Nosh 168: 'Ad Astra' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Ad Astra)

Ad Astra

You might wonder, quite rightly, why Ad Astra doesn’t star Ed Asner. But Brad Pitt will do – very well. Ad Astra (Latin for “to the stars”) gives Pitt his second fulfillment this year. The first was Cliff Booth, the wry, laidback sidekick to Leo DiCaprio in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Now, upon a future time in space, Pitt goes the distance (over four billion miles) as astronaut Roy McBride. Booth was the utter opposite of a company man. Roy is a famous NASA trouble-shooter, living in the shadow of father H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), legendary pathfinder to Jupiter and Saturn. Old McBride is such an edge rider that, scorning Earth, he has ended up orbiting solo near Neptune. Like Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon in Forbidden Planet) he has become a crank visionary, obsessed with discovering aliens. 

“I’m calm, steady, ready to go” Roy tells himself, yet churns with doubt fed by love/hate for his rogue father. His conflicted heat beneath icecap discipline drove away his wife (Liv Tyler). Now he leads a secret mission to Neptune by way of Moon and Mars, to find dad dead or alive. Somehow (“somehow” is always part of space cargo), the father triggered an electrical surge from afar, causing many fatalities. From the first whopper – an immense, skeletal antenna stormed by the surge – director James Gray, co-writer Ethan Gross and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema show synchronized fluency with both tech hardware and emotional software. Pitt’s subtle eye nuances and supple moves lift the movie above space cadet formula.  For Roy, no mere knob on the shining machinery, the long trip out is also a traumatic plunge within.

The techno-vistas and fantastic spatial depths evoke Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey without soul-freezing the actors (that grand vision barely has human characters). Dad’s Neptunian isolation evokes Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, yet Jones’s gnarly pathos is more vulnerable than Brando’s jungle rot. Pitt, whose micro-tonal acting gives focal depth and gravity to the adventure, is one of those pretty male stars (Dick Powell, William Holden, Sterling Hayden, Alain Delon, Richard Gere, Pierce Brosnan) who aged into more expressiveness, their facial lines like earned rewards.

Many space travels have aspired to drama (Moon, Solaris, Countdown, Apollo 13, The Martian etc.). None, even the poignant fable Silent Running, had quite this cross-weaving of astronomical risk and personal angst. Compulsive team bonding relieves the alienation of stellar distances, yet it often seems suspended in a pitiless void. Donald Sutherland exudes ambivalence as an old pro of the program. Ruth Negga has a small but fully loaded role as a station officer on Mars, suffocating from sterile enclosure and control mania from Houston (the clipped, chipper space talk can sound like mutant English, bleached of personality).

True to genre, there is some plot lint and minor implausibles (I have doubts about Roy swimming in his space suit to enter a rocket). When Roy uses a thin metal sheet as a shield against incoming asteroids, it’s almost as if Pitt is leaping back to Troy (now less Achilles than Odysseus). There is, in fact, a vestige of Homeric power in this very modern story, and without Kubrick’s slightly sedated, enigmatic symbolism. The most compelling twist of this linear but not simple saga is that it is high on space and yet skeptical about humans in space. Film buff Gray has stretched bravely before (The Yards, Little Odessa, The Immigrant), with rather mixed results. In Ad Astra he has, with expert passion, achieved an intimately personal space spectacular. The ending delivers serious satisfaction.

SALAD (A List)

The 12 Best Outer Space Movies

No, not space invader or super-hero movies:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick 1968), 2. Ad Astra (James Gray 2019), 3. The Martian (Ridley Scott 2015), 4. Apollo 13 (Ron Howard 1995), 5. Moon (Duncan Jones 2009), 6. Star Wars (George Lucas 1977), 7. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky 1972), 8. Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull 1972), 9. Forbidden Planet (Fred Wilcox 1956), 10. Galaxy Quest (Dean Parisot 1999), 11. Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin 1964) and 12. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer 1982). Best earthbound space dream: Gattaca (Andrew Niccol 1997).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

An endless target of bad fat jokes in later years, Orson Welles had his own mischief with the trope. As when pal Henry Jaglom asked him his height: “I used to be six-three and a half, now I’m about six-two. My neck keeps disappearing. Gravity, you know? Like Elizabeth Taylor. She has no neck left! Her shoulders come to her ears, and she’s still young. Now imagine where her face will be when she’s my age (69).” Lady Liz died before this snarky morsel was published, in Jaglom’s and Peter Biskind’s My Lunches with Orson.  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Piety for Raymond Chandler’s last major detective novel was never an issue for Robert Altman, filming The Long Goodbye in 1972: “Adapter Leigh Brackett (script veteran of The Big Sleep) felt that Chandler’s book broke down: ‘You couldn’t really translate it to screen. It was hackneyed.’ Only an update might overcome the flaws diagnosed by Ross Macdonald, Chandler’s great successor: ‘Philip Marlowe’s voice is limited by his role as a hardboiled hero. He must speak within his character limits, and those are quite narrowly conceived. (Chandler) was old and the language failed to respond. He was trapped like the late Hemingway in an unnecessarily limiting idea of self, hero, and language.” Altman’s revision emerged as a creative triumph and, gradually, a cult success. (Quote from the Elliott Gould/Long Goodbye chapter in my book Starlight Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

As space warlord Khan, Ricardo Montalban crowned his career with hammy brilliance in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Paramount Pictures 1982, director Nicholas Meyer, d.p. Gayne Rescher).

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Nosh 167: 'The Goldfinch', 'Brittany Runs a Marathon' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Goldfinch and Brittany Runs a Marathon)

The Goldfinch

Some critical snipes at The Goldfinch come off like book reports written by an English Lit. nerd-snob who disdains movies. But every strong film of a major novel (see list below) is more deft abridgement than devout facsimile. This stylish, adult, tricky entertainment is a real page-turner – of scenes superbly photographed, keenly acted and often suspenseful. Donna Tartt’s novel won a Pulitzer and the Carnegie Medal. It, too, was fragged by littérateurs who thought her lavish text was too far in debt to grand old scribblers (Dickens, Hugo, Stevenson, etc), although Stephen King was a big fan. You don't need Tartt’s 784 pages to absorb this artfully streamlined film, which trusts its viewers to do some thinking.

As in Brooklyn (2015), John Crowley sets off intense, reciprocal flows of feeling between people and places. This tale tells of Theo Decker, 13. His mother dies in a terror blast in the Dutch galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum (Tartt’s time-tripping of the 1654 gunpowder explosion in Delft which killed young Carel Fabritius, a fledgling master taught by Rembrandt). Theo survives whole but burdened: a dying victim foists on him Fabritius’s undamaged goldfinch painting (the film might smartly have shown this somewhat sooner). Many Oliver Twist-ing adventures follow. Nicole Kidman, showing hints of middle age, later more aged by make-up, tenderly provides Theo a posh Manhattan sanctuary. Until his seedy rogue father (Luke Wilson) turns up, hauling him to a dismal desert suburb near Las Vegas. The always excellent Jeffrey Wright is a mysterious antiques restorer who mentors the boy. Theo keeps secret “his” little painting, a sort of Audubon-Vermeer talisman for a better life yet also a growing danger as he heads into adulthood.

Crowley gives the story a dreamy mental flux, crucially photographed by Roger Deakins, the great imagist for the Coen brothers. With his fluent transitions, focal shifts and sure-shot lighting, Deakins lives up to Fabritius (at some moments virtually Vermeer). The heart of the excellent cast is four young actors. Oakes Fegley is quiet, pensive but not passive Theo, then Ansel Elgort the grown Theo. Charismatic Finn Wolfhard (Dickensian handle!) is the Artful Dodger figure Boris, son of a Russian émigré thug. Vampirishly pale, he leads Theo (whom he calls Harry Potter) into mind-trip drugs but also radical friendship. Boris full-grown is the stellar Aneurin Barnard. Fegley, Elgort, Wolfhard, Barnard – quite a quartet.

Tartt’s somewhat magical-realist tactics, freely adapted by Peter Straughan, deliver aesthetic largesse and numerous time-jumps (this will all be “too much talk, too little action” for the mall crowd that needs adrenaline drips of violence). There is a flimsy romance, and in the final 20 of its 149 minutes The Goldfinch spins some hasty melodrama of intrigue with Euro-crooks. This is not a dud ending like Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, a bookish fantasy which seemed to be suddenly abducted by hacks. Tartt’s yarn is strong, stretchy, textured and vivid. Theo is no quitter, and the goldfinch lives – perched, forever beautiful, at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague.

Brittany Runs a Marathon

Brittany is no chubby club comic lobbing lines about body issues, even though actor Jillian Bell has comedy creds (SNL writer, the Groundlings). Her Brittany is seriously desperate. Writer and director Paul Down Colaizzo, inspired by a friend who jogged away her flab, lets Bell find and sweat the changes of the near-30 New Yorker, whose poor jobs, drinking, party drugs, loneliness, envy and humiliation finally drive her to a doctor for weight relief. Her fast quips are mostly defensive, although her  “comical” takedown of a heavier woman who has found happiness is ugly. Street running brings sweat, freedom, dropped pounds and a goal: the city’s fabled 26-mile marathon. Girl-snark texting, tweeting and flirtation gambits get rather tiresome, yet Brittany finds more than feedback from a caring, funny guy (Umbesh Ambudkar). Bell takes the weight struggle beyond schtick. The true marathon isn’t about running but surviving.   

SALAD (A List)

Impressive Filmings of Important Novels

With their source writer, director and year:

                  Greed from McTeague (Frank Norris, Erich von Stroheim 1924), Alice Adams (Booth Tarkington, George Stevens, 1935), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, John Ford, 1940), The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett, John Huston, 1941), Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens, David Lean 1948), Intruder in the Dust (William Faulkner, Clarence Brown 1949), Diary of a Country Priest (Georges Bernanos, Robert Bresson 1950), East of Eden (John Steinbeck, Elia Kazan 1955), War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, King Vidor 1956), The Horse’s Mouth (Joyce Cary, Ronald Neame, 1959), Elmer Gantry (Sinclair Lewis, Richard Brooks 1960), The Trial (Franz Kafka, Orson Welles 1963), The Leopard (G. T. di Lampedusa, Luchino Visconti 1963), Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Kulidzhanov 1965), The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Francis Coppola 1972), A Room With a View (E.M. Forster, James Ivory 1985), Persuasion (Jane Austen, Roger Michell 1997).               

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles was an impacter. Startling impact launched his stage career at age 16 in 1931, in his wanderlusting (more painting than lust) trip to Ireland. Actor and director Micheál MacLiammóir of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, soon his mentor, never forgot meeting the “very tall young man with a chubby face, full powerful lips and disconcerting Chinese eyes. His hands were enormous and very beautifully shaped … and moved with the sort of abandon never seen in a European. The voice, with its brazen transatlantic sonority, was already that of a preacher, a man of power. It bloomed and boomed its way through the dusty air of the scene dock as though it would crash down the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor. (He) surveyed us with magnificent patience as though here was our chance to do something beautiful at last – yes, sir – and were we going to take it?” You bet. (From David Thomson’s Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Audrey Hepburn was severely tested when her father, a fascist sympathizer, left under a cloud, divorced, never returned. When the Nazis brutalized Holland, she ‘did her bit’ in opposition and came close to slow starvation. Later she would turn down filming The Diary of Anne Frank because it ‘was like reading my own experience from her point of view. I was quite destroyed by it.” The story of  tough, endangered youth before fame is told in Robert Matzen’s deeply researched book Dutch Girl. (Quote from the Hepburn/Funny Face chapter in my book Starlight Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Romy Schneider reaches for falling fluff on the set of The Trial; behind her are Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins. (Paris-Europa/Astor 1963; director Orson Welles, d.p. Edmond Richard)

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Nosh 166: 'Bunuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles,' 'Honeyland,' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles and Honeyland)

For those who don’t need to have their brain swacked at the mall by Hustlers or It Chapter Two …

Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles 

Here is an odd movie, one befitting the greatest surreal director, Luis Buñuel. Salvador Simó has made an animated salute to the 1932 making of Buñuel’s once scandalous, now obscure Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread). Using a little budget, after his anarchist friend Ramón Acín won the lottery (Buñuel spent much of it on a Fiat touring car for the filming), Tierra imitated and slightly spoofed the vogue for “ethnographic” documentaries about exotic places. Unemployed after his MGM-paid visit to Hollywood, and stung by falling out with Salvador Dalí after their scandalous Un Chien Andalou and even more subversive L’Age d’Or, Buñuel’s exotic place was in his homeland: Spain’s remote, western Las Hurdes region of medieval poverty and superstition, an outback ripe for the coming of fascism. The main fiesta involved caballeros pulling the heads off live roosters. A key local income was the state stipend for taking in poor orphans (soon multiplied by the Civil War – Franco’s regime would ban Tierra Sin Pan).

The animation is elegantly simple and austere, with only a few flourishes (as in the image above). No need to hype the subject graphically, given the still disturbing clips inserted from Tierra. Simó’s team comes through, as did Buñuel’s little band (which included one assistant on assignment from … Vogue!). Did Buñuel, prompted by the Marian idolatry of villagers, really have erotic dreams of the Virgin as the one cartooned here? His compassion, notably for a sick girl, is shown touchingly. He also “improvised” certain incidents, including a chicken’s exit and probably a mountain goat’s. He was young, angry and whipped along by his muse, and so: a surreal documentary (he was Werner Herzog’s soul father). This is a moving tribute,  too close to his spirit and the harsh themes to be just a cinephile valentine. It hops along the gears of creativity with sprightly assurance.  

Buñuel is, like surrealism, a past-century sensation, and yet his best movies (El, Viridiana, Los Olvidados, Robinson Crusoe, Nazarin, Tristana, Exterminating Angel, Belle de Jour) remain vitally entertaining and almost timeless (for purity of Buñuel read his memoir My Last Sigh). He compared movie-viewing to both hypnosis and rape, and while this moving and even charming postscript film avoids both of those conditions, it invades our imagination compellingly. Turtles and Tierra (which can be found on You Tube) would make quite a double video – those title turtles refer to the archaic stone-shelled houses of the villagers.

Honeyland

We know bees are in trouble. None of us know it like Hatidze Muratova, a rustic beekeeper in Macedonia, north of Greece. In the docu-dramatic Honeyland, the spindly, sunbaked (she could be 40 or 55) Hatidze crops honeycombs of wild or semi-tamed bees. She admires their dense social labor and, ecologically astute, always leaves them at least half the golden honey (sharing her half with her old, fading mother). Honey and no dentistry have left spinster Hatidze’s teeth like a decimated Stonehenge. Directors Tamara Koterska and Ljubomir Stefanov relish her tough spirit, stoical kindness and Ma Joad femininity. At the market down in town she buys modern hair dye – chestnut brown – and says “Everyone likes to look nice, Mom, even me.”

Not nice are new, locust-like neighbors who spill from their big truck. They have nearly feral kids and some skinny cattle. The father is a crude scrounger who ignores Hatidze’s advice, his greed ravaging his hives and even spoiling hers. This is less primal capitalism than a Hobbesian state of semi-nomadic abuse. After helping some of the exploited and bee-stung children, Hatidze steels herself for sheer survival. This curious movie’s best value is the fertile buzz of the hives, the rough Balkan landscape, and hard-scrabble Hatidze staring up at the stars or the contrails of planes: aliens from a less rooted world.  

SALAD (A List)

Remarkable Dramatic Movies About Poverty

In order of arrival, with year and director:

                  The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940), The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio de Sica 1948), The Little Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini 1950), Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel 1950), The Lower Depths (Akira Kurosawa 1957), Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini 1957), The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie 1961), A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson 1961), Hunger (Henning Carlsen 1966), Mouchette (Robert Bresson 1967), Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett 1978), Ironweed (Hector Babenco 1987), City of Joy (Roland Joffé 1992), Always Outnumbered Always Outgunned (Michael Apted 1998), Rosetta (Dardenne Bros. 1999), The Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino 2006), Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino 2010), Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik 2010).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles had a yarn for any assistant who came up with multiple excuses for not doing something:  “(Austrian Emperor) Franz Joseph is riding in his carriage through this tiny provincial town, plumes and all. The trembling mayor sits next to him and says, ‘Your Imperial Highness, I apologize to you in the profoundest terms for the fact that the bells are not ringing in the steeple. There are three reasons. First, there are no bells in the steeple …’ And Franz Joseph interrupts him with, ‘Please don’t tell me the other two reasons.’ Now, that’s a good answer for every assistant director in the world, working for you in any capacity.” (OW to chum and director Henry Jaglom in My Lunches with Orson.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Who should better dream than a down-and-outer?

After old Howard’s prospecting pitch in the Tampico flophouse in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fred C. Dobbs “rolls over on his cot, with a sneer: ‘Think I’ll go to sleep and dream about piles of gold getting bigger, and bigger and bigger.’ At daybreak he will wake up inside the dream, hooked, and soon tells Curtin that ‘gold don’t carry any curse with it. It all depends on whether the guy who finds it is the right guy.” The dream becomes, of course, his nightmare. (Quote from the Bogart/Treasure chapter in my book Starlight Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

After a drinking night, uprooted Native American men head “home” through L.A.’s Bunker Hill tunnel in The Exiles (independent release 1961; director-writer Kent Mackenzie).

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Nosh 165: 'Angel Has Fallen', 'The Peanut Butter Falcon' and More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Angel Has Fallen and The Peanut Butter Falcon)

Welcome, plex rats, to the last dog days of summer:

Angel Has Fallen

The really hard guys are stuck in the Petrified Forest. The Rock is a grinning wind-up toy. Steven Seagal looks like a sofa stuffed with Velveeta. Sly Stallone is in the last gasp of his marathon (coming soon: Rambo: Last Blood). Vin Diesel is more bald than ballistic. Jason Stathem is buff but dull. Bruce Willis looks baked. Jackie Chan is a Comic-Con collectible. Liam Neeson lumbers his bulk as Senior Avenger and Tom Cruise is the Fort Knox of Botox. Forget Norris (now 79), Van Damme (a Belgian waffle) and Lundgren (down to Sharknado 5). Their manly master, dear ol’ Charlie Brontosaurus (Bronson), went into the tar pit long ago.

But here comes – tote that gut! – haggard Gerard Butler as Secret Service agent Mike Banning. Angel Has Fallen is Butler’s third blast belch in the medium-costing (Bulgarian locations) but sturdy-grossing Fallen franchise, an ammo dump wired to blow. For director Ric Roman Waugh, five writers honed the alpha-dodo plot. An attack by feral bat drones puts Banning’s beloved President Morgan Freeman in a coma (did Freeman insist?). Falsely accused of treason, Banning burns for patriotic payback despite spinal injuries and an overall AARP aura. He goes on the lam, chased by the deluded feds and also black-op villains led by sadistic war buddy Wade (Danny Huston). He is almost instantly ambushed by “militia” yokels, launching a truck chase that clearly was edited in a Cuisinart.

If you have spent quality time dumpster diving into these body bags you know the rewards: 1. stunts, 2. blowouts, 3. goons frantic to die, 4. veteran actors trying to grab their checks with verve. Butler is just meatloaf on a mission, but Huston channels his father John’s famous ham-rogue inflections into the mayhem. Jada Pinkett Smith is a fierce agent. Piper Perabo is Mrs. Banning, whose wee babe appears truly terrified. Tim Blake Nelson is a mini-Mnuchin (Trump’s dorky Secretary of the Treasury) as the swinish V.P. of Freeman’s noble President. The king of the mountain, literally, is Nick Nolte as Banning’s dad, a raging Viet-vet hairball. His forest refuge, a Bunker Hill of senile libertarian lunacy, blows up real good. The repartee has the special, gastric growl of a bazooka digesting barbed wire. Butler: “You smell like gunpowder.” Huston: “Yeah, you know you love it.”

The Peanut Butter Falcon

Come git yer grub! Served fresh (well, familiar) at the Dixie Bait Snack Café: gators, herons, a big dawg, crab cages, a blind preacher, a goofy baptism, banjo music, the Salt Water Redneck (retired wrestler) and Bubba’s road store where “yer Ding Dongs are two-dollar-a-peece.” The beef entrée is Shia LaBeouf, who plays tough hick Tyler as lookin’ for redemption after a bad mistake – perhaps an echo bounce off LaBeouf’s own legal etc. troubles. Tyler, surly but then sensitive, bonds with a young Downs syndrome guy who ran away from being the mascot of a retirement home. Zak is played by pudgy, cuddly Zack Gottsagen. He wants to swim and drink and shoot and rassle. He gets there as Tyler’s “bro-dog,” while being pursued by Dakota Johnson as a darlin’ caregiver with moon pie eyes. Here, ground zero, is the quicksand of the empathy swamp.

It’s The Peanut Butter Falcon, never (please) to be confused with The Maltese Falcon. Director-writers Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz graduated summa cum sorghum from the Forrest Gump Academy. There is a raft of freedom and a mention of Mark Twain, so naturally a blurb has declared the movie “Twainesque.” Make that Clemensized, fit not for a book club but a Hee-Haw reunion. Amid vistas of coastal North Carolina the cast sweats buckets: John Hawkes as a crabby crabber, Thomas Haden Church as the ex-wrestler, and Bruce Dern in one of his surefire lightning strikes as a codger who aids Zak’s escape. Dern, having a rich revival in small roles (see Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood), gleefully rips off some vintage cuckoo’s nest from his ole bud Jack Nicholson. Slurp it up good, and don’t fur-git to spit. Me, I’m gonna hang at the bait bar and suck worms.   

SALAD (A List)

Sixteen Ripe Ones from the Country South

With main star, director and year:

The Apostle (Robert Duvall, also directed, 1997), Baby Doll (Carroll Baker, Elia Kazan, 1955), Cross Creek (Mary Steenburgen, Martin Ritt, 1993), Deliverance (Jon Voight, John Boorman 1972), The Fugitive Kind (Marlon Brando, Sidney Lumet, 1960), Intruder in the Dust (Juano Hernandez, Clarence Brown, 1949), The Long Hot Summer (Paul Newman, Martin Ritt, 1958), The Member of the Wedding (Julie Harris, Fred Zinnemann, 1952), Mud (Matthew McConaughey, Jeff Nichols, 2012), The Reivers (Steve McQueen, Mark Rydell, 1969), Sounder (Cicely Tyson, Martin Ritt, 1972), The Southerner (Zachary Scott, Jean Renoir, 1945), The Strange One (Ben Gazzara, Jack Garfein, 1957), Thieves Like Us (Shelley Duvall, Robert Altman, 1974), Wind Across the Everglades (Christopher Plummer, Nicholas Ray, 1958) and Wise Blood (Brad Dourif, John Huston, 1979).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

In 1940, instinctive showman Orson Welles rapidly pared down Herman Mankiewicz’s bulging script for American, forging Citizen Kane. For example, he “deleted the scene of young Charles crying on the train and in its place used a single shot of his sled covered in snow, while the hollow wail of the whistle on the train, carrying the boy away, can be heard in the distance. Welles illustrated the boy’s loneliness, reinforced the importance of Rosebud in the story (without giving away the secret – the word on the sled is obscured by snow), and set up the chain of scenes that followed.” Magic time! (Quote from Harlan Lebo’s Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker’s Journey.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“The early star system of the 1910s and ’20s favored full-frontal personality, codified visually. ‘Almost from the beginning,’ writes James Naremore, ‘movie stars were regarded as aesthetic objects rather than as artists, or as personalities who had a documentary reality. D.W. Griffith and other directors strengthened the ‘organic’ effect by inserting details from an actor’s real life into fiction.’ So, Lillian Gish in True Heart Susie gazed upon a photo of her actual mother cradling baby Lil. What Gish began so sweetly, Brando consummated viscerally in his self-referential Last Tango in Paris (call it True Heart Marlon). All actors tap themselves, though the deepest aquifer eludes many.” (From the Katharine Hepburn/Alice Adams 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.

Fallen pastor T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), reduced to boozing tour guidance in Mexico, faces the snarly hell of Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall) in The Night of the Iguana (MGM 1964; director John Huston, d.p. Gabriel Figueroa).

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