Nosh 175: 'Ford v Ferrari' & More

David Elliott

         

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

Note: Nosh 176 will appear on Friday, Dec. 6.

APPETIZER (Review: Ford v Ferarri)                    

Ford v Ferrari

Back in the Sixties era there was a virtual traffic jam of racing car movies: Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000 (1965), a hot-tires rally starring young James Caan; Grand Prix (1966), a Formula One spin-around and carousel of stars (Garner! Montand! Mifune! Saint!); Winning (1969), with actor and actual racer Paul Newman seeking Indy 500 glory, and Le Mans (1971) about the 24-hour French race, starring speed nut Steve “Bullitt” McQueen. I believe the generous term for those pictures is “road kill.” Apart from some robust racing, they were about as dull as oil-clotted dirt. Watching, I looked back rather fondly to Kirk Douglas in The Racers (1955), if not to Clark Gable’s jalopy To Please a Lady (1950).

Even ladies should be pleased with Ford v Ferrari (v as in “versus”), probably the best professional racing movie ever made as entertainment. Partly that’s because Caitriona Balfe is not just hangin’ around frettin’ for her man, race driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale). Balfe, the beautiful Outlanders TV star, is Ken’s wife Mollie: English, bright, caring but not coddling. When she angrily lays down some road rubber of her own, he gets scared. A real piston, very pedal to the rebel, Ken is weary of his sports car repair shop. Big action returns when hard-driving auto dreamer Carroll Shelby lures Miles into a project sparked by Lee Iacocca: to make Ford sexy by challenging Ferrari’s dominance of prestige racing. This led team Ford to the 1966 prize at the sport’s supremely testing ordeal, Le Mans.

The movie’s strategic core is the fast and sometimes furious bond of insolent Miles and supple, never quite corporate Shelby (Matt Damon, as car-grooved as he was into space gear for The Martian). The mix of Damon’s spunky, all-American grit and Bale’s feisty, fish-n-chips Brit is infallible (without getting numbingly macho). Other winners are ace Noah Jupe as Ken’s son Peter, who loves cars but adores his dad, and lean Ray McKinnon as the highly overhauled GT40’s mechanical wizard, Phil Remington. The casting is terrific.

My friend Larry Marks, once a Formula One mechanic, alerted me to the story’s nips and tucks of docu-factuals (the race’s finishing twist can still cause rancorous debate, and Ferrari was not deeply competitive in ’66 after its best driver, John Surtees, quit). Between bursts of bravura road action, not too customized by special effects, FvF has the best view of corporate auto politics since Tucker (and many laps beyond The Betsy). Jon Bernthal is sly riser Iacocca, and Josh Lucas is Ford honcho Leo Beebe, frantic to tame hot-doggin’ Miles and Shelby. At the apex is the contrast of Old World master Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone) and big Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), who is thrilled by his fear when Shelby hot-rods him in their new car. Of course there is an American bias. Ferrari is called a “greasy wop,” but there’s no mention that Henry Ford (the First) was a rabid anti-Semite who despised labor unions.

Director James Mangold (Logan, Walk the Line) pumps surefire adrenaline, balancing family, buddy, auto-biz and racing scenes expertly. Often drenched in light, decal-plated with sparkling colors, FvF evokes a mid-century America of open horizons, bold assertion and runaway speed. We clobbered the Axis, now let’s flatten those Italian car snobs! This gleaming, gung-ho machine of a movie might be just the antidote to the divisive acids of 2019. Most Americans are still car crazy, and maybe for a few weeks Trumpies and anti-Trumpers can come together. Hey, brother, pour me a bowl of Pennzoil, with some Chianti on the side. Alas, rumors of a coming Edsel v Yugo are very premature.

SALAD (A List)

Good Mileage: 12 Cool and Hot Car Movies

More or less in preferred order (with star/director);

American Graffiti (Richard Dreyfuss/George Lucas), The Driver (Ryan O’Neal/Walter Hill), Bonnie and Clyde (Warren Beatty/Arthur Penn), Senna (Ayrton Senna/Asif Kapadia), Bullitt (Steve McQueen, Peter Yates), The Italian Job (Mark Wahlberg/F. Gary Gray), Genevieve (Kay Kendall, Henry Cornelius), Mad Max: Fury Road (Charlize Theron/George Miller) /Duel (Dennis Weaver/Steven Spielberg), Vanishing Point (Barry Newman/Richard Sarafian), Death Proof (Kurt Russell/Quentin Tarantino) and Two-Lane Blacktop (Warren Oates/Monte Hellman).   

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Surely the finest movie speech about cars is in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), after pioneer car-maker Eugene Morgan is insultingly baited at a 1905 family dinner by callow, shallow George (Tim Holt). Joseph Cotten speaks with elegant, measured dignity:

“I’m not so sure George is wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward, they may be a step backward in civilization. It may be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of men’s souls. I’m not sure. But automobiles have come. And almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They’re going to alter war and going to alter peace. And I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles.  It may be that George is right. It may be that in 10 or 20 years from now, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with George that automobiles had no business to be invented.” (And now, 77 years after the film’s arrival?)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Director Stanley Donen “could pop pizzazz. Small, cocky, alert as a ferret, he had survived Gene Kelly’s armored ego and, irking Cole Porter, had filched ‘Be a Clown’ from The Pirate for revamping as ‘Make ’Em Laugh’ in Singin’ in the Rain (for which he knew exactly how to turn sound’s traumatic arrival into pure joy). He placed some pearls in the corn barn of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, transplanted brilliantly The Pajama Game and preserved Gwen Verdon’s wowness in Damn Yankees. Some later limps (Staircase, Lucky Lady, The Little Prince) can be quietly forgiven. Donen’s Audrey Hepburn trilogy – Funny Face, Charade, Two for the Road – are unique entertainments. His career-prize Oscar topped the 1998 show when, at 73, he tap-danced ‘Cheek to Cheek.” (From the Hepburn/Funny Face chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

American Graffiti, a great car movie, is surely the best film for Candy Clark (as Debbie) and Charlie Martin Smith (as Toad). (Universal Pictures 1973; director George Lucas, d.p. Jan D’Alquen and Ron Eveslage.)

 For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 174: 'By the Grace of God,' 'The Chambermaid' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: By the Grace of God and The Chambermaid)                     

By the Grace of God

How odd that the Roman Catholic Church, having survived 17 centuries through the Roman Empire, barbarian hordes, the Dark Ages, the rise of Islam, the near-loss of Spain, the Renaissance, the brutal conversion of the Americas, Henry VIII, the Protestant Reformation, secular science, fascism and Soviet communism, should be so pathetically evasive about its internal rot from pedophile priests. Maybe that’s because for so long the Church had a virtual, assumed monopoly on cultural morality. And because, in the male power hive of the Vatican (women mainly relegated to convents) the “holy fathers” decided that priestly celibacy was a sanctuary in which starved affection, hidden sexual alliances and erotic predation on juveniles were left mostly to rumor. Some movies (Spotlight, Judgment, Bad Education, the harrowing Deliver Us From Evil) have cast light on this. The most articulate, in a very French way, is By the Grace of God.

Francois Ozon’s lay-it-open film closely examines the actual case of Father Bernard Preynat (as in prey on nature, between prayers?). He hawked onto dozens of boys at Catholic schools and summer camps. Bernard Verley, who played Jesus in Luis Buñuel’s Milky Way (1969), makes Preynat a furtive old monster with guilty eyes. He admits his crimes but is locked into his pathology, addressing past victims, now grown men, as if they were still “his” chosen lads. Cardinal Barbarin of Lyon (Francois Marthouret) has known Preynat’s dismal story for years. Speaking an urbane line, rich in modulated jargon, he’s a cover-up wizard (his chief advisor, a woman, looks like she knows every dark secret of the Vatican). Ozon hates the plague of pederasty, but he keeps a humane lens on everyone, not tumbling into the traps of facile melodrama. He never tries to lift this story onto the austere spiritual plane of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest.

Along with cascades of talk siphoned from journalism, dossiers and testimonies, Ozon uses a triple perspective, that of three men who found the courage to face their soul crisis and spill their often shamed pain into public and legal view: Alexandre (Melvil Poupard), a refined bourgeois raising his five kids as devout Catholics, fears losing his devout faith; Francois (Denis Ménochet), a burly, impulsive guy who flaunts atheism, wants revenge fully publicized; and Emmanuel (Swann Arlaud), an unemployed epileptic, blames the Church for ruining his life. Arlaud raises the temperature quite a bit, but Ozon keeps all in balance, never allowing emotions to become another masking of the facts. This all happened, and partial justice has been served (quite recently). Amid the personal agonies is a huge, festering wound: the failure of a great but fallible institution, gripped by an old sexual neurosis that it confuses with sacred purity. Even a universal vision can have blind spots.   

The Chambermaid

Time to press the flattening pole on the bed covers – eliminate the wrinkles! And don’t forget to fold the toilet paper’s edge, into a tidy triangle. That has always been important, as supervisor Nachita tells Eve: “They made me pray next to the toilet paper until I learned how to fold it.” This is habitual but not dreary duty at the high-rise hotel. Eve has “her” floor to clean and stock with “amenities”  (one guest is a real hog for them). The air conditioning is nice, and she can view the smoggy sprawl of Mexico City through big windows (a window-washer, looking in, thinks Eve is special). She eats tiny lunches to save money, and she misses her young son. Especially when a chatty, sexy-thin Argentine guest recruits her into caring for her baby, while mom bathes and dresses. The kid is adorable, and Eve needs the extra pesos. This is not slavish peon work, but her life is no pillow mint.

Not to be confused with either Renoir’s or Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, Lila Avilés’s exquisitely nuanced directorial debut can be seen as an introspective satellite of Alfonso Cuarón’s lauded, remarkable film about a Mexico City nanny, Roma (Netflix is still hobbling its video release). Roma spreads out through the vast capital. Avilés keeps us in the hotel, in mostly quiet rooms that stir Eve’s moods. Cuarón’s nanny (Yalitza Aparicio) was a squat Mayan charmer, while shy, sweet Eve has the almost Chinese-porcelain features of actor Gabriela Cartol. Landing somewhere between the granular intimacies of the best Iranian pictures and the work documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, The Chambermaid is a feat of sustained observation. Eve dreams, yet mostly of ascending to a high floor, where furnishings are elegant and tips are larger. She reads Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but her flights are by elevator (which speaks computer-voice English). Carlos Rossini photographed so that each room and corridor, wide or long, becomes in effect a close-up of Eve’s mental spaces. She works hard, and some lucky day she may supervise. Will cute robots fold the t-paper?        

SALAD (A List)

12 Stirring Performances as Catholic Priests

Claude Laydu in Diary of a Country Priest,1951; Pierre Fresnay in Monsieur Vincent, 1947; Raul Julia in Romero, 1989; Montgomery Clift in I Confess, 1953; Michael Lonsdale in Of Gods and Men, 2011; Francisco Rabal in Nazarin, 1959; Brendan Gleeson in Calvary, 2014; W.G. Fay in Odd Man Out, 1947; Karl Malden in On the Waterfront, 1954; Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt, 2008; Adam Driver in Silence, 2016; Don Murray in The Hoodlum Priest, 1960, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Léon Morin, Priest, 1961.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Charles Chaplin’s most sophisticated movie is Monsieur Verdoux (1947). The concept came from Orson Welles, who told Peter Bogdanovich: “I had an inspiration on the subway. I saw an advertisement for an anti-dandruff remedy, which had a picture of a bright-faced little hairdresser type making that gesture of the stage Frenchman which indicates something or other is simply too exquisite for human speech … (Bogdanovich: ‘It made you think of Chaplin?’) … Chaplin as Landru (the French serial killer of women). I’d gotten to know Charlie by then, through Aldous Huxley and King Vidor, so I told him about it. He said, ‘Wonderful!’ So I went away and wrote a script, and showed it to him. He said, ‘Wonderful, and I’m going to act it for you.’ But at the last moment he said, ‘No, I can’t. I’ve never had anybody else direct me. Let me buy it.’ So I did (sell), and he made Monsieur Verdoux. My title was The Ladykiller.” (Not to be confused with Alec Guinness’s great comedy The Ladykillers. Quote from This Is Orson Welles by Bogdanovich and Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Few films have caught the harsh demands of miners working so well as John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, directly inspired by B. Traven’s novel: “Muscular montage captures the grim labor. Washing and rinsing, catching the sand up and washing it over and over again, this alone would have been work enough. But first it had to be dug out.’ The opening of a log sluice channel is thrilling, but as sweat and soil merge ‘no one could ever imagine any of these men holding a woman in his arms. Any decent woman would have preferred to drown herself.” (From the Bogart/Treasure chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Smooth killer Verdoux (Charles Chaplin) is amused by clueless Annabella (truly funny Martha Raye) in Monsieur Verdoux (United Artists 1947; director Charles Chaplin, d.p. Roland Totheroh, along with Curt Courant).

 For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 173: 'Motherless Brooklyn,' 'Harriet' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Motherless Brooklyn and Harriet)                    

Motherless Brooklyn

Playing a detective with Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) in a hard noir set in 1950s New York is tough enough. Edward Norton also directed, produced and freely adapted Motherless Brooklyn from Jonathan Lethem’s novel (and here is a neat trivia tangent: Art Carney, who played sewer worker Ed Norton on The Honeymooners, starred in his own excellent neo-noir, The Late Show). At 50 Norton has what may well be his career apex. “Brooklyn” is Lionel Essrog’s nickname, though his gumshoe partners, with snarky affection, also call him “Freak Show.” A thought or a name will often trigger a loud outburst from Lionel’s speed-dial brain. The word “brisket” launches him into a bris (circumcision) joke. “A piece of my head broke off,” he laments, “and decided to keep on ridin’ me for kicks.”

Funny, because his spit-zip bursts fly like cartoon shrapnel.  Lionel tries to muffle these outcries, yet must often give a sheepish explanation (he doesn’t know the name Tourette’s). Norton finds wit and pathos in the handicap, achieves a kind of TS/OCD deepening, without the schtick-fest of Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man. At the heart (a real one) is how Lionel becomes the main man, tracking the killers of his boss (Bruce Willis has one big, juicy sequence), who prized his savvy and memory and simply liked him. The curling case will take Lionel past his hustling partners into chasms of corruption ruled by the power octopus Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, a blitz of tongue, brain and bulk). Randolph is, of course, Robert Moses, the city’s mid-century “empire builder” who snacked on mayors and governors. We realize that the core source, beyond the Scorsese crime sprees or Farewell My Lovely (a huge thug echoes Moose Malloy in that) is the most elegant of neo-noirs: 1974’s Chinatown.

As in that stunner, family secrets poison the intrigues and there is much knot-folding of plot strands. Baldwin fuses John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown to the ruthless Robert Moses of Robert Caro’s definitive biography (called “Jake” the private eye bleats “I’m Lionel, not Jake!” – a wink at Jake Gittes of Chinatown). There is more hipness at a Harlem jazz club, where Lionel’s riffs and tics jive with the bop notes of the trumpeter (angry but cool Michael Kenneth Williams). The sequence also lets the story’s smart beauty (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) see that odd, lonely Lionel is a guy who might be trusted, perhaps loved. That Norton dives so far into the character keeps this from becoming just another fond rummage of the noir files. That the whole effort keeps flowing on track is fairly  miraculous. Norton cast very well, notably Bobby Cannavale and Dallas Roberts as gumshoes, Cherry Jones as a populist firebrand and Willem Dafoe, in his Van Gogh beard again, as an urban dreamer sickened by rot.

In the Naked City lineage, Motherless Brooklyn is a hymn for old New York. Dick Pope’s cinematography achieves a fresh retro take on the great noir city, rivaling the unrelated Bill Pope's sexy 1950s Manhattan in Fur. This goes beyond all-night diners and brownstones and a rotary phone shot like an idol, beyond Scorsesean rips of violence and some Spike Lee riffs of blackitude, climaxing in a gorgeous restaging of Penn Station (photo above). The Moses monuments endure, yet the old, dirty, teeming, dangerous town is the one we relish. It may lack the silken purity of Chinatown or the inspired ’40s to ’70s blend of The Long Goodbye, yet this original vision packed with derivations is a hard, meaty fist you cannot duck. 

Harriet

It is difficult not to be pious when your movie’s subject is on a U.S. postal stamp. Harriet Tubman got her stamp in 1978, 65 years after dying. It is planned that her shrewd survivor’s face will arrive on the $20 bill. Now she has a film, Harriet – solid, sincere, not groaningly pious, yet it might be better. Director Kasi Lemmons has shown good instincts (Talk to Me) and wayward ones (The Caveman’s Valentine, a hash that even Samuel L. Jackson couldn’t save). Harriet lands in-between, though closer to Talk. You can bet $20 that people who love her stamp, and will love her money image, will want to see this. Because it simplifies the complex hero’s story with genuine passion. And because Cynthia Erivo is such a close but youthful replica of photos of the aged Tubman (Erivo also looks somewhat like Whoopi Goldberg, and won a Tony for re-creating on Broadway Goldberg’s Celie in The Color Purple).

Born around 1820 in Maryland, Araminta “Minty” Ross (Harriet became her free name) was an illiterate slave. She was whipped, and suffered a brain injury when a lead weight, hurled by an overseer at another slave, hit her. Her husband, the freedman John Tubman, remarried when he thought she had died while escaping. Her flight (running, running, running) from racists and their hounds is the most exciting and defining sequence. Minty flees by sheer will, with help from the new Underground Railroad network, a feat likely impossible had she been in the lower South. She becomes a canny, lucky liberator whom blacks would call Moses (she freed over 70). Erivo keeps Harriet alert and grounded, no simple symbol. But the script seeks extra dimension through that brain injury, which led to Tubman’s falling spells, “visions” and “voices.” Religious, she felt guided by providence. Here that becomes blue-sepia flashbacks, coded messaging through spirituals, and a quickly formed myth (which doesn’t save her return trips into Maryland from falling into a here-we-go-again rhythm).

Historical tributes include elisions, so Frederick Douglass and John Brown flit by as tiny cameos (Tubman recruited men for Brown’s fabled raid). Nobody speaks in “yassuh” dialect, the violence is vivid but brief, and a viciously smug white, Gideon (Joe Alwyn), distills the racist hotbloods of Old Dixie. That is the sort of Morse code that rich history doesn’t need, notably when Harriet out-machos Gideon and, using her mental powers, taunts him about the coming doom of “the Lost Cause” (a term not in use until after the war). John Toll’s plush photography lays on a slight patina of sacred memory, the “Spielberg loves De Mille” shellac. But Harriet Tubman remains too movingly rooted in tough truth to be much slighted by such things.

SALAD (A List)

The Most Creative Neo-Noirs

The ten best, all after the classic period (1940-60), with director and year:

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman 1973), Chinatown (Roman Polanski 1974), Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino 1997), Point Blank (John Boorman 1967), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982), Motherless Brooklyn (Ed Norton 2019), The Late Show (Robert Benton 1978), Inherent Vice (P.T. Anderson 2014), Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin 1995) and L.A.Confidential (Curtis Hanson 1997).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson is burning angelic oil at the Celestial Cinematheque, for his total restoration of The Magnificent Ambersons.

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The insecurity of social virgin and middle-class striver Alice (Katharine Hepburn) at her first, classy dance in Alice Adams “is a pressure cooker, one approaching the anxious self-consciousness of witty writer and raconteur Alexander King’s first visit to the opera: ‘I was embedded in such perfumes, such hair oils, such pomades and hairdos on all sides that I thought I was suddenly going to rise up to the crystal chandeliers with the wonderful odor and ecstasy of it all. There was one depressing note in this glittering assembly, however: me.” (From the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Land baron Noah Cross (John Huston, left) proves himself a devil to private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown (Paramount Pictures 1974; director Roman Polanski, d.p. John Alonzo).

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