Nosh 142: 'Cold War,' 'The World Before Your Feet' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews of Cold War and The World Before Your Feet)

Cold War

My big Polish movie experience was at the Chicago International Film Festival during the early 1970s. In chill November, in an under-heated screening room, well-wrapped pundits dutifully previewed many Polish (often wintry) movies. The saving warmth was the discovery of emerging talents like directors Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof  Zanussi, stars like tense, electric Daniel Olbrychski and soul-baring actress Maja Komarowska. They would all continue, but I would leave the Chicago fest behind. For me Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War evokes that strangely rich time, but in a rather freeze-dried way.

There is an aura of importance: festival honors, the Golden Reel as best Polish film of 2018, now Oscar nominations (for foreign film, director, and ace cinematographer Lukasz Zal). But what’s missing is the urgent, arresting energy of those ’70s films I recall, cracking through the iced cement of an increasingly dead Communist system. Cold War, shown in classic 4:3 screen ratio, filmed in velvety black and white, traces the long-term affair of fated lovers: gifted pianist and musicologist Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and the singer-dancer Zula (Joanna Kulig), a sparky blonde with a rugged, ragged past.

They meet in 1949. Stalinism is killing tragic Poland’s last hopes for democracy. Wiktor is a virile, stern, brooding intellectual, with facial stubble decades before it became fashionable. He is the classic older, frustrated guy hooked on a younger woman who is not only sexy but more emotionally free. This is all culturally packaged. Wiktor’s zeal to preserve Polish folk dance and music is soon Stalinized by officials who want patriotic hymns of happiness, like a Marxist Tabernacle Choir. The time is pre-Wall (Germany’s, not Trump’s), and on tour in East Berlin Wiktor peels away to freedom. Zula holds back, but will later meet him in Paris for brisk surges of lust and Left Bank attitude (sadly no bongos or Juliette Greco imitators). Music shifts from folk chants and Chopin to bop, cabaret crooning and (raw decadence!) “Rock Around the Clock.” The lovers, whose hearts can reach across the Iron Curtain when they’re apart, are often riven by angst when they’re together.

Pawlikowski’s lesson-plan script and earnest direction merely dangle the heavy politics (even labor camps). Each theme is slotted into tidy vignettes with terse, biting dialog, yet the romance is never explored in depth. It mopes and moans. This begins to feel like David Lean’s Brief Encounter oddly grafted to a Tony Judt essay on postwar Europe, yet without the rewards of either. The Vatican will appreciate the solemn, topping lurch into Catholic piety. More secular viewers may cherish an unforgettable line: “Love you to bits, but I need to throw up.”  

The World Before Your Feet

For those of us to whom “seeing New York” means zipping around Midtown Manhattan, with a few jaunts north or south, the rambles of Matt Green are almost as exotic as Marlow tracking down Kurtz in the Congo of Heart of Darkness. For over six years Green has visited by foot  every New York City street and block, in every borough, including parks, beaches, cemeteries and industrial pockets. The World Before Your Feet, video-filmed from a few paces behind by Matt’s shadow Jeremy Workman (son of Chuck Workman, maker of rapid-fire Oscars clips), presents without any travelog bluster many delights of Green’s tireless journey. Now in his 30s, the ex-engineer lives on $15 a day, crashes friendly couches, is a devoted cat-sitter, and as of 2018 still had a thousand or more Whitmanesque miles to add to his pedestrian odometer of 6,000-plus. Each walk, though planned and notated, is also an exercise in serendipity.

Low-key Green is entirely amiable. Challenged by a paranoid home-owner, he soon makes the guy a friend. Fearlessly curious, he fled a comfy office grind (also a couple of disappointed girlfriends) for ambulatory freedom and serial interests including street art, obscure graves, quirky barber shops, 9/11 memorials and “churchagogues” (synagogues turned into churches when Jews left the nabe). He researches every find and feeds his richly informative blog (imjustwalkin.com). Green visits the Queens Museum’s glorious panoramic model of NYC, and also finds a grand, hidden tree with roots in the American Revolution. As he meets many people, we can feel again the hopeful, communal spirit of On the Town. This is like a more prosaic (but never dull) cousin of The Cruise (1998), the poetic, layered docu-gem about the totally original street stroller and tour guide Tim Levitch, who made a rapt visit to the old WTC plaza. Matt is Tim’s post-9/11 heir, in an entirely engaging and satisfying movie.

SALAD (A List)

Since the 2018 Oscars will be given this Sunday, I offer my Hope These Will Win list from the nominees, while knowing that many worthies were not nominated. These are not predictions!

Picture: Roma. Director: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma. Actress: Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Actor: Christian Bale, Vice. Supporting Actress: Amy Adams, Vice. Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Green Book. Original Screenplay: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma. Adapted Screenplay: Spike Lee etc., BlacKkKlansman. Cinematography: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson has taken this week off to deeply ponder my review last week (scroll below) of The Other Side of the Wind.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Rambling street guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch “had gone some years without personal living space, but kept clean and practiced ‘couch surfing’ (he praises actress Natasha Lyonne and her ‘great couch’). Tim paid in verbal coin, minted with hyperbolic alloys. As writer, artist and raconteur Alexander King said of his Village pal DeHirsch Margules, ‘The outstanding characteristics of my friend’s personality are affirmation, emphasis and over-emphasis.’ ” (From the Timothy Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Always fastidious, the doomsday doctor (Peter Sellers) inspects his leather hand in Dr. Strangelove (Columbia Pictures 1964; director Stanley Kubrick, photography by Kubrick and Gilbert Taylor).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 141: 'The Other Side of the Wind' & More Orson

 David Elliott

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

APPETIZER: Review of The Other Side of the Wind

For almost 50 years it haunted Orson Welles’s name, longer than the span from Citizen Kane (1941) to F for Fake (1977). Filmed in patchy intervals from 1970 to 1976, partly edited by Welles (to curry investor interest at a 1975 tribute to him), The Other Side of the Wind remained unfinished. After his 1985 death, lavish footage sat in a vault as legal combat between an Iranian investor, Orson’s estate-ruling daughter Beatrice and the film’s star Oja Kodar (Orson’s great love for 23 years) blew on and on, like a tireless wind. This is cult-myth stuff, made poignant by the 2006 death of cameraman Gary Graver. Enthusiast, friend, gofer, problem-fixer, Graver was for 15 years Sancho to Quixote Welles. His imagery is often excellent in the “reborn” Wind, now on Netflix – which was a completion angel, but also cramped theatrical showings. Wind is now, at last, a visible ghost – but how viable?

 

Using Arizona and L.A. locations, either rented or shot on-the-run, it pivots around the 70^th birthday of fabled director Jake Hannaford. He is clearly a variant on Welles, also evoking old studio bulls (Walsh, Ford, Hawks) as incarnated by John Huston (playing Jake out of loyalty to his friend Orson). The budget has collapsed for Jake’s The Other Side of the Wind, his comeback project to eclipse the young, Rebel Hollywood guests (which include Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom, etc.). Aging Welles veterans circulate as snipers: Paul Stewart (wryly echoing his butler in Kane), Lilli Palmer, Cameron Mitchell, Norman Foster, Mercedes McCambridge and funny, booze-ravaged Edmond O’Brien. Pedants, paparazzi and voyeurs help churn the event into gossipy chaos. Fast-cut editing aims for docu-spontaneity. yet the party often feels staged. Much dialog was improvised, yet many zingers sound recycled. Nobody has much fun. Serving this Jake cake, Welles never rivals his great gatherings: film’s best office party (Citizen Kane), the mansion ball in The Magnificent Ambersons, the Goya  fiesta and wild Munich party in Mr. Arkadin.

Preening as master-of-revels is insufferable Brooks Otterlake – Peter Bogdanovich, oozing the flip hauteur that by 1971 made him Hollywood’s most resented young success (he seems to intuit his coming hard lessons, and the fate of his hero). In this feast of rancor, the acid plum is Welles’s evident disdain for his acolyte, which curdles most of Huston’s famous charm. Bogdanovich would age to champion this film, despite this self-portrait. Because Hannaford is such a sour pickle he never suggests the vital, unbeaten Welles who was still planning films on the night of his death at 70, nor the Huston who made late masterpieces before departure at 81.

Another buzz-kill is Jake’s nastiness to intrusive critic Julie Rich, a spitball at Pauline Kael. Pretty, easily rattled Susan Strasberg plays Rich as an aggressive pest, much less like Kael than Hedda Hopper in The Oscar. As filming lurched along, Kael’s big New Yorker piece arrived, attacking Welles’s primacy in scripting Citizen Kane. Bogdanovich led the counter-blast, nailing Kael for some lazy research and for over-touting forgotten writer Herman Mankiewicz (while ignoring her canny rooting of Kane in its era, and her shrewd analysis of Welles’s creative dominance). A “Polack extraction” line snaps at Kael’s Polish-Jewish ancestry. It may be the worst of the ’70s bad vibes, in a movie with too many. 

The party sputters on past fireworks and drunken midgets and Jake’s giddy rifle shooting, to a drive-in screening of segments from Jake’s unfinished film, a swank erotic reverie in which Kodar and a dull stud (who had worked for porn parodist Russ Meyer) display flesh. This connects with nothing, but suggests a lampoon of Vogue Antonioni (the au courant auteur whom Welles disdained). Orson distanced himself, leaving much of the design and cutting to Kodar and Graver. Glossy, elegant but not very sexy, the mock-kitsch Antonioni styling and Welles’s love of Kodar cancel each other out. Could Orson Wizard have pulled off the radical reboot that he later talked about? A fanatical improver, he was still editing The Trial on the morning of its Paris premiere. Instead, surplus footage, a baggy script, revision notes and too many iffy choices swamped the rescue’s brave editor, Bob Murawski. This is not the movie Welles would have finished. There is some pathos, for Hannaford is a shipwrecked talent, and luscious Kodar is like his mermaid dream. Nothing can help the dreary hippie touches, which echo the worst of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.    

The Other Side of the Wind seems written on the wind, spraying its confetti about insurgent filming, industry politics, macho gayness, vamp-ad chic and auteurist cultism. It lacks force and focus. Perhaps the artist praised by Andre Bazin as "the fastest director in the world" simply got slowed, becalmed and stymied by the many frustrations. It’s a time capsule holding  too much dust and ash, less art than archeology. Released in its day, it would likely have been panned as an indulgent echo of Fellini’s 8½, or even (given the sex) a wan attempt at Citizen Hefner. But an ironic footnote soon emerged. Welles achieved mini-budget magic by uniting witty cutting, conceptual collage and a sly, sexy salute to Kodar in his bravura essay movie F for Fake. He one-upped the unseen Wind. Which, in a Netflixed era, should now be seen if not revered. (Netflix viewers can also find  Morgan Neville’s documentary on the history, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead).

SALAD (A List)

Orson Welles’s Movies Ranked by Quality 

As chosen by (what else?) my discriminating taste:

1. Citizen Kane (1941), 2. Chimes at Midnight (1966), 3. The Trial (1962), 4. Touch of Evil (1958), 5. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), 6. Mr. Arkadin (1954),7. F for Fake (1975), 8. Othello (1952), 9. The Lady from Shanghai (1948), 10. The Immortal Story (1968), 11. Macbeth (1948), 12. The Stranger (1946), 13. Journey Into Fear (Welles-Foster,1942) and … posterity will find a number for Wind.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The heartfelt guide to Orson’s last, productive but ill-financed years is What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (2006), a nuanced memoir by scholar and friend Joseph McBride, who appears briefly in Wind. His thoughts on the movie’s eroticism: “Welles joked, ‘All I can say is that compared to (Bertolucci’s) Last Tango in Paris, which incidentally I liked very much, my production will be a nice family picture.’ But in fact Wind offers an especially searching and complex portrait of sexuality for a director whose earlier work had tended to treat sex discretely. When Welles turned down, on moral grounds, an offer to appear in Gore Vidal’s Caligula (he suspected) that the Penthouse production would become a pornographic extravaganza. Kenneth Tynan told Vidal, ‘You must never forget what a Puritan he is when it comes to sex.’ Welles told me (McBride) that he had always wanted to shoot erotic scenes but was uncomfortable doing so until he could pass them off as somebody else’s work.”  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As a film stylist, Welles was no Puritan. In the baroque Kafka mazes he created for The Trial, most at the derelict Gare d’Orsay in Paris, “form followed fantasy, and every space is charged for cinematic effect. ‘Distaste for a richly rhetorical style may be an intelligent and well-earned sensibility,’ notes Robert Garis, ‘but it may also be a puritanical refusal to allow art its full range. No one has ever accused Welles’s flamboyance of being puritanical.’ ” (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial 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.

Their noir nightmare shatters in a mirrored “funhouse” for Everett Sloane (left), Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai (Columbia Pictures 1948; director Orson Welles, photographed by Charles Lawton Jr. and others).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 140: 'Stan & Ollie' plus More

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.