Nosh 178: ' A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,' 'The Two Popes' & More

David Elliott

         

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

(Note: Nosh 179 will appear on Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.)

We’re “dressed for church” this week, with a movie about two popes, and another uniting two secular saints of popular media, Tom Hanks and Fred Rogers. Happy holidays!

APPETIZER (Reviews: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and The Two Popes)                    

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

After seeing the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in 2018, I thought: very good, but that’s it for me and Fred Rogers. I grew up in the Roy Rogers TV era, and my kids would be attuned to Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Fred Rogers, a religious man turned TV educator with very special gifts, a musical man who found the best rhythm and tone for talking to kids with problems on his children’s show from Pittsburgh, was also an inventive pioneer, commercially astute without merchandising himself. Sixteen years after departure at 74, he is a modern legend, now reincarnated by Tom Hanks. Marielle Heller, who directed Melissa McCarthy to an Oscar bid for her charmingly cranky forger in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, might well bring that honor to the multi-prized Hanks, for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Hanks, Heller and the writers tickle some tears without dipping into the corn syrup of old Hollywood tributes like Pride of the Yankees (Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig), Swanee River (Don Ameche as Stephen Foster) and The Story of Will Rogers (Will Jr. echoing his dad). The movie’s ace card, along with Hanks, is compression. Rather than trot through Fred’s bio (which Morgan Neville’s documentary did very well), this salute centers on Rogers lifting the Esquire profile writer Lloyd Vogel from sneering New York cynicism and acidic rage about his alcoholic father. Fred embraces him with the supple, caring decency that kids sensed intuitively. Much of the pressure on Hanks is relieved by having the adult reactions of excellent actors Matthew Rhys as Vogel, Susan Keleshi Watson as Vogel’s  baby-laden wife, and terrific Chris Cooper as the jarring but finally teachable father.

The story only wobbles in a surreal, confusing scene of Vogel imagining himself as a tiny visitor to the famous TV set, as Fred looms like a godly Gulliver. Fred dispenses calm advice, slightly fuzzy homilies like rescue messages from a centered, pre-Trumped world. We can accept a whole restaurant falling into silence when Fred asks his new, anxious friend to join in a mute minute of reflection. The movie really pauses for a whole minute of pensive silence. If Hanks does not exactly nail the nerdy-pastor quality of Fred’s voice, he has the aura of loving sense and gentlemanly authority. When Fred plays piano (Schumann) with his wife we are spellbound again. Hanks’s work is lovely but not love-me, not a votive candle for him as the Most Adorable Great Guy Since Jimmy Stewart. I sure can’t picture Hanks in Vertigo, but Stewart could never have matched his Mr. Rogers.

The Two Popes

Heavens Above!, a 1963 comedy about a dear English priest (Peter Sellers) who is finally shot into space because the Anglican hierarchy considers his pastoral ideals too naïve and risky, is the oddest “religious” film I’ve ever seen (also quite funny). After 56 years it has a very chatty rival, The Two Popes. A kind of papal peekaboo, a docu-drama with superbly faked Vatican settings abetted by news clips, it examines the relation between Pope Francis (played by Jonathan Pryce) and his stern Bavarian predecessor Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins). Benedict’s stunning 2013 resignation lifted Jorge Bergoglio, Cardinal of Buenos Aires, to become the more liberal and loveable Francis. Not a Catholic, I was moved and bemused. No other film has two aged pontiffs sitting in a lovely room behind Michelangelo’s glorious Sistine Chapel, eating take-out pizza and sipping Fantas before Benedict confides his dark night of the soul and ritually confesses to the startled cardinal. The resulting transfer of power would thunder-clap the Catholic world. Is this history, or fantasy, or a kind of endearingly purgative prayer?

Pryce, sweet but no plaster Jesus, recalls in flashback Jorge’s own long, dark night (tricky dealings with the Argentine junta that persecuted his “radical” priests), and Juan Minujin is very fine as the younger Bergoglio. Hopkins, wearing creaky age and a German accent with flinty precision, provides much of the dramatic tension that makes the conversations more human than pontifical. Director Fernando Meirelles surprises us with abrupt jumps, as he did in City of God. Writer Anthony McCarten flashes the kind of blithe cleverness that propelled his bio-pics about Freddy Mercury (Bohemian Rhapsody), Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything) and Winston Churchill (Darkest Hour). In a quick, glancing way the picture raises the crisis of priestly pedophilia. Mostly we savor Hopkins and Pryce as they shape the challenging friction and then fraternal bond of the lonely, intellectual, primly Benedictine German and the modest, tender-hearted, Jesuit (but truly Franciscan) Argentinean. I will not be converting, but these  are two remarkable men. 

SALAD (A List)

The next list, my 12 Best Movies of 2019, will appear on Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Though never a pope, the non-Catholic Orson Welles did play wily Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann’s A Man For All Seasons, his red-robed bulk truly filling the wide screen. He was not voluble about it to Peter Bogdanovich: “That came right after the Casino Royale caper, so you can imagine how grateful I was to be associated with something decent. I enjoyed acting with Paul Scofield. A wonderful day – that’s all it took.” (From the Welles/Bogdanovich This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

No actor was more subtle than Alec Guinness, whose artist Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth “has a sexual forwardness rare for Alec. He slyly spoofed the machismo of military men, taking that to a high level in Tunes of Glory. He admired alpha-male friends like Jack Hawkins, Bill Holden and Harry Andrews, and envied Richard Burton’s stellar wallop. Piers Paul Read’s biography suggests a closeted gay or bi impulse, but never finds the closet key. Possibly Alec didn’t either, letting the dress-up of acting reveal the ribbons but hide the risks. One can’t imagine a brazen ‘man’s man’ being half so good at depicting Jimson.” (From the Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

On Dec. 12 actor Danny Aiello died at 86. His best film work included Ruby, Moonstruck and (above) Sal the pizza man in Do the Right Thing, in which he is seen between John Turturro and Richard Edson (Universal Pictures 1989; director Spike Lee, d.p. Ernest Dickerson).

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Nosh 177: 'The Irishman', 'The Aeronauts' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Irishman and The Aeronauts)                     

The Irishman

Unlike many towns, mine got a theatrical run of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (bless the Bijou). On the big screen it’s definitely a movie, though taffy-stretched for “epic” TV streaming (three hours, 29 minutes). On a home screen, where I saw it again on Netflix, it seems more uneven, episodic and time-ticking. How Scorsese is it? Very. Top Scorsese? No. It’s a Marty Gras mob rally, and something of a bloated scrapbook. Despite Thelma Schoonmaker’s expert editing there is seldom the potent wallop of Jonathan Hensleigh’s Scorsesean Kill the Irishman (2011).

But Marty has the old gang! Robert De Niro is East Coast Irish hustler turned syndicate gofer, then killer Frank Sheeran. Joe Pesci, sprung from golfing retirement, plays Frank’s Mafia “nice” but icy mentor Russ Bufalino. Original Marty star Harvey Keitel is hood Angelo Bruno (make that Mini Cameo). The royal recruit is Al Pacino, preening as infamous Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa, the charismatic autocrat who got “whacked,” possibly by Frank Sheeran, his bodyguard buddy. Around them is a rogue storm of mostly ugly crooks and creeps. The veteran stars got flashback help from digital “youthing” (no, not Pesci’s “yutes” in My Cousin Vinny). Still, as Steve Zaillian’s script hatchet opens up the rotted wood with abrupt transitions, info bulletins and manly blasts of macho double-speak, these guys are mostly just old. De Niro wears his sturdy, upholstered flesh well, anchoring everything as Frank, doomed to realize that serving two corrupt overlords (Russ and Jimmy) will make him a Judas. As he rots, Frank shows cool nerve, low cunning, few scruples and blank silence for his family. Morally the story is a cesspool, an ash-hole of toxic despair. The almost mute Sphinx of judgment is Frank’s daughter Peggy (when grown, Anna Paquin). Her X-ray stares are unforgiving, and pity is on short rations.

Stride with Scorsese in his goombah work boots and you find predictable rewards: vulgar restaurants, barbaric thugs, mob wives like potted plants, arias of f-talk, croon tunes (salute to Jerry Vale), big cars to die in (don’t take the front seat!) and a brutal hit parade – “Crazy Joe” Gallo has a stunningly fast finish, while Hoffa’s exit gets a long, meditative prelude. Era markers flash: the Albert Anastasia hit, JFK in confetti, Bay of Pigs, Nixon at golf, Dallas ’63. For comedy there is non-boozer Hoffa’s love of ice cream. A solemn shot of Umberto’s Clam House is followed by one of equal piety for the WTC towers. Pesci, using his age superbly, becomes the toughest little clot of cynical conniving since Lee Strasberg in Godfather II. Pacino is not truck-built for Hoffa like Jack Nicholson in Hoffa (1992), yet he is awfully good at bristling, impatient egotism (the Trucker’s Best Friend figured he could beat the mob and the feds).

This pizza is stuffed with old tabloid headlines (a 1992 slice, thinner but juicy, was John Mackenzie’s Ruby, with Danny Aiello oddly touching as Oswald assassin Jack Ruby). The Irishman attains some visceral grip, yet in the last half hour it becomes TV wallpaper, a dull mood-drip of Frank’s dazed, wintry guilt, with a green casket his last gasp of Irish cockiness. Jack Goldsmith, a writer who has turned over many rocks on Hoffa’s death, believes with key FBI agents that Sheeran did not himself cap Hoffa. Well, as the prevailing lingo would say: wha-duh fuh. A necro-nostalgic exhumation, this saga is no genuine comedown for Scorsese, despite being caught in the Netflix net (streaming 24/7 also involves the choking of theaters). No pro lasts in movies without making many deals. But does his spirit sag because he has not equaled Coppola’s The Godfather? “Never put a fish in the car” has a fine ring, but it doesn’t equal “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” (Footnote: This retro crime cafeteria has won the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best movie of 2019. Wha-duh fuh.)
 

The Aeronauts

One of my boyhood thrills was seeing Fogg (David Niven) and Passepartout (Cantinflas) aloft in a balloon over Paris and then the glistening Pyrenees, in Around the World in 80 Days. Mike Todd’s hit, in essence a deluxe travelog, was named Oscar’s best movie of 1956 (few watch it now, but the bravura end-credits are still witty). The Aeronauts uses elements from Richard Holmes’s book Falling Upwards, mostly a gutsy 1862 flight in a coal-gas balloon by England’s James Gleisher and Henry Coxwell. More than Todd’s episodic epic, it has the Victorian storybook charm of the Jules Verne adventures. Eager, red-faced Eddie Redmayne has the role of young scientist Gleisher, seeking to fathom weather by rising high. Felicity Jones, as Amelia Wren, has womanized Coxwell’s job as the bold pilot. Her mourning a dead husband, the balloonatic Pierre, is based on the French spouse of English lighter-than-air pioneer Sophie Blanchard.

Director Tom Harper (of the BBC’s War and Peace) and adapter Jack Thorne make it all work. From the entry of plucky, gung-ho Amelia, with dog and fireworks, the film treats early aerial science as retro but fresh entertainment. CGI enhancements of sky, storm, clouds and a Turner-worthy London sustain beautifully the seven mile rise and then descent. Increasingly cold high-sky spaces are poetic, as when the balloon’s shadow, circled by a rainbow aureole, is seen on a radiant cloud. You might wonder about limited clothing and no parachutes (Gleisher was a fanatic to cut cargo weight). This movie achieves genuine wonder and daring, without camping into ye olde tech-kitsch like Irwin Allen’s silly Verne lark Five Weeks in a Balloon. It is much closer to the fable power of Albert Lamorisse’s Parisian classic The Red Balloon. Amelia pulls off nearly all of the rugged derring-do, so if you have girls from about 8 on up, take them (boys, too).   

SALAD (A List)

My 15 Favorite Gangster Movies

Marvels of organized crime (with star, director, year):

The Godfather (Marlon Brando, Coppola, 1972), Point Blank (Lee Marvin, Boorman, 1967), Scarface (Paul Muni, Hawks, 1932), Drunken Angel (Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa, 1948), White Heat (James Cagney, Walsh, 1949), Casino (Robert De Niro, Scorsese, 1995), Little Caesar (Edward G. Robinson, LeRoy, 1931), Ruby (Danny Aiello, Mackenzie, 1992), Le Samourai (Alain Delon, Melville, 1967), Godfather Part II (Robert De Niro, Coppola, 1974), Key Largo (Bogart/Robinson, Huston, 1948), Al Capone (Rod Steiger, Wilson, 1959), Eastern Promises (Viggo Mortensen, Cronenberg, 2007), Mafioso (Alberto Sordi, Lattuada, 1962) and Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, Baron, 1961).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

If Frank Sheeran was a Judas to Hoffa, he certainly never heard the Judas take of Orson Welles: “I think that Judas was the most passionately committed disciple, and that he betrayed Jesus in order to fulfill the prophecies. Well, that’s my theory. I think he took the 30 pieces of silver to convince the Romans that it was a genuine sellout. I think he’s the greatest martyred saint of them all. At least I had a play written on that basis once.” (From Barbara Leaming’s indispensable Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Like gangsters for laffs, Max (Zero Mostel) and Leo (Gene Wilder) are convicted for bilking mostly very old ladies to finance their Broadway musical Springtime for Hitler. When the show is a smash “the producers become convicts (and) soon cons are belting ‘Prisoners of love/ Blue skies above/ Can’t keep our hearts in jail!’ Sing Sing never sang better.” (From the Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Crime king Rico (Edward G. Robinson) plugs another dapper tough in Little Caesar (Warner Bros. 1931; director Mervyn LeRoy, d.p. Tony Gaudio).

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Nosh 176: 'Pain and Glory' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Pain and Glory)                    

Pain and Glory

“The eyes, those silent tongues of love.” – Cervantes

Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory finds, through personal pain, creative glory. Notably private despite his gossip zest, a party lion but shy of egotism, the Spanish maestro has made his 22^nd feature no vanity project. “Without filming, my life is meaningless,” says director Salvador Mello, played by Antonio Banderas as a slender, sick, tired and retired Almodóvar. In 1981 Pedro, at 32 the bold and impudent Prospero of post-Franco filming, first greeted Banderas in a Madrid café: “You should do movies. You have a very beautiful face.” Pedro was gay, Antonio straight, yet they soon made mutual love to film (first with the campy hoot Labyrinth of Passion). After long separation – Banderas pursued an American career, his mentor didn’t – their shared consummation is Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria).

Start: Salvador Mello in a pool, a long surgical scar tracing his spine. Memories bubble up, of a poor but often bucolic boyhood. Little Salva (Asier Flores) smiles at mama Jacinta (Penélope Cruz) washing sheets in a river. She breaks into song with other women, with flirty touches of flamenco. The sun-soaked warmth evokes both Renoirs (painter Pierre-Auguste, son-auteurist Jean). This movie is a river. It swerves and cascades in the Almodóvar way, as broken currents rejoin with added life. Modern Salva, bedeviled by an agonized back and migraines, is startled by the return of his early macho star Alberto Crespo (virile, almost feral Asier Etxeandia). Now, 32 years after their famous creative rupture, the old boys can still ego-tango. Alberto lusts for a comeback with the one-man show Salva has scripted from his own life. Irritated but amused, Salva offers the script, partly because Alberto brings pain relief with his chalky  caballo: heroin (fortunately only a sub-motif of the plot; Almodóvar has said that he never used “horse”).   

Childhood again: a rustic, whitewashed cave, the home that tireless Jacinta makes beautiful for her brilliant boy. He is a choirboy star, although more hooked on classic movie idols like Marilyn (Pedro chose the same stunning MM clip from Niagara that glows in Bertolucci’s La Luna). As mama sews his sock, using her wooden “egg” (Proust ping for me: my grandmother’s perfectly spheroid darning egg!), Salva asks, “Do you think Liz Taylor sews Robert Taylor’s socks?” The cave dwelling is his imagination crib, the egg a talisman of maternal devotion. Salva will crack mom’s pious shell of Catholicism after he sees the workman Eduardo (César Vicente) nude, washing himself like a Hispano-Roman statue sprung to life. Eduardo’s drawing of the lad (tender but not pedophilic) becomes another talisman, floating in the time stream.

Grown Salva’s supreme Madrid lover, the lost Federico, is the soul hook of the one-man show. Inevitably he returns, now frankly hetero (and a father), played by suave and kind-eyed Leonardo Sbaraglia. Old embers flicker through ash as they talk (photo above) in Salva’s art-filled home, his adult cave and refuge. One of the supremely intimate, barely carnal scenes of gay filming is compact with memories, gestures, words and silences. It’s Pedro perfecto, a chalice of self-mythic elegy. With Federico’s brief return, and actor Alberto having played “Marcelo” in his last Salva movie, the tap root is clearly Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini. Almodóvar was 68½ when he filmed this picture. An 8 ½ poster vamps a wall. That 1963 marvel’s time-foldings of dream, memory, anxiety and desire are even more emotionally loaded in Pain and Glory, yet with no pedantic stuffing.

It’s riveting, without obvious rivets (the medical anxiety scenes are a little generic). Embracing all is the Almodóvarian style jacket of blooming colors, graphics, design and José Luis Alcaine’s almost liquid photography. We could doodle academically, calling this a dialectic of river (time), cave (imagination), egg (love), caballo (false care) and friendship (true care). But as with The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s fluent vision of an aging style maestro in Rome, consummate grace eclipses analysis. In this masculine story Sbaraglia, Etxeandia, Vicente and  young Flores are remarkable. Their terrific eye acting, worthy of Cervantes’s quote, is topped by Banderas’s deepest and most powerful achievement (Salva is no Zorro). Keenly present, since any Almodóvar film must celebrate women, are Nora Navas and Cecilia Roth as Salva’s devoted friends, and lustrous Cruz in her small but moving role of Jacinta.    

Julieta Serrano, now 86, is up to a tough job: following Cruz as Jacinta in her lonely, ritually Catholic dotage (imagine a shift from Sophia Loren to Betty White). After heroin and surgery and the public “reveal” of Alberto’s one-man show, Salva returns to the yolk of the egg and confides to Jacinta his most piercing wound: “I failed you, just by being who I am.” But Jacinta is no homophobic fossil. After all, her loving, pious heart still beats for the beautiful boy of the cave, who became a great Spanish artist.

SALAD (A List)

El Cine Grande de Pedro Almodóvar

In my opinion absolutemente his best:

Volver (2006), Pain and Glory (2019), All About My Mother (1999), Women on the Verge … (1988), Talk to Her (2002), Live Flesh (1997), Bad Education (2004), Broken Embraces (2009), Law of Desire (1987).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles began loving Spain at 18, in a 1933 visit. Biographers cannot decide if, as claimed, he briefly became the boyish matador “El Americano.”  Decades later an Andalusian producer challenged him, saying “he doubted the legend …‘In the history of this towering art,’ he had heard Orson boast, ‘there can be very few people who were as bad as I was.’ But if Orson were as poor a toreador as he claimed, the man said, surely he would have heard of him. Welles roared with laughter.” (His afición for the corrida diminished, yet his ashes would be buried in Spain at the ranch of a friend, a bullfighter. Quote from Patrick McGilligan’s brilliant Young Orson.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As Marcello Rubini in La Dolce Vita Marcello Mastroianni “extends a mood, he doesn’t posit an agenda. Ambition flagging, religion vacant, pleasures often sterile, Rubini is chalk in a city of bronze, brick and marble. His essential approach was indicated by Joseph Conrad’s preface to Under Western Eyes: ‘The course of action need not be explained. It has suggested itself more as a matter of feeling than a matter of thinking.” (Much like Banderas in Pain and Glory. Quote from the Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

From left: Asier Flores, Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Pedro Almodóvar and Nora Navas during the filming of Dolor y Gloria (El Deseo, 2019; director Pedro Almodóvar, d.p. José Luis Alcaine).

 

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Nosh 175: 'Ford v Ferrari' & More

David Elliott

         

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

Note: Nosh 176 will appear on Friday, Dec. 6.

APPETIZER (Review: Ford v Ferarri)                    

Ford v Ferrari

Back in the Sixties era there was a virtual traffic jam of racing car movies: Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000 (1965), a hot-tires rally starring young James Caan; Grand Prix (1966), a Formula One spin-around and carousel of stars (Garner! Montand! Mifune! Saint!); Winning (1969), with actor and actual racer Paul Newman seeking Indy 500 glory, and Le Mans (1971) about the 24-hour French race, starring speed nut Steve “Bullitt” McQueen. I believe the generous term for those pictures is “road kill.” Apart from some robust racing, they were about as dull as oil-clotted dirt. Watching, I looked back rather fondly to Kirk Douglas in The Racers (1955), if not to Clark Gable’s jalopy To Please a Lady (1950).

Even ladies should be pleased with Ford v Ferrari (v as in “versus”), probably the best professional racing movie ever made as entertainment. Partly that’s because Caitriona Balfe is not just hangin’ around frettin’ for her man, race driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale). Balfe, the beautiful Outlanders TV star, is Ken’s wife Mollie: English, bright, caring but not coddling. When she angrily lays down some road rubber of her own, he gets scared. A real piston, very pedal to the rebel, Ken is weary of his sports car repair shop. Big action returns when hard-driving auto dreamer Carroll Shelby lures Miles into a project sparked by Lee Iacocca: to make Ford sexy by challenging Ferrari’s dominance of prestige racing. This led team Ford to the 1966 prize at the sport’s supremely testing ordeal, Le Mans.

The movie’s strategic core is the fast and sometimes furious bond of insolent Miles and supple, never quite corporate Shelby (Matt Damon, as car-grooved as he was into space gear for The Martian). The mix of Damon’s spunky, all-American grit and Bale’s feisty, fish-n-chips Brit is infallible (without getting numbingly macho). Other winners are ace Noah Jupe as Ken’s son Peter, who loves cars but adores his dad, and lean Ray McKinnon as the highly overhauled GT40’s mechanical wizard, Phil Remington. The casting is terrific.

My friend Larry Marks, once a Formula One mechanic, alerted me to the story’s nips and tucks of docu-factuals (the race’s finishing twist can still cause rancorous debate, and Ferrari was not deeply competitive in ’66 after its best driver, John Surtees, quit). Between bursts of bravura road action, not too customized by special effects, FvF has the best view of corporate auto politics since Tucker (and many laps beyond The Betsy). Jon Bernthal is sly riser Iacocca, and Josh Lucas is Ford honcho Leo Beebe, frantic to tame hot-doggin’ Miles and Shelby. At the apex is the contrast of Old World master Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) and big Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), who is thrilled by his fear when Shelby hot-rods him in their new car. Of course there is an American bias. Ferrari is called a “greasy wop,” but there’s no mention that Henry Ford (the First) was a rabid anti-Semite who despised labor unions.

Director James Mangold (Logan, Walk the Line) pumps surefire adrenaline, balancing family, buddy, auto-biz and racing scenes expertly. Often drenched in light, decal-plated with sparkling colors, FvF evokes a mid-century America of open horizons, bold assertion and runaway speed. We clobbered the Axis, now let’s flatten those Italian car snobs! This gleaming, gung-ho machine of a movie might be just the antidote to the divisive acids of 2019. Most Americans are still car crazy, and maybe for a few weeks Trumpies and anti-Trumpers can come together. Hey, brother, pour me a bowl of Pennzoil, with some Chianti on the side. Alas, rumors of a coming Edsel v Yugo are very premature.

SALAD (A List)

Good Mileage: 12 Cool and Hot Car Movies

More or less in preferred order (with star/director);

American Graffiti (Richard Dreyfuss/George Lucas), The Driver (Ryan O’Neal/Walter Hill), Bonnie and Clyde (Warren Beatty/Arthur Penn), Senna (Ayrton Senna/Asif Kapadia), Bullitt (Steve McQueen, Peter Yates), The Italian Job (Mark Wahlberg/F. Gary Gray), Genevieve (Kay Kendall, Henry Cornelius), Mad Max: Fury Road (Charlize Theron/George Miller) /Duel (Dennis Weaver/Steven Spielberg), Vanishing Point (Barry Newman/Richard Sarafian), Death Proof (Kurt Russell/Quentin Tarantino) and Two-Lane Blacktop (Warren Oates/Monte Hellman).   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Surely the finest movie speech about cars is in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), after pioneer car-maker Eugene Morgan is insultingly baited at a 1905 family dinner by callow, shallow George (Tim Holt). Joseph Cotten speaks with elegant, measured dignity:

“I’m not so sure George is wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward, they may be a step backward in civilization. It may be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of men’s souls. I’m not sure. But automobiles have come. And almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They’re going to alter war and going to alter peace. And I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles.  It may be that George is right. It may be that in 10 or 20 years from now, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with George that automobiles had no business to be invented.” (And now, 77 years after the film’s arrival?)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Director Stanley Donen “could pop pizzazz. Small, cocky, alert as a ferret, he had survived Gene Kelly’s armored ego and, irking Cole Porter, had filched ‘Be a Clown’ from The Pirate for revamping as ‘Make ’Em Laugh’ in Singin’ in the Rain (for which he knew exactly how to turn sound’s traumatic arrival into pure joy). He placed some pearls in the corn barn of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, transplanted brilliantly The Pajama Game and preserved Gwen Verdon’s wowness in Damn Yankees. Some later limps (Staircase, Lucky Lady, The Little Prince) can be quietly forgiven. Donen’s Audrey Hepburn trilogy – Funny Face, Charade, Two for the Road – are unique entertainments. His career-prize Oscar topped the 1998 show when, at 73, he tap-danced ‘Cheek to Cheek.” (From the Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

American Graffiti, a great car movie, is surely the best film for Candy Clark (as Debbie) and Charlie Martin Smith (as Toad). (Universal Pictures 1973; director George Lucas, d.p. Jan D’Alquen and Ron Eveslage.)

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Nosh 174: 'By the Grace of God,' 'The Chambermaid' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: By the Grace of God and The Chambermaid)                     

By the Grace of God

How odd that the Roman Catholic Church, having survived 17 centuries through the Roman Empire, barbarian hordes, the Dark Ages, the rise of Islam, the near-loss of Spain, the Renaissance, the brutal conversion of the Americas, Henry VIII, the Protestant Reformation, secular science, fascism and Soviet communism, should be so pathetically evasive about its internal rot from pedophile priests. Maybe that’s because for so long the Church had a virtual, assumed monopoly on cultural morality. And because, in the male power hive of the Vatican (women mainly relegated to convents) the “holy fathers” decided that priestly celibacy was a sanctuary in which starved affection, hidden sexual alliances and erotic predation on juveniles were left mostly to rumor. Some movies (Spotlight, Judgment, Bad Education, the harrowing Deliver Us From Evil) have cast light on this. The most articulate, in a very French way, is By the Grace of God.

Francois Ozon’s lay-it-open film closely examines the actual case of Father Bernard Preynat (as in prey on nature, between prayers?). He hawked onto dozens of boys at Catholic schools and summer camps. Bernard Verley, who played Jesus in Luis Buñuel’s Milky Way (1969), makes Preynat a furtive old monster with guilty eyes. He admits his crimes but is locked into his pathology, addressing past victims, now grown men, as if they were still “his” chosen lads. Cardinal Barbarin of Lyon (Francois Marthouret) has known Preynat’s dismal story for years. Speaking an urbane line, rich in modulated jargon, he’s a cover-up wizard (his chief advisor, a woman, looks like she knows every dark secret of the Vatican). Ozon hates the plague of pederasty, but he keeps a humane lens on everyone, not tumbling into the traps of facile melodrama. He never tries to lift this story onto the austere spiritual plane of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest.

Along with cascades of talk siphoned from journalism, dossiers and testimonies, Ozon uses a triple perspective, that of three men who found the courage to face their soul crisis and spill their often shamed pain into public and legal view: Alexandre (Melvil Poupard), a refined bourgeois raising his five kids as devout Catholics, fears losing his devout faith; Francois (Denis Ménochet), a burly, impulsive guy who flaunts atheism, wants revenge fully publicized; and Emmanuel (Swann Arlaud), an unemployed epileptic, blames the Church for ruining his life. Arlaud raises the temperature quite a bit, but Ozon keeps all in balance, never allowing emotions to become another masking of the facts. This all happened, and partial justice has been served (quite recently). Amid the personal agonies is a huge, festering wound: the failure of a great but fallible institution, gripped by an old sexual neurosis that it confuses with sacred purity. Even a universal vision can have blind spots.   

The Chambermaid

Time to press the flattening pole on the bed covers – eliminate the wrinkles! And don’t forget to fold the toilet paper’s edge, into a tidy triangle. That has always been important, as supervisor Nachita tells Eve: “They made me pray next to the toilet paper until I learned how to fold it.” This is habitual but not dreary duty at the high-rise hotel. Eve has “her” floor to clean and stock with “amenities”  (one guest is a real hog for them). The air conditioning is nice, and she can view the smoggy sprawl of Mexico City through big windows (a window-washer, looking in, thinks Eve is special). She eats tiny lunches to save money, and she misses her young son. Especially when a chatty, sexy-thin Argentine guest recruits her into caring for her baby, while mom bathes and dresses. The kid is adorable, and Eve needs the extra pesos. This is not slavish peon work, but her life is no pillow mint.

Not to be confused with either Renoir’s or Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, Lila Avilés’s exquisitely nuanced directorial debut can be seen as an introspective satellite of Alfonso Cuarón’s lauded, remarkable film about a Mexico City nanny, Roma (Netflix is still hobbling its video release). Roma spreads out through the vast capital. Avilés keeps us in the hotel, in mostly quiet rooms that stir Eve’s moods. Cuarón’s nanny (Yalitza Aparicio) was a squat Mayan charmer, while shy, sweet Eve has the almost Chinese-porcelain features of actor Gabriela Cartol. Landing somewhere between the granular intimacies of the best Iranian pictures and the work documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, The Chambermaid is a feat of sustained observation. Eve dreams, yet mostly of ascending to a high floor, where furnishings are elegant and tips are larger. She reads Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but her flights are by elevator (which speaks computer-voice English). Carlos Rossini photographed so that each room and corridor, wide or long, becomes in effect a close-up of Eve’s mental spaces. She works hard, and some lucky day she may supervise. Will cute robots fold the t-paper?        

SALAD (A List)

12 Stirring Performances as Catholic Priests

Claude Laydu in Diary of a Country Priest,1951; Pierre Fresnay in Monsieur Vincent, 1947; Raul Julia in Romero, 1989; Montgomery Clift in I Confess, 1953; Michael Lonsdale in Of Gods and Men, 2011; Francisco Rabal in Nazarin, 1959; Brendan Gleeson in Calvary, 2014; W.G. Fay in Odd Man Out, 1947; Karl Malden in On the Waterfront, 1954; Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt, 2008; Adam Driver in Silence, 2016; Don Murray in The Hoodlum Priest, 1960, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Léon Morin, Priest, 1961.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Charles Chaplin’s most sophisticated movie is Monsieur Verdoux (1947). The concept came from Orson Welles, who told Peter Bogdanovich: “I had an inspiration on the subway. I saw an advertisement for an anti-dandruff remedy, which had a picture of a bright-faced little hairdresser type making that gesture of the stage Frenchman which indicates something or other is simply too exquisite for human speech … (Bogdanovich: ‘It made you think of Chaplin?’) … Chaplin as Landru (the French serial killer of women). I’d gotten to know Charlie by then, through Aldous Huxley and King Vidor, so I told him about it. He said, ‘Wonderful!’ So I went away and wrote a script, and showed it to him. He said, ‘Wonderful, and I’m going to act it for you.’ But at the last moment he said, ‘No, I can’t. I’ve never had anybody else direct me. Let me buy it.’ So I did (sell), and he made Monsieur Verdoux. My title was The Ladykiller.” (Not to be confused with Alec Guinness’s great comedy The Ladykillers. Quote from This Is Orson Welles by Bogdanovich and Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Few films have caught the harsh demands of miners working so well as John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, directly inspired by B. Traven’s novel: “Muscular montage captures the grim labor. Washing and rinsing, catching the sand up and washing it over and over again, this alone would have been work enough. But first it had to be dug out.’ The opening of a log sluice channel is thrilling, but as sweat and soil merge ‘no one could ever imagine any of these men holding a woman in his arms. Any decent woman would have preferred to drown herself.” (From the Bogart/Treasure chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Smooth killer Verdoux (Charles Chaplin) is amused by clueless Annabella (truly funny Martha Raye) in Monsieur Verdoux (United Artists 1947; director Charles Chaplin, d.p. Roland Totheroh, along with Curt Courant).

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Nosh 173: 'Motherless Brooklyn,' 'Harriet' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Motherless Brooklyn and Harriet)                    

Motherless Brooklyn

Playing a detective with Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) in a hard noir set in 1950s New York is tough enough. Edward Norton also directed, produced and freely adapted Motherless Brooklyn from Jonathan Lethem’s novel (and here is a neat trivia tangent: Art Carney, who played sewer worker Ed Norton on The Honeymooners, starred in his own excellent neo-noir, The Late Show). At 50 Norton has what may well be his career apex. “Brooklyn” is Lionel Essrog’s nickname, though his gumshoe partners, with snarky affection, also call him “Freak Show.” A thought or a name will often trigger a loud outburst from Lionel’s speed-dial brain. The word “brisket” launches him into a bris (circumcision) joke. “A piece of my head broke off,” he laments, “and decided to keep on ridin’ me for kicks.”

Funny, because his spit-zip bursts fly like cartoon shrapnel.  Lionel tries to muffle these outcries, yet must often give a sheepish explanation (he doesn’t know the name Tourette’s). Norton finds wit and pathos in the handicap, achieves a kind of TS/OCD deepening, without the schtick-fest of Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man. At the heart (a real one) is how Lionel becomes the main man, tracking the killers of his boss (Bruce Willis has one big, juicy sequence), who prized his savvy and memory and simply liked him. The curling case will take Lionel past his hustling partners into chasms of corruption ruled by the power octopus Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, a blitz of tongue, brain and bulk). Randolph is, of course, Robert Moses, the city’s mid-century “empire builder” who snacked on mayors and governors. We realize that the core source, beyond the Scorsese crime sprees or Farewell My Lovely (a huge thug echoes Moose Malloy in that) is the most elegant of neo-noirs: 1974’s Chinatown.

As in that stunner, family secrets poison the intrigues and there is much knot-folding of plot strands. Baldwin fuses John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown to the ruthless Robert Moses of Robert Caro’s definitive biography (called “Jake” the private eye bleats “I’m Lionel, not Jake!” – a wink at Jake Gittes of Chinatown). There is more hipness at a Harlem jazz club, where Lionel’s riffs and tics jive with the bop notes of the trumpeter (angry but cool Michael Kenneth Williams). The sequence also lets the story’s smart beauty (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) see that odd, lonely Lionel is a guy who might be trusted, perhaps loved. That Norton dives so far into the character keeps this from becoming just another fond rummage of the noir files. That the whole effort keeps flowing on track is fairly  miraculous. Norton cast very well, notably Bobby Cannavale and Dallas Roberts as gumshoes, Cherry Jones as a populist firebrand and Willem Dafoe, in his Van Gogh beard again, as an urban dreamer sickened by rot.

In the Naked City lineage, Motherless Brooklyn is a hymn for old New York. Dick Pope’s cinematography achieves a fresh retro take on the great noir city, rivaling the unrelated Bill Pope's sexy 1950s Manhattan in Fur. This goes beyond all-night diners and brownstones and a rotary phone shot like an idol, beyond Scorsesean rips of violence and some Spike Lee riffs of blackitude, climaxing in a gorgeous restaging of Penn Station (photo above). The Moses monuments endure, yet the old, dirty, teeming, dangerous town is the one we relish. It may lack the silken purity of Chinatown or the inspired ’40s to ’70s blend of The Long Goodbye, yet this original vision packed with derivations is a hard, meaty fist you cannot duck. 

Harriet

It is difficult not to be pious when your movie’s subject is on a U.S. postal stamp. Harriet Tubman got her stamp in 1978, 65 years after dying. It is planned that her shrewd survivor’s face will arrive on the $20 bill. Now she has a film, Harriet – solid, sincere, not groaningly pious, yet it might be better. Director Kasi Lemmons has shown good instincts (Talk to Me) and wayward ones (The Caveman’s Valentine, a hash that even Samuel L. Jackson couldn’t save). Harriet lands in-between, though closer to Talk. You can bet $20 that people who love her stamp, and will love her money image, will want to see this. Because it simplifies the complex hero’s story with genuine passion. And because Cynthia Erivo is such a close but youthful replica of photos of the aged Tubman (Erivo also looks somewhat like Whoopi Goldberg, and won a Tony for re-creating on Broadway Goldberg’s Celie in The Color Purple).

Born around 1820 in Maryland, Araminta “Minty” Ross (Harriet became her free name) was an illiterate slave. She was whipped, and suffered a brain injury when a lead weight, hurled by an overseer at another slave, hit her. Her husband, the freedman John Tubman, remarried when he thought she had died while escaping. Her flight (running, running, running) from racists and their hounds is the most exciting and defining sequence. Minty flees by sheer will, with help from the new Underground Railroad network, a feat likely impossible had she been in the lower South. She becomes a canny, lucky liberator whom blacks would call Moses (she freed over 70). Erivo keeps Harriet alert and grounded, no simple symbol. But the script seeks extra dimension through that brain injury, which led to Tubman’s falling spells, “visions” and “voices.” Religious, she felt guided by providence. Here that becomes blue-sepia flashbacks, coded messaging through spirituals, and a quickly formed myth (which doesn’t save her return trips into Maryland from falling into a here-we-go-again rhythm).

Historical tributes include elisions, so Frederick Douglass and John Brown flit by as tiny cameos (Tubman recruited men for Brown’s fabled raid). Nobody speaks in “yassuh” dialect, the violence is vivid but brief, and a viciously smug white, Gideon (Joe Alwyn), distills the racist hotbloods of Old Dixie. That is the sort of Morse code that rich history doesn’t need, notably when Harriet out-machos Gideon and, using her mental powers, taunts him about the coming doom of “the Lost Cause” (a term not in use until after the war). John Toll’s plush photography lays on a slight patina of sacred memory, the “Spielberg loves De Mille” shellac. But Harriet Tubman remains too movingly rooted in tough truth to be much slighted by such things.

SALAD (A List)

The Most Creative Neo-Noirs

The ten best, all after the classic period (1940-60), with director and year:

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman 1973), Chinatown (Roman Polanski 1974), Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino 1997), Point Blank (John Boorman 1967), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982), Motherless Brooklyn (Ed Norton 2019), The Late Show (Robert Benton 1978), Inherent Vice (P.T. Anderson 2014), Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin 1995) and L.A.Confidential (Curtis Hanson 1997).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is burning angelic oil at the Celestial Cinematheque, for his total restoration of The Magnificent Ambersons.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The insecurity of social virgin and middle-class striver Alice (Katharine Hepburn) at her first, classy dance in Alice Adams “is a pressure cooker, one approaching the anxious self-consciousness of witty writer and raconteur Alexander King’s first visit to the opera: ‘I was embedded in such perfumes, such hair oils, such pomades and hairdos on all sides that I thought I was suddenly going to rise up to the crystal chandeliers with the wonderful odor and ecstasy of it all. There was one depressing note in this glittering assembly, however: me.” (From the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Land baron Noah Cross (John Huston, left) proves himself a devil to private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown (Paramount Pictures 1974; director Roman Polanski, d.p. John Alonzo).

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Nosh 172: 'The Lighthouse,' 'The Current War' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Lighthouse and The Current Wars)                   

A little light on two movies fixated on light:

The Lighthouse

Robert Eggers, who shivered many with The Witch in 2015, has made The Lighthouse as a steampunky quest for a maritime fable. His vision concerns a Victorian  lighthouse on the raw North Atlantic coast. We can imagine this rugged outpost hosting Edward G. Robinson’s crazy Captain Wolf Larsen (The Sea Wolf), or Wagner’s Rhine maidens on an ocean cruise, or even (why not?) Wilson the volleyball, floating in from Cast Away. Framed in a classic 4:3 aspect ratio that tightly funnels Jarin Blaschke’s gothic, black and white photography, The Lighthouse joins other movies with primal stories and curt, primal titles: The Island, The Hill, The Hurricane, The Fog, The Gun, The Village, The Wind, The Road and The Birds (menacing seagulls seem to have flown directly from Hitchcock’s nightmare of bird paranoia). 

Antiquity’s fabled lighthouse was the giant Pharos of Alexandria. Eggers and his design team have turned a Nova Scotia lighthouse into a wave-pounded phallus of Neptune (or, in Freudian terms, a big cigar). The macho master is old Tom Wake. Willem Dafoe, having played Christ, Satan, the Buddha, Van Gogh, Vulko (Aquaman) and Green Goblin (Spider-Man), isn’t about to miss a trick with this rockbound Ahab. Stomping around on a peg leg, his gnarly, glaring face like a hairball of seaweed, Wake shouts lewd shanties and spouts Moby-Dickish gusts of mad rhetoric. As a foghorn booms, he taunts and enslaves his new apprentice, Winslow (Robert Pattinson), who hauls coal for the steam motor, cleans rampant filth (Wake: “Swab, dog, swab!”) and carries loaded chamber pots out to a jetty during a gale. The men are like blowfish trapped in a septic aquarium, and their drinking binges expose guilty secrets.

We must believe that Eggers wanted comedy when Winslow, sick of Wake’s slop buckets of seafood gruel, bellows “If I had a steak I’d fuck it!” Wake replies like a miffed Julia Childs, “You don’t like my cooking?” Their increasingly feral (and erotic) duel of wills could be compelling, except that Pattinson, in strapping prime with arms like anchors, uses a slurred, Boston chowder accent and can’t match Dafoe’s vocal power. Only Wake has high-rise rights to the top of the tower where, risking blindness, he worships the mighty light beam as Neptune. Never before has alcoholic mysticism had such a platform.

It is impossible to out-Melville Melville or out-Conrad Conrad. Anyway, old actor and sea skipper Sterling Hayden surfed this particular wave long ago, in his boozed rants on a houseboat in the documentary Pharos of Chaos. The Lighthouse is a beached whale, stuffed with lurid themes of sea mania, macho dominance and pent-up gay desire harpooned by homophobia. The images are often terrific, such as the cold, dreamy mermaid who lures drunken Winslow with her grasping tentacles. But the text is gibberish, and the film becomes self-parody. Full fathom five, and foolish, this movie lies.

The Current War

As a kid I discovered Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, the grand, almost Roman pile first built for the Columbian Exposition of 1893 (Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck would save the building, which became a huge wonderland for tech nerds). The Current War rightly climaxes with the dazzling electric light of the fair, the topping showdown of the lords of early electricity, prolific inventor Thomas A. Edison and industrial visionary George Westinghouse. Their long, money-burning struggle to dominate the new lighting of America is echoed on a small scale by the movie’s near blackout. After showing at the 2017 Toronto festival, it fell victim to the collapse of sex scandal Harvey Weinstein’s production firm. Now it arrives as a “director’s cut,” thanks largely to Martin Scorsese, who came to the rescue of filmmaker Alfonso Gomez Rejon.

The movie has a great subject. We learn a lot, in a rushed  way. Gaudy with CGI retro design and fabulous machines, the film is giddy (hyper-active pacing, hoggish close-ups.). Everyone seems wired (Edison’s wife recalls their Niagara honeymoon as “enough to illuminate a lifetime”).  As brilliant egotist Edison, Benedict Cumberbatch is so ablaze with his “direct current” dream that he almost sparks like Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein. The contrast with “alternating current” advocate Westinghouse, played as a block of hard-headed integrity by Michael Shannon, gives the movie its vital friction (at first serving Edison, then saving Westinghouse, is Nicholas Hoult’s Nikola Tesla, the émigré genius who provided a key breakthrough).There is plenty of moral skirmishing about patents, legal schemes and whether to build the first electrocution chair. There is also a ripe sense of scale and history, and when the White City beams, we  catch an era at its joyous peak (even though the Beaux Arts exposition structures set back modern architecture for years). The Current War deserves a booking at the Museum of Science and Industry, maybe near the stunning steam locomotive or the Nazi U-boat.       

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Good Seafaring Movies

In order of arrival (with star, director, year):

Mutiny on the Bounty (Charles Laughton, Frank Lloyd, 1935), Captain Blood (Errol Flynn, Michael Curtiz, 1935), The Sea Wolf (Edward G. Robinson, Michael Curtiz, 1941), Captain Horatio Hornblower (Gregory Peck, Raoul Walsh, 1951), The Cruel Sea (Jack Hawkins, Charles Frend, 1953), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (James Mason, Richard Fleischer, 1954), The Enemy Below (Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, 1956), Moby Dick (Gregory Peck, John Huston, 1956), Mutiny on the Bounty (Marlon Brando, Lewis Milestone, 1962), Jaws (Richard Dreyfuss, Steven Spielberg, 1975), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Russell Crowe, Peter Weir, 2003) and Riding Giants (Laird Hamilton, Stacy Peralta, 2004). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

What the French call mise-en- scene would translate into Orson Welles English as mix-and-match. Never more than in the marvelous pastiche of his exotic 1955 noir Mr. Arkadin, shot on the run with a skeletal budget and scrambled script: “The Munich Christmas scenes were filmed on a set of reception rooms for Luís Marquina’s film Alta costura in Spain, and at the Hilton Castillana which Welles filled with a crowd of unpaid extras invited to ‘a filming party.’ The luxurious La Gavina hotel on the Costa Brava was used for terraces of Sophie’s Mexican residence. Arkadin has to have a castle in Spain, so that will be no less than Segovia’s Alcázar.” And so it went, hopping around much of Europe. (From Orson Welles at Work by Jean-Pierre Berthomé and Francois Thomas. Of Arkadin’s various edits, the best is Criterion’s Comprehensive Version.)  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Brilliantly versatile writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante nailed a crucial truth: “Vanishing Point is my script as seen on the white mirror of the screen, in DeLuxe color, running at 24 frames per second, in stereo sound—much more than I ever wrote, or could write. That’s a movie. I just wrote the screenplay.” (From the Introduction in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (Image)

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

Enigmatic billionaire Grigori Arkadin (Orson Welles) looms over the exotic locations that define Mr. Arkadin (1955; director Orson Welles, d.p. Jean Bourgoin).

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