The Screengrab : marilyn monroe

Jack Cardiff, 1914 - 20009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Jack Cardiff, who died last week at the age of 94, was a legend among cinematographers, and a man who spent virtually his whole life working in movies. Born to a show business family, Cardiff acted in silent films as a child, making his movie debut when he was four in a 1918 picture called My Son, My Son. Self-educated, he also haunted art museums, feasting his eyes on the work of Rembrandt and Caravaggio. As he grew into his teens, he branched out into such odd jobs as clapper boy, production runner, and, most fatefully, camera assistant. His first job as full-fledged cinematographer was on Wings of the Morning (1937), starring Henry Fonda, the first British film shot in Technicolor. When the Technicolor representative interviewed him to test his worthiness of the assignment, he asked him, “Which side of the face did Rembrandt light?” Cardiff's reply, which satisfied his interlocutor, was to point to one cheek and then add, "Except when he does etchings; then it’s the other side.” When telling this story in later life, Cardiff admitted that he was only guessing.

In 1946, Cardiff worked for the first time with directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, on A Matter of Life and Death. It was his flamboyantly colorful work on their Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) that really elevated him to the international A-list. His other credits included Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (1949) with Ingrid Bergman, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and The Barefoot Contessa (1954) with Ava Gardner, John Huston's The African Queen (1951) with Katharine Hepburn, and King Vidor's War and Peace with Audrey Hepburn, which solidified his reputation as a master photographer of beautiful women. He also shot Laurence Olivier's The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), whose leading lady, Marilyn Monroe, once sent him a note reading, “Dear Jack, If only I could be the way you have created me!"

Cardiff, who continued to work as a cameraman up until the last couple of years, also had a side career as a director. His first film as a director was the 1953 The Story of William Tell, starring Errol Flynn. His most distinguished films were the 1960 D. H. Lawrence adaptation Sons and Lovers and 1966's Young Cassidy, starring Rod Taylor as a fictionalized version of the young Sean O'Casey; he also directed Taylor in the 1968 action flick Dark of the Sun, and also made the trippy-ass 1968 Girl on a Motorcycle starring Marianne Faithfull and his last film as director, a Donald Pleasance-Tom Baker horror job called The Mutations (1974). He won the Academy Award for his work on Black Narcissus as well as an honorary Oscar for his life's work in 2001, a year after he was awarded an OBE. The British Society of Cinematographers gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994.

Reviews By Request: Mister Lonely (2007, Harmony Korine)

Paul Clark — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

As always, I’ll be polling you folks to determine my next Reviews By Request column. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

I find myself sort of at a loss at how to review Harmony Korine’s latest film, Mister Lonely. Here is a film with plenty of ideas without enough ways to satisfactorily tie them together, yet it’s also so rich and strange that it’s impossible to ignore. That it doesn’t really work in any of the usual ways is to its credit. Just because I have such a hard time pinning the movie down doesn’t diminish my admiration for it.

Like all of Korine’s films, Mister Lonely deals with characters who live on the fringes of society. In this case, his protagonist is a Michael Jackson impersonator (played by Diego Luna) who ekes out an existence in Paris. Most of time, he performs on the street, although occasionally his agent (fellow filmmaking enfant terrible Léos Carax, who’s really overdue to direct another movie) will find him a job. It’s at one of these jobs- a “personal appearance” at a nursing home where he cheerfully tells the residents, “don’t die! Live forever!”- that he meets another impersonator, a Marilyn Monroe played by Samantha Morton, who invites him to live with her in a commune just for impersonators.

The commune, an old castle in the Scottish Highlands, is inhabited by Marilyn’s husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple (Morton’s real-life daughter Esme Creed-Miles). There’s also the Pope (James Fox), Queen Elizabeth II (Anita Pallenberg), Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), Madonna, James Dean, Sammy Davis Jr., Buckwheat, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Three Stooges. A rather eclectic mix, I’m sure you’ll agree. Here, Marilyn promises, they can all live the lives they’ve chosen in an environment where they will be understood and welcomed.

The early Paris scenes are good, but the movie gets really fascinating once Michael makes the journey to Scotland. It’s also here that the idea of impersonation becomes complicated- for some celebrity impersonators, it’s primarily about making money or indulging their fantasies in a relatively healthy context. Yet the residents of the commune are another breed entirely, having substituted the lives they’ve assumed for their own. Korine shows us the Pope getting drunk at dinner, Buckwheat tending to his chickens, and so on. But try as they may to escape who they are, their real natures end up coming out- Lincoln reveals himself to be a foul-mouthed petty tyrant, Chaplin alternately abuses and neglects his wife, and Marilyn begins to unravel. Even the sheep end up getting sick and having to be put down.

Complicating matters even more is the show they put on for the locals- a few of the impersonators do their own chosen celebrity’s shtick, but some do other people’s famous routines, with such strange sights as James Dean doing stand-up comedy. Indeed, all Three Stooges are never onstage at the same time. Could it be that these people are so uneasy in their own skin that they’re forever searching for another identity to assume? Regardless of the intent, the show is hardly the success that it was intended to be, no doubt because if people are paying to see celebrity impersonators, then by gum want to see them impersonating those celebrities.

All the while, Michael mostly keeps to himself, practicing his routine, never quite giving himself over to the commune’s vibe. If most of the other impersonators have turned the celebrities’ identities into their own, it becomes clear that Michael is more of a seeker, using the Michael Jackson persona as a way to find fulfillment in his own life. Once it’s clear to him that he won’t find it at the commune, he makes his way back to Paris and gives up his Michael Jackson persona, seeking fulfillment from something different altogether.

Perhaps it’s this search that best explains a strange subplot involving a group of nuns led by a priest who’s played by longtime Korine friend Werner Herzog. One day, when air-dropping bags of rice in Central America, one of the nuns falls out of the airplane only to discover that if she prays hard enough, she will survive the fall unharmed. In contrast to Michael, who has searched all his life for some kind of inner peace, the nuns happen upon it by accident, and seize upon the opportunity to experience transcendence through their literal leaps of faith.

After rising to prominence as the writer of Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine has made three features to date, all of which have attempted to push the boundaries of cinema. But while julien donkey-boy and particularly Gummo were dragged down by Korine’s need to turn them into freak shows, with Mister Lonely he has matured as a filmmaker by showing a real curiosity for his characters and a willingness to approach his ideas with real sincerity. In an interview earlier this year, Korine described his directing style by saying, “I try to create a place where you feel that anything's possible.” With Mister Lonely, I believe he has successfully accomplished this, and in doing so he’s made his best film to date.

What’s next for Reviews By Request? Once again, I’m playing catch-up on my 2008 releases, and this week’s choices include two of this year’s most acclaimed documentaries, a comic corrective to the rather humorless Quantum of Solace, a celebrated Danish drama, and a David Gordon Green-produced family tragedy. So, what’ll it be?

What should I watch for my next Review By Request? | BuzzDash polls

Voting closes on Monday night. Feel free to stump for your favorites or to recommend future candidates in the comments box. See you in two weeks!

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

10. ISABELLA ROSSELLINI (1952 - )

Rossellini made her movie debut in 1976, playing a nun in Vincente Minnelli's A Matter of Time, which starred her mother, Ingrid Bergman -- but that was basically just a family outing. Her movie career didn't really take root until after her mother's death, when she appeared in 1985's White Nights. The next year, equipped with a tacky wig, a tackier apartment, and a kitchen knife, she achieved neo-noir immortality as Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet. She and Lynch became a couple, acting together in Zelly and Me and collaborating on his Wild at Heart. Around the time that picture hit theaters, he reportedly broke up with her over the phone, inspiring millions of film geeks across the globe to murmur in unison, "Jesus Christ, maybe he is nuts!" More recently, she has formed a productive working partnership with Canadian auteur Guy Maddin, who directed her in his feature The Saddest Music in the World and also in the short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a tribute to her father, Roberto Rossellini, which she wrote. (She also seized the opportunity to cast herself as Alfred Hitchcock, David Selznick, and Charlie Chaplin.) More recently, she wrote, directed and starred in the "Green Porno" short film series.

9. CATHERINE DENEUVE (1943 - )

With her cool elegance and breathtaking beauty, it would have been all too easy for Catherine Deneuve to become yet another in a long line of Euro-babes who were emerging during the 1950s and 1960s. That she dated notorious starlet-“groomer” Roger Vadim for a time would seem to indicate this. Yet from the early stages of her career, it was clear that Deneuve was in it for the long haul. For most rising performers, starring in a film by a relative neophyte in which every line of dialogue was not merely sung but dubbed by a professional singer would have seemed risky. But Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg became a sensation largely on the basis of Deneuve’s charisma, and she quickly became an international star. But rather than simply playing girlish characters again and again in a series of Umbrellas clones, Deneuve began seeking out roles that tweaked this archetype, notably as the tightly wound virgin of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and the bourgeois wife with the vivid fantasy life in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. In the decades that followed, Deneuve became an icon in France -- literally, having served as the face of the French national symbol “Marianne” during the 1980s. Hollywood came calling on several occasions throughout her career, and Deneuve answered, most memorably as the 200-year-old bisexual vampire in The Hunger. But more often, Deneuve has leveraged her stardom -- and her still-formidable beauty -- to work with directors of international renown. In addition to Demy, Polanski, and Buñuel, Deneuve’s roll-call of world-class collaborators has also included François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Andre Téchiné, Robert Aldrich, Raul Ruiz, Agnès Varda, Manoel de Oliveira, Léos Carax, and Arnaud Desplechin. Heck, she even petitioned to play a punch-press operator in Dancer in the Dark just to work with Lars Von Trier. Perhaps most happily for her fans, François Ozon’s 8 Women finally allowed Deneuve to unveil the singing voice that Jacques Demy had dubbed over decades before- which, as it turned out, was just fine after all.

8. MARILYN MONROE (1926-1962)

There are a lot of bad things you can say about Marilyn Monroe. A depressive, self-pitying pillhead, she had the biggest career anyone could ever hope for, and she threw it away; she was too ambitious, she fell in love too easily (and always with the wrong men), she was talented enough to go just so far and no farther. She never realized her potential (or never had any real potential to begin with); she helped to introduce a poisonous dumb-blonde stereotype for actresses – and, for that matter, for women – that persists to this day; and, if you believe some people (including, reportedly, Richard Nixon), she’s one of the reasons John F. Kennedy died. That’s pretty bad stuff. So what can you say in her defense? How about this: she was the biggest movie star of all time, and she will be for the rest of time. She was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived, and if the platinum-tressed knockout look has gotten out of control since her heyday, she had the pleasure of inventing it. She took a limited acting range and worked it to razor-sharpness, and if she never stepped out of a very specific spectrum of characters, she played each and every one of them to the hilt, and what’s more, she seemed to have a great time doing it. She was so universally beloved that every man wanted her and every woman wanted to be her, and she was the most mourned figure in America until JFK bought a bullet a year later. She is – more than James Dean, more than Humphrey Bogart, maybe even more than the Hollywood sign – a visual symbol of the movie business. She’s an icon’s icon, rivaled in our entire culture by only Elvis Presley. That’s what you can say about Marilyn Monroe.

7. BETTE DAVIS (1908-1989)

If you can judge even a superstar by the company they keep, how are we to judge Bette Davis? It’s beyond question that she’s one of the biggest stars who ever lived, but what kind of star was she? The name she’s most often linked with, by both fate (their most productive periods coincided) and judgment (they ran neck and neck for Oscar nominations much of their careers), is Katharine Hepburn. But Hepburn always seemed to be in Hollywood, but never of it: you could easily get the idea she was just a well-meaning, patrician East Coast gal who happened to be really good at acting in movies. Davis, on the other hand, was a self-constructed creature of Hollywood who was nearly as influential off screen as she was on. A ruthless manager of her own career, she forced more than one studio into court when she felt she was being mishandled by the system, and so influential was she in backstage wrangling that she became known as “the fourth Warner Brother”. Of course, her other famous nickname was “Mother Goddamn”; her only rival in sheer ballsy spite, and the only person who could assess an enemy and go right for their jugular, was Joan Crawford. With their cut-throat business acumen, their penetrating eyes, their disastrous personal lives, and their ability to exploit a studio system built to exploit them, Crawford would be the real actress Davis most resembled if it weren’t for one thing: Davis was ten times the actress Crawford was. With her dramatic intensity, her cynical humor, and her ease in any kind of genre, Bette Davis wasn’t just a superstar, she was also a legitimately great actress – and that’s why she’s on this list.

6. MERYL STREEP (1949 - )

If there is one thing that can be considered a transcendental aspect of Meryl Streep’s career, it is that she proved that you don’t have to be inhumanly attractive to become an actress of superstar caliber. (Obligatorily, we will mention that it also says a lot about Hollywood that Ms. Streep – who, in fact, has always been a perfectly lovely-looking woman – is not considered particularly attractive by its standards.) Simultaneously, if there is one thing that can be considered an abject failure about Meryl Streep’s career, it is that it set no particular precedent; since her stunning early work in movies like Sophie’s Choice and Silkwood to her amazing latter-day roles in Adaptation and The Hours, she has been widely feted as the greatest actress alive, while elsewhere, starring roles keep on going to the sort of women who look like she doesn’t. Pity poor Streep: she’ll have to go to her grave content to be merely the most spellbinding actress of the last half-century, with nothing but an unprecedented 14 Oscar nominations to show for it. If it were anyone else getting that many nods for Academy gold, you’d have to suspect the fix was in – no one can be that good. But Meryl Streep is, astonishingly, that good. At times, in fact, she seems to be some sort of highly sophisticated android that has been programmed by omniscient aliens to be good at acting: every one of her fourteen nominations was well-earned, and you could make a solid argument she should have won at least half a dozen more than the two she owns. She has no particular schtick, tic, or gimmick; she’s seemingly not drawn to a particular type of role, nor does she seek out scripts that play to one strength or another. Instead, she acts the way Michael Jordan plays basketball: whatever is required of her in the moment, she finds some unexpected yet utterly effective way of doing it, and there is no way to stop her.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Booking Time with Tony Curtis

Phil Nugent — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Nicola Graydon of the Guardian checks in with Tony Curtis on the occasion of his new autobiography American Prince, "a rollercoaster of a book in which he’s brutally frank about his childhood, his affairs, stardom, drug addiction, depression, women and sex. Lots and lots of sex. It’s a romp through Hollywood’s golden age, when Curtis, with his thick, black hair and cerulean eyes, practically invented celebrity as we know it." Today, Tony is 83 and hangs out at his home in a Las Vegas suburb with his wife of ten years, sitting in a wheelchair and concentrating on his painting. It was sixty years ago this year that he signed his first studio contract, his first step in becoming box office catnip. And as one of the enduringly moviestruck of major Hollywood movie stars, he can get misty-eyed about his status as one of the last living links to the final years of the old studio system. “Poor darlings, they’re all dead. Sinatra, Brando, Cary Grant. They’ve all gone.”

In Curtis's studio, reporter finds herself "surrounded by canvases of Marilyn Monroe, sitting in the same pose, head turned away, laughing, in slightly different colours, all with slightly prominent nipples." Curtis, who says that he has "an affinity for women," elaborates on his romantic past: "I was falling in love every day. I am completely in love with women. Every woman. I loved their company and there was always a chance you could kiss them." Some readers of his book will surprised to discover that Marilyn Monroe was one of them--one of the women he kissed, and apparently even one of the women he loved. He kissed her on-screen, of course, in Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder comedy that is generally regarded as his best movie by those who don't know that his best movie was Sweet Smell of Success. But for years, Curtis, who once addressed a British TV interviewer's request for a detailed analytical analysis of Marilyn's personality with the curt diagnosis that she was a "fruitcake," has eaten out for years on his line that having to kiss her for a movie was "like kissing Hitler." But that was about the later superstar and basket case, who screwed up takes and muffed her lines to the point that time stood still. When she and Curtis had their affair, when both were starting out, “She was 19 and didn’t look anything like what she became. She had reddish-brown hair and her figure was not distinguished yet. Her bosoms weren’t what they were later and her legs were a little scrawny, but she was putting it all together. Don’t you see? Once she accepted she was a woman, then, look out, world. There was no guy that was safe." (It would have been nice if Graydon had thought to ask Curtis about the title of his book: is it a slap at Norman Marilyn, who in his book Marilyn wrote of Joe DiMaggio, who was to become her first husband, that he was "an American prince--her first; the others have only been Hollywood princes.") Curtis remains endearing, even when he's cheerfully admitting that he married Janet Leigh form the publicity or brusquely dismissing these new kids they got starring in movies today ("“And that Pitt fellow – whatshisname? He hasn’t got it either. Now, Robert Downey Jr – I think he might have something.”), the star-struck kid who wants to be accepted still comes through. "He shows me a huge portrait of Cary Grant in a gilt frame. There’s a handwritten message on it by his hero, telling him he will be in for a “long, happy and enduring career”. He says: “'Isn’t that amazing? Cary Grant. The movie star of all time.'”

That Guy! Special "Godfather" Edition, Part Three

Phil Nugent — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This week, "The Godfather--The Coppola Restoration", a DVD and Blu-ray set consisting of newly remastered editions of the three "Godfather" films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, hits the stores. To honor the release of the home video set, That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous, is devoting itself this week to the backup chorus of these remarkable films.

LEE STRASBERG: Co-founder of the Group Theatre and a director of the Actors Studio, Strasberg was a legendary acting teacher and Method guru but had barely had an acting career of his own when his former studio Al Pacino suggested that, at 72, he might be the right man to incarnate Hyman Roth, the ancient Mafia rainmaker who is said to have earned Vito Corleone's respect but never his trust. There may have been a bit of sly mischief mixed in with Pacino's worship when he put the actor and the character together; Strasberg had inspired a fair amount of gossip over the years about his manipulation of those under his sway--particularly Marilyn Monroe, who left him the bulk of her estate in her will--and there are moments when it's easy to see in Roth an old actor who's used to playing up both his accumulated wisdom and his infirmities to get attention, and also to gull those around him into thinking that he's as harmless as he seems. Yet Strasberg, handed this unexpected opportunity to show what he could do with rich material after many years of talking the talk, really dove in and acted the hell out of the role. Given his reputation for stressing the importance of emotional groping in acting, one might be surprised at how technically accomplished his work is, especially in the scene where he talks about the grounds he has for harboring a grudge against Michael, begins to make a painful-sounding noise indicating that he's having trouble controlling his breathing, and just plows on ahead with his monologue, mastefully using the painful-sounding grunts as counterpoint to the lines. Strasberg won an Academy Award nomination for the performance but lost to another of his old students, Robert De Niro, for De Niro's performance in the same movie. It's no surprise that after this late-life fling, he was eager to do more film acting, though it's also no surprise that, at his age, there seemed to be no surplus of appropriate roles halfway worthy of him. He played Pacino's grandfather in the 1979 ...And Justice for All and co-starred with Ruth Gordon in Boardwalk and with Art Carney and George Burns in Going in Style that same year, and died in 1982.

DOMINIC CHIANESE: Chianese, who played Hyman Roth's right-hand man Johnny Ola, is unique in the annals of Godfather cast members in that he didn't really get much of a career boost from the movie but later became a celebrity thanks to his work in another organized-crime drama made twenty-five years later, which often used The Godfather itself as a handy reference point: The Sopranos. Chianese began his show business career as a musician with one foot in musical theater-- Gilbert and Sullivan, off-Broadway musicals, Oliver! He was working for the man, giving guitar lessons in a rehab center, when he landed the role of Johnny Ola and performed it with a skillfully applied veneer of polished smarm. (It was his second movie role, after a bit part in the 1972 Fuzz.) It did lead to fairly steady work in film and TV and a continuing association with Al Pacino: a year after The Godfather, Part II, he played Pacino's father in Dog Day Afternoon, and twenty years after that, Pacino invited him to participate in his documentary about acting Shakespeare, Looking for Richard. But none of that brought him anywhere near the attention he earned when David Chase stuck a pair of Mr. Magoo eyeglasses on him and dubbed him Uncle Junior. Since then, he has appeared in such movies as Unfaithful (2002) and When Will I Be Loved (2004) but has mostly used the boost he got from the TV show to re-energize his singing career, making personal appearances and releasing the CDs Hits and Ungrateful Heart.

ABE VIGODA: Vigoda was hired at an open casting call to play Tessio, the dignified and, to his ultimate misfortune, the tragically "smarter" of the Don's two oldest and most trusted close associates. At the time, he had done some stage work and a little TV, but had gained an embarrassingly slight toehold in the business for a working actor who'd recently entered his fifties. The shot of him at the Don's daughter's wedding, smiling while dancing with a little girl who's standing on his shoes, is as endearingly human as any image in the film; the later shot of him, lit like Boris Karloff at a black masque and laughing at the idea of the upstanding Michael carrying out an assassination, is scary enough to make you lose it in your pants. The movie automatically raised Vigoda's profile among casting directors. (Vigoda would tell interviewers that it also raised his profile among traffic cops, who took to stopping the shifty, baleful-looking man who they knew they'd seen someplace before...) Vigoda's big post-Godfather break was, of course, that of Fish, the senior citizen member of the detective squad on the TV comedy Barney Miller. That role made him semi-beloved, but after a couple of years, the network insisted on spinning him off onto his own goddamn sitcom with a bunch of goddamn kids, and after that was quickly canceled, Vigoda was stranded, overexposed, and badly typecast.

But he didn't turn into an official joke until the premature reports of his death started in 1982, with a false item in People magazine. It might have helped if Vigoda hadn't seemed so grateful for the attention. By now, late night talk shows, Conan O'Brien's in particular, have gotten a lot of mileage out of treating Vigoda as a punch line, the way comedians of an earlier generation used Sonny Tufts or The Horn Blows at Midnight. Sometimes the joke is that Vigoda, who turned 87 this year, is still alive; that may be an inevitable result of his having had his greatest success playing walking dead men before he himself was sixty. Sometimes, the joke seems to just be that there's this fellow named Abe Vigoda out there who was once in a great movie and whose name is still recognizable. It doesn't help that in Vigoda's few appearances in movies that have actually been released to theaters since 1974--such deathless classics as Joe Versus the Volcano and North--he seems to have been cast on the theory that it'll just tickle people to see Abe Vigoda turn up in a movie, as if he were an actor or something. Perhaps sensing this, Vigoda has generally seemed less alive and committed in these roles than he does when Conan or Dave has trotted him out to use as a sight gag. It's not altogether clear just what he's done to deserve this, but sometimes the world is just brutal on people who insist on continuing to exist after we've decided that that their fifteen minutes are up.

Fitting Farewells: The Top Ten Great Final Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in THE MISFITS (1961)

The onscreen drama in John Huston’s film of Arthur Miller’s vehicle for wife Marilyn Monroe about horse wranglers and broken relationships in Reno, Nevada runs only a close second to the offscreen drama surrounding the film. Huston drank so much during the production he sometimes fell asleep on set, Monroe wound up in detox at one point during the shoot and died less than two years after delivering her final complete film performance as troubled divorcée, Roslyn Taber. The Misfits also marked the final performance of her equally iconic co-star, Clark Gable, who probably hastened his own death by a macho insistence on performing his own stunts, including (according to our old friend Wikipedia) “being dragged about 400 feet across [a] dry lakebed at more than 30 miles per hour” by a horse. Yet despite the tragedy surrounding the film, Gable and Monroe at least ended their careers (and too-short lives) with a worthy (and timeless) cinematic milestone.

Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1983)

After his first collaboration with Clint Eastwood, A Fistful of Dollars, made it possible for him to do what he liked as a director, Sergio Leone basically made nothing but epics, and they kept getting bigger and bigger. He had hoped to make a gangster movie back in the late 1960s but was persuaded to stick with the Italian Western form he had helped create for two more films, Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) and Duck, You Sucker! (1971), both of which were first released to the English-speaking markets in butchered cuts that helped to temporarily kill off his reputation in America. His Prohibition-set crime epic Once Upon a Time in America, which finally arrived in 1983, helped to inspire a re-evaluation of his passionate feel for action, story and romance, his large-scale compositional sense and the hallucinatory romanticism of every shot. Unfortunately, that was only after a 229-minute version of the movie began to get some play in theaters and on cable TV around 1985; originally, Warner Brothers, bowing to what had by then become tradition with Leone movies, sent it out to theaters in the summer of 1984 in an incoherent two-hour-twenty-minute cut that exposed Leone to ridicule and mockery on what should have been a triumphant occasion, which seems to have been a key part in this most movie-intoxicated of major director's decision that he had done enough for the art of film. He spent the rest of his life essentially retired. He died in 1989, by which point the good name of his last work had been pretty much restored.

Richard Farnsworth in THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999)

David Lynch's G-rated tribute to the diversity and rich unpredictability of the American heartland draws much of its strength from the man at its center: Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight, an actual World War II veteran who, at 73, drove a riding lawn mower 240 miles to reconcile with his dying older brother. (It was the only motor vehicle Straight was still fit to drive; the trip took him six weeks.) Farnsworth had gotten into movies as an extra and stuntman back in 1936. The movies in which he made uncredited nonspeaking appearances include Gone with the Wind, Gunga Din, Red River, The Ten Commandments, The Wild One, and Blazing Saddles. He began to get small speaking parts after three decades in the business, and then in 1978, he got an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as an aging ranch hand in Comes a Horseman. His first big chance to carry a movie came with the 1982 Canadian Western The Grey Fox, in which, in his ealry sixties, he showed that he had learned how to present himself as a romantic, gentlemanly icon. He continued to play character parts through the 1980s and into the 1990s, but by the time David Lynch came calling, Farnsworth was pushing eighty and had been diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Fearing that it might cost him the job, he kept that as his little secret and somehow managed to give the performance of his life, imbuing his now well-rehearsed iconic American character with a new vulnerability and humanity, while doing his best to conceal that he was in terrific physical pain most of the time. Farnsworth died in the fall of 2000, several months after his last performance won him another Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actor.

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Click here for Part One and Part Two

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

DESERT HEARTS (1985)

Unlike the much-heralded 1982 Olympic-athletes-in-love drama Personal Best, 1985’s lower-profile lesbian romance Desert Hearts (based on a novel by Jane Rule) was (A) actually directed by a woman (Donna Deitch) and (B) depicted a love story where neither participant ultimately winds up going back to a man after a tentative Sapphic fling. Like Marilyn Monroe’s character years before in The Misfits, Helen Shaver’s restrained English professor Vivian Bell finds herself in Reno, Nevada, sweating out the state’s six-week residency requirement in order to obtain a quick divorce from her husband. While killing time in a no-boys-allowed guest house (run by Jack Tripper’s old landlady, Audra Lindley), Vivian meets a free spirit named Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and, much to her own surprise, discovers an intense spiritual and sexual connection she never experienced with the XY chromosome set. Given the don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t even acknowledge that homosexuality exists mindset of the story’s 1959 setting, Vivian isn’t even entirely aware that she’s been living in a closet, but once she’s out, her feelings trump her fears of a life less ordinary, and she invites Cay to follow her back to New York, and Cay admits that Vivian “reached in and put a string of lights” around her heart, one of the great swoony lines in the annals of romantic cinema.

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (2006)

A funny, real-life detective yarn, a brief history of film and a timely exposé of American cultural hypocrisy...all that AND a compendium of notorious, uncensored sex scenes? What's not to like? This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a gotcha! documentary in the Super Size Me tradition, where the filmmaker explores a larger topic by subjecting himself to a series of misadventures. In this case, the subject is the shadowy, puritanical Motion Picture Association of America, an unelected, unimpeachable board which subtly shapes our national cultural agenda by determining which films (and values) are "family-friendly" and which are marginalized by means of the current G-PG-PG13-R-NC17 ratings system. Combining movie clips and filmmaker interviews, director Kirby Dick demonstrates how the MPAA habitually demonizes sex in movies (particularly the homo- variety) while letting violence slide...but the real fun of the movie is watching the ironically-named Dick track down the secretive MPAA board members together with a spunky private detective (who, coincidentally but with obvious thematic irony, also happens to be a lesbian mother) before submitting the very film you're watching to the very group it's about for a rating in a great meta moment of "Fuck You" brio.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967)

Long before the "Don't ask, don't tell" era, a Southern army post was probably the least healthy environment for a deeply closeted homosexual imaginable. That's certainly the case in John Huston's adaptation of the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, in which pretty much every character has a psychosexual hang-up of some sort. Marlon Brando is Major Weldon Penderton, whose pride is entirely tied up in being something he's not: a portrait of courage, a leader of men. Elizabeth Taylor is his wife Leonora, one of the all-time ballbusters, and she's definitely got his number. "Firebird is a horse," he grumbles one morning, annoyed at his wife's devotion to the animal. "Firebird is a stallion," she hisses, and though it may have taken the 1967 audience a while to catch on (the words "gay" or "homosexual" are never mentioned – probably couldn't be mentioned), Penderton could hardly feel more emasculated if she horsewhipped him across the face in front of his colleagues – which she later does. A pent-up bottle of rage and self-loathing (he rides a horse like he's got the post's flagpole up his ass), Penderton finally pops his cork when he catches the object of his obsession, a hunky but dim young soldier played by Robert Forster in his movie debut, in his wife's bedroom sniffing through her undies. The movie's ending is a bit overheated, but Brando is brilliantly bizarre as a gay man who is definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975)

He certainly wasn’t the first gay filmmaker, but a legitimate argument can be made that the brilliant German director Rainier Werner Fassbinder was the first gay filmmaker of importance. Fassbinder himself was openly gay, and homosexuality often played a part in his films, whether obviously or subtly, but Fox and His Friends was the first movie he made where a homosexual romance was the centerpiece of the plot. More importantly, though, as the director stressed in interviews, the gayness of the characters is not “a problem, or a comic term”. Fassbinder wanted nothing more – and nothing less – than to bring us a moving, tragic soap opera romance in which the main characters were not heterosexual. To accomplish this, he had to make the movie extremely personal (he filmed many of its scenes in the gay Berlin demimonde he frequented in his private life, and he chose to play the character of naïve working-class lottery winner Fox Biberkopf himself), but he also had to ensure that the movie would neither humiliate nor glorify its gay characters. In order for it to work, he had to show that gays were just as noble, as innocent, and as decent as other people, but he also had to show that they were just as base, as manipulative and as cruel as other people. The result is a masterpiece that contains everything that is great about Fassbinder as a director, and one of the most sad and human stories in the history of film drama: what Fox gives up for love, and the way his need for acceptance and affection leads him to ruin, resonates universally. That’s what good movies – be they ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ – are supposed to do.

BEN-HUR (1959)

One of the most iconic gay performances in cinema history came from a man who not only wasn’t gay, but apparently had no idea he was supposed to be playing a gay character, and when he found out, vehemently denied it for decades. The story goes that director William Wyler and screenwriter Gore Vidal found the notion that Messala and Judah Ben-Hur would have been so close, only to come to a position of extreme hatred over a fairly arcane dispute over politics, a tad hard to believe. Vidal, whose reputation as a bit of a troublemaker has never been a secret, came up with the notion that the two men had been lovers when they were young, and their split was not over politics, but over Ben-Hur’s eventual rejection of Messala. Wyler thought it was worth a shot, and while the two men discussed it with Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, they dared not bring the subject up with Heston, who was none too fond of gays. Naturally, the script never directly mentioned the situation either, but given the way Heston’s adult Ben-Hur interacts with Messala (the result, according to both Vidal and Boyd, of precise wording in the script and careful direction from Wyler), it’s a bit hard to believe that Heston couldn’t figure out that something was going on. Still, for reasons of his own, Heston spent the next forty years as the sole representative of the “I did not play a homo in Ben-Hur” position, going so far as to deny Gore Vidal had anything to do with the finished script of the film – a claim Vidal handily disproved, using, among other things, passages in Heston’s own autobiography as a source.

Click here to read Part One, Part Three and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Mister Lonely"

Peter Smith — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By Bryan Whitefield

By now you're probably aware that Harmony Korine's third film as director follows a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) in Paris as he meets and follows a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like (Samantha Morton) to a castle in Scotland filled with even more people dressed as iconic figures as varied and ridiculous as Queen Elizabeth, James Dean and Abraham Lincoln. Ironically this wildly original concept is also Korine's closest attempt at a traditional narrative. That said, the bizarre but beautiful opening shot of Luna as Michael on a miniature motorcycle set in super slo-mo to the Bobby Vinton classic the title refers to is a quick reminder that Korine's films are as close to belonging at the Whitney Biennial as they are the Tribeca Film Festival.

The newly sober Korine may not rely as heavily on stunts or shock value here, but there are still several of his signature moments, including Luna's Michael entertaining a French old folks home with dance moves interspersed with chants of, "I want you to live forever! Don't die! Don't die!" There is also a pre-teen Buckwheat riding a miniature pony repeating his love for chickens and women's breasts, "They make me so hot!" But with Korine nothing is literal or necessarily related, as is the case with a strangely satisfying sub-plot with Werner Herzog as a small plane pilot who takes nuns up in the air to skydive back safely to the ground with prayer instead of parachutes. These incredibly beautiful scenes look like found footage from a Super 8 archive and further explore the idea of sublimating one's own identity for a belief in something greater than yourself.

While Luna (in his best performance to date), Morton and Denis Lavant as her Charlie Chaplin/Adolf Hitler husband are all excellent, the impersonator idea ends up a missed opportunity, with only Luna able to carry over any behavioral attributes of the celeb he emulates. A conversation between the Pope and Madonna might've been more interesting than just seeing them at a dinner table together.

Mister Lonely is easily Korine's most personal film; its themes of redemption and rebirth in some ways mirror the director's own struggle to get it made. When Diego Luna's character comes out of the Michael Jackson shell, he is seeing the world for the first time, reflecting how Korine himself might've felt with his vision finally freed from drugs. There are several moments throughout the film that confirm Korine's sharp eye for the potent and absurd in his cinema but he, like other indie auteurs (Michel Gondry, Todd Haynes and Vincent Gallo to name a few) who rely on instinct, image and impression to tell a story, fills the movie with beautifully crafted, half-finished ideas. He does however continue to make uncompromising films that have next to no concern for commercial appeal, and while the movies themselves may be uneven there is a certain joy and excitement in getting a glimpse of a filmmaker's overactive imagination almost completely unfiltered.

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The sad death of Heath Ledger caused speculation that the film he had been shooting, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, might be in jeopardy. This isn't the first time that the loss of a principle cast member has threatened to shut down a movie. Witness the battle Doug Trumbull had to fight to keep Brainstorm from being written off when Natalie Wood died. Of course, there are various movies that had not been finished for one reason or another, some through accidents and others to a simple lack of interest. What follows is a list of 10 of the more promising or at least potentially interesting films that were not released in their intended form for one reason or another.

--Faisal A. Qureshi

DARK BLOOD

River Phoenix's death in October 1993 led to the complete shutdown of George Sluzier's film. Already a troubled production, with reports of tension between Judy Davis and Phoenix, the film only had 11 days of shooting left before tragedy struck. The British company Palace Pictures, which was funding the production, decided that the film couldn't be salvaged. Even though Jim Barton's script received a postive reception when it was given a read through by the Script Factory, there have been no takers for trying to re-shoot or complete the picture.

THE MAN WHO SHOT DON QUIXOTE

Terry Gilliam's first experience of getting a film written off was luckily recorded in a documentary, Lost in La Mancha, shot by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. After one week of shooting, Jean Rochefort, injured himself while getting on a horse, flew back to France and received doctor's orders to never ride again. There are rumours that Jeremy Thomas would take over the project and re-start production with Johnny Depp still attached, but until then all we have are rushes of Depp berating a fish.

I, CLAUDIUS

The 1976 BBC Adaptation of Robert Graves I, Claudius has been hailed as one of the greatest works of British TV drama. Forty years earlier, however, Alexander Korda tried producing a feature adaptation of the book starring Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as the nymphomaical Messalina, with Josef Von Sternberg directing. Unfortunately, Merle Oberon suffered an accident that resulted in the abandoning of filming. Luckily, the footage that had been completed survived and was later the center piece of the excellent BBC Documentary, The Epic That Never Was, which was itself released to film theaters.

ORSON WELLES'S DON QUIXOTE

Orson Welles had worked on Don Quixote for years, going through various scripts and cast changes, and shooting in Mexico and Spain. Financed out of his own pocket, Welles started shooting in 1955 just after he was kicked off the editing of Touch of Evil, and carried on until the death of his Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff. Strangely enough, the job of assembling the surviving footage into something coherent was given to Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jesus Franco, who had been Welles's first assistant director during some of the shooting. Reviled when it premiered in Cannes, it leaves one hoping that someday there will be another attempt to "complete" the job by someone with more artistry and closer to Welles's own wavelength than a second-rate horror hack.

SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE

Marilyn Monroe's final film, which was shelved after her death. On paper it looked great, with George Cukor directing and a cast that included Phil Silvers and Dean Martin. The story, a remake of the 1940 My Favorite Wife (which was itself derived from Tennyson's "Enoch Arden") involved a husband who has his wife declared dead after she's been missing for five years, only for her to turn up when he's getting re-married. Unfortunately Monroe's inability to come in to shoot her scenes (she was apparently off 17 days out of 30 of the duration of the production) and with Fox hemorraging money from the even more expensive, Cleopatra, decided to sack the actress and re-organise the production. Unfortunately, Monroe's death killed the project altogether, and it wasn't until 1999 that Fox allowed the release of 39 minutes of footage shot for the film to celebrate Monroe's 75th birthday. (My Favorite Wife was ultimately remade as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner.)

--Phil Nugent, Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 2.

Trailer Review: Mister Lonely

Paul Clark — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I wasn't a big fan of Kids, Harmony Korine's screenwriting debut, or Gummo, his first feature as director. I was more positive on his subsequent film julien donkey-boy, although that film demonstrated that he still had some maturing to do. In spite of this, and the lukewarm notices from last year's Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, this trailer has me intrigued about his latest film, Mister Lonely. A lot of it is the film's cast — where else are you going to find Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, and Denis Lavant in the same film, much less playing second-rate impersonators of Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Charlie Chaplin respectively? Part of me fears that this moody trailer is hiding some of the thornier aspects of the film, and I don't have the foggiest idea of how Werner Herzog fits into the whole thing, but I'm certainly curious to find out how it all fits together.

British Actor Reports: "I Was a Fake Abe Lincoln for Harmony Korine — and Lived!!"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

"I had been a fan of [Harmony] Korine since his 1997 directorial debut, the disturbingly quirky Gummo. However, I had no idea that the fidgety, punky livewire I recently spent two hours chatting with at a London party was Korine. I never thought to ask him what work he did — we were laughing too much, exchanging ever-more outrageous stories, and comparing near-death experiences. Only when I was leaving the party did we exchange phone numbers. A week later, as I was about to fly to Los Angeles for a three-month run of the Tom Waits/Robert Wilson/William Burroughs theatrical collaboration The Black Rider, Korine called me and announced: 'Hey, I want you to play Abe Lincoln in my new movie. We film in the Highlands of Scotland, June through August. Do the dates work?'" Thus begins actor Richard Strange's account of how he can to appear in Harmony Korine's latest freak-out: Mister Lonely, set in "an isolated commune for retired impersonators. A place where everyone is famous and no one gets old." (The cast also includes directors Werner Herzog and Leos Carax, Samantha Morton as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson stand-in, and "a man who looked worryingly like Larry, the shock-headed klutz from The Three Stooges.") The piece includes descriptions of Korine at work that will just sound bizarre if you're unfamiliar with his films but are oddly reassuring if you've seen them: "Although Mister Lonely is scripted, Harmony used the script as a working sketch rather than the finished painting. One day, having rehearsed a scene in which we are planning a barbecue for the newly arrived Michael Jackson, Harmony leaned towards me to whisper, 'You are not going to do any of that. I want you to tell them about your experience of acid and napalm in the Vietnam war,' and left chuckling. His directorial style is akin to that of the solicitous hostess of a cocktail party who makes sure that all her guests have their glasses charged, then leaves the room, lobs in a mace grenade, and locks the door." If nothing else, it does sound about like what you'd expect.

Korine, who recently turned thirty-five, is now a married man — his wife, Rachel, appears in Mister Lonely as Little Red Riding Hood — and Strange describes him as now being "cleaner and happier than he has been for many years." (Oddly enough, it's the second part of that combo that seems to me the bigger shocker: he's always seemed unaccountably jolly to me. Trying to imagine him even happier just makes me picture Ed Wynn floating around his study in Mary Poppins.) If nothing else, Mister Lonely will qualify as some kind of event for marking the reunion of two of the stars of the 1970 Performance: Anita Pallenberg, who plays an impersonator of the Queen of England, and James Fox, as Pope John Paul II. Legend has it making Performance weirded Fox out to such a degree that it caused him to retire from acting for almost fifteen years. Now that he's had the experience of being directed by Harmony ("Do a card trick with your ass sticking out, then dance like you're in a swamp"), we may never see him again. Certainly none of Fox's or even Anita's old associates can tell their director anything new about self-destructive behavior. He told Strange that his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor "didn't go out for four years. He stayed in a room, and shat in pizza boxes. He felt bugs under the skin, and used a 100-watt light-bulb to burn them out. Then poured disinfectant on the burns. If you want to know what pain is, try that." Or, if you really want to know what pain is, see Julien Donkey-Boy...

Vanishing Act: Harmony Korine

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Attention Diablo Cody: you are not the first oddly monikered young screenwriter whose first script became an indie sensation. Way back in the 20th century, there was a fella name o’ Harmony Korine, no more than a teenager when his screenplay Kids became photographer Larry Clark’s 1995 directorial debut. An instant controversy, the documentary-style look at the sexually-charged, drug-fueled life of a group of New York teens was slapped with an NC-17 rating that prevented its distribution by Miramax (then as now owned by Disney). The Weinstein brothers released Kids on their own to a mixed reception; some critics swooned, others proclaimed it exploitative sleaze.

Still, Korine made enough of a name for himself to secure his own directorial debut two years later with Gummo. A fragmented, impressionistic ode to white trash, the film was if anything even more divisive than Kids. Janet Maslin of the New York Times opened her review with the line “October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine's Gummo as the worst film of the year.” But while sophisticated metropolitan tastemakers were busy pointing out how condescending and hateful Korine was toward his “nonprofessional actors, often freakish individuals” (jeez, no condescension there, Janet!), Gummo was well on its way to becoming the cult favorite of the trailer park. And why not? Among other things, it featured the greatest battle of man versus chair ever captured on film:

Korine followed Gummo with his Dogme 95 entry, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), an uneven tale of a schizophrenic that garnered the now-predictable mixed reception ( I offered qualified praise: “Shot on digital video, with blown-out colors and punishing graininess, Julien Donkey-Boy has the look and feel of something unearthed in an archeological dig - a primitive piece of folk art.” Admittedly, I haven’t revisited it since.) That was nearly a decade ago, so where has Korine been?

For a while, there was talk of a disturbing movie in the Jackass vein, wherein Korine would antagonize random people on the street into fighting him and document the resulting damage done to him. In 2002, Clark directed Korine’s script for Ken Park, but that had been written years earlier. There were whispers of heroin addiction and, perhaps even more disturbing, a friendship with doofus magician David Blaine that resulted in the British television special Above the Below. But there were no new Harmony Korine movies...until now.

Mister Lonely, which will have its U.S. premiere at South by Southwest in March, is exactly what you’d expect: a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton), who brings him to a commune full of faux celebrities and historical figures. Having shown at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film breaks no new ground as far as its critical reception: it’s as divisive as ever, sometimes within the same review. The UK Telegraph describes it as “by turns idiotic, over-extended, childish and half-baked.” Then, in the very next sentence: “But when it’s not those things, and sometimes even when it is, the results are brilliantly bold, moving and tenderly, rhapsodically beautiful.” Sounds like a Harmony Korine movie alright.