Friday, February 23, 2018

Nosh 99: 'Black Panther,' 'Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool'

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Black Panther and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.



Black Panther
Set largely in Wakanda, an African El Dorado, Black Panther tells of fierce rivalry between the new King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and his baiting challenger (Michael B. Jordan). The hidden realm is both rich and ecological, tribal and high-tech, royal and democratic, leafy-green and cyber-metallic. Don’t turn to history or archeology or Alex Haley for roots. This extravaganza has an archive of back-story, including the original comic book, a 2010 animated series, updates by Te-Nehisi Coates and a 2016 Marvel movie (Captain America: Civil War) where Boseman had a romping audition for his Wakandan destiny.

A lot of press has greeted this show as if it were an overdue Oprah opera, as if black America (and Africa?) finally had a film equivalent of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Director Ryan Coogler employs the solid conviction he brought to Creed and Fruitvale Station. Boseman and Jordan are manfully robust leaders. Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker and Lupita Nyong’o have good strut time. Colorful effects are so dazzling that the movie is its own parade, and the New York Times even had a giddy feature on the lavish, stagey hairstyles (sort of the Vidal Sassoon approach to “black lives matter”). There is general rejoicing, though I add a tiny ribbon of pathos: Eartha Kitt died nine years before she could have purred and preened as Wakandan royalty.
No doubt this is a totem of racial pride, but the black story has a green virus: Marvel money fever. Now a movie empire, still using its comics-born brain, the Marvel machine nearly always falls back on over-used ideas, a lavish mash of hash. So we find a plot hectic with obvious motivations; a car chase we’ve seen in countless mutations; cross-pollination with past and coming movies; lifts from other franchises (a weapons scene is straight outta Bond, not Compton); superheroes with bionic muscles but cardboard dialog; wow women holding statuesque poses; the villain feasting on sadistic fun – here that’s Andy Serkis as the racist British psycho Klaue (claw), hailing his own mayhem as “awesome!”

A white critic should not be too skeptical about a production that may inspire many a black child. After all, at 8 I thrilled to a re-release of King Solomon’s Mines and found tall, majestic Siriaque (as Umpoba, returning king of the lofty Watusi) even more excitingly heroic than “great white hunter” Stewart Granger. That 1950 adventure movie has dated attitudes (notably re: Deborah Kerr). But its green horizons still beckon, and it never lays out a red carpet for gilded purple kitsch.




Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
In her prime time, few actresses had a better decade than Gloria Grahame: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Crossfire (’47), immortal with Bogart in In a Lonely Place (’50), The Bad and the Beautiful (her loveable ditz won a supporting Oscar, ’52), The Greatest Show on Earth (’52), Sudden Fear (’52), the Fritz Lang/Glenn Ford noirs The Big Heat (’53) and Human Desire (’54), and a funny flip of image: Ado Annie in Oklahoma! (’55). Consider also the imposing first decade of Annette Bening: superb as Myra in The Grifters (1990), then ace in Postcards From the Edge (’90), Bugsy (’91), Guilty by Suspicion (’91), Richard III (’95), The American President (’95), Mars Attacks! (’96) and American Beauty (’99).

I would give Grahame the edge, though Bening has had a saner life and a good marriage (she bagged The Beatty!), while Grahame had five flops. Now a karmic kiss has brought these singular beauties together. Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is based on a fond memoir by Pete Turner, an English actor selling furniture when he met Grahame, who was doing a play in Britain near her life’s end. Jamie Bell may never match the boyish sensation of his Billy Elliot, but this layered movie proves he was no fluke. He supports Bening’s Gloria scene by scene, with genuine feeling and tact.

For Bening, Grahame is a capstone role, ripe in physical and emotive courage. She brings out Gloria’s nerve-strung moods without making her a tabloid neurotic. She underplays Gloria’s obsession with her upper lip which led to bad plastic surgeries, but we get the insecurities of a woman both fragile and forceful. Gloria and young Pete had a love affair from 1979 to 1981, and their story is no quaint footnote to Sunset Boulevard or Sweet Bird of Youth. It has the sweat and heat of sexual romance. And there is pathos. Grahame was dying of cancer, wouldn’t admit it, invited Pete to America, and later fled back to Liverpool as a refuge.

Pete’s parents are wonderfully earthbound Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham (who looks back at movie Gloria and smiles with relish: “You knew you’d get sore lips walking her home”). Vanessa Redgrave has a plummy scene as Gloria’s actress mother, reciting from Shakespeare’s Richard II (Gloria’s funny compliment: “Yeah, the Bard’s the nuts, mom”). Director Paul McGuigan polishes grace notes, doesn’t oversell sentiment or suffering, and allows Bening, an innately witty talent, to find the spit and spark in Gloria. Urszula Pontikos’s superbly lighted imagery, using a tight budget, resonates Liverpool, Hollywood and New York without sudsy nostalgia. While there may be overall a slightly gauzy scrim of memory, every soul texture is truthful.

Long ago the brilliant essayist Robert Warshow wrote that no one should leave their self out of the movies that matter. Grahame’s father was an architect (so was mine), and Gloria’s life span (1923-81) ran parallel to my father’s. Gloria’s gutsy, stoical finish reminds me of my mother’s last phase, three years earlier. Bening, who in early scenes has flashes of Monroe’s breathy sexiness, by the end looks more like haggard Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden. It is a small crime that Bening and Bell are not up for Oscars, but never mind. It’s the movie that matters.

SALAD (A List)
Fifteen Terrific Female Noir Performances:
Mary Astor as Brigid in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis in Double Indemnity (1944), Ann Savage as Vera in Detour (1945), Jane Greer as Kathie in Out of the Past (1947), Agnes Moorehead as Madge in Dark Passage (1947), Gloria Grahame as Laurel in In a Lonely Place (1950), Ida Lupino as Mary in On Dangerous Ground (1951), Thelma Ritter as Moe in Pickup on South Street (1953), Marie Windsor as Sherry in The Killing (1956), Kim Novak as Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo (1958), Nina van Pallandt as Eileen in The Long Goodbye (1973), Faye Dunaway as Evelyn in Chinatown (1974), Lily Tomlin as Margo in The Late Show (1975), Annette Bening as Myra in The Grifters (1990), Kim Basinger as Lynn in L.A. Confidential (1997).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Though an outspoken racial progressive, Orson Welles creatively admired film’s founding pioneer D.W. Griffith, whose biggest hit was the epochal (and racist) Birth of a Nation. He met him once, while making Citizen Kane, offering admiration but “uncharacteristically hemming and hawing.” They “stared at each other across a hopeless abyss … ‘There was no place for Griffith in the film industry by 1940,’ Welles said years later. ‘He was an exile in his own town, a prophet without honor, an artist without work. No wonder he hated me.” (Quotes from Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Matthew McConaughey made a big jump forward with 2013’s Arkansas river story Mud, written for him by director Jeff Nichols. With teen Tye Sheridan he had “a virtual blood transfusion of feeling. One of the best boy performances, ever, matches up with film’s best man-in-nature performance since Daniel Day Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, (and) the river seems to rise with Mud’s emotions.” (From the Matthew McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)  

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




Glenn Ford confronts the full-frontal Gloria Grahame in Human Desire (Columbia Pictures, 1954; director Fritz Lang, cinematographer Burnett Guffey).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.



No comments:

Post a Comment