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.
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