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).

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