David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
(Note: Nosh
161 will appear on Friday, Aug. 2)
APPETIZER (Reviews: Meeting
Gorbachev and Pavarotti)
Meeting Gorbachev
Try to imagine an 1820 documentary of the prematurely aged
Napoleon being interviewed on St. Helena, recalling his victories, that damned Waterloo,
and his lost dream of an imperial, Napoleonic Europe somehow true to the French
Revolution. Impossible, of course, but here up-close is Mikhail Gorbachev, the
man who transformed Europe with even more rapid force, and without war. Meeting Gorbachev, from Werner Herzog
and colleague Andre Singer, captures the final Soviet president 36 years after
the USSR dissolved. Interviewed by the German auteur, Mikhail Sergeyevich at 87
has a big gut and bloated face (his dome’s famous “port wine” birthmark seems
faded), yet his pensive words, sly glances and sage twinkles reveal the unique authority
of a man who made history on a huge scale. A devout Communist since youth, he yet
ended the Red empire most Russians both feared and cherished. He ushered in
German reunification, major arms treaties and, after losing power as the system
collapsed, two aftershocks: the flop regime of “populist” drunk Boris Yeltsin
and the klepto-tsarist rule of KGB man Vladimir Putin (seen moving like a cold
eel at the 2015 funeral of Gorbachev’s beloved wife Raisa).
Among the few Herzogian touches is a triple dirge of
Kremlin death rites for the “three fossils” (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko).
Their failed, geriatric tenures opened up power for the balding but young and
energetic Gorbachev, a farmboy who, as a rising Party boss,often
hitched rides or even walked his
province. Necessity could mother only so much invention in a system as clotted and
defective as the 1980s Soviet Union, and while he won the admiration of Reagan,
Thatcher and big Western crowds, rigid Russian apparatchiks and bewildered citizens could barely fathom the
lurching zig-zag of Gorbachev’s reforms. The easy charm so tonic to Western
media never quite seduced a nation of weary, depressed, often alcoholic people
still haunted by Stalin and the 25 million Soviet dead of World War II. Gorbachev
was both an insider and outlier. He came too late or too soon – and after a
great run, he ran out of luck.
The film is Herzog in a fairly official mode, using formal
interviews, file footage and pensive pauses, laced with personal moments and
memories. This is a moving, lastingly important homage to a humane Marxist whose
devotion to peace and democratic change, though often wily, was not cynical (he
seems a bit startled when Herzog proclaims his loving gratitude). Gorbachev
remains pertinent: “People who don’t understand the importance of cooperation
and disagreement should get out of
politics” – a nail-hard rebuke to Trump and Putin, the vain, corrupt titans
of our current disorder. Certainly neither would choose to recite “I Go Out on
the Road Alone,” a lyrical poem about death and hope by the 19th century
romantic Mikhail Lermontov. But Gorbachev does.
Pavarotti
In Pavarotti the fabled tenor, simply Luciano to around two billion fans, is all about la abbondanza Italiana. Abundant in
appetite – the meals, the widening girth! Abundant in goodwill – the adulation
tours, the charities! Above all, abundant in song – his “Nessun dorma” routs Mario
Lanza’s ghost! You don’t so much watch Ron Howard’s documentary as scarf it up,
sauced by the positive emotion of the
former Opie’s adult career (Splash,
Cocoon, Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, The Beatles, even Frost/Nixon). This tribute reveals the man himself only if you
think that the private Luciano can be separated from his lifelong packaging.
That began in childhood as a Modena baker’s child, the pasta cherub in a largely
female family. Near the end he regretted being an inadequate father, yet he once
put his hot career on hold for months to tenderly nurture a very sick daughter
(she recovered).
The often astounding heart is the music, its
standing-O chorus including Michael Jackson,
the Reagans, Bono, Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana and Joan Sutherland (the grand
coloratura Aussie who gave the rising Italian key lessons in breath control). We
meet the foxy, iron-willed managers, much of the big family and, of course, Placido
Domingo and José Carreras, who joined Pavarotti in the profitable tours of the
Three Tenors. We are spared Luciano’s fall into cinema buffa, the 1982 kitsch bomb Yes, Giorgio (he rose in a balloon, the movie sank). We can intuit Howard’s
backstage politics to obtain candid talk and clips about the deeply domestic
and then heartbroken wife Adua, and a young soprano Luciano mentored into an
affair and scandal, then the short reign of adoring young wife Nicoletta (who
inherited hugely). Always there is the solar beacon: the epic, toothy smile framed
by hair, venting the voice that he called “the prima donna of my body” (in late
years, less prima than problematic). Opera’s most stellar male since Enrico
Caruso, Luciano was a complex, needy and life-consuming man. Howard’s aria della
abbondanza is another obligatory ovation.
SALAD (A List)
10 Movies Concerning
the Soviet Union
October (Sergei Eisenstein 1927), The End of St. Petersburg (Vsevolod Pudovkin 1927), Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko 1929), The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov
1957), Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei
Tarkovsky 1962), One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich (Caspar Wrede 1970), Moscow
on the Hudson (Paul Mazursky 1984), Come
and See (Elem Klemov 1985), The
Russia House (Fred Schepisi 1990) and Stalin
(Ivan Passer 1992).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
Welles felt some chagrin that he didn’t direct The Third Man (1949), his greatest hit as an actor. Carol Reed let
him shape his magnetically evil hustler Harry Lime: “Carol was the kind of
person who didn’t feel threatened by ideas from other people. A wonderful
director! In Europe the picture was a hundred times bigger than here, the
biggest hit since the war. Europeans could understand (it) in a way Americans
didn’t. They had been through hell, the war, the cynicism, the black market,
all of that. Harry Lime represented their past, the dark side of them – yet
attractive, you know. You cannot imagine what it was, a kind of mania. When I
came into a restaurant, people went crazy, my one moment of being a superstar.”
(OW to Henry Jaglom in My Lunches With
Orson.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Jim
Bouton died on Wednesday, July 10 at 80, recalled for his highly debated career
in big-time baseball and his funny, provocative memoir Ball Four. But for some of us he remains forever Terry Lennox, the
tanned, jaded, smooth-talking killer in Robert Altman’s great 1973 film The Long Goodbye, betraying his pal Philip
Marlowe (Elliott Gould). Earlier, in Marlowe’s L.A. apartment “the pals joke
about baseball’s DiMaggio brothers, a juicy spitball of dialog because Lennox
is played by former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton. Gould had pitched his chum to
Altman, and Bouton marveled that “It’s like the Yankees reaching up in the
stand to some guy and saying we’re putting you at third base today.” He was
terrific. (Quote from the Gould/Long
Goodbye chapter in my book Starlight
Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Harry Lime (Orson Welles) hides from the Viennese sewer police in The Third Man (British Lion;/'Selznick 1949; director Carol Reed , d..p. Robert Krasker).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
Harry Lime (Orson Welles) hides from the Viennese sewer police in The Third Man (British Lion;/'Selznick 1949; director Carol Reed , d..p. Robert Krasker).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
