The Screengrab : night and the city

The Rep Report (March 26 - April 1)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Forum celebrates the life and career of director Jules Dassin, an American expatriate who died last year, at the age of 96. With such pictures as the French heist picture Rififi (1955), the prison picture Brute Force (1947), and the 1948 tribute to the virtues of on-location filming The Naked City, Dassin can claim a lot of the credit for shaping the evolution of the crime genre during its ripest years; the schedule also includes everybody's favorite underappreciated Dassin film, the 1950 LOndon-set cult classic Night and the City, with Richard Widmark giving the performance of his career as an ambitious grifter whose inability to put a cap on his ingenious schemes proves the downfall of everyone around him, himself included. Also included are such rarities and oddities as the truckers' noir Thieves Highway (1949) with Richard Conte and Jack Oakie and the 1968 Up Tight, a remake of The Informer that transposes the story to the black militant scene in the days after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Rounding things out are more than half a dozen of the films that Dassin made starring his wife, Melina Mercouri (Never on Sunday, Topkapi).

Today marks the beginning of the annual New Directors/New Films festival, which among New York film freaks marks the first real day of spring. This year's schedule begins with Amreeka, Cherien Dabis's film about a Palestinian family who immigrate to America at the time of the invasion of Iraq. The closing night attraction, on April 5, is We Live in Public, director Ondi Timoner's long-awaited follow-up to her 2004 documentary DiG!

FLORIDA: The 11th Annual Sarasota Film Festival runs March 27 through April 5. This year's festival includes a retrospective tribute to director Hal Ashby, with screenings of The Landlord, Shampoo, The Last Detail, Harold and Maude, Bound for Glory, and others, and with appearances by Ashby biographer Nick Dawson, Illeana Douglas, Norman Jewison, and Jon Voight. There's also a complete retrospective of films that document the work of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who will also appear at a Q & A.

PHILADELPHIA: There's also the Philadelphia Film Festival and Cinefest 09, starting tomorrow and running through April 6. The opening night attraction is the comedy (500) Days of Summer. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Let's assume that you're already in Philadelphia. What the hell else do you need to know?

Take Five: The Squared Circle

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler opens across the country this weekend, and in addition to being hailed as a return to form for the Pi director and a triumphant comeback for shooting star Mickey Rourke, it's also one of an increasingly large number of acclaimed films -- both narrative and documentary -- to deal with professional wrestling. High culture has always had a problematic relationship with rasslin'; it's popularity is undeniable but has always upset the intellectuals of the sporting press, who delight in reminding people that it isn't real, as if its fans don't already know that. It can be lowest-common-denominator entertainment for sub-morons, but it also carries an undeniable emotional heft and a sort of physicalized symbolism that was remarked on at great length by no less august a personage than Roland Barthes, who wrote a famous essay about it for his book Mythologies. And now, years after it was considered an activity significantly less respectable than bowling or roller derby -- the great 'untouchable' sports of the 1950s -- a number of directors have found its combination of artifice and wounded reality irresistible. Here's some of our favorite movies that make reference to life inside the squared circle.

BARTON FINK (1991)

In the Coen Brothers' masterpiece about the art of writing and the way crafting fiction gets in the way of seeing reality, wrestling is used as a metaphor by the highfalutin playwright Barton Fink to symbolize class struggle -- but his inability to complete a simple screenplay in the wrestling genre also serves as a metaphor for his creative blockage. While he seems almost physically incapable of putting words on paper, his flustered producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) delivers a classically bewildered line: "Wallace Beery! Wrestling picture! Whattya want, a road map?" Watching the moral and physical struggles of wrestling in stark black and white on cheap B-picture dailies, Fink still can't think of anything -- and is typically dismissive and oblivious when his neighbor Charlie tries to show him a few moves. John Goodman's Charlie will eventually teach him a lesson he'll never forget.

HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS (1998)

Bret "Hitman" Hart comes from what can only be described as one of professional wrestling's royal families. His father, a tough-as-nails Canadian legend and a strict disciplinarian who planned his childrens' careers from the crib, runs one of the most respected schools in the sport, and almost everyone around him -- his brothers, his in-laws, his friends -- are involved in pro wrestling. In this A&E documentary, we follow the everyday life of someone immersed in the game: his strained family life, his true feelings about the sport, and his growing discomfort with the storylines being written for him -- which results in one of the most memorable betrayals, both real and staged, in the modern-day history of wrestling. A little-seen film, Wrestling With Shadows is a sharp, perceptive piece of work that deserves a wider audience.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)

Jules Dassin's legendary British film noir would probably have worked just as well if it had featured boxing -- that violent and often rigged sport so beloved by the makers of moody crime dramas -- instead of professional wrestling. But by having Richard Widmark's needy, creepy, desperate little hustler Harry Fabian wrapped up in the sport of wrestling, we get a number of elements that prove highly rewarding: Herbert Lom's compelling performance as Kristo gives some sense of the strange dynastic quality of some of the great wrestling families, and best of all, we get the unforgettable fight scene between Mike Mazurki as the Strangler and Stanislaus Zybyszko as Gregorius. Both men were actual wrestlers -- but Zybyszko, then an astonishing 70 years old, was from the transitional era when it was actually a legitimate sport. His performance in the scene -- almost silent, incredibly brutal, and absolutely mesmerizing -- has both incredible dignity and repulsive, visceral emotion.

BEYOND THE MAT (1999)

Inspired by Wrestling with Shadows and covering a lot of the same thematic territory, Barry Blaustein's Beyond the Mat had a theatrical run and thus attracted a good deal more attention than its predecessor. Both films shared qualities in common, though, from the alternatingly absurd and tragic lives of those who try to make a living as professional wrestlers to the personal dramas of the ring workers that mirror their gamed-out struggles. (They also share the quality of making WWE head honcho Vince McMahon look like an utter fucking creep, but that's not so hard, since he does the same thing himself every time he opens his mouth.) This time out, the most compelling figures are the ruined, crack-addicted wreck Jake "The Snake" Roberts and his opposite number, the witty, gregarious family man Mick Foley.

SPIDER-MAN (2002)

One of the most successful and enjoyable big-screen super-hero adaptations, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man gets a lot of its juice from the way it envisions Peter Parker's origin story without being boring or disrespectful. Since Spider-Man's is one of the most familiar origin stories in comics, Raimi had to do it just right, and one of the just-rightest scenes is the one where Parker, his powers newly acquired but not fully mastered, decides to cash in on them by taking part in a televised wrestling match. Raimi updates the scene by making it a big, flashy, ECW-style 'extreme' competition, but keeps the sense of fun and absurdity, most especially by casting lovable legend Randy Savage as Spidey's squared-circle nemesis, Bonesaw. To this day, the scene is one of my all-time favorites in any superhero movie to date.

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The Rep Report: August 21--27

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's that time of year--the humidity-soaked dead space between the last of the real summer movies and the first of the autumn "serious" pictures--where unexpected flurries of stray weirdness count for a lot even in repertory programming. Starting August 21 and running for a week, Anthology Film Archives digs deep into the seamier recesses of the nostalgia glands for a celebration of New York vigilante movies from the 1970s and 1980s. including the official kick-start to the genre: Michael Winner's Death Wish, with Charles Bronson in his most archetypal role, and a movie that Jeff Goldblum (who made his screen debut with a five-second appearance as one of the caterwauling thugs who fuck up Chuck's wife and daughter) has been apologizing for ever since. The schedule also includes Abel Ferrara's moody, arty-looking bloodbath Ms. 45, which is notable for its wordless star performance by the beautiful and doomed Zoe Lund, who would later write Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant under the name Zoe Tamerlis. (She also appeared in that film as one of Harvey Keitel's drug connections. Zoe Tamerlis Lund died in 1999, of a heart attack brought on by cocaine use, at the age of 37.) The schedule also amounts to the closest thing you're ever likely to see to a William Lustig Festival. Lustig, the subject of a new interview in the New York Press, directed the 1988 Maniac Cop (which was written by Larry Cohen and boasts one of the all-time classic B-list casts of its era: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Sheree North, Richard Roundtree, William "Big Bill" Smith, and the cruelly-underappreciated-by=everyone-except-Larry-Cohen Laurene Landon) and its sequel Maniac Cop 2 as well as the 1983 Vigilante. (Say what you like about Lustig, nobody can accuse him of going in for opaque, misleading titles.) Vigilante, which stars Fred Williamson and my man Robert Forster, has an impressive back-up choir itself in Richard Bright, Joe Spinell, Woody Strode, Joseph Carberry, Rutanya Alda, and Steve James, a talented performer who died young after practically taking out a patent on the category "Action Hero's Sidekick, Black Male." There are people who actually watch the Times Square scenes in Taxi Driver and tear up from thinking about the "good old days." They'll be squeezing them into the theater with a crowbar.

The dog days are also a great time for rummaging in the career of actors who had such long and busy careers that they can to be part of the landscape and rediscovering what they were like when they were walking cult items. The Brooklun Academy of Music is having a three-day Richard Widmark festival from August 25 through the 27th, and the inclusion of the London-set Night and the City makes it an event. This febrile yet moving noir was directed by Jules Dassin, who as it happens died this past March, as did Widmark himself, when both men were in their nineties. Neither ever did better work than they did here.

Criterion Gets Comical

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:45:00 GMT

"Cozy Lummox" is the name of a blog owned and operated by one Eric Skillman, who happens to be a rather good graphic designer whose work, if you are a big film buff, you've probably seen before. He's one of the primary designers for the Criterion Collection, and has been responsible for some of their finest package design (we're big fans of his work on Jules Dassin's Night and the City in particular). In addition to the gorgeous work routinely featured there, his blog is also highly enjoyable, giving an insider's perspective on the sometimes amusing, sometimes agonizing work that goes into designing for the world's most prestigious home cinema collection. His accounts of putting together the package for Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz are particularly enjoyable.

Recently, Skillman has been discussing a different collision of comic books and movies than we usually talk about around here: for a few recent Criterion releases, he's enlisted the services of a number of high-profile comics artists to do the cover art. Of particular interest: Jaime Hernandez (of Love and Rockets fame) designed the cover of Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style; Mad Man's Mike Allred was brought in to do Germi's Seduced and Abandoned; Sean Phillips of Criminal contributed the cover to Allen Baron's Blast of Silence; and the legendary Bill Sienkiewicz on Byron Haskin's Robinson Crusoe on Mars. It's a fascinating combination of great artists from one field applying their talents to the work of great artists in another -- and there's still more to come: Darwyn Cooke (best known for his terrific retro art on DC's Justice League: New Frontier) will be handing the package art for an upcoming collection of Boris Karloff films entitled Monsters and Madmen.

Jules Dassin (1911-2008)

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:32:00 GMT

I came home tonight to the news that the great Jules Dassin, director of the seminal heist film Rififi, has passed away. I think I speak for all of us when I ask this question:

Jesus, when will this end?

Dassin rose to prominence as a director of Hollywood crime dramas, particularly the four films he made between 1947 and 1950: Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves' Highway, and Night and the City, all of which have received the Criterion treatment.

His promising career hit a snag when he was named as a Communist in 1952, blacklisted, and forced to continue his career outside the U.S. Fleeing to France, he directed Rififi, which has influenced countless filmmakers with its 30-minute dialogue-free heist sequence, as well as Dassin's eye for the Parisian underworld. Other post-blacklist Dassin films included The Law and He Who Must Die.

Even after the lifting of the blacklist, Dassin remained in Europe, makiing such films as Never on Sunday and Topkapi, both of which starred his future wife, Melina Mercouri. Along with their cinematic collaborations, Dassin and Mercouri remained active in politics, working to help restore democracy to Greece during the rule of dictator Stylianos Pattakos.

Dassin, who in a strange irony was arguably more productive and influential after his blacklisting, was 96 years old. Take a moment of silence to remember this master of the medium. Better yet, take half an hour.

Richard Widmark, 1914 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Richard Widmark has died at the age of 93. Widmark made a splash with his movie debut in the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which he played a sniggering young gangster named Tommy Udo. Widmark shaved his eyebrows off for the role and cultivated a skin-crawling giggle that was all the creepier for the times he employed it: among the things that amused Tommy in the course of the movie were the chance to shove an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs and his own delivery of the line, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over." It was a supporting role, designed as a contrast to the movie's hero--a remorseful, older, family-man hood, played by Victor Mature in what was probably his best performance. Yet Widmark took the picture straight away from him, and Tommy Udo and his giggle entered permanent crime-movie folklore, referenced in the Jimmy Breslin novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight and the Kaleidoscope song "The Ballad of Tommy Udo", and reportedly serving as a role model for the New York mobster Joey Gallo. Widmark received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe for the new male star of the year. In later years, he would express mixed feelings about the attention the performance got: "It’s a bit rough, priding oneself that one isn’t too bad an actor and then finding one’s only remembered for a giggle.”

His career had its ups and downs, but he is remembered for a bit more than that. Predictably, he came out of Kiss of Death typecast as a hood, but he began to get to play good guys after Elia Kazan cast him in the 1950 thriller Panic in the Streets. And his edgy appeal proved ideal for the good-bad heroes of more offbeat noirs such as Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street, in which he played a career pickpocket named Skip who reaches inside the wrong purse and finds himself in possession of some stolen microfilm coveted by foreign agents, and Jules Dassin's London-set Night and the City (later ineptly made as a vehicle for Robert De Niro); his performance there, as the doomed con man Harry Fabian, is probably the best of his career. As noir died out by the end of the 1950s, Widmark spent more and more time in Westerns; he was cast as Jim Bowie in The Alamo by his ideological arch enemy, John Wayne, whose battles with the actor over both politics and their shared profession were the stuff of Hollywood legend. He also turned producer in order to set up a few projects, including the submarine melodrama The Bedford Incident, in which the studios had little interest. His last big, attention-getting starring role was as the title character of Don Siegel's police drama Madigan (1968), which he later resurrected for a short-lived TV series. In the later stages of his career, he specialized in character turns as authority figures: presidents, politicians, millionaire string-pullers, etc. He retired from acting on- screen after playing a United States Senator in the 1992 True Colors. “The older you get, the less you know about acting,” he once said, “but the more you know about what makes the really great actors.”