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.
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