Nosh 81: 'Mother!,' 'Neither Wolf Nor Dog'

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Mother! and Neither Wolf Nor Dog

Mother! 

The movie opens with Jennifer Lawrence’s face on fire, like a Barbie-cue doll. We guess that Mother! isn’t going to be lots of fun. Darren Aronofsky also directed Black Swan, which I loathed. The creepy ballet fantasy won Natalie Portman an Oscar (beating Lawrence in her breakthrough, Winter’s Bone). But never mind Oscars, let’s talk concepts.

Aronofsky, who also gave Mickey Rourke his glory revival with The Wrestler, is a kitsch dynamo. He confuses ding-dong concepts with ideas, and silly shocks with emotions. He puts Lawrence to work as Mother, even though she’s not yet a mom. She sure is working, rehabbing a big Victorian house that must be the future Bates Hotel (“ho” as in horror). It isn’t so much the blood in the floorboards, or the bizarre toad, or the icky thing in the toilet that bothers Mother, it’s all the collateral mess. As her new “paradise” goes to hell, she’s like a demented renovator on Love It or List It.  Her home obsession annoys her husband, a poetic genius now bereft of muse (he turns for inspiration to a lustrous crystal). Impotence is a tough role for Javier Bardem, who rams scenes with his great, Picasso bull’s head.

Ed Harris plays a coy, weird visitor, dying from smoking, and Michelle Pfeiffer is his wife, dying to steal scenes from Lawrence. The former Catwoman claws the younger beauty with “You’re not going to be so young forever.” Family violence somehow sparks Bardem into renewed virility, Lawrence gets pregnant, and the script spawns a litter of bad ideas. We detect fragments of the Book of Genesis, the mythic system of C.G. Jung, and about half the dumb papers written for middle-school English classes.

Aronofsky’s reliance on close shots by a dizzy camera builds to panic, then pandemonium. Bardem, thrilled by his revived cojones and a new poem, lets in a horde of crazed fans. They trash the home (this is not a spoiler; the movie continually spoils itself). A riotous orgy escalates to fire, terror, even symbolic cannibalism. Conceptually Mother! is all over the place, but nowhere. Maybe not since George C. Scott gave the world The Savage Is Loose has serious talent so ludicrously embarrassed itself.  

Neither Wolf Nor Dog

The “white rage” fueling Trumpism should take a respite from angry self-pity. One way to gain perspective is to think hard about Native Americans. Start by watching Steven Lewis Simpson’s cheaply made but finely observed Neither Wolf Nor Dog. Kent Nerburn scripted from his 1996 novel, about a writer (yep, Nerburn) who is asked by a tribal elder, Dan, to come to the Lakota Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Dan offers memories and wisdom for Kent to write a book. Kent faces testing travels on “the res,” where stark landscapes are foregrounded by family love but also poverty, alcoholism, and a chicken shack called Buster’s Last Stand.

The leisurely pace builds pressure. Uneasy, self-doubting Kent begins to understand. This road movie, mainly about tragic Indian history, has very intimate tensions, especially when Kent deals with his Lakota driver, old Dan’s bluntly angry friend Grover (Richard Ray Whitman, with a touch of Jack Palance). Not even Brando, famously a friend of Native Americans, could have kept Kent from seeming rather like a test tube in which latent white guilt is shaken into honest, emotional shame. But actor Christopher Sweeney is very credible in absorbing the lessons, including a haunted visit to the cemetery of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre.

The film’s special treasure and enabler of insight is David Bald Eagle as Dan. If you could overlap Chief Dan George in Little Big Man, Russell Means in Last of the Mohicans and Sam Jaffe’s High Lama in Lost Horizon, you’d come near this small, round monument to endurance. His eyes and voice express the pained heart of a conquered people whose pride will never surrender. No tom-tom hokum, no rhetoric, just straight news. Bald Eagle saw the film before dying at 97 this summer, and was rightly pleased.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Horror-Fright Films of Lasting Quality, in order of arrival:

Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932), Island of Lost Souls (Kenton, 1932), Cat People (Tourneur, 1942), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956), Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1960), Village of the Damned (Rilla, 1960), The Innocents (Clayton, 1961), Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), The Shining (Kubrick, 1980), Cronos (Del Toro, 1993) and In My Skin (De Van, 2002). Bonus No. 13: Phil Kaufman’s fine 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Even Big O sometimes faltered: “Orson Welles described a time he was filming Touch of Evil and felt he was flailing as both actor and director. When the camera was on he kept flubbing his lines. His co-star Akim Tamiroff was in the scene, just off camera. When Orson yelled ‘Cut’ on his own scene, Tamiroff came over to him and whispered, ‘You’re the man.’  That’s all it took. Welles said he never looked back from that moment. The praise clinched it. This is how he put it: ‘You have to make the actor believe he is better than he is. That is the job. More than confidence, give him arrogance.” (From Jeffrey Tambor’s new memoir Are You Anybody?)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Perhaps Akim Tamiroff’s finest work for Welles was as Bloch, the sad, stooging client of the advocate Hastler (Welles) in The Trial, a Kafka tour-de-force (and farce): “Bloch squirms, bug-on-pin. Hastler confides mentioning his case to a judge, but ‘in these matters there are so many conflicting opinions that the confusion is impenetrable.’ His tone is almost deadly, and poor Bloch falls to his knees. Joseph K, appalled, tries to lift him as Hastler demands ‘Who is your advocate?’ Bloch squeals ‘You, you!’ and crawls over the huge bed to kiss his monstrous master’s hands. Bloch’s rear rises, as if mooning his own abasement.” (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) attempts to steer Quinlan (Orson Welles) in Touch of Evil (Universal, 1958; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Russell Metty).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 80: 'Close Encounters of Third Kind,' Harry Dean Stanton

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Almost 40 years ago, in November, 1977, I enjoyed the most star-gazing press preview of my life. Afterwards I called home to Chicago from New York, as thrilled as a space visitor. Sure, New York is always another planet, but Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one-of-a-kind, a celestial trip that gives us a cosmic lift without leaving Earth. Of course it’s really about earthlings, not space visitors, and remains Spielberg’s most elating and high-spirited movie.

I went to our best plex for the film’s revival, wanting to see it again on a big screen (smaller framings dim the luster). I got smacked again by Spielberg’s youthful power. His confident sense of entrancement, as people try to decipher why UFOs are popping up like cheerful light bandits, even in Muncie, Indiana, pulls us in at once. There is a brilliant French scientist, played by that humane beacon Francois Truffaut, who lucidly collates the sightings and sounds (the alien signals become John Williams’s inspired theme, worthy of 2001: A Tinkerbell).There are dazzled hicks, stunned peons, Indian chanters and Indiana guy Roy, played by Richard Dreyfuss (Roy’s wide appeal probably clinched the actor’s Oscar a few months later, for the sudsy romance The Goodbye Girl).

A close alien sighting, using a truck with the visual wit of Spielberg’s early film Duel, sunburns half of Roy’s face and colonizes his imagination. He compulsively builds a mystery mound (with shaving cream, then mashed potatoes, then soil), which will lead him on a frantic dreamer’s drive to Devil’s Peak, Wyoming. Spielberg turns cartoonish when Roy rips up the garden and house, shocking his wife (Teri Garr). But his obsessive quest carries us along, as he and other believers converge at the peak to welcome the giant “mother ship” along with Truffaut and government reps. If you argue that Spielberg oversells the big light show and the escalating music, you’re outside the movie without a ticket, as sad as an alienated alien.

Close Encounters, superbly photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond (who had done another Aladdin job with light in The Long Goodbye), became pure magic for me with little Cary Guffey, 3. As beam-eyed Barry, who sees the luminous alien craft as fabulous toys and playmates, he runs in bliss below the stars, childhood’s perfect envoy. Spielberg touches genius with the scene of Barry’s abduction in a fiery visitation both playful and terrifying, like a modern fairy tale. Guffey is forever this enchanting mascot of the movie’s myth (add depth of love from Melinda Dillon as his mother). The Barry scenes and the grand finale move me much more than E.T. One can fathom why Spielberg had to reach for work like Schindler’s List and Lincoln. but his talent was at its wide-eyed best when he brought the heavens to Indiana and Wyoming. He made gaping up at the mother ship the perfect metaphor for our old habit, gazing up at the movies.

You can be cynical about the big product plugs, and call this show a gaga party for moonbeams. But remember that the film came right after Vietnam and Watergate, and that in 1977 Jimmy Carter was providing a sort of Jiminy Cricket hopefulness. Now, in the  time of Harvey and Irma and Don and Vlad, Close Encounters seems from another time and better world. If you go to this thrilling entertainment for escape, hoping that benign aliens and giddy dreamers can lift you from doldrums, you’re no fool. Revel in the rise.   

SALAD (A List)

Harry Dean Stanton’s Ten Best Roles in a long film career, by my estimation: Travis in Paris, Texas (1984), Bud in Repo Man (1984), Jerry in Straight Time (1978), Asa in Wise Blood (1979), Philo in The Black Marble (1980), Kiser in Where the Lilies Bloom (1974), Jack in Pretty in Pink (1986), Johnnie in Wild at Heart (1990), Brain in Escape From New York (1981), Jack in Cockfighter (1974). And, of course, his best victim role: Brett in Alien (1979).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is taking the week off, and not drinking.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Singular actor and presence Harry Dean Stanton died on Sept. 15 at 91, two months after the death at 84 of Sam Shepard, author of Stanton’s finest role (in ‘Paris, Texas’): “Wim Wenders worried about Harry Dean’s age (he turned 57, Nastassja Kinski was 24), and then felt ‘it makes no difference, in fact it’s better.’ Stanton and Sam Shepard bonded over drinks in Santa Fe, Harry telling him that ‘I wanted to play something of beauty or sensitivity.’ Getting the unfinished script, he accepted pronto, craving to play Travis Clay Henderson. Wenders believed he ‘was frightened of playing a lead. The great thing for him was Travis’s innocence, even if it’s rather abstract … he has managed to retain that certain innocence.’ Dean Stockwell saw that ‘Harry had enormous difficulties because all the workings of character were internal,’ and helped Harry Dean find his groove. The result streams, yet ‘seamless’ is too smooth a term for both the process and the result. Truth rises as vents of inner pressure, a tri-tonality of silence, speech, music. After the shoot, Stanton happily told reporter Patrick Goldstein of ‘finally playing the part I wanted to play … It’s the story of my life we’re talking about.” (From the Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Harry Dean Stanton in his great romantic role, with Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas (Road Movie, 1984; director Wim Wenders, cinematographer Robby Müller).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 79: 'Tulip Fever' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Review of Tulip Fever

When you attain fame and win two supporting Oscars (for     

Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained) by nailing Quentin Tarantino lines with an Austro-German accent, the lack of such crackling lines can be a handicap. Still, Christoph Waltz is echt pro. Playing a sturdy Dutch burgher in Tulip Fever, with only a few sharp-tongued remarks, doesn’t stop him from being the best actor in the movie.

What an odd, spotty, almost sophisticated movie it is. A throwback to old studio history pictures, when bulging cargos of plot were hauled across a shining Bijou screen in galleons of melodrama. In this busy plot, the rich Amsterdam trader Cornelis (Waltz), mourning his family lost to sickness, virtually buys himself a virgin bride, Sophia (Alicia Vikander). Fresh from a convent orphanage, where the head nun (Judi Dench) has the sly cunning of a Vatican-worthy Gordon Gekko, Sophia always looks a bit underfed. She can’t get pregnant, maybe because aging Cornelis has trouble perking up his “little soldier” (his phallic metaphor – a wry wink, but not a Tarantino zing).

Cornelis is cuckolded by his (and Sophia’s) young portrait painter, Jan, who is no Rembrandt or Vermeer. But Dane DeHaan does have facial echoes of a Leonardo: Di Caprio, circa 1995. There is a parallel plotline about Sophia’s servant and a bold, studly fishmonger. The painter plunges into the Dutch tulip craze, circa 1637, a speculation fever for exotic flowers with rare color striations (caused by a plant virus). The more intimate plunges of Jan and Sophia feature limited acting but lovely vistas of nudity, enshrined in what Hollywood used to call “Rembrandt lighting.” Cornelis becomes both a gullible dupe and an endearing hopeful, although Waltz often seems half-buried in his fabulous neck ruff.

Playwright Tom Stoppard, adapting a popular novel, may have let down director Justin Chadwick with his juicy but hectic script. They should have studied how Antonioni filmed stock trading mania in Eclipse, and how Jacques Feyder piled on Old World exhuberance in Carnival in Flanders. It doesn’t help that lean, pretty Vikander is less vitally sexy and light-catching than Holliday Grainger (the high-spirited servant Maria). Still, there are splendid sets wrapped around a canal, impressive photography by Eigil Bryld, and even a fat, drunken Bacchus on a donkey. Climaxes plop into place with an “OK, now I get it” resolution. Waltz is quite fine, though he isn’t starring in Rembrandt. Charles Laughton did so brilliantly, in 1936, but didn’t get an Oscar nomination.  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, Janet Leigh has a special spark that she doesn’t quite have even in Hitchcock’s Psycho, and she explained why: “We rehearsed for two weeks prior to shooting (and) rewrote most of the dialog, all of us, which was also unusual. Mr. Welles wanted our input. It was a collective effort, and there was such a surge of creativity, of energy. You could feel the pulse growing … felt you were inventing something. Mr. Welles wanted to seize every moment. He didn’t want even one bland moment. He made you feel involved in a wonderful event.” (From Marc Eliot’s new book Charlton Heston).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

It could well be the funniest American movie, but Mel Brooks’s The Producers received, like most comedies, modest attention at the Academy Awards: “Zero Mostel got no Oscar nomination. Gene Wilder lost, as supporting actor, to Jack Albertson in The Subject Was Roses, but Mel provided him with excellent compensations, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Brooks won the 1968 original script prize, probably for the bravura of his risk-taking. Surpassing any award was this puff by Gene Shalit, which justified his entire career as a TV blurbster: “No one will be seated in the last 88 minutes of The Producers. They’ll all be rolling around on the floor.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Kindle, Nook and Amazon.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Mischa Auer (left) and Robert Arden eyeball each other in Mr. Arkadin (Mercury Productions, 1955; director Orson Welles, cinematographer Jean Bourgoin).  

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 78: 'Wind River,' 'Columbus' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Wind River and Columbus

Wind River

With his compact, rather beaten-up fist of a face, Jeremy Renner is exactly right for Corey Lambert, his best role since breaking through in films with The Hurt Locker. Corey is a federal tracker and hunter (wolves, big cats) on the raw slopes of the Wind River Reservation in Montana. Looking for a mountain lion, he finds a murdered young woman’s remains. She is the daughter of a proud but now broken Native American (her fate echoes a tragedy in Corey’s own past). Gil Birmingham as the grieving father, Martin, rises next to Renner. When did you last see a big Indian man cry in a film? Martin is not Iron Eyes Cody, shedding a symbolic tear in a TV commercial.

The writer and director is Taylor Sheridan, who scripted Sicario and Hell or High Water. In this movie so full of pain and winter, the only cop-show touch is Corey guiding and helping a young FBI agent, though Elizabeth Olsen doesn’t flounder into tenderfoot clichés as she absorbs his lessons (“This isn’t the land of back-up, Jane. This is the land of you’re on your own”).We know there will be primal violence, yet even the rape scene doesn’t unhinge the story’s intricate balance of elements. Wind River, “inspired by actual events,” is a sort of Western with snowmobiles (just one horse). It is also a stark lancing of family tragedy and, without pushing, a view of Native American life as a rustic depresson where exploited poverty easily tips into drink, drugs and crime (the key villains are white).

Renner is exactly the man needed for this duty. Without macho brag and strut, he has the intuitive, manly presence that Randolph Scott and Robert Mitchum once had in the high saddle. The film would make a fine partner with Track of the Cat, William Wellman’s strange 1954 Western in which Mitchum hunted, and was hunted by, an almost mythic cougar. Wind River delves into people, astutely invading the inner wilds that so often bewilder them.     

Columbus

Curious, how modern architecture fits into movies: for futuristic menace (Metropolis) or exaltation (Things to Come), for vaulting ambition (The Fountainhead) or high-top luxury (North by Northwest), for morally suspect status (La Notte), for satirical wit (Playtime), for enigmatic display (Contempt). Famous structures resonate oppressively in Blade Runner but frame hopes of transformation in Gattaca. Also powerful are splendid documentaries like Ken Burns’s Frank Lloyd Wright, Yeshiro Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí and My Architect, Nathaniel Kahn’s brave tribute to his father Louis.

Which brings a curiosity: Columbus, not about the explorer – has there ever been a good movie about him? – but Columbus, Indiana. The modest town (pop. 44,000) has a constellation of “mid-century modern” edifices that place it on the aesthetic pilgrimage map. Cinephile and video essayist Kogonada’s first feature, set in Columbus, tells about the young architectural guide Casey, loyally bound to her recovering (addiction) mom. And a visiting Korean translator, Jin, who feels alienated from his stricken (comatose) father, an architectural scholar. Walking and talking, they twine like tendrils as she shows him Columbus and they mull the buildings. Notably masterworks by Finland’s Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero, but also a covered bridge, an old inn, even an alley. And each other.

The shifting perspectives of mood and challenge, of imposing buildings and embracing sites, has the kind of circling, space-shaped drama you can explore in big Japanese screen paintings. One-named Kogonada and his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, lace angles and details and surprises without plot rigging. Excellent Haley Lu Richardson’s searching growth as Casey is stimulated by the more worldly Jin of John Cho, far from Harold and Kumar. The film is an elegant drafting board on which all the lines connect (as in the recent, architecturally smart Paterson). The characters and the elegant art can lure you, like Columbus crossing an inland sea both provincial and cosmopolitan.    

SALAD (A List)

Ten Movies That Impressively Use Modern Architecture

(with director and year): North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), A Summer Place (Delmer Daves, 1959), The Bellboy (Jerry Lewis, 1960), Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964), Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967), The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975), Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997), My Architect (Nathaniel Kahn, 2003) and Visual Acoustics (Eric Bricker, 2008).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles played only Claudius in Hamlet, but on BBC TV in 1963 he “and Peter O’Toole discussed Hamlet. While O’Toole proposes a textually underfunded theory that Gertrude is a lesbian, Welles propounds something more interesting. That the principal fact about Hamlet is that he is a genius, a Mozartean prodigy of thought and feeling out of step with his own world, (an idea) which cannot help spilling thought and insight. It is a very Wellesian insight, a true one, and a significant instruction for the whole play.” (From writer-director Dominic Dromgoole’s new book Hamlet Globe to Globe). 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Alec Guinness as the painter Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth gives a wonderful art lesson to a philistine friend, staring at a Jimson painting: “I’ll show you how to look at a picture … Don’t look at it. Feel it with your eyes. First feel the shapes in the flat areas, like patterns. Then feel it in the round. Feel all the smooth and sharp edges, the lights and the shades, the cools and the warms. Now feel the chair, the bathtub … the woman. Not any old tub or woman, but the tub of tubs, the woman of women.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth 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.

Sanctuary ceiling of Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church, seen in Columbus (Front Row, 2017; director Kogonada, cinematographer Elisha Christian).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 77: 'Logan Lucky,' Jerry Lewis & More

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).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.