The Screengrab : raising arizona

Great Beginnings: Screengrab's Favorite Opening Scenes Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Yesterday marked the 100th day of the Obama presidency, which means I’m cautiously starting to believe that Bush is maybe really, actually gone and won’t suddenly pop up again for one last attack like Freddy Krueger at the end of Nightmare On Elm Street.

Cheney and Rove and the rest of the neo-conservative gang are still with us, of course, and the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world certainly didn’t need the full 100 days to determine they were right all along about Obama’s anarchist-fascist-abstract-impressionist agenda.

Most of the rest of America (and the world), meanwhile, thinks the new administration is actually off to a pretty good start -- and while great beginnings don’t always lead to happy endings, they at least give us some...what’s that word again? Oh yeah, HOPE...

...much like the opening sequences in the following movies, which hooked us right from the get-go and made us completely forget about sneaking out of the theater to see what was playing on the next screen over and/or changing channels.

Of course, your pals here at the Screengrab fully appreciate the irony of running this list in light of recent events here in our little corner of the cyber-verse...but, considering that every ending brings with it the possibility of a new beginning, what better time, really, to salute OUR FAVORITE OPENING SCENES OF ALL TIME!!!!!

TOUCH OF EVIL (1958)

The mother of all tracking shots opens with a bomb being set -- telling us right away that it will explode in three minutes -- and hidden in the trunk of a ludicrously long and garish vehicle. Then begins the long dance through the streets of Tijuana. The camera pulling ahead of the car, but the car always catching up or passing, always staying in frame. The sound (on the reconstructed version, at least) is disorienting, as passing through the streets of a busy nightlife district can be, with different noises blaring for attention. As soon as they appear, the camera is focused on Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston, paced by the car with the bomb, crossing the numerous obstacles in their path. As they arrive at the border crossing, the film reveals that they are just married, and he is a Mexican policeman (yes, yes, ha ha) known for taking down a drug ring. He laughs it off and, just as the car passes them, moves in to kiss his wife. BOOM! In the next couple of minutes, we'll meet Hank Quinlan, as much a power-mad racist as The Searchers' Ethan Edwards, but far more monstrous and strangely vulnerable. But the rest of the movie belongs to him. Here, at the beginning, the movie belongs to that single unbroken shot that defied the millions of things that could go wrong and introduced most of the major themes, all without breaking a sweat. Astonishing, even now. (HC)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)

Three killers are waiting for a train. One of them, his craggy, weather-beaten face a dead ringer for the desert landscape that surrounds them, is distracted by an annoying fly. Water drips onto the hat of another, until enough has accumulated for him to tip the hat to his lips and take a cool drink. The buzzing of the fly and the dripping of the water and the creaky whine of a windmill are the only sounds we hear, until that whine fades into the whistle of the approaching train. Their intended victim has arrived. He plays a harmonica and looks like Charles Bronson. Extreme close-ups give way to the widest of widescreen vistas, the whole of the wild west in one deep focus shot of impending violence. This is how you build suspense, Sergio Leone style. (SVD)

RAISING ARIZONA (1987)

Even exposition can be thrilling when the Coen Brothers are operating at the peak of their powers. Accompanied by the spirited whistling and banjo-plucking of Carter Burwell, Nicolas Cage’s sleepy drawl narrates the tale of an unusual courtship. Recidivist H.I. McDunnough is such a regular at the mug shot station, he becomes smitten with the photographer, a spunky officer named Ed. (Short for Edwina.) Hilarious bite-size vignettes of small-time crime (“I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn’t easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House”), prison life (“When there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand”), parole hearings (“These doors gonna swing wide”) and pitching woo (“I’m walkin’ in here on my knees, Ed”) sketch the unfolding romance, which gives way to trailer park life, the daily grind and the yearning for a critter as the banjo plunges joyfully into Beethoven’s Ninth. Endlessly quotable, relentlessly rewatchable, kinetic as a Bugs Bunny cartoon, this opening sets the stage for one of the zippiest romps in the Coen catalogue. (SVD)

THE PLAYER (1992)

Robert Altman’s cutting Hollywood critique self-consciously strives for Wellesian grandeur in its impressive 8-minute single take opening shot, which makes its homage upfront by having a character overtly reference the Touch of Evil sequence (as well as Bernardo Bertolucci’s sustained tracking shot in The Sheltering Sky) upon which it’s based. Altman uses this bravura scene to firmly establish his major studio milieu and the various, cretinous industry clowns who populate it, mocking the agents, pitch-men and execs who manufacture the country’s celluloid dreams. The shot’s inquisitive, labyrinthine movements subtly suggest the probing survey to come. And Altman’s opening proves a hilariously caustic encapsulation of his story’s modus operandi – to scathingly ridicule the Hollywood machine via the type of dazzling, daring filmmaking that, as evidenced by comments made by the scene’s various dunderheaded players, has little place in a studio system where market-focused creativity-by-committee is the rule. (NS)

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager

April Fools: The 35 Funniest Movie Characters Of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

NICOLAS CAGE AS H.I. MCDUNNOUGH IN RAISING ARIZONA (1987)

The Coen brothers have turned out some truly amazing fools over time (Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Are Thou? is a standout), but their first full-fisted idiot, H.I. McDunnough from Raising Arizona, was their best. As the above chase sequence shows, H.I. lives in a world of blasé, gun-happy morons who easily compartmentalize the absurdity of their lives. It's cartoonish in the best way, like a live-action Merrie Melody that features lots and lots of guns and ammo and bizarre double-crossing and for some reason all the men resemble Elmer Fudd. One of the nicest touches is that the baby Nathan Jr. generally has a pacifying effect on the idiotic adults around him: H.I.'s prison buddies Gale and Evelle Snoats, the nightmarish Leonard Smalls, and even Nathan Arizona, Sr., who shows no propensity towards compassion until his baby boy comes back to him. It's ultimately a sweet movie about fools who can make a better world for themselves. Because if there's one thing that is true in every movie directed by the Coen brothers, it's that everyone in the world fools themselves and plays the idiot, and somehow, by the grace of luck and sheer numbers, the human race keeps creeping forward for better or for worse. We're all the punchlines in an elaborate joke, so we have to find some way of enjoying it. That's a very particular type of existential gallows humor, but it's my favorite type. (HC)

PETER O'TOOLE AS ALAN SWAN IN MY FAVORITE YEAR (1982)

Flipping out and in the throes of an attack of stage fright, Alan Swan declares, "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!" Both terms seem inadequate for whatever the hell he really is. Broken down, bankrupt, and alcoholic, Swan is both a coward who plays heroes and a universal object of adoration who despises himself; he works as hard as he does to live up to people's romantic image of him because he's always disappointed in himself, and he'd hate to have other people feel as bad about how pathetic he is as he does himself. The paradox is that the effort to conceal what a wreck he is really does make him a romantic hero. To see this performance when you're young is to be filled with the desire to be middle-aged and dissolute as quickly as possible, so that you can be worth a damn. (PN)

ANTONIO FARGAS AS THE ARAB IN PUTNEY SWOPE (1969)

Robert Downey, Sr.'s feature-length put-on about a subversively "honest" advertising agency is all over the place, but it has one strong center of focus in Fargas, playing a character so far-out that nobody had the guts to name him: ranting at top speed and top volume in a burnoose, he's just called "the Arab." Everybody in the movie is out for himself, but Fargas is the one who manages to make this seem not just hip but enlightened. Brandishing his cane and alternating haranguing people and reaching out to them by telling them how impressed he is that they have the sense to see things his way, he's funny, threatening, insane, philosophical, and irresistible, all at the same time. If you've ever wondered just what the hell it is that Flavor Flav thinks he's doing, here's what it looks like when somebody actually pulls it off. (PN)

PETER SELLERS AS HRUNDI V. BAKSHI IN THE PARTY (1968)

Of all the subtly anti-establishment movies to come out of Hollywood in the late '60s and early '70s, The Party may be one of the best. Why wouldn't you want to watch film extra Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers — in brown-face no less *ahem*) methodically fuck up the glitzy party of a Bizniz hot shot. (With nothing but the best of intentions, of course.) Hrundi ensures that the party becomes infinitely better than it ever would have uninterrupted. By the end of it all, the face-lifted fat-deprived Hollywood wives are dancing with abandon amidst soap suds gone amok while the maid who demurely opened the door in the first scene gets down to the band. Let the revolution begin. (SCS)

ZERO MOSTEL AS MAX BIALYSTOCK IN THE PRODUCERS (1968)

Generally speaking, the best comic performances have at least some element of subtlety to them. When all you have is shouting and playing to the balcony, like as not, you come off as obnoxious instead of funny. Zero Mostel’s gargantuan overacting as failing show producer Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’ debut feature puts that generality to its most severe test. From the first moment we see him, putting on outrageous airs to seduce the rich widows who finance his rapidly decaying lifestyle, he’s so far over the top that he’s coming back at it from beneath. When he hatches a scheme to make millions by luring investors to a play (Springtime for Hitler) that he knows will be a flop, he essentially terrorizes nervous accountant Leo Bloom (played by a fragile Gene Wilder) into going along with it – and when Leo isn’t being intimidated by Max’s bellicose bellowing, he’s being seduced by his insanely unrealistic lust for life. Mostel and Brooks apparently didn’t get along well during filming (possibly because they shared a similarly vulgar and explosive sense of showmanship, and there wasn’t room enough on the set for two such rampaging egos), but Brooks didn’t dare fire him – he knew he’d caught pure comedic lightning when he saw what Mostel was capable of. Brooks’ script has such great one-liners that almost anyone could make them funny, but Mostel’s Hindenburg-going-down style lent genius even to shouted throwaway lines like “I’m wearing a cardboard belt!” (LP)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Leonard Pierce

Not on DVD: "Patty Hearst" (1988)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

[Inaugurating a new series about movies that are not currently available on home video, and why this sucks.]

Patty Hearst wasn't Natasha Richardson's first movie, but it did mark the first time that the then-twenty-five-year-old actress had the lead role in a feature film. It also marked the first time that she was asked to pass for American, an ability that can make or break an English performer who hopes to make it in the international marketplace. In fact, she was asked to pass for an actual American, in a film based on Hearst's own account of her 1974 abduction by the crackpot "revolutionary" group the SLA and that event's aftermath--a film that Hearst herself, who posed for publicity photos with her movie doppelganger, had some input on. But no pressure! The director Paul Schrader made the movie on a tight budget at a time when he was coming off some expensive failures; much of the first half is set in the house where Hearst was kept prisoner. In fact, because of Schrader's decision to tell the story from Hearst's point of view, a fair amount of it is set in the dark closet where she was locked until she began parroting the SLA members' slogans and convinced them that she was ready to switch sides and become a guerrilla soldier. The strategy means that Richardson has to not just carry the picture but to supply its heart and soul, while remaining essentially mysterious to the audience: as Patty goes from being helpless, whimpering victim to fugitive from justice, you stare at her, trying to figure out where her head is at. It isn't until the end, when she's behind bars and plotting out how best to spin her story, that it's fully clear that, up to that point, she hasn't really known herself.

For a guy who's had his name on some movies that have made direct contact with audiences in remarkable ways, Paul Schrader, as a director, does not have the most ingratiating style. His films have a tendency to be coldly cerebral and, given his taste in subject matter, are often downright unpleasant. But his charmless, rigorous approach can yield major dividends when he has the right story to tell, and when he has actors who can supply a human core to his theme-dissertation filmmaking. Like David Fincher's Zodiac, Patty Hearst deglamorizes sociopathic behavior by showing the sociopaths as they really look, not as they might in the movie that's playing in their heads. The SLA we see here consists of a bunch of phlegmatic middle-class idiots under the sway of a incompetent, petty career criminal--Ving Rhames as ""Field Marshal Cinque"--who thinks he's a revolutionary prophet and who does his best to convince other people to see him that way by talking like Ming the Merciless. They're patently silly, but they aren't just silly to the terrified college girl over whom they hold the power of life and death. (Patty, in between listening to the SLA assure her that she's a pig and that they'd like nothing better than to kill her, is subjected to multiple rape; the men, and the women too, of the SLA seem to think that raping a rich girl constitutes a bold political act.)

Richardson isn't the only person onscreen keeping the movie alive and jumping. Rhames does an amazing job, and the zoo under his command includes Dana Delany, Frances Fisher, and William Forsythe as Bill Harris, the Ned Flanders of armed revolution. Forsythe, an actor who has spent most of his career playing rednecks, thugs, or both--he made Patty Hearst a year after his breakout movie role as John Goodman's baby brother in Raising Arizona--pulled off a major stretch as the pasty jackass Harris, who enjoys babbling about how much he wishes he were black so he could really be down with the street; it may be the best performance of his career. Richardson gives the movie the warmth that is often missing from Paul Schrader's work, but it's warmth with nails in it; Patty turns especially spiky after she's seen the lawmen she's been waiting to come to her rescue pouring bullets into a burning house they think she's in, and after her arrest and conviction, when Richardson's Patty calmly talks about her plans to tell her story and get public opinion on her side--plans that, of course, reached their fruition with her book and with the movie from which it was made. That scene sums up what Schrader himself brings to a project; he has the unsentimental intelligence to see that both his movie and Hearst herself would benefit from being honest enough to acknowledge their role in the larger story of Patty Hearst and the SLA, and though Hearst herself originally objected to the scene, Schrader says that she later saw that he was right about it. By a fairly sick coincidence, in the same week that we lost this movie's star, Sara Jane Olson, who joined the SLA after the Hearst abduction, was released from prison. If she can get a release, Patty Hearst definitely deserves one.

Trailer Review: Burn After Reading (Red-Band Trailer)

Paul Clark — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

New Coen Brothers trailer. Whaddya need, a road map? And while the Coens’ flat-out comedies have been somewhat subpar of late (hello- The Ladykillers), these are also the guys who made The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Raising Arizona. And that cast! Clooney, McDormand, Malkovich, Swinton, Jenkins, Simmons… but the scene-stealer in the trailer is Brad Pitt, messing with his himbo image to uproarious effect. I’ve got high hopes for this one- even if it’s not great, it promises to at least be hilarious.

Take Five: Arizona

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:15:00 GMT

How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer gets its limited-release debut this Friday, after two years of lingering on the festival circuit without a distributor. Although some critics have praised its good-natured look at sexuality and overall sunny demeanor, it's likely that the real reason Georgina Riedel's feature-length debut is finally seeing the light of day is the newfound TV stardom of its lead actress, America Ferrara. Still, the reason I want to see it is simple: it's set in Arizona. I was born and raised in Phoenix, at a time when everyone from there was from somewhere else, and while I don't really miss the place, I still have that hokey boosterism that makes me raise an eyebrow whenever I hear a movie or television show is set there or filming there. During the early days of Hollywood, the movie business was obsessed with the 48th state -- largely because it had only recently become a state. It was the last of the frontier, the final remnant of the proud plains and deserts of the New West, and while the vast majority of the western shoot-'em-ups set in Arizona were really made on a back lot five blocks from La Cienega Boulevard, there's still plenty of movies out there claiming Arizonan provenance. As the state has morphed into Southern California's bedroom annex, with all the strip malls and chain stores that implies, there's continued to be a few standout films that use the Grand Canyon State as their setting; here's five of them.

IN OLD ARIZONA (1929)

The filming of this early classic western didn't get within 300 miles of Arizona, but like a lot of early cowboy pictures, it's set there. In Old Arizona has a lot of the corny qualities that modern audiences associate with this era of filmmaking, but it's worth seeing -- and historically significant -- for a number of reasons. The first full-length talkie ever released by 20th Century Fox, it was also the first talking picture to be filmed outdoors. Director Raoul Walsh was set to play the lead himself, but a car accident robbed him of the chance, and cost him an eye, leading to the eyepatch that became his tradmark in later years; his replacement was Warner Baxter, who won only the second Best Actor Oscar in history for his performance as the Cisco Kid. Finally, the movie has a memorable twist ending that sets it apart -- courtesy of the original story, by O. Henry.

3:10 TO YUMA (1957)

We'd love to include the remake here, but it was filmed entirely in New Mexico, Arizona's glory-hogging next door neighbor. But the original is just as good in many ways; it's based on the same wildly popular pulp novella (by a young Elmore Leonard!) that spawned the reboot 50 years later, and the overall look, feel, and plot are the same. There's also a handful of swell performances, especially by leads Van Heflin and Glenn Ford, both playing against type. Often compared to its superior contemporary High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma simply isn't in that class, but it's still a tight, claustrophobic little western thriller, worth seeing until it sort of falls apart at the end. It's also about all the big-screen fame that Yuma, AZ -- a dodgy little town on the California border, best known for its ungodly temperatures in the summer -- would ever get.

PSYCHO (1960)

Very little of Alfred Hitchcock's slasher masterpiece was actually filmed in Phoenix, Arizona -- mostly just a few establishing shots and street scenes. But for some moviegoers, seeing the name of the town at the tail end of the movie's memorable opening credits would be their first recognizable experience of Arizona even existing outside of old-time westerns, and their first clue that the state capitol was actually a bustling modern city, not a frontier outpost constantly besieged by bands of Apache. (Even in the '70s, when I was growing up, people from out of state would ask me if living in Phoenix was like growing up in a Western.) The action shifts pretty early on to California, the home of the Bates Motel, but really, I just included it on this list to test my theory that no matter what 'best movie featuring _____' theme you come up with, you can fit Psycho into it.

REAL LIFE (1979)

Albert Brooks' first full-length film as a director is absolutely fantastic. It establishes his winning comedic persona as a shallow, self-centered Hollywood phony; it satirizes reality television a good twenty years before anyone else was doing it; it features one of Charles Grodin's finest big-screen performances, and a hilarious relief role for That Guy! J.A. Preston; and it's probably the funniest and most successful film that Brooks ever did. But for me, there was an extra kick: it was set, and partially filmed, in my hometown of Phoenix, and it's the very first time I can consciously remember seeing places in a movie that I'd actually been to in real life. When I first saw, at age 10, local newscaster Carlos Jurado removed from my living room TV and being featured on the silver screen, I gained an understanding of the power of movies I'd never really had before.

RAISING ARIZONA (1987)

Although the entirety of the Coen Brothers' first comic masterpiece was filmed in various locations around central Arizona, you wouldn't know it from the script. The place names are gibberish, the filming locations don't synch up with the places mentioned on screen, and the entire movie seems set less in any recognizable version of the Grand Canyon State than it is in some kind of rural fantasia that's half Wild West and half Appalachian hillbilly country. Roger Ebert actually got really bent out of shape about this, giving the film a disapproving review because of the ridiculous quasi-southern accents everyone sported and the nebulous redneck paradise it seemed to be set in, but Rog was really missing the point. I still lived in Arizona when this came out, and everyone I knew there loved it; it's not like we were expecting social realism out of the thing. The Coens are perfectly capable of verisimilitude when they want to be (see Fargo and The Big Lebowski for examples); here, Arizona was just a hook on which to hang the film's lunatic comedic sensibilities, with no more need for accuracy than Freedonia in Duck Soup.

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews of Cinema (Part II)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

JOHN GOODMAN AS WALTER SOBCHAK IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Okay, so technically, this one is a bit of a cheat. Not only was Walter Sobchak portrayed by the decidedly non-Jewish John Goodman, but the character isn’t even technically of the People; as the Dude points out, he’s a Polish Catholic who converted when he married a Jewish woman. Still, that doesn’t stop him from maintaining his Jewish identity to the point of outright hostility; he won’t roll on Shabbos, and claims that he’s “as Jewish as fuckin’ Tevye”. Nor does it stop him, in a movie not exactly known for its macho tough guys, from being the toughest guy on screen: whether it’s pulling a .45 on a burned-out hippie for going over the line while bowling, hatching a scheme to take out an entire gang of phony kidnappers, or biting the ear off of a German nihilist, the proprietor of Sobchak Security displays a toughness that borders on the psychotic. And if he sometimes flags a bit, backing off from an outraged neighbor whose car he’s just totaled, he makes up for it later by brusquely yanking a paraplegic out of his wheelchair to see if he’s faking. (Turns out he isn’t, but hey, he had to check, right?) As an aside, Walter may be the toughest Jew in the Coen Brothers’ cinematic ouvre, but he’s hardly the only one; their films are crammed full of hard-assed Hebrews. There’s tough-as-nails furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (nee Huffheinz) in Raising Arizona; steely mob moll Verna Birnbaum in Miller’s Crossing, who has plenty more guts than her conniving brother Bernie; monstrous movie producer/force of nature Jack Lipnick (played by longtime tough Jew Michael Lerner) in Barton Fink; scheming business tycoon Sidney Mussberger in The Hudsucker Proxy; and inscrutable post-modernist shyster Freddie Riedenschneider in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Sure, only one of those characters was actually played by a Jewish actor, but the Coen Brothers clearly have a soft spot for tough Jews, and Walter may be the best, but he won’t be the last.

HANK GREENBERG IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANK GREENBERG (1998)

No other baseball player could ever match the impact of Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in 1947, or go through the hell he did to achieve it. But as the 1998 documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg makes clear, the major leagues were no picnic for the first Jewish slugger either. When Greenberg got his start in the Texas League, a teammate was puzzled by his appearance; he'd been told that all Jews had horns. Things didn't improve when he made it to the show in the 1930s. Between Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, Detroit was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Chants of "kike" and "sheeny" rang out through the stands and opposing dugouts. But through it all, Greenberg was a one-man wrecking crew. He was twice voted the American League MVP and he led the Detroit Tigers to back-to-back World Series in 1934 and 1935, despite refusing to play on Yom Kippur during the pennant drive. (He did play on Rosh Hashanah, though – his rabbi found a loophole in the Talmud.) The Hebrew Hammerin' Hank was the first prominent Jew known for physical prowess and an inspiration to kids like Walter Matthau ("I was just delighted to know there was someone like Hank Greenberg around, and I didn't have to wind up as a presser, a cutter or a salesman in the garment center") and Alan Dershowitz ("He defied every stereotype – he defied Hitler's stereotype!"). He's in the baseball Hall of Fame – and now he's in our Hall of Tough Jews.

MICHAEL LERNER AS ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN IN EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

How tough was Arnold Rothstein, the only man to successfully fix the World Series? So tough that Rich Cohen, the author of Tough Jews, calls him “the Moses of organized crime”. Though the man many refer to as the most successful Jewish gangster in American history met an ugly end, getting his gut shot after he bowed out of what he claimed was a crooked poker game, he made quite a name for himself along the way: starting out as a masterful oddsmaker and proposition bettor, he rose to such prominence that Lucky Luciano credits him as having taught the Italian mobsters of the day how to act and dress, and Frank Costello claims he was the first to truly recognize the vast amounts of money to be made off of prohibition. He became fodder for no less an artist than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim on him; Damon Runyon picked up the gauntlet, writing Arnold into many of his stories under a variety of names. Along the way, he also became a legendary pool shark (providing inspiration for the marathon game in The Hustler) and made a nearly unprecedented mark on modern organized crime – so much so that another tough Jew, The Godfather Part II’s Hyman Roth, cites him as an inspiration. Oh, yeah – and he fixed the 1919 World Series and got away with it scot-free. Although the names of many a White Sox great was dragged down into ignominious disgrace (including two, Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, who were likely innocent of any wrongdoing), Rothstein, the architect of the fix and the man who made more money off of it than anyone else, was completely exonerated by an impressionable jury. In Eight Men Out, Rothstein is expertly played by Michael Lerner, no stranger to playing tough Jews (see the entry on Walter Sobchak, above); his icy, unflappable confidence and contempt is perfectly realized in a scene where, discussing with his fixer the likelihood that the best players in baseball will take a dive, says “I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. ‘Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say. ‘Sit down, maybe you'll learn something.’ Well, I learned something all right. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands.”

LEE STRASBERG AS HYMAN ROTH IN THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

By the time we meet him Hyman Roth is an old man in ill health, yet we'd never think to call him frail. His body may be failing, but his mind is sharp and his lust for wealth and power undiminished. The Godfather saga's fictionalized version of Meyer Lansky was one of the few screen roles taken on by Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg, and easily the greatest. In a few short scenes, with a handful of well-chosen gestures – the dismissive passing of a gold telephone, the raising of a plate of cake – Strasberg gives us a man in full. We may never have seen him in the full bloom of youth, but we can guess how terrifying he must have been from his "Moe Green" speech to Michael Corleone, one of the all-time great movie monologues. His gaze steady and full of fire, his breath hitching in fierce, staccato snorts, Roth lays it on the line: This is the business we've chosen.

ADAM GOLDBERG AS MELLISH IN SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) AND THE HEBREW HAMMER IN THE HEBREW HAMMER (2003)

In comedic roles from Dazed & Confused to Entourage, Adam Goldberg frequently comes across as a younger, hairier Woody Allen with his fast-talking, hyper-cerebral neurotic characters. But, even in his lighter moments, there’s always a sense of intensity and simmering anger underpinning his performances, leading my fellow Screengrabber Phil Nugent to suggest his work in 2 Days In Paris for this list (“What can I say? The guy scares me!”). But instead, I’ve chosen two of his more overtly tough screen personas, in films where his characters literally bring the pain. As the Jewish soldier Private Stanley Mellish in Saving Private Ryan, Goldberg’s character is a smart, regular guy hardened by combat and his own, very personal stake in the war. Even when his tough façade finally cracks (in one of the most harrowing, visceral depictions of impending death I’ve ever seen), Mellish, despite his fear, remains determined and clear-headed to the end. As the titular superhero in The Hebrew Hammer, meanwhile, Goldberg tweaks the popular notion that Jews are more brainy than brawny in what writer/director Jonathan Kesselman dubbed the first “Jewsploitation” movie. As Mordechai Jefferson Carver, Goldberg wears the wide-brimmed hat of a Hasidim like a pimp crossed with Clint Eastwood as he fights to save Hanukah from the clutches of Santa’s murderous, power-mad son, Damian. Non-P.C. hilarity and Jewish stereotypes repurposed as standard Hollywood action clichés ensue. Shabbat Shalom, muthahfuckers!

CHARLTON HESTON AS MOSES IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956)

It’s one of the crowning ironies in the history of religious cinema that Charlton Heston, a man who tended to project about the same spiritual qualities as a forcefully hurled brick, portrayed not only the author of the Pentateuch, but also the Pope. It’s even more ironic that Moses, perhaps the toughest Jew in history, was given his most memorable screen portrayal by a man so WASPy his first name was “Charlton”. The Bible tells us that Moses was a willful but often reticent man, a man so unsure of himself, so terrified to lead, that he asked his brother Aaron to do his public speaking; in Cecil B. DeMille’s last huge Bible epic, Heston’s Moses couldn’t be farther from that portrayal. Moses, in the hands of Chuck amok, is a primal force of nature, as intimidating as God himself; when he struts down from the Mount after having received the Decalogue, he looks less like a man awed by coming face-to-face with the creator of the universe than he does Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. His jaw jutting even beneath his pasted-on beard and his iron chest swelling outside of his robes, Heston’s Moses looks like he’s received special dispensation from Jehovah to start kicking ass and taking names, and he can’t wait to get started. When Moses sneers “Hear His word, Ramses, and obey,” he isn’t imploring, he’s demanding – let my people go, he seems to say, or I’ll take these stone tablets and flatten you right across the choppers with them. It’s no wonder this portrayal resonated with Chosen People and Gentiles alike; the goyim got to claim the actor as their own, and the Jews got to see their main man transformed from thoughtful liberationist rebbe to one-man Pharoah-stomping machine. Heston would go on to play Judah Ben-Hur, who was almost as tough a Jew as Moses, but The Ten Commandments still remains the pinnacle of big-screen Hebrew bad-assery.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Rep Report (February 28 - March 6)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Sunday, March 2 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of King Kong's debut appearance in New York City, and to honor the event, Film Forum is running the 1933 classic for two matinees, one day only. Those attending the 1:00 P.M. screening are automatically eligible to stick around and participate in the Fay Wray Scream-alike Contest, to be judged by a crack panel of experts that includes Film Forum repertory program director Bruce Goldstein, film critic Elliott Stein, and Ms. Wray's actress daughter, Susan Riskin. One lucky, leather-lunged winner will receive a two-disc DVD set of the movie, a one-year membership to Film Forum, (trust me on this — if nothing else, it pays for itself!), and a romantic trip for two the top of the Empire State Building. Jeez, you'd think it would be thrill enough just to get to be in the same room as Elliott Stein...

Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2008" (February 29 - March 9) kicks off with Claude Lelouch's Romain de gare with Fanny Ardent and Audrey Dana, introduced by the director. There are also new films by Sandrine Bonnaire, Claude Miller, Sophie Marceau, and — this sounds interesting — Fear(s) of the Dark, a black-and-white animated omnibus film that incorporates material from such comics artists as Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti.

SAN FRANCISCO: "The Unabridged Coen Brothers" (February 28 - March 2) at the Castro was apparently assembled for the benefit of anyone who's just landed here from Mars and is curious about these fellows who just won the Oscar. Of course, it might also be useful to any Coen fans who see this as a fine time to have themselves a wallow. Includes Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which, it says here, includes "Southern folklore, slapstick stunts, cinematic tributes, religious ritual, political satire, and social commentary." All that and dancing Klansmen too!

SEATTLE: The Grand Illusion Cinema brings back four of "the No-Nonsense Films of Phil Karlson in the '50s". Karlson was a specialist in hard-nosed, low-budget action noirs whose resume of grungily efficient little knuckle-busters makes Don Siegel look like Busby Berkeley. (After decades of scuffling from one small-time gig to the next, Karlson hit the jackpot with his next-to-last picture, the rabble-rousing 1973 blockbuster Walking Tall, which he had the foresight to own a piece of.) Starting February 29, the theater is showing the fifties films Five Against the House with Kim Novak and Brian Keith and The Brothers Rico with Richard Conte; on March 6, it trades them in for the Western Gunman's Walk and the newspaper melodrama Scandal Sheet with Broderick Crawford.

In Other Blogs

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

As much as we at the Screengrab would like to believe we’re your one-size-fits-all destination for movie news, reviews and ephemera, it has come to our attention that there are other film-related blogs out there that occasionally offer worthwhile content. In the spirit of what the late, lamented Spy magazine called “logrolling in our time,” we hereby launch a new weekly feature dedicated to highlighting all the good stuff we didn’t think of writing ourselves.

It turns out we’re not the only ones getting into the spirit of Valentine’s Day. Over at The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz presents Five Declarations of Love, and like our own favorite romantic moments, they aren’t necessarily the most conventional choices. We’re particularly fond of H.I. McDunnough’s timeless vow upon learning that his beloved Ed’s fiancé has left her: “You tell him I think he's a damn fool, Ed. You tell him I said so: H.I. McDunnough. And if he wants to discuss it,” he continues, pacing in front of the height chart and cupping his 'nads, “he knows where to find me: In the Maricopa County Maxiumum Security Correctional Facility for Men, State Farm Road Number 31, Tempe, Arizona!”

Cinematical, understanding that the love of film is often a solitary pursuit, presents Seven Movies for the Valentine’s Day Loner. Again, some of the choices are offbeat, but we have to agree with their selection of In a Lonely Place as the movie that makes you feel better about your unromantic life. “This is an excellent film and the leads are perfect, but boy can it be depressing. On the other hand, at least you'll feel better that it's not happening to you.”

The Onion AV Club weighs in with “14 romantic comedies with romance- and comedy-killing gimmicks.” Said gimmicks include such timeless troubles of the heart as “I gave up sex for Lent” and “my true love is a mannequin.”

And finally slashfilm alerts us to what will surely be the next great romantic comedy, the 20th Century Fox adaptation of Just Do It: How One Couple Screwed Their Life and Love Back Together, Denver Post writer Doug Brown’s memoir of having sex with his wife for 101 straight days. The tender cockring scene will no doubt make our list next year.

Face/Off: Fargo

Peter Smith — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE: Unlike our last Face/Off, when we discussed Children of Men (a film which you will be marrying next summer in a small private ceremony at the Film Forum, whereas I view it simply as the most overrated movie by one of the Three Amigos prior to the release of Pan's Labyrinth), today, we're going to talk about a movie we both really liked, albeit possibly for different reasons — Fargo by the Coen Brothers.

Specifically, we're going to talk about how the movie feels about Marge Gunderson, its main character and moral center. One of the most common critiques of the Coen Brothers as filmmakers is that, while they're technically gifted and skilled synthesists, they lack heart, soul and feeling — the humanistic qualities of the directors they choose to ape. I don't believe this is true, necessarily; while I don't think the Coens will ever be accused of Capraesque oversincerity, I think they believe, more or less, in the message as well as the medium. But I do think that the Coens are very cynical filmmakers, not calculating or phony, but with a pretty jaundiced view of humanity. I don't, in short, think they really like their characters very much.

I won't go as far as to say they hate Marge Gunderson; she is clearly a decent human being for the most part, and they don't reserve for her the contempt with which they treat Jerry Lundegaard, who doesn't even have the courage to be a bad man, or Wade Gustafson, who treats the kidnapping of his daughter like a business deal only he is competent enough to close on. But I think Marge is meant to be yet another manifestation of the dull, unimaginative "Minnesota nice" of their childhood, which they sought to exorcise in Fargo just as surely as Todd Haynes did the wealthy Southern California of his youth in Safe. There are a number of scenes in which the film's attitude towards Marge peeks out: her choice of cuisine, her reaction to Mike Yanagita, her small pleasures and simple dreams, her "police work" which so impresses Deputy Lou but which is strictly small-town. But nowhere is it more apparent than in the final scene with the blank-faced killer Gaear Grimsrud: with the murderer, captured through little more than luck, sulking in the back seat of her prowler, Marge counts down a list (incomplete, as it happens) of everyone who has died because of his crimes. "And for what?" she asks of this Nordic hulk, so far removed from her world of Arby's and postage stamps. "For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here you are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."

Indeed she doesn't. She doesn't understand it, and she probably never will. We aren't privy to the decision-making process that led someone as cloistered as Marge Gunderson to become a law enforcement agent in the first place, but her befuddlement — almost irritation — at being exposed to the ugly reality that the police must often face is less sadness than it is annoyance. We see here what we glimpsed in the scene with Mike Yanagita: Marge doesn't like being out of her comfort zone. She wants a quiet little life of sameness and simplicity, and her reaction to Gaear Grimsrud isn't one of moral outrage; when she encounters the first crime scene (which, it's easy to forget, begins with the murder of a fellow officer), she treats it with all the gravity she would a stolen bicycle.

Does this make her a bad person? Certainly not. In fact, it's perfectly normal — which is, in fact, the point. Marge isn't a heroine. She isn't a special person at all. She's resolutely normal, bland: boring. She is a very conventional, and in some ways small, woman who we are tricked into thinking is exceptional because her banality is on a different moral level than that of the other banal characters in the film. She is not someone who grows over the course of the film, who develops or transcends — and that is perhaps the greatest reason to believe that the film doesn't think much of her. The Coens, as they are about most things, have been tight-lipped about this, aside from their usual talk of how they don't seek to cause the same sort of reactions in their audience that most actors do, or how people react badly to films where the main character isn't "sympathetic in a Hollywood formula way." But the evidence is there on the screen for those who care to look for it.

And now, you will tell me why I have my head up my ass. (I trust you won't take the tack of a friend of mine, who insisted the Coens must have thought highly of Marge, since Joel Coen wouldn't have cast his wife in an unsympathetic role. I figure he must never have seen Raising Arizona.)

PHIL NUGENT: Leonard, first, let me just say that I would never imply that you have your head up your ass because of your take on Marge Gunderson. However, your suggestion that Pan's Labyrinth is overrated proves that you need professional help. I actually like the idea that Marge is sort of the butt of the movie. So far as theories that seem to me to be unsupported by the movies themselves, it may be second only to the idea that everything that happens in Minority Report after Tom Cruise is locked away in suspended animation is his dream of the what should happen while he actually remains locked away and unavenged. The fact that I have trouble buying it has nothing to do with any deep attachment I have to the idea of Marge Gunderson, Superstar. Rather, it's about what kind of filmmakers the Coens are. I wonder if, maybe out of some insistence on seeing Fargo as a hipper or more complex movie than it really is, you might not be overthinking this a little. Me, I tend to think of the Coens as surface guys who put an incredible amount of conscious planning into the physical details of their movies, and who are inhumanly aware of how they expect both critics and audiences to respond to their cleverness. It might sound as if I'm one of those people who sometimes badmouth the Coens for being 'merely' clever, but cleverness is something I'm all for; at the very least, it sure beats lack of imagination. But I do think that these guys have traditionally done their best work as flashy, surreal comedians — cartoonists, in fact — in such films as Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the underrated Intolerable Cruelty, which is the one movie where I think they actually achieved satire, a sometimes ruthlessly biting satire on the possibility that genuine romantic love might not exist as anything more than a crippling delusion. Fargo is a smart, impressive movie, but it is also a movie outside what I think of as their best range, and a movie that I think they made for the outside world, a movie pitched at the mainstream. I think that it was built to serve two purposes. One was to save their career after The Hudsucker Proxy, a movie closer to their best range, and a movie altogether less successful in every way than Fargo but, overall, I think, more interesting. It features several amazing set pieces that could only have been the work of the Coens, tucked inside a structure that's a bit of a train wreck. I don't think there's any question that Fargo was successful in that and its other goal, which was to give Frances MacDormand a juicy sort-of-leading role that would make her beloved, win her some great reviews and maybe an award or two, and take her career to another level, as a much-sought-after character lead just when she was about to reach an age when good actresses who haven't achieved more than McDormand had achieved before Fargo start to find themselves dropping off the map.

This may sound a little cold, and a lot less cool than the idea that the Coens made the movie to dump on the boring "ordinariness" of the frozen Midwest, but the Coens are very smart guys, who understand the movie business very well, and I see no reason why they shouldn't take these kind of calculations into effect while making the best movie they can, within the terms they set. After all, if they hadn't had their big mainstream success with Fargo they wouldn't have been able to make my beloved The Big Lebowski —a movie that, long before it was enshrined as an acknowledged modern classic, was initially written off as a disappointment by people like The New Yorker's Daphne Merkin because it lacked the "heart" that so many detected in Fargo. That heart pretty much comes down to McDormand, and while it was be a delicious joke if it was something that the squares were projecting onto a blank screen, I do think that the Coens mean for us to find it there, to the extremely limited degree that they mean to instill some kind of feeling in their work at all. Looking at the bill of indictment — all the specifics you cite as reason for judging Marge as, not even a "bad person" but disappointingly "ordinary" — I can't say that it seems like much of a put-down portrait to me. Is it really such a dreary thing for someone to say that they can't understand why somebody, even Peter Stormare, would kill a woman and feed someone, even Steve Buscemi, into a wood chipper? Or that, whether or not they understand this werewolf, they brought him in partly through luck? So long as he's not standing in line behind me at Wendy's, I'd be delighted if he were locked up based on a tip some cop read in his horoscope that morning. No, she doesn't like to be taken out of her comfort zone, but who does? (Extreme sports athletes and professional mercenaries may lead more physically exciting lives than some of us, but talk to some of them for five minutes and you may conclude that, rather than being driven by some wild man need to test themselves, some people just happen to have a comfort zone that includes traveling upside-down through the air at great speeds or being shot at by the last defenders of the presidential palace.)

For all her "ordinariness," Marge still manages to slap the cuffs on Dracula, and she does it while hugely pregnant and while being as gentle as possible with the crazy man in the restaurant and offering tender moral support to her husband, played by the actor who David Fincher recently fingered as the Zodiac killer. The movie gives her a well-timed entrance — we don't get to meet her until after the action has already reached a level of cutthroat scuzziness that encourages the audience to cling to her as a welcome, warm rock — and if she doesn't come across as Sherlock Holmes at first glance, by the end she seems to be solidly in the familiar mold of fictional detectives who use a mask of thick-witted blandness to throw their prey off the scent, and also to make it that much more satisfying to the audience when justice triumphs and the unassuming flatfoot proves his, or her, mettle. More than anything, though, I do think that Marge is shaped so that McDormand can win over the audience and walk off with the movie. Sure, the Coens could write an unflattering role for her; they did it years later in The Man Who Wasn't There, after this movie had done its job and McDormand, her career securely on the upswing, must have gotten a kick out of playing a femme fatale. But as Marge, she's allowed to envelope the character in a homey glow that I don't think the Coens would have tolerated if they meant for the character to inspire anything but uncomplicated love in the viewer. Ordinary, maybe. But definitely special.

LEONARD PIERCE: Like Hannibal Lecter, I must begin with first principles: if Marge Gunderson isn't the butt of Fargo, then who is? Carl Showalter? Shep Proudfoot? The Coens aren't above making even the most seemingly sympathetic characters in their films the targets of their sharpest barbs (or the least sympathetic the subject of unusual tenderness or depth — witness McDormand's role in The Man Who Wasn't There, or for a real treat, ask me about my pet theory that Eddie Dane is the moral center of Miller's Crossing.)

As for the question of what kind of filmmakers the Coens are, that's a bit beyond our jurisdiction here, but you're right that it's a central component of how to read the character of Marge Gunderson. I agree that they put tremendous amounts of planning and detail-work into their films, and that they're hyper-aware of the reaction they're likely to get from their audience — but to me, this argues in favor of my point, and against the idea that I'm reading to much into the depiction of Marge. The Coens are amongst the most economic filmmakers I can think of; at their best, hardly a frame is wasted. It's hard for me to believe that these little moments where Marge Gunderson comes across as small or unsympathetic are accidental, given the care with which her creators have approached everything else they've ever done.

Beyond that, it's hardly a secret that the Coens like fucking with their audiences, whether that means moviegoers or critics or even studio executives (for a sterling example of this, check out the uncomprehending foreword to the published screenplay of The Hudsucker Proxy, by a clueless producer who laments the deranged casting choices offered up by the brothers, clearly not realizing he was being had). Fargo is rife with this sort of thing from its very conception — it goes out of its way to draw attention right off the bat to its alleged based-on-a-true-story nature, after which it presents us with a story that is clearly anything but true. Given the level of high-stakes game-playing Joel and Ethan Coen have engaged in before, it doesn't strike me as implausible that Marge Gunderson was meant to be something more than Oscar bait, career padding, or a warm-gooey-nougat-center of "uncomplicated love" for the mainstream audience to chew on.

And while I've tried to keep this discussion civil, by gad, sir, I will not have my sanity called into question by a man who calls Intolerable Cruelty underrated.

PHIL NUGENT: I don't know that I can discuss something like this without addressing what kinds of filmmakers the Coens are. And despite your saying that the topic is "outside our jurisdiction," I think you're making your own assumptions about that when you ask who, if not Marge, is the butt of Fargo. If the film were credited to someone less famed for being knowing and sarcastic, you might not approach it with the sense that it must be meant as a joke at somebody's expense. Because the Coens are hip, it might seem fair to assume that they must be inclined to stick it to the most unhip person on the screen.

But working in the movie industry does strange things to you, especially if you're intelligent enough, as the Coens surely are, to be appalled by how much intelligence and skill go into shaping formula crap aimed at the lowest common denominator. And if you look at the Coens' work as a whole, it seems clear to me that they've never reserved their greatest contempt for well-meaning, good-hearted dummies: time and time again, in Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother Where Art Thou? and, yes, Fargo, that's the model for their heroes. With all due respect for your weird man-crush on the Dane, I think the most likable character in Miller's Crossing is the Albert Finney character, who thinks he's on top of things but who doesn't really know the score and has to be protected by the friend who's cuckolding him with his fiancée. Even Jeff Lebowski, a verbally adroit hero who has his erudite moments and has inspired something of a minor philosophic movement, appears to have read great swatches of his how-to-be-a-detective manual with the book held upside-down.

So who, traditionally, have the Coens had it in for? From the start, guys who think they're smart but have no moral compass, like M. Emmet Walsh and Dan Hedaya in Blood Simple, and Billy Bob Thornton and his pretentious windbag lawyer in The Man Who Wasn't There, and just about all the important male characters in Fargo, who at their most advanced suggest some exotic form of insect life. The all-time champion whipping boy for the Coens, even more than the William H. Macy character here who shrieks and whimpers when prevented from escaping through the bathroom window while in his underwear, may be Barton Fink, the self admiring blocked playwright who doesn't listen, who lacks the professional discipline to hack out a B-movie script, and who in the end is denied even the minor dignity that might have come with being a true victim: instead, his uselessness may have inspired the aggrieved representative of dark forces to murder his family, just to get his attention. I don't think this is the kind of cynical, sucking-up to the 'average people' in the mass audience that you see in a shitheap like Forrest Gump. Coming from guys who have had to deal with charges of being 'merely clever' since they first emerged as filmmakers in their late twenties, it smacks of self-examination, and it may be the single most striking and attractive thing I know about the Coens.

The Coens, indefatigable entertainers and reflexive smart-asses that they are, may have laid the tracks for people to suspect that Marge can't be meant to be taken straight by setting her down in a Middle America snowscape where people talk as if they're making fun of the guys in Pepperidge Farms commercials, and I think that they may have intended a corrective to that in No Country for Old Men, where a guy who's not as smart as he thinks he is but who's basically decent is pitted against an abomination, with a guy who's thoroughly decent but not as quick as he used to be as moral referee, in a Texas that never threatens to turn into Blood Simple/Raising Arizona-ville. Fargo is probably still the Coens' biggest mainstream success — however well No Country does on the year-end critics' lists, I suspect it's too cold to supplant or even join the earlier film in the popular consciousness — and that means that its fan base includes a lot of people who the Coens' real fans must hate to find themselves agreeing with about anything. It may be hard for us to believe that guys like this could come up with someone like Marge — good, competent, caring, and utterly, conventionally square — without intending for her to be snickered at. But maybe that says more about us than it does about them.

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Hudsucker Proxy

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The setup: After making a name for themselves with a series of unique and relatively small-scale crime stories (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller's Crossing), Joel Coen and his producer-cowriter brother Ethan won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with their Hollywood-themed comedy Barton Fink. Their next film saw them collaborating with super-producer Joel Silver and working with a budget of upwards of $25 million back when that still meant something in Hollywood.

What went wrong: The popular rap against the Coens is that their films are stylish but soulless, which is definitely applicable to Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance. Leigh comes off as affected even in realistic roles, and playing girl reporter Amy Archer, she doesn't so much play a role as ape Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. The mannerisms overwhelm the role, which makes sense when she's putting on a tough front for the boys, but once that front begins to fall, the character is meant to be the film's emotional center, and I wasn't feeling it. Compare Cate Blanchett's Hepburn to what Leigh's doing here and you'll see the difference between a fully-realized character and an explosion at the tic factory.

Fortunately, Leigh's misguided performance is hardly fatal, as there's a whole lot of other elements to love about The Hudsucker Proxy. Leigh aside, the performances are spot-on, beginning with Tim Robbins in the title role. As the naïve sap turned into Hudsucker Industries' puppet president, Robbins gives a comic performance that would have fight right into a Preston Sturges film, and his gangly physical presence and good-natured cluelessness recall Sturges' favorite leading man Eddie Bracken. Even Robbins' character name — Norville Barnes — could have been a Bracken character.

As usual in a Coen film, the film's supporting cast is dynamite, especially Paul Newman as the calculating vice president, forever answering questions with a gruff "sure-sure," and Jim True as the chatty, duplicitous elevator operator Buzz. Plus there's the famous stylized Coen dialogue, which might get distracting if it weren't so damned clever.

But the most notable aspect of The Hudsucker Proxy is the world the world the Coens have lovingly created, an Art Deco nightmare version of fifties New York. Norville's experiences in the mailroom wouldn't be out of place in Brazil, while the top-level offices and boardrooms owe a debt to Ayn Rand. Dennis Gassner's visionary production design, coupled with cinematography by the great Roger Deakins and a score by Coen stalwart Carter Burwell that makes liberal use of Aram Khachaturyan's "Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia," make The Hudsucker Proxy the most visually stunning of the Coen brothers' films. It's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun.

The fallout: Clueless how to market the film, Warner Brothers dumped Hudsucker into a handful of theatres to middling reviews, although the film has its share of defenders today. The Coens left Hollywood to make the more modestly-budgeted Fargo, which won back their previous critical supporters and then some. Their latest film, No Country for Old Men, opened earlier this month to ecstatic reviews. — Paul Clark

Hair Today, Coen Tomorrow

Peter Smith — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

After largely triumphant tour of the festival circuit — it premiered at Cannes last spring and recently played at the New York Film Festival — the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men has now started trickling into commercial theaters. With a cast headed by Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, and widely hailed as a "return to form" for the Coens after a couple of poorly received comedies (the doomed remake of The Ladykillers and the sharp, cruelly underappreciated Intolerable Cruelty) the picture does not lack for talent, cultural cachet, and the news hook. Yet from the very first reports from Cannes, one detail has tended to dominate the coverage: the hair helmet that Bardem sports in his role as the borderlands Terminator, Anton Chigurh. The first notices the movie received simply described it as a "pageboy haircut", which is accurate enough but fails the convey the full, shocking impact of the sight of the thing.

But the people who've been waiting these past months for the movie to open so they could weigh in on it have no intention of being left out. Paste magazine calls the character "splendidly coiffed", but that's either sarcasm or the minority opinion weighing in. More typically, Dana Stevens of Slate calls him "a bob-haired golem," while Jan Stuart of Newsday refers to his "forklift mop of hair." Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post, Keith Phipps of the Onion AV Club, and David Edelstein of New York magazine have all invoked Prince Valiant, but Salon's Andrew O'Hehir thought Bardem looked more like Ringo Starr. In the Village Voice, Scott Foundas invoked Cousin Itt. (New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, a man with a literary background who understands the value of understatement, simply described Chigurh as "a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut.")

This is hardly the first time that a Coen brothers movie has attracted attention of a tonsorial nature. The corny-surreal tone of Raising Arizona was quickly established by Nicolas Cage's haircut, which suggested an attempted imitation of Kevin Bacon's tastefully spiky 'do as executed by an epileptic barber with the blind staggers. As the title character of Barton Fink, a leftist playwright who seemed to be a cartoon of Clifford Odets, John Turturro wore a pop-top hairdo that actually made him look more like George S. Kauffman by way of Eraserhead. We may never know for sure whether this was a deliberate attempt to make the Odets-like character seem more "universal" or if the hairdresser on the picture was working from a miscaptioned photograph. In The Big Lebowski, all the political and cultural battles of the 1960s seemed to have come down, decades later, to an uneasy truce between Jeff Bridges' hippie-burnout look and the squared-off cropping of Walter, the reactionary Vietnam vet played by John Goodman [and inspired by John Milius! — ed.], who looks like a cinder block wearing tinted shades. "I'm a hair actor and proud of it!" George Clooney once insisted, and maybe the Coens wish there were more performers out there willing to define their characters somewhere above their eyebrows. After all, it was the Coens who, in O Brother Where Art Thou?, established that George Clooney isn't just a fine actor, a major star, and the unashamed voice of show business liberalism: he's a Dapper Dan man! — Phil Nugent