Friday, July 19, 2019

Nosh 160: 'Meeting Gorbachev,' 'Pavarotti' and more


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.

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Nosh 159: 'Be Natural (Alice Guy-Blache),' 'Echo in the Canyon' & More

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Be Natural and Echo in the Canyon)


Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
Film archeology, which now firmly embraces the 30 years of silent movies, has found its Tut’s tomb in a little Frenchwoman who lived from 1873 to 1968, won the Legion of Honor and is buried in New Jersey. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is like a reef of coral magic, loaded with treasure from a silent Atlantis.  Pamela B. Green’s documentary uses explanatory graphics and zappy devices for a great purpose. Guy-Blaché was a pioneer in tinted color, rapid cutting, sight gags, depth-of-field, surrealism, pre-recorded sound, gender comedy and unforced acting (“Be Natural” was posted in her studio). She rose not by acting (bourgeois father: “I’d rather see you dead”) but, at first, by way of stenography. Attending a key 1895 demonstration of projected film in Paris with her boss, the emerging mogul León Gaumont, petite Alice found her wonderland. A visionary in a new, still mongrel medium, she would parlay her steno pad into a launch pad of imagination, a prodigious career of scripting, designing, directing, producing and editing.

With similar passion Green and her team tracked down  relatives, colleagues and terrific interviews of old Alice and a surviving daughter. Though not obscure in her prime, Alice never quite joined the primal pantheon of Lumière, Pathé, Porter, Mélies, Friese-Greene, Edison and others (you know: the guys). Gaumont was a good but patriarchal boss, and once the “flickers” became a world industry Guy-Blaché’s energy and authority were largely siphoned into marriage and motherhood. This movie is Alice Guy shedding her corsets to dance her cancan. Losing her marital Blaché would be a topping reward, for Herbert Blaché (English, not French) muscled into her art, took office control after they moved to Fort Lee, N.J., to make longer films, ran their studio aground and killed their marriage by philandering. Masterful Alice was nobody’s fool, yet still a woman in her time, and she was sidelined. It would take Leni Riefenstahl to make “woman auteur” an undeniable fact, although her mentor was Hitler.

Green has populated her devotional salute with a hallelujah chorus (Geena Davis, Julie Delpy, Martin Scorsese, Kevin Brownlow, Diablo Cody, Agnes Varda, Julie Taymor, Ben Kingsley etc.). Jodie Foster narrates. A key backer was flesh-peddler Hugh Hefner, now making amends from his grave. Most of the best talk is French, full of technical insights and suspenseful discoveries. The academic hive buzzes, with an American prof declaring that Alice’s bold improvs and meta-filmic tangents are the DNA of YouTube (would that make her Playing Trumps a Gallic premonition of Trumpism?). More of her prolific work is being saved from nitrate oblivion, and yet we see only tauntingly delicious fragments. Alice mothered more than she knew – in remaking her whimsical first hit The Cabbage Fairy, twice, she pointed the way to serial franchising.

The film has a haunting figure, barely mentioned: D.W. Griffith. Given too much credit in his time, the American master may now, by will of fate and fad, get too little. He is seen briefly but mentioned only in a Hitchcock quote praising him and Alice as early inspirations. Griffith’s impact on acting, genre, narrative and the biz was massive, but today’s revisionism must wonder if Guy-Blaché’s folksy, funny use of a black cast led by “cakewalk king” William Russell, in A Fool and His Money, is the forgotten antidote to Griffith’s patronizingly racist treatment of blacks in The Birth of a Nation. Did Alice ever contemplate the contrast between her short charmer and Griffith’s seismic event? Now, in tandem, their dialectic cannot be silent.   


Echo in the Canyon
“It was just ’66 and early ’67,” music producer Terry (Peter Fonda) said to an awed young lover in 1999’s The Limey. “That’s all (the hip, positive Sixties) really was.” Echo in the Canyon opens a slightly wider window on that era,  when a foaming surf of California rock, cross-fed by folk and pop, flowed from musical wizards sharing ideas and guitars in their homes in L.A.’s lotus-dreamy Laurel Canyon. Though Jackson Browne calls it “the antithesis of the plastic straight world on television,” bless the TV archives of Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark for period performances of The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds and more. Andrew Slater’s documentary is hosted by singer and producer Jakob Dylan, whose demurely attentive interviews often star his handsomeness (courtesy of mama Sara, not papa Bob), his profile a camera beacon much like Fonda’s in The Limey.

This nostalgic package barely explores the famous canyon, yet loves the songs and musicians, guitars and studios. We learn that the Beatles’s Rubber Soul inspired Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds, which in boomerang return inspired the Beatles’s Sergeant Pepper, and so forth. A less epochal echo is Jake Dylan’s whisper-glide voice in tribute versions, boosted by songbirds Fiona Apple, Norah Jones, Cat Power. The real gold is old clips and recent, dig-this memories from Eric Clapton, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, John Sebastian and Wilson. The au-courant sex life of Michelle Phillips helped end the heavenly harmonic Mamas and Papas. Post-sylph she still looks good, impishly telling Dylan “I was a very busy girl.” Bonus for film buffs: slices of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, a footloose time capsule of hipster L.A. in 1968 that is beyond imitation. Remember star Gary Lockwood? Here he is, like a hunky, tanned astronaut on planet Cool.

SALAD (A List)
Remarkable Movies about Silent Filming
In order of arrival (with year, director):
Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton 1924), The Cameraman (Buster Keaton, Ed Sedgwick 1928), Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga-Vertov 1929), The Magic Box (John Boulting 1951), Nickelodeon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1976 but see 2009 “director’s cut” DVD), A Slave of Love (Nikita Mikhalkov 1976), Unknown Chaplin (Kevin Brownlow, David Gil 1983), Lyrical Nitrate (Peter Delpeut 1991), The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius 2011), Hugo (Martin Scorsese 2011) and Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison 2016).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson is busy this week devising a new magic show in Vegas.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“Born upscale in 1899 to a Manhattan doctor and illustrator, Humphrey Bogart still had a steep climb to fame. His first Hollywood campaign in the early 1930s inflicted ten flops, but Broadway success in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest led him to Warner Bros. to re-create his Duke Mantee. Mentored by friend and co-star Leslie Howard, the triumph was his last for years. English movie critic Graham Greene called Mantee ‘the sad simian killer, the best character in the play,’ without mentioning Bogart.” (From the Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre 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.


Humphrey Bogart’s gangster Duke Mantee looms over Leslie Howard and Bette Davis on a rather stagey studio set of The Petrified Forest (Warner Bros. 1936; director Archie Mayo, d.p. Sol Polito).


For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Thursday, July 4, 2019

Nosh 158: 'Last Black Man in San Francisco' & More


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

APPETIZER (Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco)



The Last Black Man in San Francisco
No need to leave your heart in San Francisco. Once smitten, you carry it in your heart as a sentimental compass. I only lived there in 1976, yet recently felt a certain compass magnetism when I went with my son Travis for a return visit. Although our best new discoveries were just outside S.F. (architect Timothy Pflueger’s superb Paramount Theater in Oakland, central Alameda on its island, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center), the old, peninsular spell of the siren city took hold again: the tonic light and lyric air, the fog, the hills and parks, the bay views, the prim rowhouses and the whispering call of old movies (see list below). San Francisco is always a little too much, and we can never quite get enough.

Rarely has the mystique been so well caught on film as in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a remarkable feature debut by director Joe Talbot. He scripted with Jimmie Fails, a fellow San Franciscan and friend since childhood. Fails’s African-American family once lived in a big Victorian home in the Fillmore District, formerly Japanese, then largely black until the area was clobbered by gentrification. The story’s 1889 house is a lofty beauty not far away on South Van Ness, in the upper Mission District. It rules the film much like the bigger mansions in Sunset Boulevard and The Magnificent Ambersons, its “witch’s hat” topping its gingerbready carvings of Queen Anne décor. The story has similar filigree, its social and family themes gripped by the fierce desire of Jimmie (playing himself) to get back the family home lost by his father (hard, angry but not simple Rob Morgan). His Quixotic San Fran dream has a Sancho Panza: Jimmie’s pal Montgomery (gentle, highly expressive Jonathan Majors), an artist and aspiring playwright.

Skateboarding across town to visit the old marvel, they touch it up with fresh paint and flowers, irritating two aging white residents. Somehow Jimmie devoutly believes that his great-grandfather built the home in 1946 despite its retro style, using materials and craft skills almost impossible to find and finance in the postwar recession. Emotionally we also wish to believe. The chums are encouraged by Jimmie’s sweet, blind grandfather (Danny Glover), and when the whites suddenly decamp, the dreamers invade like royal squatters or stake-holders of racial justice. Jimmie’s covetous yearning to rectify his father’s loss becomes a fertile fusion of urban legend, family history and private quest. There could be no better locale for this haunted story than San Francisco, with its lush, cosmopolitan but insular self-regard as the golden town at the end of the western rainbow (for a pure fix of the myth, view the bookstore scene in Vertigo).  

When a movie pierces the heart, you should admit it.  Jimmie is stunned to briefly encounter his pretty mother (who’d moved to L.A.) on a bus. Her smiling, almost ghostly intensity stirred memories of my mother, who spent her final years in San Francisco, renting half of a vintage Victorian on South Van Ness. Such echo effects carry a movie beyond formulaic or objective appeal, and Talbot and Fails have built their intuitive life-poem on a powerful sense of place, caught by the fleet, shimmering contrasts of Adam Newport-Berra’s imagery. Some scenes of Jimmie’s former street posse of angry, trash-talking buddies are somewhat generic, yet reveal why he left them, why the house is his seductive refuge, and why he needs such a sensitive, challenging friend as Monty. In his moods and moves Jimmie Fails, who looks like a young, taller Don Cheadle, is the story’s pensive core of soul.

A scene with two glib white girls feels rather editorial, but naming a white-yuppie realtor Clayton Newsom (a snip at Gavin Newsom, the former mayor and now state governor) has some sporty sass. The entirely human tale breathes with few gusts of rhetoric, and the pathos of elegy is kept under subtle control. This is a good urban, black, house and family movie, and a great San Francisco movie. (Offered in fond memory of Pauline Kael, the brilliant critic shaped in youth by San Francisco and Berkeley. Her birth centennial was on June 19.)
                                                                       
SALAD (A List)
16 (+1) Memorable San Francisco Movies, each a cable car worth riding: 
The Maltese Falcon (director John Huston, 1941), Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1979), Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947), The Killer Elite (Sam Peckinpah, 1975), The Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947), The Conversation (Francis Coppola, 1974), Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976), Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008), Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Judy Irving, 2003), Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968), The Man Who Cheated Himself (Felix Feist, 1950), D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949), Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949) and Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968). And on its lyrical suburban line: Colma: The Musical (Richard Wong, 2006). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson Welles used San Francisco and Sausalito for his Rita Hayworth noir The Lady From Shanghai, employing downtown and “three city landmarks: the Steinhart Aquarium, the Mandarin (Chinatown) Theater and Whitney’s Playland at the beach,” though interiors for the violent fun-house nightmare were shot at the Columbia studio in L.A. “The hall of mirrors is a transformations set, the mirrors arranged shot by shot to achieve the desired effect, which entailed a much longer and more costly shoot than anticipated.” Welles “increased the sense of disorientation by using many multiple exposures and other effects, and by increasing the number of ‘impossible’ frames, as in the composite shot of two Elsas (Hayworth) facing us in close-up.” No doubt the Chamber of Commerce was bewildered. (Quotes from Orson Welles at Work, by Jean-Pierre Berthomé and Francois Thomas.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
For The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman “put Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) in a unique bachelor pad atop High Tower Drive, a pipe-stem street in a skinny Hollywood canyon. Designed by Carl Kay, the Deco-stucco complex is totally noir. Its rival is Irving Goldstine’s Malloch Apt. Bldg. in San Francisco, Lauren Bacall’s nest in Dark Passage.” On our trip Travis and I returned to the Malloch at 1360 Montgomery, still a glory of applied metallic art and Moderne glasswork (interior rooms were shot at the Warner Bros. studio). We rode the shining, glassy elevator as Bogie and Bacall did in 1947. (From the Elliott 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.



Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt and a mighty big car at Fort Point below the Golden Gate, in The Man Who Cheated Himself (20th Century Fox, 1950; director Felix Feist, d.p. Russell Harlan).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.