By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Review of Logan Lucky, salute to Jerry Lewis
Logan Lucky
I pegged
Logan Lucky as slumming for summer
suckers. West Virginia hicks! NASCAR racing! Beef slab Channing Tatum! Even
after guessing that director Steven Soderbergh must have ended his brief retirement and painter's easel time for something pleasurable,
hesitation remained. Soderbergh’s slop-around Danny Ocean crime comedies included mediocre heists, and this is a heist movie. As it turns out, a sharp,
funny one.
Tatum
is Jimmy Logan, former coal miner, divorced but still a loyal dad, and savvy
enough to plot a big steal from a hot car race’s cash haul. Tatum’s bulk becomes
beef jerky with a dry twang. But chief yokel honors go to Adam Driver as brother
Clyde, a bartender with a prosthetic left arm (Iraq service). Driver, recently
the gentle, reflective poet in Paterson,
speaks in metronomic blips of deadpan, as if distilling hillbilly diction into rare
moonshine. There is some vocal DNA from Billy Bob Thornton’s Karl in Sling Blade.
Without
utterly patronizing its folk, the movie approaches West Virginia on the
familiar gravel road of hee-haw satire (the script is by Rebecca Blunt, perhaps
a pseudonym). Trump is not mentioned, but the red subtext looms. To the Tatum/Driver
anchor Soderbergh adroitly barnacled Katie Holmes, Dwight Yoakam, Hilary Swank
and singer LeAnn Rimes. Plus Daniel Craig as Joe Bang, a snow-haired convict
who moves like constipated muscle. Finally, we get James Bond chaw-drawling “Gimme two packs of those Gummi Bears.”
The movie has a sunny, frisky spirit, and the heist action does not depend on
heavy violence. The retro-toony flavor (very Coen Bros.) includes the bravura use
of pneumatic tubes. The Robin Hood angle is maybe a touch much, or not. Logan Lucky is a hoedown, not a letdown.
Jerry
Lewis, 1926-2017
My pal
Albert cried. My buddy Gary looked shaken. I felt lousy, although my reverence had
largely switched to other idols (Bogart, Peck, Lancaster, the new dazzler Audrey
Hepburn). We movie-hooked buddies were age 11 when we heard (July, 1956) that Jerry
Lewis and Dean Martin were ending their act. This felt like an atomic disaster,
a mushroom cloud beyond Ike's control, crushing laughter. Although comedy was getting smarter (Steve
Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Jonathan Winters, Mort Sahl), the giddy gift of Martin
& Lewis would never come again. And no one held a fan base in thrall like Jerry
the Brat, so crazy and loveable (singer Dean was his blithe, canny foil, if not
stooge).
After
the epic rupture, Jerry Lewis took a long time to exit. He departed on Aug. 20,
at 91. His long journey to tabloid fossil celebrity included many mediocre
films, heaps of poor TV, squirm-inducing telethons, spats, illnesses, Percodan
addiction, a TV “reunion” with Dean that was really an ego trip for Frank
Sinatra. But on the gut level where belly laffs rule, Jerry remained the king
of comedy. The shrine custodian of that truth was Martin Scorsese, who cast Lewis
as a shrewd, petulant show-biz god in The
King of Comedy. Subtle at last, Jerry made Robert De Niro seem much too
busy acting.
The
tiresome cliché was that the French loved Jerry, we tolerated him. Nonsense (c’est absurdité). Only Americans of a certain vintage truly appreciated M
& L’s glory. The team was our tonic rebuke to polio, TB, Stalin, McCarthy,
Korea, the Cold War, Abbott and Costello. We felt on top of the world because Jerry
and Dean were on top. After their
split, fame endured. Dean crooned, acted, ruled prime time TV for a while, sported
with Sinatra’s Rat Pack, died in 1995. Jerry, a control freak driven by a rat
pack of neurotic compulsions, became his own kind of movie master (best evidence:
The Bellboy and The Nutty Professor). His allure was lessened by a gain: weight. The
beanpole frame, so essential for his manic goofs and vivid contrast with Dean, filled-out
maturely (and took on a veneer of show-biz smugness). The aging Jerry was less
fun, less likeable, at times a jerk.
What
gave Lewis’s definitive work its slam-bam power was a fearlessness that said: I do it like this – watch me! His
chutzpah went beyond Jewish, it was Olympian (after a decade, Dean’s cocky loner’s
spirit had to break away). Jerry tended to make taste fall on its fancy ass. So
did Dean, for all his swank threads and buttercream cool. As partners they were
the Boffo Boys, although their luster seldom had Sinatra’s swinging brilliance.
Frank, who could also trample taste, found a late-career vanity anthem, My Way. That bugle belch of boastful self-pity
may have more closely suited Lewis, the proud,
cranky wizard of fun who must have increasingly missed the go-for-broke kid he had
been. He was very easy to criticize, but he remains the Jerry of Jerries.
SALAD (A List)
16 Satisfying Heist Movies:
The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), Crime Wave (André de Toth, 1952), The Ladykillers (Alex Mackendrick, 1955),
Bob Le Flambeur (Jean-Pierre
Melville, 1956), The Killing (Stanley
Kubrick, 1956), Big Deal on Madonna
Street (Mario Monicelli, 1958), Seven
Thieves (Henry Hathaway, 1960), Ocean’s
Eleven (Lewis Milestone, 1960), Topkapi
(Jules Dassin, 1964), Robbery (Peter
Yates, 1967), The Getaway (Sam
Peckinpah, 1972), Heat (Michael Mann,
1995), Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson, 1996),
The Thomas Crown Affair (John
McTiernan, 1999) and The Italian Job
(F. Gary Gray, 2003).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Nobody
has been criticized more for The Magnificent
Ambersons than Tim Holt as spoiled, immature George. The Westerns actor was
coached by Orson Welles into a nuanced performance, but suffered from studio
cutting. Holt was “given a difficult role (and) is supposed to remain stiff,
arrogant, somewhat ridiculously old-fashioned. Some of his more powerful scenes
were reshot or cut entirely. As a result, he becomes an exceedingly bland
presence.” How appealing Holt could be in a top movie was made clear six years
later by his Bob Curtin in Treasure of the
Sierra Madre. (Quote from James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
In
1960 Fellini’s La Dolce Vita lifted
Marcello Mastroianni to world stardom. Previously “his niche was playing
amiable pals, disposable lovers, wayward charmers. He wasn’t a virility totem
like Vittorio Gassman, did not flash Rossano Brazzi’s cashmere elegance. He
gained serious attention from Visconti’s White
Nights, but Fellini was his express train to become Italian film’s male
face for over three decades. Sophia Loren was the female face, and she would
exult ‘What a couple we were! Simple, beautiful, real!” (From the Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Jerry
Lewis cooks colorful comedy as Julius Kelp in The Nutty Professor (Paramount Pictures 1963; director Jerry Lewis, cinematographer W. Wallace Kelley).
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