The Screengrab : zero mostel

Yesterday's Hits: Fiddler on the Roof (1971, Norman Jewison)

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

In some ways, it isn’t hard to determine why Norman Jewison’s big-screen adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof was a hit. From the time sound was introduced to the cinema, musicals were one of Hollywood’s most popular and enduring genres. But while most musicals of the 1930s and 1940s were frothy entertainments, the fifties saw an increase in musicals that tackled more serious material. And the record-breaking initial Broadway run of Fiddler on the Roof made a film version inevitable, and its status as the top-grossing movie of 1971 was practically pre-ordained.

While the reasons for the long-run popularity of Fiddler on the Roof seem obvious, its initial success is somewhat trickier to pin down. For one thing, the story’s subject matter doesn’t appear to lend itself to the musical treatment. What’s more, a community of Russian Jews around the turn of the century wasn’t the sort of setting to which most sixties-era audiences were normally expected to relate. And quite frankly, even in the post West Side Story-era, the storyline of Fiddler on the Roof was something of a downer. After all, Fiddler was about a man who loses most of what he holds dear- his three eldest daughters and finally his home- before the end of the story, and its treated these losses not as a tragedy (which might’ve allowed for some cathartic tears at the end), but with a sense of resignation.

Yet Fiddler on the Roof made a real connection with audiences of the day for numerous reasons. There was the music of course- Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s catchy, Jewish-inflected song score produced half a dozen songs that quickly became musical theatre standards. Likewise, the movie’s deeper themes- particularly the conflict between forward-thinking youth and their tradition-minded elders- had a great deal of resonance in uneasy sixties. And while Fiddler doesn’t soft-pedal its Jewishness by any means, the characters’ concerns were common enough to many difficult cultures that it came across less as a Jewish story than a universal one.

But most of all, audience members fell in love with Tevye, who quickly became one of musical theatre’s most enduring characters. Tevye is not a larger-than-life hero, but a poor milkman who has been “cursed” with five daughters and no sons, and despairs of finding them husbands. Tevye believes above all in the need to uphold tradition, and it’s the clash between this need and his daughters’ need to forge their own paths in life (especially when it comes to finding husbands) that drives the story. Throughout the story, Tevye struggles with how flexible his love for his daughters will allow him to be, until he finally reaches a point where he must throw up his hands and say, “if I bend any more, I will break.” And all the while, Tevye carries on a conversation with God- so much, indeed, that he must speak to God more than any flesh-and-blood character.

Before MGM brought Fiddler to the big screen, the role of Tevye was most commonly associated with the great Zero Mostel, who originated the character on Broadway. Because of this, there was some controversy when Jewison decided to fill the role not with Mostel, but the lesser-known Topol, who starred in the West End production. In the end, however, Jewison made the right choice for the film. With his outsized style of acting, Mostel was the perfect stage Tevye, able to pitch his performance to the rafters. But for the more naturalistic big-screen production, Topol’s more human-sized turn proved to be ideal. Whereas Mostel’s over-the-top bluster would have overwhelmed everything else, Topol’s never does, and he’s a sensitive enough performer to pull off the smaller character moments, as in the quiet musical number in which he asks his wife of twenty-five years, “Do You Love Me?”

One of director Norman Jewison’s key filmmaking decisions at the outset was to go for a more realistic feel which would make the musical transcend its stage origins. However, this gambit doesn’t always pay off, and occasionally this commitment to realism makes it feel almost like Jewison was uneasy about making a big-budget musical. In some ways, it’s probably good that Jewison limited the dancing to social scenes such as the barroom and Tzeitel and Motel’s wedding. But on the other hand (as Tevye is so prone to saying), Jewison undermines several potentially powerful scenes by having the songs sung in voiceover rather than actually voiced by the characters onscreen.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the “Chavaleh (Little Bird)” number, in which Tevye ponders the loss of his third daughter, who has eloped with a non-Jew. Had Jewison allowed Topol to perform the song onscreen, it might have made for one of the most emotional moments in the film, with Tevye realizing how his need to uphold tradition has lost him a beloved daughter. But instead, Jewison has Topol sing the song in voiceover, shooting him gazing into the distance while imagining his daughters dancing away from him. The number turns into what Roger Ebert calls a “Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude”, and like most scenes of this type, it’s pretty laughable- a far cry from the powerful moment it should rightly have been.

But overall, Fiddler on the Roof does right by its original inspiration, and the elements that people loved in the stage production translated quite nicely to the silver screen. It’s not one of the greatest movie musicals by a long shot, but it’s a worthy adaptation, certainly better than most of the post-Golden Age adaptations of long-running musicals, which all too often get shoddy treatments a la The Phantom of the Opera and A Chorus Line. Perhaps the most definitive testament to the impact of the Fiddler movie is that, nearly four decades after the film’s release, Topol is currently starring in what has been called his “Farewell Tour.” That just goes to show you that while Zero might have originated the role of Tevye, he hardly owns it anymore.

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

RISKY BUSINESS (1983)

Sex sells...especially here on Nerve.com, which is why I included the HOT!!!! train sex clip above rather than, say, a clip of Bronson Pinchot counting money in the suburban bordello launched by Tom Cruise’s home-alone upper-middle-class teen wanker Joel and Rebecca De Mornay’s hooker with a heart of coal, Lana, the better to separate Joel’s horny friends from their virginity (not to mention their trust funds). But, in the same way Deadwood’s Machiavellian barkeep Al Swearengen realized the best way to get rich quick during the South Dakota gold rush was simply to bilk the prospectors, Joe Pantoliano -- in his breakthrough role as Guido the Killer Pimp -- is the movie's real schemer, winding up with all the money from Joel’s Young Enterpriser start-up. In a similar way, Tom Cruise wound up reaping most of the benefits from Risky Business, which launched his career into the A-list stratosphere while writer/director Paul Brickman somehow didn’t get to direct another movie until 1990’s Men Don’t Leave, by which point his once seemingly promising career had gone in the drink like Joel’s Porsche (along with the A-list dreams of Mornay and my own personal rooting interest, Curtis “Booger” Armstrong). But that’s capitalism, for ya! (AO)

LE CERCLE ROUGE (1970)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s second-to-last film finds the auteur reuniting with his Le Samouraï star Alain Delon for another romantically fatalistic, existential crime saga. The expansive plot involves Delon’s thief, who’s released from prison, promptly rips off his mob employer, and then enlists the aid of a fugitive murderer (Gian Maria Volonte) and a boozehound ex-cop (Yves Montand) for a jewelry heist. Melville’s orchestration of the robbery boasts his trademark efficiency and lucidity, though what resonates more forcefully is his loving portrait of male camaraderie, as well as his tough-guys’ adherence to male codes of honor and conduct. As in most of the director’s neo-noirs, Delon and company are defined by their professional rituals, by the scrupulousness with which they carry out their tasks. As such, they’re ideal stand-ins for Melville himself, a master of the cinematic form who – as ably illustrated by the prolonged, taut central swindle – blended formal rigorousness with off-the-cuff jazziness to create an entrancing movie’s-movie vision of hoods, dames and doom. (NS)

THE PRODUCERS (1968)

Broadway producer Max Bialystock used to live the good life. Champagne, limousines, and girls, girls, girls! But now he’s reduced to wearing a cardboard belt, avoiding his landlord, and hustling old ladies to get money to pay his bills. He’d become used to high living, and it’s an addiction he can’t shake. What’s more, he’s no spring chicken; he’s only about 20 years behind his elderly clients like “Hold Me Touch Me”. He’s the very definition of someone who needs to get rich, and quick. Lucky for him, into his life – and his office – walks nervous accountant Leo Bloom, whose nebbishy temperament and genius with figures are just what Max needs to hatch his plan: to produce a play so awful that it will close on the first night – thus allowing him to pocket all the money he intends to bilk his little old ladies into overpaying. Like most great get-rich schemes, its elegant simplicity is its appeal – and likewise its downfall. Max picks a play, a cast, and a crew so profoundly awful that there’s no way they can possibly succeed, which, naturally, they do, and watching how it all plays out is one of the great joys of 1960s comedy. (LP)

THE KILLING (1956)

Those of us who were introduced to the cinema of Stanley Kubrick through his later Baroque Period and worked our way backward may have initially felt like this tight, twisty crime picture was the work of another filmmaker entirely. Kubrick’s bleak view of humanity is already fully formed, however, in this case ably assisted by noir novelist Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me), and his technical proficiency – notably as it relates to the movie’s innovative and influential time-shifting structure – is unmistakable. The granddaddy of all “one last heist” movies, The Killing boasts a rock-solid cast of retro roughnecks (including Sterling Hayden, Ted de Corsia and the inimitable Timothy Carey), a well-oiled racetrack robbery that can’t possibly go wrong, and a vicious, noose-tightening sense of impending doom when it inevitably does go wrong. The final image is the essence of noir fatalism boiled down to a bitter punchline – a peerless visual representation of the get-rich-quick scheme gone awry. (SVD)

THE LAVENDER HILL MOB (1951)

Henry Holland, the London bank clerk played by Alec Guinness in this dry British heist comedy, has spent twenty years working on the slow part of his "get rich quick" scheme -- i.e., building up a supremely boring image so that his employers will trust him implicitly with the gold bullion whose transportation he regularly supervises. Holland decides that he's waited long enough when he meets Stanley Holloway, the owner of a foundry that manufactures cheap souvenirs and the last piece of his plan clicks into place: how to smuggle the gold out of the country once it's been stolen. The two melt down their swag and use it to make little Eiffel tower-shaped paperweights, then race to Paris to intersect them before they're sold in the gift shops to lucky tourists. In the end, they must pay for their dastardly deed, but at least Holland gets to meet Audrey Hepburn. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

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

Reviews By Request: The Hot Rock (1972, Peter Yates)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader “Uncle Crizzle” (a.k.a. Craig Lindsey) for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

The more heist movies I see, the more I realize that the secret to a good one lies in three factors. First, the characters have to be engaging. There are only a limited number of heists one can pull onscreen, but if we enjoy the people onscreen it scarcely matters. Second, the script shouldn’t run out of ideas before the ending, so that the audience won’t be too sure where everything stands until all the pieces finally fall into place. Third- and perhaps most importantly- the movie has to be light on its feet. If the style or the storytelling becomes overbearing, the movie will turn into a slog, which is pretty much the last thing you want from a heist movie.

Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock succeeds on all three counts, with the added bonus of getting better as it goes along. In the opening scenes, I was expecting a fairly standard issue heist movie, albeit one with an impressive, quintessential seventies-era cast. But The Hot Rock has plenty of surprises up its sleeve, not least that the story’s central heist scene happens even before the midpoint of the film. Best of all, it takes itself just seriously enough that it doesn’t feel like a lark, but never too seriously. It’s a lot of fun.

But back to that central heist, which involves the titular rock, a massive diamond that’s long been a point of contention between the ruling factions of an obscure (and apocryphal) African nation. The country’s ambassador to the U.N., played by Moses Gunn, hires the recently-released-from-prison John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) to mastermind a plan to steal the stone for him. Dortmunder’s team- comprised of safecracker George Segal, driver Ron Liebman, and explosives expert Paul Sand- exhaustively plan the job which, while quaint by modern-day standards, is a pretty good one. Of course, it doesn’t quite go according to plan, and it’s the aftermath of the heist that makes the movie so enjoyable.

The Hot Rock was based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, who I was familiar with primarily for his hard-hitting crime novels written as Richard Stark and his nihilistic screenplay for The Grifters. However, this film is based on one of Westlake’s lighter Dortmunder books, which gave me some pause since my only previous exposure to a Dortmunder story was the godawful 2001 Martin Lawrence vehicle What’s the Worst That Can Happen? That film took Westlake’s story and buried it in shticky storytelling and hammy performances until it became all but unwatchable, and I feared the worst from The Hot Rock as well.

However, the difference between the two movies is telling. Whereas the broadly comic style of What’s the Worst That Can Happen? didn’t suite Westlake’s terse prose one bit, Yates wisely plays the story straight. Primarily known up to that time as an action director (his biggest hit had been 1968’s Bullitt), Yates never leans too hard on the film’s comedy. Instead, he directs the story like a straight thriller, matter-of-factly following his band of crooks from one complication to the next. This only makes the movie that much funnier. Due to unforeseen difficulties, the original heist ends up leading to another job, then another, then yet another, each more unlikely than the last. And the team, which seemed so well-chosen at the beginning, becomes less so with each successive job. Consider that Liebman is perfect behind the wheel of damn near any car, but fairly out of sort when he finds himself in an entirely different sort of vehicle.

As I said before, the cast is a lot of fun. I’ve never been a big Robert Redford fan, but he’s a natural here as the master thief who has to keep his cool in order to think himself out of the messes in which he keeps finding himself. Segal is his usual reliable self as Dortmunder’s trusty lieutenant, all business to the outside world but always kvetching to the boss. Liebman and Sand have some good moments as the other team members. Gunn gets lots of laughs as the seemingly imperturbable diplomat, at first amused by his involvement in the crime (observe his wry smile when he states, “I am a criminal”), only to become increasingly frustrated with every new development in the case. And there’s a choice supporting role for the one and only Zero Mostel, as Sand’s shifty father. Given his over-the-top signature performance in The Producers, I sort of expected Mostel to clash with the others, but instead his outsize personality is in service of an outsize character, which allows him to fit in perfectly with the ensemble. It’s an indelible character turn, with the unfortunate side effect of making me wonder how many priceless Mostel performances we lost to the blacklist.

The Hot Rock is yet another reminder of the kind of action movies Hollywood was great at making during the seventies, but not nearly as good at today. The cast is enjoyable, the storytelling efficient, and most of all, the direction never calls attention to itself. As fun as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films sometimes are, there’s always a layer of self-consciousness to them, as though Soderbergh deliberately means to evoke a bygone filmmaking style. By contrast, Yates trusts in his story enough to stay out of the way, and the result is a highly enjoyable example of its genre, and a darn good entertainment in general.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Le Bon Temps Roule!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's Fat Tuesday, which marks the noisy, beer-stained conclusion to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, most of you who visit this site are trapped at your jobs or classrooms right now, and while we could address ourselves exclusively to those now celebrating in the Pelican State, most of them are probably too drunk to read. We'll just settle for mentally sending them some love rays and hope those in the French Quarter remember that as soon as the clock turns to twelve tonight, those nice policemen on horseback whose job it is to clear the streets will start unsheathing their billy clubs. For the rest of you, we'll just remind you that there have been a number of motion pictures that tried to tap into the mysterious beauty and happy vibe of the city that care forgot. Most of these movies stank like week-old gumbo, but here's a few that might make for an enjoyable carnival day rental:

PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

This thriller starts out on the New Orleans docks, where a tough named Blackie (played by a hulking, gaunt-featured newcomer to movies billed as "Walter Jack Palance") murders a guy who's fresh off the boat who looks as if he's only got about five minutes to live anyway. When the coroner confirms that the dead man was suffering from pneumonic plague, Richard Widmark (as a U.S. Public Health officer) and a cop played by Paul Douglas have to track down Palance, his whimpering sidekick Zero Mostel, and anyone else who may have been in contact with him, while keeping things quiet so as to prevent a panic. The director, Elia Kazan, who a year later would make one of the great movies set in New Orleans when he transferred Tennesee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to film, shot this movie in actual New Orleans locations, which means that, in addition to its virtues as a crackerjack entertainment — which are considerable — it also has the fascination of serving as a semi-documentary record of the city as it was more than half a century ago. Fun fact: shortly after directing Mostel in this picture, Kazan testified against him in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, thus helping to get the actor blacklisted.

HARD TIMES (1975)

This period piece, set during the Depression, was the first film directed by its screenwriter, Walter Hill. It's a vehicle for Charles Bronson, in what is almost certainly the best movie and probably the best performance of his '70s period as a top-billed international star; he plays a soft-spoken drifter who falls in with a gambler (James Coburn) and begins competing in bare-knuckle fistfights that are thrown together to give the locals something to bet on. You get a sense of what the leisurely pace of life does to you in New Orleans from this film: for an action movie, it has a unusually slow tempo, as if Hill were a little drunk on the atmosphere and needed to take care to remember to keep putting his next foot in front of the other in the right order. But it's so flavorful and lovingly crafted that it's never boring. Strother Martin, who wears a white suit and a moustache that make him look more than ever like Tennessee Williams's Mini-Me, plays Coburn's sidekick, who tends Bronson's wounds; he explains his unlicensed medical status by saying that "in the fourth year of my studies, a small black cloud appeared on the campus. I departed under it." (The young Becky Allen, a mainstay of New Orleans theater for many years, has a small, good appearance as his dinner date.)

Eighteen years later, another talented action director, John Woo, would come to New Orleans to shoot his first American film, Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Damme (as "Chance Boudreaux"), who stumbles across an operation, led by Lance Henriksen, to organize The Most Dangerous Game-style hunts of displaced homeless men on the streets of the city. At one point, Henriksen tells someone that "it's no accident we're in New Orleans... There's always some unhappy corner of the globe where we can ply our trade." So I guess the filmmakers deserve some kind of credit for not sucking up to the local Tourist Board. Oddly enough, this was not the first movie that tried to account for Van Damme's Belgian accent by insisting that his character was supposed to be a Cajun.

THE BIG EASY (1986)

This fast-talking crime movie is one that New Orleans itself has always had a love-hate relationship with. It's a cartoon of the city's image, complete with crooked cops, weird accents (the hero, a detective played by Dennis Quaid, is meant to be Cajun-Irish), and such lines as, "Who do I look like, the Grand Marshall of the Mardi Gras?" But on its own endearingly unambitious terms, it's often a fun cartoon, with a memorable little turn-on of a bedroom scene between Quaid and Ellen Barkin (who, when Quaid sticks his hand up her skirt, unrolls her smile as if she'd been wondering all her life what was in there), and funny turns by Lisa Jane Persky, Grace Zabriskie, and local icon John Goodman. There's even a brief appearance (as an inexplicably surly magnet salesman) by Peter Gabb, who starred in a Tulane University production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves in which this writer played a nun, a performance hailed by one critic as having been "worth trying, I guess." This movie is especially worth seeing for Charles Ludlam's appearance as Quaid's lawyer, identified at one point as "da man dat got da governor acquitted." Ludlam, the founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was a god in his own specialized field of high-camp, Pop Art theatrical farce, but he didn't leave behind much on film, and by the time The Big Easy opened, he had died of AIDS. Though Ludlam was a Yankee, his joyously broad, eye-rolling cameo specifically captures the kind of fun that blossoms in New Orleans like few things I've ever seen.

TUNE IN TOMORROW... (1990)

This one's really freaky, and definitely a matter of taste. Fans of hardcore silliness will find a lot in it to like. Even its bloodlines are surreal: the screenplay, by the British novelist William Boyd (An Ice Cream War; A Good Man in Africa), is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was set in Lima, Peru in the 1950s, but with the action shifted to New Orleans in the same period. It was directed by Jon Amiel, a British TV and movie director who was then fairly hot after coming off the Dennis Potter-scripted miniseries The Singing Detective, and who was on his way, after this film came out, to never being fairly hot again. It stars Peter Falk as "Pedro Carmichael", a radio soap-opera writer who takes a creatorly interest in the forbidden romance developing between hot-blooded man-child Keanu Reeves and the ripe, womanly Barbara Hershey. The movie, which really takes off in the sections where Pedro's radio show fantasies are acted out by a group of actors that includes Peter Gallagher, Elizabeth McGovern, Dan Hedaya (in an eyepatch), Hope Lange, Buck Henry, and local embarrassment John Larroquette, also features a terrific original score by Wynton Marsalis, who can be seen performing with his band in a nightclub sequence. If you ever get the chance, give it a shot: it sure won't remind you of much else that you've seen before.