R.I.P. Jules Dassin

Aged 96. Damn, I was looking for a Jewish filmmaker to outlive Leni Riefenstahl. First Billy Wilder let me down, now this.

And yes, I let Richard Widmark’s death go unmentioned (but was gratified to see him get his due all over the blogosphere) but I’m glad I wrote about Widmark and Dassin when they were both very much alive.

My friend Duncan suggests that what with this and the passing of Abby Mann, it’s time for anybody closely associated with Widmark to worry.

A while back I gave a copy of NIGHT AND THE CITY to a friend on his birthday. Said friend had complained of an aversion to noir, and I wasn’t going to let that stand. Months later, you’ll be happy to know, Dassin’s film had cured him entirely, and he was watching it regularly with friends — it had become “like STAR WARS or something.” (You maybe have to be able to conceive of people watching STAR WARS regularly to be able to get that image, and I confess it’s a stretch for me, too.)

Here is a somewhat mysterious image of Dassin (the one with the flag) disguised as a beaver. It isn’t how *I* will be choosing to remember him, but for those of you who don’t know his work, this will LODGE IN YOUR BRAINS and force you to seek out NIGHT AND THE CITY and RIFIFI etc. The gain will be entirely yours.

The Late Billy Wilder

 

Changing our Viennese directors in mid-stream, we watched Billy Wilder’s FEDORA (sadly an ancient pan-and-scanned VHS off-air recording), which prompts all sorts of thoughts about the phenomenon of the late film, especially as I was just pontificating on Otto Preminger’s last works. Older filmmakers’ output has a tendency to be neglected upon release, especially in Hollywood, where fashion is all. Wilder in particular suffered about twenty years of critical and commercial decline. After THE APARTMENT won him three Oscars in one night, Moss Hart is supposed to have said, “This is the moment to stop, Billy.” If that’s true, how those words must have rung in his ears as he released ONE, TWO, THREE and KISS ME STUPID and AVANTI! and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES to a largely indifferent or hostile public. And then, following the bloody train wreck that is BUDDY, BUDDY (don’t watch it, folks), another twenty years of enforced idleness.

That last movie is the only real disaster, for me — I find much to enjoy in the later films, though perhaps you have to be sympathetic to Wilder as a filmmaker first. Here’s Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester on the subject:

SS: Clearly around the late sixties his view of society or his take on society became… not interesting to an audience.

RL: He had a very oblique take on a very formal structure, and then that structure was taken away and there was an empty field there and he didn’t have to become oblique. You see, there is a parallel with me. If I don’t really know what we’re doing now, how can I have that oblique take on it? I think that may come from, as you say, the coccooning of physical and financial comfort. Then you don’t take buses and you don’t know what’s going on and I listen to Oasis and say, ‘But I absolutely heard all those chords before …’

Well, he’s dead right about Oasis. And he may well be right about Wilder. Certainly Wilder developed his skills within the constraints of the Hays Code and the studio system, and when it was forced to relax its stranglehold Wilder was handed his freedom and maybe didn’t know what to do with it. If your skill is in a kind of Lubitschian suggestiveness, suddenly being able to say or show anything you like must be daunting. Voluntarily working within the PG certificate might be a solution, but Wilder had always made films aimed at adults.

 

And although he was an enthusiastic consumer of literary pornography (it seems likely he read the first, anonymously published Henry Millers) his relationship to sex onscreen became uncomfortable. There are little, uncertain flourishes of nudity in the later films, but they feel oddly forced and unnatural. They violate the Wilder style.

FEDORA, from a story by actor-turned-novelist Tom Tryon, combines all the virtues and vices of late Wilder. The satire of ’70s Ho’wood is strained and inaccurate, although “The kids with beards have taken over,” is a great line. There is some awkward nudity, though by restraining the profanity to 1960s levels Wilder and IAL Diamond manage to avoid seeming like they’re either old-fashioned or jumping on a sweary bandwagon. For once in his career though, Wilder seems to have saddled himself with an ineffective structure — part one sets up a mystery: what’s with Garbo-like reclusive star of yesteryear Fedora (Marthe Keller)? And how has she remained so youthful? Fiona guessed the solution fifteen minutes in. Part two explains, in prolonged and unnecessary detail, how and why Fedora’s secret was maintained. But once the basic solution is revealed , the dramatic tension has dissipated and there’s only the mildest interest in learning the details. What’s left at this point is 45 minutes in the company of some nice actors in attractive locations, with a few excellent lines. And it’s testimony to the quality of William Holden’s performance and the sheer weirdness of Marthe Keller’s that this is very nearly enough.

It sounds like I’m down on the film, but I really enjoyed it. I was just conscious of what was wrong.

Holden plays washed-up producer Barry Detweiler (a transparent Wilder stand-in). When his voice-over starts up with exactly the same bitter tone as his V.O. in SUNSET BOULEVARD, I got goosebumps. Maybe that’s part of the trouble, the film borrows its resonance from earlier movies. Even Fedora’s breakdown reminded me of Robert Stephens’ suicide attempt during Wilder’s THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES.

Wilder’s earlier writer-director gifts really only show in a scene where Holden searches Keller’s bedroom and one baffling discovery leads smartly to the next — empty film boxes, school jotters filled with the line “I am Fedora,” written over and over, a drawer full of white gloves, a hidden shrine to Michael York…

Apart from Holden’s crusty, bitter presence, York’s appearance as himself adds a certain bizarre gaucherie– the one role York can’t possibly play is himself. I can’t quite say why, but the York performance style, which seems perfectly acceptable in other roles, becomes absolutely preposterous once it’s supposed to stand in for the actual person we’re looking at. In a role intended for Faye Dunaway (which would have made this a Holden-Dunaway NETWORK re-match) the normally naturalistic Marthe Heller, in white gloves and Jackie O shades, gives an expressionistic perf of terrifying eccentricity, like a strung-out elf, or a Michael Jackson puppet in drag. One could quibble, but why bother when she’s the most interesting thing onscreen?

Fiona provides the epigram: “It’s a film about physical decrepitude that’s really about artistic decrepitude.” And consciously so – that’s exactly why Holden’s character is our guide through this curiously one-way labyrinth. Wilder is recasting the past, trying to bring it back, and yet the last exchange of dialogue puts a rueful postmodern spin on the inevitability of failure:

Countess: “I know you will keep this to yourself… for old time’s sake.”

Detweiler: “Too bad. Because this would have made a much better picture than the script I brought you.”

Countess: Yes… but who would you get to play it?”

(I found the above clip and Wilder’s grave at A. Gropius and Nana’s blog, “in dreams begin responsibility”. Only fair to link to them.)

Quote of the Day: Stolen Face

 

Billy Wilder on his friend, Otto Preminger:

“Tantalised by his mystique, I have devoted the last decade to unravel it. After the most laborious detective work, after scanning literally thousands of documents and photographs, after analysing and comparing samples of handwriting as well as of fingerprints, I have come to the irrefutable, if maybe not too surprising conclusion that Otto Ludwig Preminger is in fact none other than the elusive and dreaded Martin Bormann.

“He has been capable of perpetrating this brazen deception by using his modicum of talent for acting, by shaving his head three times daily, by wearing elevated shoes and having his face re-shaped by a plastic surgeon in Luxemburg. A xeroxed document in my voluminous files on Preminger attests that the operation was performed by a Dr Thomas Frick-Hutzmann in the Luxemburg Landesspital on 11 August 1945. Looking at his new face, there is no doubt that a sloppy and rather unflattering job has been done. However, one better remember that the delicate operation had to be performed by the usually quite competent surgeon while blindfolded.”

~ From Behind the Scenes of Otto Preminger, by Willi Frischauer.

Euphoria #38: chase me, chase me

 

Musician / singer / songwriter Daniel Prendiville has a series of interesting suggestions for Cinema Euphoria, our ongoing project to condense the sum total of human happiness into a few thousand feet of celluloid and look at it on Youtube with a wry smile.

‘- the car chase in What’s Up Doc?

- the wedding scene in Guys & Dolls - I was always struck by the way the wedding crowd disperses immediately after the nuptials. It seems to emphasise just how impersonal the big city is - one minute you’re the most important person in the world - the next…

- anything from Welcome to Collingwood - particularly the dialogue where they are describing various capers.’

I like all these suggestions but I find MY HANDS ARE TIED — I don’t have a good copy of GUYS AND DOLLS and the key moment is not on Youtube. Nor are any scenes from WTC, the Russo brothers’ remake of Mario Monicelli’s BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET. So, just like Cybill Shepherd in the ’70s, we are STUCK WITH BOGDANOVITCH.

But that’s no big problem. Although this sequence from the end of Peter Bogdanovitch’s film of Buck Henry’s script is a bit bigger and altogether more climactic than I generally like for Cinema Euphoria (get me some more little moments, you… lurkers, you) we can remedy that easily by concentrating on the Small Things in this big-ass sequence.

The way this clip starts is super-great: I love the little musical set of sounds created by Verna Fields’ sharp and witty editing: muffled shouting / tip-tap footsteps of Streisand and O’Neil / car-horn blasts / whistling patsy. It’s kind of beautiful just to listen to.

Verna F’s inspired work (she also cut AMERICAN GRAFFITI and JAWS before retiring) continues with the marvellous orchestration of LOUD and QUIET in the coming chase. The way she cuts ahead to peaceful scenes lying in the path of the mayhem creates antici… pation that builds the comedy up. I’ve argued here that Boggo sometimes lets his dramatic instincts get in the way of his comedy ambitions, playing on spectacle and suspense in ways that aren’t relevant to slapstick, but it has to be admitted that few filmmakers since the ’20s have even attempted classical slapstick on this scale and with half this amount of success.

(Billy Wilder noted in the ’70s that only Richard Lester and Blake Edwards could shoot slapstick. Before that there were Tati and Tashlin. Preston Sturges loved slapstick but wasn’t particularly good at it. In the silent era there were many many brilliant orchestrators of elaborate visual gag sequences. Now the closest thing is the cartoony exaggeration of Jeunet or Raimi, which is a form of heightened action cinema, a different animal altogether.)

Bogdanovitch himself got to play around with pratfalls again in NICKELODEON, a flawed film (studio interference is at least partly to blame) but one that does boast some rather brilliant comic action, again filmed in bold long-shots like dance sequences. It would be great to see him turned loose on this kind of material again — Boggy may not be as hot as he was back in the day but I do think that any producer who gave him his head on a decent visual comedy piece would make a killing.

Quote of the day: King Zog Shot Back!

 

“I might have known: every time I try to see The Magic Flute, something happens! I have yet to get a peek at the third act. Last time, King Zog lost Albania right in the middle of the opening aria!”

~ newsman Walter Abel in ARISE MY LOVE.

Directed by Mitchell Leisen.

Screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

The beautifully-named Albanian monarch is the only world leader in history to have responded to an assassination attempt by drawing his own pistol and blasting away at his assailant, a noteworthy fact commemorated in Nicholas Roeg’s installment of the operatic compendium film ARIA – which makes the connection between Zog and opera two-fold.

Let the Shadows Play

Maurice Binder’s titles for Ken Russell’s THE BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN (the second sequel to THE IPCRESS FILE with Michael Caine).

Saul Bass gets a very good press, and rightly so, but maybe we should also talk more about Maurice Binder? While Bass is more consistently elegant and tasteful, Binder could be guilty of breathtaking kitsch (those later Bond titles!), as well as more classical work.

ARABESQUE is a film made by Stanley Donen, who told his cinematographer, the great Christopher Challis (TALES OF HOFFMAN) that the script was so bad their only hope was to try every crazy photographic trick in the book. It works! The presence of Sophia Loren and Alan Badel also help compensate for the fey script and the usual Gregory Peck drag-factor.

A similar contempt for the story enlivens THE IPCRESS FILE, where director Sid Furie started the shoot by tearing up and stamping on his script in front of the whole crew. “THAT’S what I think of THAT!”

Michael Caine supposes he must have had to borrow somebody else’s copy for the rest of the film.

Anyhow, Binder certainly gets these films off to a groovy start. I once asked production designer Ken Adam about Binder. The two had worked on many of the same James Bond films. I made the mistake of pronouncing the name “Morris Bynd-er”. But Binder was a German like Adam himself:

“Maw-reece Bin-der,” he enunciated, “was a lovely man, who liked, very much, to photograph silhouetted naked ladies.”

Well, yes.

Binder himself told the story of his struggle with a model’s pubic hair, which stuck out in a censorable mohawk formation, visible as she turned in silhouette. ‘She wouldn’t shave, so I thought I’d smooth it down with vaseline. I was just patting it down when [producer] Cubby Broccoli walked in. He just looked at me, then said, “Maurice, I think maybe I am paying you too much.”‘

Maybe sometime I’ll post the titles of Billy Wilder’s THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, a favourite film of mine. Elegant and witty credits by Binder, with Miklos Rosza’s finest and most melancholy score. ‘Why is it so SAD?’ asks Fiona. The violin theme started life as a concerto by Rosza, and Wilder listened to it while writing the script. The sadness seeped into the comedy, making for Wilder’s most deeply-felt work since maybe THE APARTMENT. It’s also Wilder’s SCOTTISH FILM and makes better use of Robert Stephens’ unique gifts than any other movie — although working with Wilder was so stressful for Stephens, he attempted suicide partway through the shoot.

(While Mitchell Leisen would annoy Wilder by cutting his scripts to make things more comfortable for the actors, Wilder, it seems, never did ANYTHING for the comfort of his actors…)

My friend Roland suggests that you tend to find the best title sequences attached to the worst films, and there are certainly cases of that, but as long as there are films like TPLOSH around, I can’t subscribe to that as a guiding principle.

“We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”

It doesn’t really look like there’s a head growing up out of his neck, more like there’s a scrotum hanging out of his hat. Adorable.

For all his famous work with Walter Matthau (pictured), director Billy Wilder, who can be credited with first pairing Matthau with Jack Lemmon, never seemed to grasp the fundamental truth: we love Walter Matthau. Wilder kept casting W.M. as lowlifes, scumbags and grifters (from a crook in THE FORTUNE COOKIE to a hitman in the appalling BUDDY, BUDDY): hate-figures for Lemmon to act nervous and vulnerable next to, when in fact the entire point of this unique and wonderful actor is his transformation of boredom into an attractive quality, his hangdog avuncular grouchiness, and his long-suffering Oliver Hardy-type appeal to our sympathies.

These winning qualities all emanate from from a preposterous physical substance (avoid any film which reveals Matthau in a bath-towel), hunchbacked, pot-bellied, sunken-chested, bow-legged, flat-footed, with long bony hands flapping limply like the wing-tips of a disappointed eagle, and fronted by a rumpled and pouchy kisser that looks like it’s sculpted from all the wrinkly bits snipped off of fifty years of Hollywood royalty at the plastic surgeon’s.

Though celebrated for his comedies, Matthau’s best roles are in thrillers — CHARLEY VARRICK, THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 and THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, where his hard-assed side can find fuller expression without turning him into a heavy. Because we want a full demonstration of Matthau’s worst traits, and we want to love him the while.

THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN is one of the best films directed by Stuart Rosenberg, who died last March. Rosenberg also helmed COOL HAND LUKE which, in the sunny days of my childhood, seemed to be on T.V. every week. His Matthau film is a funny and smart and very veryseventies cop thriller, based on a Swedish novel but set in San Francisco. It walks a fine, meandering line between liberal tolerance and outright homophobia in its politics, and allows Matthau to grumble, of a high-powered lawyer: ‘Probably got enough juice to get a sodomy beef reduced to “following too close”,’ which is a great line even if it does commit the cardinal sin of using the words “sodomy” “beef” and “juice” in the same sentence. Anyhow, the whole thing fizzles out in an overlong bus chase, but we can forgive that for the beauteous fluorescent striplighting photography, the suave support of Bruce Dern and Louis Gossett Jnr, and Anthony Zerbe, who can do no wrong, and the fact that Joanna Cassidy’s beauty takes the breath away.

CHARLEY VARRICK is an authentically tough movie from the revered Don Siegel, and it’s maybe the guy’s best thriller. Walt is Charley, an independent heist artist who has trouble from corrupt authorities and a double-crossing young punk sidekick (the majestic Andy Robertson, best known as Scorpio the Zodiac Killer substitute in Siegel’s DIRTY HARRY).

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 can loosely be typed as a group-jeopardy movie, which is to say we can’t quite label it as a disaster movie (although Matthau did contribute a mysterious one-shot cameo to EARTHQUAKE, using the pseudonym Walter Matuschanskayasky. Very weird film, that, being one of the very few contemporary dramas where nearly all the cast were wigs). Joseph Sargent, who’s had an amazingly long career, directs this one, and seems at times to be channelling Fritz Lang, as he cross-cuts narrative strands to make definite statements: a line about the value of a human lifeis followed by a pointed cut to wads of ransom money being counted. Matthau is an island of bored humanity in a dyspeptic sea of surly New Yorkers, in a city on the verge of breaking down utterly because those who, like Matthau, care enough to do a decent job are in a distinct minority (and the film proceeds to thin their ranks even more).

*

There’s a story I love from the making of BUDDY BUDDY, the only funny thing associated with that movie (which is to Wilder, Lemmon and Matthau as ATOLL K is to Laurel & Hardy — a painful object to be SHUNNED. For once the invective unleashed by Klaus Kinski in his hysterical autobiography is justified when he describes that film) –

Sliding down a laundry shoot, Matthau missed the crash mat and injured his back (stick with me, it gets funnier).

An ambulance is called and Jack Lemmon, an emotional man, kneels by his friend, in tears. “Can I get you anything?” he pleads, and, “Are you comfortable?”

Matthau looks up at him with his Droopy visage and replies, “I make a reasonable living.”

(Oh, and I’m working my way through Donald Westlake’s excellent Dortmunder books, and Matthau is my Blue Sky Casting choice for Dortmunder, hands down. Thriller fans, check them out!)