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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