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.
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