Nosh 172: 'The Lighthouse,' 'The Current War' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Lighthouse and The Current Wars)                   

A little light on two movies fixated on light:

The Lighthouse

Robert Eggers, who shivered many with The Witch in 2015, has made The Lighthouse as a steampunky quest for a maritime fable. His vision concerns a Victorian  lighthouse on the raw North Atlantic coast. We can imagine this rugged outpost hosting Edward G. Robinson’s crazy Captain Wolf Larsen (The Sea Wolf), or Wagner’s Rhine maidens on an ocean cruise, or even (why not?) Wilson the volleyball, floating in from Cast Away. Framed in a classic 4:3 aspect ratio that tightly funnels Jarin Blaschke’s gothic, black and white photography, The Lighthouse joins other movies with primal stories and curt, primal titles: The Island, The Hill, The Hurricane, The Fog, The Gun, The Village, The Wind, The Road and The Birds (menacing seagulls seem to have flown directly from Hitchcock’s nightmare of bird paranoia). 

Antiquity’s fabled lighthouse was the giant Pharos of Alexandria. Eggers and his design team have turned a Nova Scotia lighthouse into a wave-pounded phallus of Neptune (or, in Freudian terms, a big cigar). The macho master is old Tom Wake. Willem Dafoe, having played Christ, Satan, the Buddha, Van Gogh, Vulko (Aquaman) and Green Goblin (Spider-Man), isn’t about to miss a trick with this rockbound Ahab. Stomping around on a peg leg, his gnarly, glaring face like a hairball of seaweed, Wake shouts lewd shanties and spouts Moby-Dickish gusts of mad rhetoric. As a foghorn booms, he taunts and enslaves his new apprentice, Winslow (Robert Pattinson), who hauls coal for the steam motor, cleans rampant filth (Wake: “Swab, dog, swab!”) and carries loaded chamber pots out to a jetty during a gale. The men are like blowfish trapped in a septic aquarium, and their drinking binges expose guilty secrets.

We must believe that Eggers wanted comedy when Winslow, sick of Wake’s slop buckets of seafood gruel, bellows “If I had a steak I’d fuck it!” Wake replies like a miffed Julia Childs, “You don’t like my cooking?” Their increasingly feral (and erotic) duel of wills could be compelling, except that Pattinson, in strapping prime with arms like anchors, uses a slurred, Boston chowder accent and can’t match Dafoe’s vocal power. Only Wake has high-rise rights to the top of the tower where, risking blindness, he worships the mighty light beam as Neptune. Never before has alcoholic mysticism had such a platform.

It is impossible to out-Melville Melville or out-Conrad Conrad. Anyway, old actor and sea skipper Sterling Hayden surfed this particular wave long ago, in his boozed rants on a houseboat in the documentary Pharos of Chaos. The Lighthouse is a beached whale, stuffed with lurid themes of sea mania, macho dominance and pent-up gay desire harpooned by homophobia. The images are often terrific, such as the cold, dreamy mermaid who lures drunken Winslow with her grasping tentacles. But the text is gibberish, and the film becomes self-parody. Full fathom five, and foolish, this movie lies.

The Current War

As a kid I discovered Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, the grand, almost Roman pile first built for the Columbian Exposition of 1893 (Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck would save the building, which became a huge wonderland for tech nerds). The Current War rightly climaxes with the dazzling electric light of the fair, the topping showdown of the lords of early electricity, prolific inventor Thomas A. Edison and industrial visionary George Westinghouse. Their long, money-burning struggle to dominate the new lighting of America is echoed on a small scale by the movie’s near blackout. After showing at the 2017 Toronto festival, it fell victim to the collapse of sex scandal Harvey Weinstein’s production firm. Now it arrives as a “director’s cut,” thanks largely to Martin Scorsese, who came to the rescue of filmmaker Alfonso Gomez Rejon.

The movie has a great subject. We learn a lot, in a rushed  way. Gaudy with CGI retro design and fabulous machines, the film is giddy (hyper-active pacing, hoggish close-ups.). Everyone seems wired (Edison’s wife recalls their Niagara honeymoon as “enough to illuminate a lifetime”).  As brilliant egotist Edison, Benedict Cumberbatch is so ablaze with his “direct current” dream that he almost sparks like Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein. The contrast with “alternating current” advocate Westinghouse, played as a block of hard-headed integrity by Michael Shannon, gives the movie its vital friction (at first serving Edison, then saving Westinghouse, is Nicholas Hoult’s Nikola Tesla, the émigré genius who provided a key breakthrough).There is plenty of moral skirmishing about patents, legal schemes and whether to build the first electrocution chair. There is also a ripe sense of scale and history, and when the White City beams, we  catch an era at its joyous peak (even though the Beaux Arts exposition structures set back modern architecture for years). The Current War deserves a booking at the Museum of Science and Industry, maybe near the stunning steam locomotive or the Nazi U-boat.       

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Good Seafaring Movies

In order of arrival (with star, director, year):

Mutiny on the Bounty (Charles Laughton, Frank Lloyd, 1935), Captain Blood (Errol Flynn, Michael Curtiz, 1935), The Sea Wolf (Edward G. Robinson, Michael Curtiz, 1941), Captain Horatio Hornblower (Gregory Peck, Raoul Walsh, 1951), The Cruel Sea (Jack Hawkins, Charles Frend, 1953), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (James Mason, Richard Fleischer, 1954), The Enemy Below (Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, 1956), Moby Dick (Gregory Peck, John Huston, 1956), Mutiny on the Bounty (Marlon Brando, Lewis Milestone, 1962), Jaws (Richard Dreyfuss, Steven Spielberg, 1975), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Russell Crowe, Peter Weir, 2003) and Riding Giants (Laird Hamilton, Stacy Peralta, 2004). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

What the French call mise-en- scene would translate into Orson Welles English as mix-and-match. Never more than in the marvelous pastiche of his exotic 1955 noir Mr. Arkadin, shot on the run with a skeletal budget and scrambled script: “The Munich Christmas scenes were filmed on a set of reception rooms for Luís Marquina’s film Alta costura in Spain, and at the Hilton Castillana which Welles filled with a crowd of unpaid extras invited to ‘a filming party.’ The luxurious La Gavina hotel on the Costa Brava was used for terraces of Sophie’s Mexican residence. Arkadin has to have a castle in Spain, so that will be no less than Segovia’s Alcázar.” And so it went, hopping around much of Europe. (From Orson Welles at Work by Jean-Pierre Berthomé and Francois Thomas. Of Arkadin’s various edits, the best is Criterion’s Comprehensive Version.)  

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Brilliantly versatile writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante nailed a crucial truth: “Vanishing Point is my script as seen on the white mirror of the screen, in DeLuxe color, running at 24 frames per second, in stereo sound—much more than I ever wrote, or could write. That’s a movie. I just wrote the screenplay.” (From the Introduction in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (Image)

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

Enigmatic billionaire Grigori Arkadin (Orson Welles) looms over the exotic locations that define Mr. Arkadin (1955; director Orson Welles, d.p. Jean Bourgoin).

 For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh: 'Loro,' 'Raise Hell' (Molly Ivins) & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Loro and Raise Hell)                   

Loro

No, Toni Servillo will not make his rep playing noble old Tolstoyan peasants.  He was the corrupt master politician Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008), then jaded, autumnal playboy Jep in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013). Now he is gaudily corrupt politician Silvio Berlusconi in Loro (“them,” which stands for Italy’s decadent elite and/or the voters hypnotized by Silvio’s

power circus). Each film is from director and writer Paolo Sorrentino, who wears Fellini’s crown with spectacular  gusto. The Great Beauty, rightful heir to La Dolce Vita, had Servillo’s Jep reincarnating Marcello Mastroianni as a maturely suave hipster and quipster. The exquisite exploration of Rome wound me up like a golden pasta fork.

Il Divo curled its baroque pasta for 110 minutes, Great Beauty for a sumptuous 141, and Loro offers 150, down from the 204 shown (two parts) in Italy. The result is such a multi-faceted, mixed bag that we can’t tell if the shorter version is a loss or gain. The “hero,” drenched in lassitude between his third and fourth tours as prime minister, takes half an hour to show up. At his ultra-modern Sardinian villa, one of 20 abodes, he stages “bunga-bunga” parties where women are flesh décor and go-go bait for later consumption (the word “prostitute” is frowned on). And yet, for all the nubile display and festive nudity, Sorrentino really sees the faces, not just a bod squad of erotic tassels as in Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street and De Palma’s Scarface. When Silvio, with his “dictator black” helmet of hair and rubbery Botoxed face, makes his creepy bedroom move on a young lovely (Euridice Axen), she ponders and then slips away, gently rejecting his “breath of an old man” (quirky echo of Jep in Great Beauty recalling that, as a boy, he loved “the smell of old people’s homes”). The predator is gent enough not to make a Jeffrey Epstein grab as she exits.

The neo-Nero message is that Berlusconi, who rose to power as a master of crass media, pimped the whole country. In a frail plot string, the young super-pimp Sergio (Riccardo Scamarcio, a handsomely minor Mastroianni) oozes into Silvio’s circle, only to be dazed, then dashed. His story gets lost among the blowout parties and Sorrentino surprises (the most lurid involves a rat, a garbage truck and the Roman Imperial Forum). Silvio, although sharp and wry, lacks Jep’s nuanced urbanity, but as the wormy apple of all eyes he has the best scenes. Bored without supreme power, he entertains himself by going on the phone and, using virtuosic bullshit from his youth, seduces a middle-class housewife into buying an unbuilt home she doesn’t want (it’s a nostalgia high, beyond bimbos).

With comical vanity Silvio, preening like Johnny Fontaine in The Godfather, croons a cornball song to his court of sycophants (imagine Charlie Kane belting “Arrividerci Roma” to the old gang at Xanadu). A final confrontation of Silvio with his disgusted wife (poignant Elena Sofia Ricci) rivals the heart-rippers in Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. But the scene of party babes bursting into a “Viva Italia!” dance cries out for Busby Berkeley, and Silvio’s waxen visage often seems a mask hiding the story’s inner secrets (in Il Divo, Servillo’s Andreotti seems to carry the mummified look back through papal tombs to ancient Egypt). In a surreal bit (dream?) Silvio consults with his look-alike, a past partner acted by Servillo using his thinning hair, pleasantly aged face and debonair impudence. This supple double is basically Jep revisited.

Il Divo was a pinballing maze of insider politics, though the devious plotting became a little tiresome. Here there is not enough of Silvio’s politics, just some bribing of other grizzled machers so that he can regain the premiership.  Luca Bigazzi’s often terrific photography lingers too long over the manicured estate with its carousel, pool and butterfly aviary, without the entrancing Roman luster he brought to Great Beauty. Here is advice to Sorrentino from a distant province: get away from crazy power games, and make another great city film about Rome or your native Naples.

Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins

She named her dog Shit, and many of her words for Texas politicians were much less affectionate. Big-boned Mary Ivins, six feet tall by age 12, became Molly. That shocked her religious, conservative father, whose macho dominance she flouted. He was rich from oil and gas, she became a  populist journalist rich in compassion for the poor, the weak, the dark and dismissed. Molly Ivins was an earthy daughter of Texas like her friend Ann Richards, who became a liberal governor known for her wit and effrontery. Ivins goaded, applauded and sometimes out-sparked her. For Richards, adoptive Texan George H.W. Bush “was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Ivins eviscerated the son, George “Dubya,” in her book Shrub (the pro-Bush Houston Chronicle never ran her political columns).

Personal sidebar: I was raised in Houston when LBJ and Sam Rayburn ruled the dominant Democrats, and Republicans were a “piss-ant” party of Ike fans. I never hung around tony River Oaks, where the Ivinses lived and where the Bushes roosted after passing as petro-cowboys in West Texas. Mary, reborn as Molly, rebelled against the River Oaks crowd, and after some Paris time attended Smith College (someone recalls her, with accent buried, “sounding like Jacqueline Kennedy”). Her native twang revived after she offended her New York Times bosses by walking around barefoot and coining “gang-pluck” for a chicken fiesta story, though her Elvis obit drew huge readership. Ivins returned to Texas as Odysseus had to Greece. Mentored by John Henry Faulk at the upstart Texas Observer, she became the scourge of corrupt, sexist backslappers in the legislature. Ann Richards crowed, “She can deck’em!”  Molly was too large to patronize, too savagely funny to ignore, and too fearless to play nice.

Raise Hell, from TV-formed documentarian Janice Engel, is a riptide of juicy clips and talkers (Richards and daughter Cecille, Paul Krugman, Dan Rather, Ronnie Dugger, Jim Hightower and – to resonate current pertinence  – Rachel Maddow). Key points are delivered with spittoon accuracy, and the backstory includes shyness and loneliness (her great college love had died young), Tex grit ramped up for full effect, and recurrent alcoholism (like many a life-of-the-party, Molly could be merely a loud, then sullen drinker). Cancer took Ivins in 2007, pre-Obama. Today she would feel let-down by Beto and disgusted by Trump. Her afterglow, a Texas bonfire, endures.   

SALAD (A List)

12 Vivid Dramatic Movies About Real Politicians

Darkest Hour (Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, 2017),  Secret Honor (Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon, 1984), Milk (Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, 2008), Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, 2012), Il Divo (Toni Servillo as Giulio Andreotti, 2008), Blaze (Paul Newman as Earl K. Long, 1989), Vice (Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, 2018), Vincere (Filippo Timi as Benito Mussolini, 2010), The Iron Lady (Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, 2011), George Wallace (Gary Sinise as Wallace, 1997), LBJ (Woody Harrelson as Lyndon B. Johnson, 2017) and Le Grand Charles (Bernard Farcy as Charles de Gaulle, 2006).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

A valuable side-motor for Orson Welles in his Hollywood heyday was tall, can-do secretary and “girl Friday” Shifra Haran. “Oh, she was great!,” said Orson. “There was nothing too daring she wasn’t ready to do” (including keeping secret some of his affairs). Haran said “Mr. Welles was just a demon for work. I’ve worked for other people and no one worked as hard … just drove himself relentlessly, and apparently reveled in it.” Orson’s cronies sneaked a sign into the hospital scene in The Magnificent Ambersons: “Miss Haran, Head Nurse.” (Quotes from Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Making his debut feature, 1998’s The Cruise, about motor-mouthed New York tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch, director Bennett Miller could not know he was catching the World Trade Center three years before its demise, with special lyricism: “On an overcast day, Speed hurries to the towers. Above their plaza the white twins rise, and to Mark Beller’s Sati-like piano music the giddy dervish spins in circles. Dizzy, he lies prone and gazes up at the still-turning immensities. In a Tati touch, he lifts one leg, as if to steady the world. The Cruise, one of the WTC’s enduring monuments, was blessedly unaware of it.” (From the Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (Image)

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

Near his beloved Brooklyn Bridge Timothy “Speed” Levitch contemplates the East River while the World Trade Center towers rise beyond, ghostly in The Cruise. (Artisan Entertainment, 1998; Bennett Miller, director and d.p.)

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 170: 'Joker' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Joker)

Note: Nosh 171 will appear on Friday, Oct. 25.

Joker

Starring in You Were Never Really Here, Inherent Vice, Walk the Line, Her and The Master has lifted Joaquin Phoenix into the pantheon of Most Daring Actors (Christian Bale, Tim Roth and Gary Oldman are rivals, with Nicolas Cage sadly orbiting some pulp asteroid of career abuse). Phoenix fascinates even in a campy grinder like Joker.  Morphing into cruel Jokerness, his little mime ballet to cello music is, well, special. Beginning in 1940 in the DC Comics Batman series, the grinning night crawler remains a fab freak-out for millions. Jack Nicholson ego-ramped his larking Joker in 1989’s Batman. Heath Ledger delivered neo-Brando psychodrama in 2008’s The Dark Knight, capped after death by an Oscar (still, the prince of posthumous is James Dean, nominated for East of Eden and Giant).

Set during the 17-day New York City garbage strike of 1981, Joker snorts a Golden Age of Stench. In Gotham’s prime of grime and stain of shame one of the low slugs is Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), future Joker, his demento calling card a feral cackle. Arthur is a street clown who waves promo boards, and the movie is a graffiti mural for films of that era. So it’s back to 1979 for Walter Hill’s stylized The Warriors (gangs, graffiti, dirty subways), and forward to 1982 for Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. Arthur, a futile, wannabe club comic, festers with love/hate for a talk show host, who is Robert De Niro revising the TV idol (Jerry Lewis) pestered by De Niro’s nerdy Pupkin in King. Add the paranoia fevers of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Arthur gets a gun, crazy-talks to himself, and stalks a politician as did De Niro’s Travis Bickle (the pol’s son is Bruce Wayne, future Batman).

The movie’s hoarding of those sources and old musical chestnuts (Sinatra, the Ink Spots, Jimmy Durante’s Smile) never attains the sizzling fervency of urban disorder that Hill and Scorsese did. Arthur reveals no special powers, neither does director Todd Phillips (Starsky & Hutch, three Hangover yucks). Phillips, who let his design team go retro-gonzo, probably hoped that Phoenix (who lost weight and looks tortured inside and out) could bind the show together. As an added glaze, extra oomph of ooze, Arthur is a kind of Norman Bates to his dying, guilty mother (Frances Conroy). He “courts” a single mom (Zazie Beetz) who absurdly responds to his creepy overtures. Spiced with mentions of addiction, abuse and pedophilia, this pasta of pillage was a prize winner at the Venice festival. The DC thrills and chills are more like a wheezing CB ride (as in Charles Bronson and his crappy Death Wish pictures).

Phoenix, whose primal ancestor here is Conrad Veidt in 1928’s The Man Who Laughs, has some gargoyle charisma steeped in self-pity, but his nuances seldom find traction in the slurry of flippant derivations. Over-hyped in style, over-debated by media, this is a pop culture mortuary, a fossil deposit of kitsch nostalgia. Arthur’s celebrity breakout comes on De Niro’s program, which launches his violent Joker nihilism. Rising bloody but grinning from a pietá pose, he is hailed by clown-masked rioters. How much further franchising can there be from such exhausted premises?   

SALAD (A List)

Ten Good Crypto-Toon Movies from Comics

With main star, director and year:

The Life and Death of Col. Blimp (Roger Livesey, Michael Powell, 1943), The Addams Family (Anjelica Huston, Barry Sonnenfeld, 1991), American Splendor (Paul Giamatti, Shari Springer Berman, 2003), Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire, Sam Raimi, 2002), Batman (Jack Nicholson, Tim Burton, 1989), Popeye (Robin Williams, Robert Altman, 1980), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, Patty Jenkins, 2017), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Bob Hoskins, Robert Zemeckis, 1988), Superman (Christopher Reeve, Richard Donner, 1978) and Men in Black (Will Smith, Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

John Ford welcomed Orson Welles to Hollywood in 1939, and while prepping Citizen Kane Welles studied Ford’s Stagecoach religiously. But when, decades later, Peter Bogdanovich put a vintage Ford on his home screen, Orson couldn’t help himself: “During the first reel I said, ‘Isn’t it funny how incapable even Ford was of making women look in-period?’ You can always tell which decade a costume picture was made in, even if it’s supposed to be in the 17^th century. ‘Look at those two girls in the covered wagon. Their hairdos and costumes are really what the actresses in the ’50s thought was good taste. Otherwise, they’re gonna say ‘I won’t come out in this.’ Peter flew into a rage, turned off the projector and wouldn’t let us see the rest of the movie because I didn’t have enough respect for Ford! But Jack made some of the best ever.” (From the Welles/Henry Jaglom My Lunches with Orson.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The halting, difficult bonding of Tex-stud Ron (Matthew McConaughey) and drag queen Ray/Rayon (Jared Leto) is the binary core fused by AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club: “Leto’s ‘I don’t wanna die’ is the most moving I’ve ever heard on film, his performance as humanely graceful and open-hearted as Bruce Davison’s in Longtime Companion. Ray’s ending in a hospital cuts to Ron in Mexico (buying drugs). There in a drug-med lab he walks in wonder among thousands of golden butterflies, used for thcir hormones. The poetic juxtaposition feels absolutely right, for Dallas is about a man dying, but also about a man emerging like a butterfly from a cocoon – turning from a crudely barricaded personality into a caring, missionary person, in one of the toughest critiques of machismo ever filmed.” (Both actors won Oscars. From the McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Kindle, Nook and Amazon.)

DESSERT (Image)

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

Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto put themselves through the mortal mill, and both won Oscars for starring in Dallas Buyers Club (Focus Features 2013; director Jean-Marc Valée, d.p. Yves Bélanger).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 169: 'Downton Abbey', 'Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: Downton Abbey and Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool)

Downton Abbey

For years it all felt like a Victorian or Edwardian pre-vision of television. Now Downton Abbey is a movie, a deluxe nostalgia package so British it’s like taking high tea with the royal Corgis (kibble, anyone?). Why people who missed out on the show’s six seasons and 52 episodes should wish to see this pious, lavish encore is hard to fathom. In its episodic teasing and preening the series was the most impeccably upholstered of British TV’s many gifts to PBS (if not the best – for me that is the Le Carré spycrafters starring Alec Guinness). The Abbey is a rare, high world. Manners are to Downton what magic is to Hogwarts, and if you put a pickle fork next to a gravy spoon you just might vanish.

The Anglo-American media bond is being fused again for trans-Atlantic benefit: money. This movie is making big dough, and does it show! Every chandelier sparkles like a tiara, every silver service is lined up like Churchill’s toy soldiers, every room and wardrobe ordains admiration. The Crawleys, Downton’s aristo family, are very human and they fret about expenses, which suddenly gush when the Most High arrive for a 1927 visit: crusty old George V and Queen Mary, parents of future kings, the love-dodo David (Edward VIII) and nice, stuttering Bertie (George VI). Never mind the stiffs who play the royals, we’re busy welcoming back the Downton double family, the Crawley brood upstairs and their downstairs retinue of imitative servants. Lovely heiress Mary (Michelle Dockery) is still a porcelain doll of snooty briskness, kind sister Edith (Laura Carmichael) is still nervous but now exhibits more bosom, the risen servant Tom (oak-solid Allen Leech) flickers his past Irish republicism and yet comes to the king’s rescue. The lower ranks flit, fret, snark and ogle. Many millions care whether Daisy (Sophie McShera) and Andy (Michael Fox) will at last marry, whether furtive, closeted Barrow (Rob James-Collier) will find erotic vent, whether old butler Carson (Jim Carter) can still deliver a definitive harrumph.

The master spirit is producer and writer Julian Fellowes, a fabulous plot doodler and fixer (could he be the one Brit to solve Brexit?). Fellowes first opened this gold mine, with a sly wink back at Upstairs Downstairs, by scripting Robert Altman’s 2001 triumph Gosford Park. He knows that inflaming the snobberies of the downstairs crew, by foisting on them a bunch of even more snooty royal servants, resonates the posh drama up above. The crown jewel of the series is She Who Must Speak, the dowager Violet. Maggie Smith has sailed through the saga like Nelson’s Victory, firing her witty grapeshot dead-on (“Do you have enough clichés to get you through the visit?”). Fellowes, a huge Vi fan, has given her a simple, deep, heartfelt speech after the Downton ball, one that will dampen many a cheek  (and that, to me, movingly echoes Burt Lancaster’s noble stoicism at the grand ball that ends The Leopard). This retro rally will most please viewers determined, by devout habit, to be pleased. Rule Britannia, also known as Lady Violet.

And now for something completely different:  

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

He was jazz’s leading icon of inspiration after Louis Armstrong, but Miles Davis felt that even “jazz” was a white brand put upon the hip black muse that rode him even more than his addictions (heroin, coke, pain pills, etc.). Small, guarded, elegant and very black, he came from a well-off Missouri family racially surrounded by Jim Crow. As a teen prodigy at the Juilliard School, the trumpeter was invited by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie into the founding ferment of bop. He felt an ecstatic escape from bigotry in postwar Paris with Left Bank diva Juliette Greco (who called their romance “a miracle of love”). Davis returned to drugs after a vile police beating in front of the New York club where he was headlining, but his musical mutations, style and deportment built an armor of cool around his ravaged psyche. It’s all here jamming, in the slightly over-jammed documentary from Stanley Nelson (The Black Press, The Black Panthers).

Carl Lumbly lays down (in quotation) Davis’s voice, left raspy by a throat operation. Old clips montages to mark new eras are superficial, but grace notes include a shot of two twined lovers (black?) standing before a night-lit markee for Susan Hayward’s White Witch Doctor (1953). Often excellent club and studio footage overlaps with smart talk from George Wein, Jimmy Cobb, Herbie Hancock, Gil Evans, Wayne Shorter, Carlos Santana, Quincy Jones, etc. There is moving time for dancer Frances Taylor Davis, Miles’s first and longest wife. The sharp, funny beauty (pictured above with Miles on a cruise) lent her face to a major Davis/Coltrane album. Despite some abuse (described by her, not dwelt upon) she was loyal to their  love, until dying last year. Frances is the film’s soul peg for Miles’s best (tender sensitivity) and worst (jealous rage).

Davis had a charismatic mystique that usually brought forgiveness for his fits of rudeness and raw temper. His muse would go mute, then rally. Even if like me (and many) you most prize the intimate melodies and lyrical mood poems of the 1950s and early ’60s, and grow impatient with the funky churn of his later bands (where he often seems like a weird, visiting shaman), the zeal of his artistic search remains exciting. Nelson’s tribute would be a good double-up with Don Cheadle’s open-surgery take on the reclusive late years in Miles Ahead.

SALAD (A List)

10 Effective Movies Rooted in Television

With main star and year of release:

Marty (Ernest Borgnine 1955), 12 Angry Men (Henry Fonda 1957), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (The Pythons 1975), Pennies from Heaven (Steve Martin 1981), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Ricardo Montalban 1982), Dragnet (Dan Aykroyd 1987), The Addams Family (Anjelica Huston 1991), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Kyle MacLachlan 1992), The Singing Detective (Robert Downey Jr. 2003) and Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen 2004). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

To fulfill his radio commitments while making Citizen Kane, Orson Welles often flew cross-country, L.A. to Newark (New York’s La Guardia had not yet opened) and then back. Once, “speeding back to Newark, his car broke down, and he and two (of his) Mercury climbed out and stuck out their thumbs. The only vehicle to stop was a garbage truck, good enough to get them to the airport on time. When a guard at the gate asked what kind of cargo he was carrying the truck driver barked, ‘actors and garbage!’ (‘At least he gave us top billing,’ Orson liked to say).” (Quote from Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The aggression in photography, made predatory by Italian paparazzi, was not alien to Diane Arbus. She “charm-vamped subjects into submission, despite her shyness. ‘I get incredibly persistent in the shyness,’ she boasted, ‘enjoying enormously the experience of being put off and having to wait.’ She came to personify mentor Lisette Model’s dictum ‘Don’t shoot until the subject hits you in the pit of the stomach.’ Of the camera’s objectivity Arbus said, ‘It’s a little cold, a little bit harsh. Now I don’t mean photographs have to be mean (but) this scrutiny has to do with not evading facts.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur 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.

New York butcher Marty (Ernest Borgnine, right) needs a real girl more than sharing Girls and Gags with the guys, in the upstart Oscars winner Marty (United Artists 1955; director Delbert Mann, d.p. Joseph LaShelle).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.