caught anything special, because he only took two or three shots when he had Guevara in his line of sight, and if he'd thought he had the makings of an important photo, he would have snapped ten or twelve. Maybe so, but Korda must have noticed at some point that he'd gotten a portrait of the camera-shy Guevara looking especially intense and fiery-eyed. Instinctively, he proceeded to crop the other figures out of the shot, leaving something that looks very much like a movie star's head shot.

Korda was unable to sell the picture to the Cuban newspapers in 1960, but years later, it fell into the hands of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian who had recognized the potential of easily reproducible, easily disseminated graphic posters as a political medium and who was not above profiting from this insight. Korda was above it; because of his devotion to the ideals of the socialist revolution, he declined to copyright the image or even make a public show of taking credit for it as it was being widely proliferated around the world. Shortly before he died in 2001, Korda did begin to go after companies that exploited Che's image by associating it with products he deemed inappropriate to the point of being degrading, such as cigarettes and booze, an ongoing battle that is now overseen by his daughter. Among the things they regarded as tarnishing to Che's memory is apparently leftist sludge rock, because they also went after Rage Against the Machine for decorating their drum kit with Che's face. The movie includes a wistful Tom Morello recalling how he and the guys used to think of Che as a fifth member of the band until a squad of lawyers showed up to announce that they were there to audition for the role of Yoko Ono.

Chevolution would be a stronger documentary if it included a meatier picture of who Che himself was and what he did and stood for. Most of the people who speak about him in the movie's first half do so in a tone that's respectful bordering on worshipful. That includes Gael Garcia Bernal and Antonio Banderos, both of who have played Che in movies--I guess Omar Sharif had prior commitments--and who speak of him, not unintelligently, as a fellow celebrity. In the movie's final third, which shows how thoroughly the Che image has entered the advertising culture, we do get to hear from a few young campus-conservative types, one of whom rants bitterly about the shallow ignorance of the radical chic and expostulates that if you want to live in a doctrinaire police state that tells you what to think and what you can say and how to live your life, then you should definitely wear Che's face on your T-shirt. (At the screening I attended, one guy in the audience chose this moment to applaud and hollar, "Yeah!" Ah, New York.) One way or another, the movie does demonstrate that the Che image is now so cut off from actual history as to mean whatever the person who wears it thinks it ought to mean, which is one reason it's had a much longer shelf life than Che himself did.

World Film Beat: "I Am Cuba" (1964)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

With the announcement of Fidel Castro's ambiguous "retirement" from government, the time is ripe for research and rediscovery into the strange recent history of Cuba and its revolution. One touchstone in that history, and one of the oddest great movies ever made, remains I Am Cuba, which, thanks to a happy stroke of timing, was recently issued on DVD in a dandy box set from Milestone Video that includes a couple of extra discs of supplementary materials (including the feature length making-of documentary I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth), handsomely packaged in a cigar box. The movie itself was made in the early 1960s by a filmmaking team headed by director Mikhail Kalatozov. Kalatozov, who had enjoyed one of the major international successes of post-Stalin Russian filmmaking with the 1957 patriotic love story The Cranes Are Flying, was literally a man on a mission: I Am Cuba was conceived by the Soviet Union and the Cuban government as a joint project that would result in a movie that would not just make the case for Castro's revolution but also help it to spread. The idea was that the film's exciting fusion of visual dazzle and firebrand propaganda would light in a fire in the heart of everyone who saw it, and revolution would break out all over the globe. Boy — the sixties, you know what I'm saying?

The fact that I Am Cuba can now be purchased as a consumer durable in a decadently attractive package is one clue that it failed in its higher historic mission. Fortunately, there are other standards by which a movie can be judged besides its success rate at overturning the worldwide capitalist system. The filmmakers had all the funding and official assistance they could ask for, and they availed themselves of it, big time. They were given plenty of time and resources in order to experiment, so that they could pull off such coups as the movie's celebrated long, long continuous shot that begins with images of a beauty contest being staged high up in a Batista-era luxury hotel and tracks down to the swimming pool area, and follows a woman underwater as she dives in. (P. T. Anderson included a homage to the shot in Boogie Nights.) The multipart story is your basic simple-minded political cartoon about the exploitation of the island and its people, back in the bad old days, by high-rolling gringos smoking cigarettes and wearing out their Men-in-Black sunglasses. In the first part, these good-for-nothings ply native women with the demon rum and force them to hit the dance floor and listen to the jazzy rhythms of the house band, which dangerously loosens their morals and hip joints. This is followed by the story of an old sugar-cane farmer who sets his crops and home on fire rather than let them fall into the hands of the capitalist vultures. The story material in I Am Cuba is today of interest only as political kitsch from another era, but the extraordinary visual energy and imaginative beauty transforms the material. When the farmer lights up his fields, the black smoke that fills the sky is like an apocalyptic vision from a science-fiction movie. It's too amazing looking to pass for something that really happened so that a film crew could photograph it.

I Am Cuba never really got the chance to demonstrate its revolutionary potential, if any. After its much-ballyhooed 1964 premieres in Moscow and Havana, the two governments slunk away from it. Cuban audiences thought that it was a silly, alien vision of their culture, and Soviet leaders were concerned that it made capitalist hedonism look a little too inviting. Kalatozov didn't get to direct again until the 1969 adventure film The Red Tent, which turned out to be his last film; he died in 1973. It wasn't until twenty years later, with the Iron Curtain a fading memory, that I Am Cuba was rediscovered through the efforts of some enterprising festival programmers, Milestone distribution, and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who lent their names to the promotional efforts when the movie was "re-released" — actually, in the West, released for the first time — in 1994. Years after that, the documentary crew that made The Siberian Mammoth hit the island and tracked down some of the surviving Cubans who worked on the movie, who, if they'd thought about I Am Cuba at all since 1964, had done so under the impression that they'd spent those years working on what turned out to be the Cuban-Russian equivalent of Howard the Duck in terms of critical respect. One of them, handed a video of the movie, turns it over in his hands and gazes at it quizzically. Finally he mutters, "Scorsese had something to do with this?"

Reviving Richard Fleischer: "Violent Saturday" and "Mandingo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The director Richard Fleischer, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 89, had a long career, an immaculate bloodline (as the son and nephew of Max and Dave Fleischer, the animators behind the great short films starring Betty Boop, Superman, and Popeye), and no critical reputation to speak of. Fleischer's vast filmography is all over the map in terms of subject matter and style, and his name is attached to a number of big commercial disasters (Dr. Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora!) and minor embarassments (Che!, an attempt by 20th-Century Fox to cash in on '60s revolutionary youth, starring Omar Sharif in the title role and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro; The Jazz Singer, starring Neil Diamond, with Laurence Olivier as his chagrinned poppa; Red Sonja with Brigitte Nielsen) that are unified mainly by their lack of personality. But he's begun to attract defenders, and Dave Kehr, for one, thinks it's surprising that he "still has not been given a major New York retrospective." As it happens, three of Fleisher's movies are enjoying return engagements on the New York revival circuit in the days and weeks to come. Violent Saturday (1955), which plays for a week at Film Forum starting February 29, is one of those odd film noirs where the thugs from the city hit the highway and track their mud all over the clean, open fields of the American heartland. Written by Sidney Boehm, who also did the script for The Big Heat, it serves up Lee Marvin as the nastiest of a trio of bank robbers who impose their bad morals and worse manners on a quiet little town where they may fit in a little than the locals want to admit. It was made the same year as James Sturges' better-known rural thriller Bad Day at Black Rock, where Marvin and Ernest Borgnine both served as muscle for the local forces of darkness. Borgnine is in this one, too, but cast against type as an Amish farmer who has understandable cause to worry that his religious proscription against violence may not be strong enough to survive its encounter with Lee Marvin. The film, which enjoyed a brief period of revival and acclaim in the mid-80s when it was discovered by critics and used as a club against Peter Weir's tonier Witness, is a reminder of how well Fleischer's no-frills filmmaking technique worked when applied to simple but gimmicky thriller material, as in the 1952 The Narrow Margin and Armored Car Robbery, both testaments to the grip of nuts-and-bolts noir and the nut-cracking sturdiness of Charles McGraw's jawline.

The "Film Comments Selects" series at Walter Reade Theater is showing Fleischer's 1971 10 Rillington Place on February 21 and 24, thus giving audiences the chance to see the director of Gandhi, Richard Attenborough, sweat up the screen as a serial killer who strangled eight women and left it to an innocent fellow played by John Hurt to be hanged in his place. But the real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here may be the chance to see the 1975 Mandingo (screening on February 23) on a big screen, assuming that no one tears it down before the closing credits roll. This anti-Gone with the Wind, set on a Southern slave-breeding plantation presided over by James Mason, was made in 1975 from a script by Norman Wexler, the ad executive turned wild man screenwriter who wrote Joe and Serpico. (Wexler, who reportedly served as a model for Andy Kaufman's loathsome lounge-singer character Tony Clifton, was notorious for such stunts as blowing off a man trying to make conversation with him on a commercial airplane flight by telling him that he was on his way to assassinate President Nixon. Wexler's seatmate notified a flight attendant, who in turn notified the FBI, and when the plane landed, Wexler wound up having to talk to a lot of people he would rather have not talked to.)

Kehr takes the position that "Mandingo is Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system." This is a very interesting take on the picture, though some will feel that it may amount to putting a little too much thought into a movie that climaxes with Perry King reacting to the news that his wife (Susan George) has been having an affair with his prize slave, played by the heavyweight champ Ken Norton--King finds out the hard way, after his wife has given birth--by sticking Norton into a boiling cauldron and jabbing him with a pitchfork. But however seriously you end up taking Mandingo, it's definitely one of a kind, and very entertaining, if you can handle the fact that Eric Cartman would question its political correctness. (I remember that it was briefly on rotation on HBO around the time that my high school buddies first got cable, and for a long time, they were much taken with King's line, "I fancied her, so I bought her! She's gonna be my bed wench!" I can promise you, however, that use of this line in the real world got them no action whatsoever.) Devotees of hambone turns will want to see it just for the great James Mason drawling his lines, sitting with his bare feet on a black kid's tummy (it's supposed to be good for the arthritis), and generally giving the kind of performance that gives one visions of the star constantly asking the director, "Now, that last take, you're just going to show it for laughs at the wrap party and then burn the negative, right?" There was actually a sort of sequel to Mandingo called Drum, and it had a script that Wexler had worked on and a cast headed by Warren Oates, Pam Grier, and Yaphet Kotto, who you might think would raise the stakes a bit from Perry King, Susan George, and Ken Norton, but it had none of the, um, magic of the original, and is beloved by no one. Fleischer didn't direct it. So maybe he's some kind of auteur after all.

YouTube Cabinet of Curiosities: Candy From Castro

Paul Clark — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

We here at Screengrab consider ourselves to be omnivorous in our moviegoing tastes. So, in an attempt to counter the rash of pieces about end-of-year lists and other prestige pictures, I'd like to tell you about a singularly strange film I caught up with recently, entitled If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? Released in 1971, Footmen was meant to be screened in churches throughout the South, but the film is no clean-scrubbed bit of Christian piety. It’s perhaps the most notorious example of a regional genre called the "soul winner," designed to (literally) scare the hell out of stray believers and send them running back into the bosom of the Lord.

Footmen was directed by down-home auteur Ron Ormond, who was spotlighted in the indispensable hixploitation book Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, written by Screengrab’s own Scott Von Doviak. But the real dominant force behind the film was Mississippi preacher Rev. Estus Pirkle. Footmen was based on Pirkle’s book of the same title, and is a mindbending mix of fire-and-brimstone Christianity and anti-Communist propaganda. A sermon by Rev. Pirkle serves as narration for dramatized scenes of what would happen when the Communists took over America- based, according to Pirkle, on events that have already occurred in other Communist nations.

Footmen feels like a kind of Southern-fried Red-panic version of Scared Straight, containing one bizarre scene after another. The video above is from one of the film’s most infamous scenes, in which a state-sanctioned schoolteacher brainwashes children to turn away from Jesus. Believe it or not, the movie only gets weirder from here. Footmen is one of the damnedest films ever committed to celluloid, and one that ensured that Southland Tales was only the second most jaw-dropping movie I saw this past weekend.

Et-Yuma-ology

Peter Smith — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

In Slate, Brett Sokol explains how a recently remade Western added a word to the Cuban lexicon. "Take a walk down any of Havana's main thoroughfares," he writes, "and you'll hear American visitors hailed as yumas, while the United States itself is affectionately dubbed La Yuma." This is a spin on the term "La Yunay", which was, back in the bad old Batista days was inspired by the omnipresent United Fruit Company but was the closest most Cubans could come to saying "United." Cuban audiences were nuts about American Westerns, though, and when the original 3:10 to Yuma played Havana, Cubans looking for a catchy slang terms for Americans were quick to trade up to "Yumas," which was similar to "Yunays" but more lovable in its associations. Castro's government eventually mostly banned American Westerns from Cuban screens in favor of ideologically pure entertainment from the Soviet bloc. But by the late 1970s even Fidel must have been getting sick of movies starring tractors, because the freeze on American pop culture thawed a bit, and both 3:10 to Yuma and the slang word it had inspired made a comeback.

For Elmore Leonard, on whose novel of the same name the film was based, this is all just a reminder of how fluky pop culture can be: he simply picked the name "Yuma" because that's where the prison was. Of course, that was in another lifetime, before he figured out that the big money for him was never going to be in writing Westerns; back in 1957, he scored $4,000 for the screen rights, with a clause assuring him another $2,000 if the story was filmed again. His feelings about the remake? "My agent is working on getting me that two grand." — Phil Nugent