Nosh 22: 'Free State of Jones' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (review of Free State of Jones)
The Civil War will always be with us, resonating its fantastic cast of heroes and villains, its issues still somehow pertinent. In recent years this has mostly shifted to the antebellum period, in films like 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained, and the upcoming slave revolt picture The Birth of a Nation (cheekily taking the title of the 1915 pro-Klan epic). A chunk of the war itself, and many of its bloody strands, is served up in Free State of Jones. It’s about Newton Knight, a Confederate Army deserter in 1862 who led Jones County, Mississippi, into virtual secession from the Lost Cause.

Owning no slaves (though his grandfather had), Knight seems to have sensed early that the Dixie rebellion was a loser, and unworthy. The movie gives his motives time to bubble in the pot. He doesn’t like slavery, but he’s proudly Southern. He scorns the bias of a Confederate law allowing big slave owners to avoid conscription, yet only warms to blacks when he hides with escaped slaves in the swamps. Above all he hates that his and other simple farmers and soldiers’s families are being pillaged for supplies by the CSA military. Knight is a born leveler, though Karl Marx’s Das Kapital wouldn’t come until 1867. Knight’s education was the Bible, and his plain gift for moral rhetoric is one key to his success with both blacks and whites (the first blacks he recruits, on film, all have biblical names).

Knight, a rather wild man even before the war, had the guerrilla instincts of a natural fighter. Still, at moments Matthew McConaughey’s Knight seem almost knightly, as if blending Robin Hood, John Brown, Tom Joad and even Abe Lincoln. The script nudges some pieties, but McConaughey’s gritty, thoughtful, manly conviction as an actor holds the story together (much as Daniel Day-Lewis did for Lincoln). His growth into commanding stature does not feel forced or hollow. This is the star’s best film since Dallas Buyers Club, and includes a touching echo of his work in Mud: Jacob Lofland, one of  the Arkansas boys who bonded with McConaughey in that, plays a recruit whose death ignites Knight’s rage (most of the other white Southerners are formulaic figures, almost like sacks of corn meal).

Gugu Mbatha-Raw, as the fugitive slave whom Knight loved and married (after his wife fled), is pretty, genuine but lightweight. Benoit Delhomme’s fine rural imagery never reaches poetry, but then director Gary Ross (Seabiscuit) is not attempting art. Jones wedges into the sturdy, high-crafted tradition of Cast Away, Gettysburg, Master and Commander, Last of the Mohicans. While skipping some details, it takes us pretty deeply into history, and then pays a dramatic price for that. The climax comes with the Jones revolt, but once the war is over there is the melancholy slide through Reconstruction, the terror of the Klan, and the piecemeal destruction of the new racial justice that had been a brave premise of Knight’s crusade.

He lived to 1922, proudly pro-black, pro-Union, a loyal Republican although the party of Lincoln had by then sunken to Warren G. Harding. Once federal troops pulled out in 1877, the story of Knight and Unionist Southerners fell under the harsh shadow of Jim Crow rule, a form of slavery revivalism. He never saw the topping shame, when Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan led the Republicans to betray their heritage by courting Southern racists. This is a sure bet: Newton Knight would never have voted for Donald Trump.

SALAD (A List)

The 12 Best Civil War Movies, with their directors: The General (Buster Keaton, 1926), Ride With the Devil (Ang Lee, 1999), The Red Badge of Courage (John Huston, 1951), The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915),  Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012), Free State of Jones (Gary Ross, 2016), The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971), Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989), Friendly Persuasion (William Wyler, 1956), Gettysburg (Ronald Maxwell, 1993) and The Raid (Hugo Fregonese, 1954).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The famous Welles marriage was to Rita Hayworth: “A woman as insecure about her lack of education as Rita could only be flattered by the attentions of a reputed genius like Orson. He actually seemed interested in what she had to say, something that she had not much experienced in men. He was neither vulgar nor tyrannical nor exploitive. He did not want to perform with her, merchandise her or own her. He responded to Rita’s sweetness with an unexpected sweetness of his own.” (From Barbara Leaming’s fascinating Orson Welles) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In Mud, “Mud has returned for Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), the Great Love who left him for better chances … As with Paul Newman’s Chance Wayne, seeking his lost lover Heavenly in Sweet Bird of Youth, erotic nostalgia bodes ill. And like Bird’s Boss Finley, a threatening villain looms (Joe Don Baker, a brute who prays from hate). Mud is a rustic Chance, baked in a deep muddy tan and acting with feral instincts, in his wilderness of compulsive desire.” (From the Matthew McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Kindle and Nook.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Matthew McConaughey and Tye Sheridan in Mud (Lionsgate Films, 2013; director Jeff Nichols, cinematographer Adam Stone)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 21: 'Dark Horse,' "Dheepan' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (reviews of Dark Horse and Dheepan)
Fortunately, Dark Horse is not about John Kasich, Ben Carson or Martin O’Malley. You can get fractious politics off your mind by going to a vividly spirited horse movie, a documentary from director Louise Ormond. Radiating equine love, it’s like an improved surge of desperado Sterling Hayden’s fixation on Kentucky horses in The Asphalt Jungle, with Kentucky replaced by Wales. In grim but plucky Cefn Fforest, a coal town almost  strip-mined of vitality, Janet Vokes had a crazy-fine idea.

Vokes was a wife, bar maid and grocery employee who decided to become a race horse owner, always the niche of royals and moneyed bluebloods (there’s a nip of Welsh whimsy; Jan’s father “used to breed show budgies”). She formed a syndicate with 30 other locals, each contributing ten pounds a week. They found a humble mare, paid a 3,000 pound stud fee for a low-ranked stallion, and then had the scrawny offspring trained, named Dream Alliance, and entered for races (both flat and steeplechase runs). No bookie took the steed seriously, then he gained fourth place in his first race, won his fourth race, had a fallow period, then a crisis, then a comeback that made “Dream” the Ben Hogan of equestrian courage.

If you want film style, you’re on the wrong turf here. Reliant on re-stagings and TV racing footage, the movie is most rich in beautiful horse images. Dream truly stars, with his white blaze on a pale chestnut hide, and above his hooves four white “stockings.” Around him are the thrilled owners and adoring fans, some of whom show a deficit of dentistry, but none of spirit and loyalty. If you miss some words, never mind. Every whinny and snort and pounding hoof is a call to satisfaction, from a huggable horse.    

Only a French director – to be specific, Jacques Audiard – would make a tense survival story drawn from living events, while also drawing inspiration from the Baron de Montesquieu’s cross-cultural satire Persian Letters (1721) and, from exactly 250 years later, Sam Peckinpah’s bloody film Straw Dogs (1971). Trace those influences if you wish, but Dheepan succeeds on a direct level of empathy. Antonythasan Jesuthasan (I assume the name reveals a Christian upbringing) plays Dheepan, a war-sickene\d soldier from the Sri Lanka civil war that pitted the Hindu Tamil minority against the Buddhist Ceylonese majority, one of many current demonstrations that religion can be a toxic matrix for violence.

Abandoning his role as a Tamil fighter (in effect a terrorist), the burly, pensive Dheepan makes it to France, along with a widow who isn’t his wife and an orphaned girl. Pretending to be a family, they find menial work as caretakers in a dreary banlieue, one of those degradations of modern mass architecture and welfare bureaucracy that ring French cities. It’s a Third World “refuge” largely controlled by North African drug gangs. Dheepan burrows in as a cagey civilian, always wary, his military training held in reserve if needed. Of course, it’s needed (here comes the Straw Dogs element). Audiard handles it with potent realism; forget Liam Neeson or Jason Stathem.

Dheepan won the Palme D’Or last year at Cannes, which seems a touch too much (a kind of World Relevance Award might be more on target). This is a soberly moving film, a work of honorable attention, not just about the crisis of the refugee diaspora swamping Europe but about utterly specific people. Its stable keel and appeal are in the balanced, vulnerable performances of Jesuthasan and his “wife,” Kalieaswari Srinivasan. “Kali” and “Sri” indicate Hindu roots. The story, which eclipses religious branding, is universal but not abstract.

SALAD (A List)

The Ten Best Horse Movies, at least on my ranch: The Black Stallion (director Carol Ballard, 1979), Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), Buck (Cindy Meehl, 2011), National Velvet (Clarence Brown, 1944), Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959), Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959), The Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish, 1959), The Red Pony (Lewis Milestone, 1949), The Horsemen (John Frankenheimer, 1971) and Dark Horse (Louise Ormond, 2015).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Welles is a great creative hero, but John Baxter offers an interesting view of his acting: “The character of this suave philosopher-criminal (Harry Lime, The Third Man) fitted Welles like a Savile Row suit. In a 50-year acting career, he never played a hero. Rather, his tastes ran to men as flawed as they were flamboyant – the murderous Renaissance grandee Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes, obsessed and suicidal Ahab in his stage Moby Dick, a roistering but finally pathetic Sir John Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight, and of course Charles Foster Kane, so desperate for love that he exhausts and alienates everyone who might provide it.” (From Baxter’s intro to the 2010 reissue of Orson Welles’s noir novel Mr. Arkadin, or Confidential Report.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“In The Producers, Kenneth Mars found his classic role as Liebkind. For immigrant Franz, the goosestep years were goose paté. On the roof with his pigeons (a short flight away from Terry Malloy’s aviary in On the Waterfront), Franz wears long Johns and a Wehrmacht helmet, to which Mars added bird drop stains. He never grasps that his visitors are Jewish, and wishes ‘to clear the Fuhrer’s name!’ Dustin Hoffman was set to do Liebkind, but left for Los Angeles and his big bingo, The Graduate.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Kindle and Nook.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Lillian Gish in The Night of the Hunter (United Artists, 1955; director Charles Laughton, cinematographer Stanley Cortez)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 20: 'Maggie's Plan,' 'Weiner' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (reviews of Maggie’s Plan and Weiner)
As Georgette, a New York tumor of academic ego in Maggie’s Plan, Julianne Moore brandishes a sort of Russo-Germanic accent that calls to mind when the Red Army and the Wehrmacht jointly invaded Poland. Like them, she knows how to kill, and her PC feminism turns volatile when her mild, dominated husband John (Ethan Hawke) falls for young, lonely, sperm-seeking (for pregnancy) Maggie. Georgette’s notion of winning him back is an intellectual endearment like “Nobody unpacks commodity fetishism like you do.” John, insecure novelist and “ficto-critical anthropologist,” is genuinely moved. Basically he’s a sensitive twerp, a slave to his penis (for more on that, see the next review).

Rebecca Miller’s comedy obtains pleasing hints of gravity from Greta Gerwig, who plays Maggie as a kind of floating, naive temptress who doubts her sexy charms. Gerwig, current Queen of the Indies (previous queens: Carol Kane, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Lili Taylor, Parker Posey), has a passive dreaminess kinked by funny rushes of impulse that seem buoyant and spontaneous, with echoing elements of Judy Holliday in the ’50s. This is Gerwig’s hip rom-com, on a clear genetic line from ’30s screwball dames to Holliday, through Woody Allen’s Diane Keaton to the frisky Big Apple sitcoms of modern times. Each mood twist nudges laughs, with mild frets about how people holding these jobs (Maggie is a modest educational functionary) keep such nice apartments in modern, deluxe-priced Greenwich Village.

The movie’s plan is obvious, with its triangular ping-ponging of familiar crises, its pretty children as adorable props, its old songs, its supporting couple (Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph) who loyally insert wisecracks and tighten plot threads. Miller, a deep New Yorker, is rich in territorial knowingness and she writes good zings. But her comedic choreography is a little closer to clog dancing than Ginger Rogers. Clog, not clod.

The politician’s downfall in Weiner makes those in Citizen Kane and All the King’s Men seem gracious, almost demure. This documentary tells about the 2013 New York City mayoral race of Anthony Weiner. Two years after his career as a liberal firebrand in Congress was killed by a “sexting” scandal, the scrawny, hyper politician attempted a comeback. But when new crotch selfies surfaced, he turned desperate and became a sucker for every punch. No city stages raw exposure more nakedly than the Naked City, and Weiner was a pitiful worm on a media hook.

The soft take on Weiner is that he was wrecked by his “victimless” crime. But here, clearly, is the victim: Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin, for years an aide to Hillary Clinton. The tragedy of the film is the humiliation of Huma, who turns mute as Tony kamikazes. He’s still the hurt, snarky kid whose “funny name” helped set him up as a viral phallic joke. In an update of the old Charles Atlas muscle-builder ads, he is the weakling who tosses a tantrum and kicks sand into his own face.

Like last year’s Amy, about sad, dismally addicted singer Amy Winehouse, Weiner is a binge of self-destruction. Both films have some caring nuances, but with sadistic zeal each leaves their subject defenseless. Seeking fast, shallow, digital sex, Weiner allowed his most private digit to ruin his life. Will our new rooster, Mr. Trump, with his huge phallic ties and almost pubic crown of hair, flop so brazenly? Please, yes.  

SALAD (A List)

Here are 15 Good Movies About Politicians (with leading star and date):
The Last Hurrah (Spencer Tracy, 1958 ), Secret Honor (Philip Baker Hall, 1984), The Candidate (Robert Redford, 1972), Il Divo (Toni Servillo, 2008), The Best Man (Henry Fonda, 1964), Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis, 2012), Blaze (Paul Newman, 1989), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (James Stewart, 1939), Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998), All the King’s Men (Broderick Crawford, 1949), The Iron Lady (Meryl Streep, 2011), Gabriel Over the White House (Walter Huston, 1933), Election (Reese Witherspoon, 1999), A Lion Is In the Streets (James Cagney, 1953) and The Great McGinty (Brian Donlevy, 1940). Special, partial case: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

On Oct. 30, 1938, having detected the first tremors of a national panic caused by his radio show The War of the Worlds, Citizen Welles signed off: “This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be, the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo.’ … ‘I’ve often wondered if you had any idea (of the public response) before you did it,’ Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles decades later. ‘The kind of response, yes,’ replied Welles. ‘That was merrily anticipated by us all. The size of it, of course, was flabbergasting.” (From Patrick McGilligan’s invaluable Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Stars often define their context. Buster Keaton rules any space he enters, and Kim Novak fulfills the Golden Gate in Vertigo. Stars can surprise, like Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, giving depth to campy Ed Wood. The best thread the needle of nuance, like Paul Giamatti in Sideways, his heartache crammed into barely speaking the name of his ex-wife’s lover: Kennnn.” (From the Introduction in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available on Amazon, Kindle and Nook.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Audrey Hepburn as Natasha in War and Peace (Paramount/De Laurentiis, 1956; director King Vidor, cinematographer Jack Cardiff)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 19: Love & Friendship, Green Room & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER (reviews of Love & Friendship and Green Room)

First, smart words not from Jane Austen but Aldous Huxley, in a 1939 letter about adapting Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for MGM: “(It is) an odd, cross-word puzzle job. One tries to do one’s best for Jane Austen, but the very fact of transforming the book into a picture must necessarily alter its whole quality in a profound way. (The story) is a matter of secondary importance and serves merely as a receptacle for the dilute irony in which the characters are bathed.”

Our Austen movie pleasure should follow Huxley’s cue. Discussions of plot, or strict cinematic values, will fall flat. Austen World is a genre with its own special rules, pouring that wry, charming irony into molds both rigid and various. As in Whit Stillman’s new Love & Friendship, a zippy stenciling of young Jane’s early novella Lady Susan. The lady is played by Kate Beckinsale, widowed, nearly broke, fierce to find wealthy husbands for herself and her sweet, musical daughter. Beckinsale, in maybe her best work, is like a social oil can in a flowing skirt. Injecting into each twist her juice of Machiavellian wiles, she ignites rumors, wins hearts, jars rivals, always with the fluent diction of someone who finished off a finishing school for breakfast. Susan’s art of the deal is far beyond Donald Trump.

Stillman, best known for comedies about WASPy heirs and wannabes (his Metropolitan was loosely derived from Austen’s Mansfield Park), provides what is needed: homes so grand they sag from hauteur; toffs in Regency finery, while servants slink around in dated, 18^th century garb; a peacock on a parapet; slabs of stately music; lovely gowns in sync with luscious gardens; impeccable cascades of British enunciation (Chloe Sevigny, as a Yank, seems a bit out of it). Above all, good actors who could suck a ton of snuff at tea and still maintain poise. The champ, along with Beckinsale, is Tom Bennett as Sir James Martin, the cheerful perfection of silly ass-ness. James doesn’t know that “verse” means poetry, and his dim, frequent pauses are like the word “stop” in telegrams.

Of course, this is an era before telegraphy, radio, TV, movies, phones and the Web (where tweet-speak is often just barely English). Conversation, and its manners, is the cynosure of life and entertainment. Stillman keeps it brisk, primly satirical, without the gilt framing of the snob elite that Stanley Kubrick used in Barry Landon, yet also without quite the saturated richness of RobertAltman’s great country estate comedy Gosford Park. He reaches for the electric verbosity of Wilde, Coward and Stoppard, but Austen is never lost in the rush.

Needing some pulp to balance Jane Austen, and ready to support an Oregon film, I went to Green Room. Shot near Astoria and Portland on a modest budget, Jeremy Saulnier’s generic nerve-grinder is about a punk band at a sleazy roadhouse, cornered by neo-Nazi skinheads. The brutes falsely try to pin on them a knife murder, although simple aesthetic vengeance would make more sense. The band’s music is less heavy metal than feral foetal, like the screaming migraine of an enraged embryo. Classic thespian skinhead Patrick Stewart, in a slumming job he won’t be boasting about on the BBC, plays the fascist patriarch as a sort of Fuhrer Lear or peckerwood Macbeth. The basic tone is set by dogs gnawing on throats, and by a big creep eviscerated like a pig. This violent muck, a sort of dwarf Revenant, seems intended for viewers who want to lick their chops down to the bloody bone.   

SALAD (A List)

Here are the Eight Best Jane Austen Movies, by my lights: 1. Persuasion (director Roger Michell, 1995), 2. Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995), Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005), Emma (Doug McGrath, 1996), Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940), Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema, 1999), Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman, 2016) and the juvenile but witty Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995).    

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In his footloose, cosmopolitan years as an actor for hire, Citizen Welles was often amused by his fellow stars. On one bloated epic, “Tony Quinn came to town with his own private writer. He played Kubla Khan, who, it turned out in Tony’s authoritative version, was kindly, brave, benevolent, good, handsome and irresistible to women. There was no grace or virtue which was not written into that character. And then he played it like Charlie Chan.” (From This Is Orson Welles, the very entertaining interview book by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich. The movie was the star-studded dud Marco the Magnificent, 1965).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Bogart’s acerbic integrity had a dash of disdain, enhanced by his pairing with filly Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Her snappy purr and lustrous gaze widened his popularity by softening its edge. Betty (Bacall) recalled that upon seeing Casablanca her companion ‘thought he was sexy, I thought she was crazy.’ The wolf and the wow became crazily popular, making adulthood fun again for a war-sick nation. Their wedding (May, 1945) was victory’s best toast.” (From the Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, now available via Amazon, Kindle and Nook.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (Warner Bros., 1944; director Howard Hawks, cinematographer Sid Hickox)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.

Nosh 18: 'A Bigger Splash' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.
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APPETIZER (review of A Bigger Splash)

In 1969 the young, nubile Helen Mirren widened many eyes (notably James Mason’s) as the juicy lass on an Aussie isle, in Age of Consent. In 1982 Susan Sarandon was the siren sexpot on a lusty Greek isle, in Tempest. In 1987 Jacqueline Bisset did more seasoned vamping on succulent Rhodes, in High Season. Dakota Johnson – the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, who began as bikini bait in 1975’s Night Moves – tries hard, using some nudity and sultry, savvy stares. But in A Bigger Splash she can’t match those past temptresses, nor the powerful adult triangle of her movie.

Johnson plays Penelope, 17, recently re-united with her father Harry (Ralph Fiennes), a rock music producer whose attentions can easily seem suspect. Most suspicious is randy Harry’s former lover and star, the rock goddess Marianna (Tilda Swinton), who has come to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa (famed for Giuseppe Tomasi, the last Prince of Lampedusa, although his great novel The Leopard was not set there). Marianna is there to heal her damaged vocal cords, and to find pleasure with her stud lover, the photographer Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). Swinton, with her smart, tomahawk face and long, sleek body, more than makes up for barely speaking. While she rasps in whispers, her eyes act eloquently, and her orgasms sound like her rock muse is having a swell vacation.

Her brio is easily matched by Harry, who at first seems like a boorish party animal, then is the real life of the party. Goaty and goading, his wit makes Paul appear sensible but dull. Whether diving into the pool naked, or taking over a karaoke club, this is a new Fiennes, not the glum Nazi of Schindler’s List or the gentle, blind diplomat of The White Countess. A carnal carnival,  Harry’s antics shame Pierce Brosnan’s in Mamma Mia! (Brosnan was simply shameless). We can guess that Harry’s inner Zorba will revive the old sparks with Marianna, but the actors make their sex heat human and suspenseful. The island is a little tacky, the police are preoccupied with desperate refugees from Africa, but the story stays close to the emotional tangles of these sybarites. They’re virtually refugees themselves, like the fevered flotsam of a disintegrating Stones tour.

Director Luca Guadagnino made the acclaimed, impeccable, at times pretentious I Am Love. This looser film has holiday energies, rich in sunlight, sweat and hot, salty desire. The nods to Roberto Rossellini’s moody classics about foreigners in Italy, Stromboli and Viaggio in Italia, don’t become scholastic. All the elements flow, fomented by Swinton and Fiennes, who offers her a fine salute: “When the space ships come, she’ll be right out in front.” The pool climax (partly a nod to Jack Hazan’s 1973 doc A Bigger Splash, about David Hockney’s most famous pool painting) is fairly amazing. It’s a scene best discovered by each viewer.

SALAD (A List)

My choice of 12 very good movies set entirely or mostly on islands (with their dates and directors): Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Bunuel, 1954); I Know Where I’m Going (Powell, 1945); I Am Cuba (Kalatozov, 1964); Cast Away (Zemeckis, 2000); From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann, 1953); Zorba the Greek (Cacoyannis, 1964); High Season (Peploe, 1987); Stromboli (Rossellini, 1950); Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (Huston, 1957); The Naked Island (Shindo, 1960); Conrack (Ritt, 1974) and The Guns of Navarone (Thompson, Mackendrick, 1961).  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

At least once in his life, Orson Welles (in his prime, 6’3” tall) aspired to play a short man. In postwar France he planned to film Cyrano de Bergerac with producer Alexander Korda: “We were going to do all the sets with big doors and high door knobs, and so on – so I’d look very short, because I always thought Cyrano should look up at everybody.” Also, “I discovered a wonderful thing about Coquelin, who originated the part, which is that in every act his nose got shorter. So of course, I was going to do that.” (From Barbara Leaming’s fine Orson Welles. Alas, the film was not made.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

For Harry Dean Stanton the climax of his greatest role, in Paris, Texas, came at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival: “Harry Dean advances up the red carpet past reefs of paparazzi. His smile suggests, without smugness: about time. The Great Supporting Actor had claimed the full stellar screen. Claire Denis, a Paris assistant, felt something amazing at the Cannes screening: ‘I could feel the breathing in the room, and then people crying. This is something very rare.” (From the Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, now available via Amazon, Kindle and Nook.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal in A Face in the Crowd. (Warner Bros., 1957; director Elia Kazan, cinematographers Gayne Rescher, Harry Stradling)

For previous Flix Nosh meals, scroll below.