David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
Note: Nosh 141 will arrive on Friday, Feb. 15
APPETIZER: Review of Stan & Ollie
After viewing Stan
& Ollie in an old theater that echoes the Laurel and Hardy era, I
topped nostalgia by watching on YouTube what may be their finest sound short, The Music Box (not the colorized version). In it the “boys” haul a boxed piano up
and down endless outdoor stairs in sunny 1932 L.A. The 29-minute gag is stacked
like those steps with side-jokes, repeats, pauses, underlinings of humor and
underminings of simple sanity. You could call it genius, but that feels too
fancy. Chaplin had genius, Keaton had it, and Lloyd in streaks (even, in
sprinkles, baby-dopey Harry Langdon). But the team loved as Stan and Ollie float
in a special bubble of comical togetherness, levitated by their warmly enduring
fan base. Their “genius” was to win laughs and loyalty.
Jon S. Baird’s tribute, scripted by Jeff Pope (Philomena), plays it cozy. Except for an
early sequence at the Hal Roach studio during the team’s 1930s heyday – Danny
Huston plays Roach as a greedy skinflint – this valentine salute is about their
1953 British Isles tour. There are hardly any clips. Instead, stagecraft delves
not into the movies, but the distant origins in music hall (Laurel) and
vaudeville (Hardy). They had known each other for years before Roach teamed
them in 1927, and each had been in many films. This new one both tops and roots
their legend, putting the troupers (Stan at 63, Ollie at 61) back into their
formative, live-show context. The soft-shoe rhythms and quaint jokes have the
feeling of a valedictory. Old bodies creak, but their timing never fails.
It’s a very British show, closer to Laurel’s origins
(in an English stage family) than Hardy's (he had run a silent movie theater
in his native Georgia, and here reveals more Dixie accent than Ollie did in his
talkies). As Stan, Steve Coogan is so sly, deft and tucked-in that Laurel’s eagerness
to reunite the team after long separation has a very winning grace (he dreams
of one last movie). As Ollie, John C. Reilly is a wry, weary mammoth who knows
his heart is failing (too many years of booze, smokes, parties and pranks – and
he can no longer golf). Reilly’s lavish fat may be prosthetic, but it delivers
emotional depth. After a slow start for the tour, the fans turn up in eager
crowds. Even if you were never an L&H devotee, this picture embraces you
like a glove, and tenderizes the sunset pathos.
Hardy, the oddly dainty king of the slow burn, was so loved he even kept his little square moustache after Hitler rose (Chaplin, who had the patent, polished it off with The Great Dictator). Like Jerry Lewis in his team, Laurel was the gag writer and idea man (no comparisons of Ollie and Dean Martin can possibly be made). This film has one genuinely fresh touch of genius. The old boys, who married often (but were creatively married to each other), are given a shadow team: their latest wives. Shirley Henderson, as Lucille Hardy, squeaks a Betty Boop voice and sweetly mothers her big man. Nina Arianda, as the Russian-born Ida Laurel, is a sexy and acerbic marvel, cracking her accent like a Cossack whip. They are the surprises of this endearingly intimate movie, as laughs arrive on chuckling pillows of affection.
SALAD (A List)
Ten Sound
Era Movies that Salute the Silents
In order of quality (best first), with year and
director:
Sunset
Boulevard (Billy Wilder 1950), Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen
1952), Lyrical Nitrate (Peter Delpeut
1991), Nickleodeon (Peter Bogdanovich 1976), The
Artist (Michel Hazanavicius 2011), Silent
Movie (Mel Brooks 1976), A Slave of
Love (Nikita Mikhalkov 1976), Chaplin
(Richard Attenborough 1992), The Comic
(Carl Reiner 1969), The Buster Keaton
Story (Sidney Sheldon 1957) and also, perhaps, the coming Silent Life (2019) directed by and
starring (as Valentino) Vladislav Kozlov.
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
Welles had a famous, even betrothed romance with Mexican beauty Dolores Del
Rio. It was his doomed 1942 Brazilian venture that helped finish that: “He went
home by way of Mexico and re-encountered Dolores, who had called off their
marriage in his absence … she must have heard many stories. Welles had grown a
small mustache in Brazil, to be closer to the local image of macho. It was on
the same journey that he chanced upon a back issue of Life in which he saw a dazzling pinup of Rita Hayworth kneeling on
a bed. ‘That’s what I’m going to do!’
he said.” Soon he married Rita. (Quote from David Thomson’s Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Part
of the velvet grip of Jackie Brown is
Quentin Tarantino’s ability to give malevolence a calm, cool, gliding magic. As
when master-creep Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) persuades victim Beaumont
(Chris Tucker) to get into a car trunk before a job, promising him the famous
“Scoe’s Special smothered in gravy and onions” at Roscoe’s House of Chicken ’N
Waffles. Then, “the chump trunked, Robbie calmly slips on his gloves, checks
his pistol, and punches in the Brothers Johnson’s ‘Strawberry Letter 23.’
Slowly he drives down the empty street’s wet-black pavement and (in rising long
shot) distantly turns left. The camera cranes above a fence, revealing death’s
vacant half-acre, the music now far-off as Ordell drives to the lot’s center.
He stops, exits, springs the trunk. A tiny squeal … the spark-pop of two shots
… g’bye, Beau.” Truly, a Scoe’s Special. (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon,
Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Stan
Laurel and Oliver Hardy on a film set, probably in the 1930s (archive publicity
photo).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
No comments:
Post a Comment