Friday, March 30, 2018

Nosh 103: 'Loveless' & 'Bombshell: Hedy Lamarr


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


APPETIZER: Reviews of Loveless and Bombshell: Hedy Lamarr
Loveless
If you are sick of Trump’s wallow in Putin's pig pit, Loveless will not make you feel much better. This very good Russian film, set in 2012, digs into a disintegrating family. At its bleeding heart is the boy Alexei, 11. Actor Matvey Novikov, despite modest screen time, registers totally. There’s a scene of Alexei convulsing with tears while trying to repress it (he’s had stern Russian lessons in “being a man”), as his parents rip each other like crazed animals. They are selling off the family apartment, and turning to sex (with others) for solace.

Mostly we follow mother Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and father Boris (Alexei Rozin). This is no long, Nordic meditation on the granular follies of marital decay, like Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage. It is a Slavic rite-of-rage and despair. Beautiful Zhenya is arrogant, spiteful and shallow, looking for salvation from a rich lover. Boris, a sullen bear, appears stupefied on some cheap soul vodka of fury and depression, though enjoying a young, pregnant lover. He is less comfortable than Zhenya with dumping Alexei into a state orphanage, “then the army.” Around them all weather swirls, and the beauty of winter woods taunts the high-rise slabs of dull housing. Director Andrey Zvyagintsev has a gem cutter’s eye, slow-pacing many shots for sustained mood. Of his fine actors, Natalya Potopova as the snarling, bitter grandmother is like a busted Stalin tank of dead Soviet hopes.

When Alexei vanishes, the parents show guilty concern.  Loveless, which has a scene almost lifted from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, becomes a rough parallel to Kurosawa’s kidnap-and-manhunt film High and Low. The Russian cops slog dutifully, but they never rival the Japanese brains (and suspense) of that 1963 masterwork. Pay attention to a brief, quiet scene as snow falls at a bus stop, and you may get a clue to Alexei’s fate. This somewhat Dostoevskian movie delivers human pain without softening the blows.



Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
In the zoo park of fauna, flora and fantasia that is Hollywood, Hedy Lamarr was her own species. As an Austrian teen from a Jewish banking family (Judaism had little grip on her), Hedy went from “starring” in the nudist film Ecstasy (simulated orgasm and wink shots became bootleg thrills for decades), to marrying a Jewish munitions maker in biz with Hitler and Mussolini. Bored with him, hating Nazis, she fled Vienna for London, then hopped on the liner Normandie where her mysterious allure wowed everyone in first-class, including MGM chief Louis B. Mayer. When they docked in New York, photographers pounced on Hedy’s sultry, soul-eyed, snow-skinned image.

Alexandra Dean’s documentary Bombshell zooms from baroque (esprit de Kenneth Anger) to rococo (esprit de John Waters). Mayer renamed her Lamarr and, being a crass moralist, considered her a whore for mass exploitation. No trained actor, Hedy dazzled when Charles Boyer got her into Algiers. Though few Lamarr movies were good, her poignantly seductive eyes couldn’t hide an innate, friendly playfulness. Her brains performed more privately. Hedy’s hobby was invention (as a kid she rebuilt a music box).  Howard Hughes, her inadequate lover but fellow techie, respected her ideas for airplane design. In 1942 she and composer George Antheil invented a “frequency-hopping” system to securely guide torpedoes without detection. In time their insights would spawn better rockets, then advance WiFi and much more, but the Navy buried Hedy’s patent while secretly exploiting her ideas. Her movie producing (three films) also brought no money or glory.

With its tasty scrap-stew of clips and interviews (friends, children, Robert Osborne, Mel Brooks, Diane Kruger and, with invaluable audiotapes, Lamarr devotee Fleming Meeks), Bombshell must detonate. We see the coming smash: decline after Samson and Delilah (of Cecil B. De Mille she said “he’s so bad he’s almost good”), dud marriages, fading looks, fortune blown, beloved children often bewildered, a debt-lost Aspen ski lodge she built out of Austrian nostalgia, tabloid headlines, plastic surgeries (her suggestions, says one doc, advanced the profession!). MGM’s use (call it the Garland Regimen) of speed pills for her 60-hour studio weeks led to addiction, mood swings and, finally, seclusion. Modest limelight came before death in 2000, for this smart, brave and creative woman.         

SALAD (A List)
The Best Performances of 27 Great Beauties:
Lillian Gish (The Wind), Greta Garbo (Camille), Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard), Louise Brooks (Pandora’s Box), Katharine Hepburn (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel), Marlene Dietrich (Destry Rides Again), Hedy Lamarr (Algiers),Vivien Leigh (A Streetcar Named Desire), Ingrid Bergman (Notorious), Rita Hayworth (Gilda), Ava Gardner (Pandora and the Flying Dutchman), Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not), Alida Valli (The Third Man), Elizabeth Taylor (Giant), Maureen O’Hara (The Quiet Man), Audrey Hepburn (The Nun’s Story), Grace Kelly (Rear Window), Sophia Loren (A Special Day), Marilyn Monroe (Bus Stop), Kim Novak (Vertigo), Sharmila Tagore (The World of Apu), Anita Ekberg (La Dolce Vita), Catherine Deneuve (Belle de Jour), Michelle Pfeiffer (The Russia House), Kim Basinger (L.A. Confidential) and Penelope Cruz (Volver).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Grudgingly half-invited by Orson Welles, gossip bee Hedda Hopper buzzed into a 1941 rough-cut showing of Citizen Kane at RKO. Early-deadline writers were dazzled, “but not Hopper. To the columnist, always eager to rush to hasty judgment, there was no question that Kane was in reality William Randolph Hearst. ‘She was violently angry,’ reported publicist Herbert Drake. ‘What I saw appalled me,’ Hopper explained years later. ‘It was an impudent, murderous trick, even for the boy genius, to perpetrate on a newspaper giant.” (If only Welles had wooed her with a cameo, as Billy Wilder cagily did later, for his Hollywood vivisection Sunset Boulevard. Quotes from Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Humphrey Bogart never acted with more feral intensity than when his prospector Fred C. Dobbs turns viciously on partner Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Dobbs even spooks himself. No Dostoevskian pity here, just thorny brush and fire-scarred shadows in Fred’s Mexican hell. He rants and cackles, roping his own gallows of guilt: ‘Conscience! What a thing. If you believe you’ve got a conscience, it’ll pester you to death!’ Six years later, Brando agonized in On the Waterfront: ‘That conscience’ll drive you nuts.” (From the Bogart/Treasure 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.

Hubert de Givenchy, master of Parisian couture whose supreme swan was Audrey Hepburn, died at 91 on March 10. Here they are in 1950s prime.

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

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