I’d heard something or other about THE COTTON CLUB ENCORE, Francis Ford Coppola’s re-edit of his embattled 1984 production, but it was Meredith Brody in Bologna I guess two years back who said it was much more interesting and worthwhile than all the various tinkered versions of APOCALYPSE NOW, and this planted a seed. I wanted to see it. Finally I bought a copy.
I always rather liked the original — it was the first Coppola I was old enough to see at the movies, I guess.
I can’t be sure of my memories of it, but I think it actually played better shorter. Coppola thinks the new cut plays shorter despite being longer, because the story’s clearer. But clarity isn’t everything. Sometimes puzzlement is more engaging. And anyway I’m not convinced this version is any clearer. Still, I’m glad to have seen it because it has more musical numbers.
Coppola got embroiled in the film in the first place because producer Robert Evans couldn’t figure out how to pull off a movie about the Club with Richard Gere, who refused to play a gangster, would only play a musician, the problem being that no white musicians played the Club. I hate to say it, but Coppola didn’t really solve that problem. Gere glides around the outskirts of the story, vanishing to Hollywood to become a star offscreen, romancing a gangster’s moll, and the movie offers us no reason to care about these characters, cute though they are, well though they wear Milena Canonero’s clothes. In 1984 I probably wasn’t aware that this plotline was a Methuselah-old pulp standard, one which Tarantino would feel the need to explode in PULP FICTION with the Travolta-Thurman story.
I did notice, though, that Gregory Hines and Lonette McKee’s love story (now promoted to the cover image/poster) was actually ABOUT something, and connected to the Cotton Club, even if it didn’t quite have all the moving parts a story needs to have. The Hines character’s relationship with his brother (real-life sibling Maurice Hines) added some complication.
Gere’s character also has a brother, played by Nic Cage — whose storyline which does manage to involve the club, and ends dramatically. But we never learn Gere’s reaction to the conclusion of that yarn, which shows just how uninterested in him the film is.
Bob Hoskins and Fred Gwynne (who Coppola hired over Evan’s furious objections: “No Munsters!”) improvised a great scene, the standout in the film, and had Coppola been on top form or able to work with some freedom, they could and should have been invited to improvise a half dozen more. Those guys should have been in more movies together.
The other best non-musical scene is with Laurence Fishburne, though his character’s arguing that he doesn’t have any choice but to be a gangster because society is racist… well, his character seems to believe it, and he argues it with panache. It’s good when characters can give a good account of themselves.
In building a musical that isn’t a musical (no bursting into song except during performance scenes) that connects to the social events of the time, Coppola seems to have taken CABARET as his model — understandably, since the Bob Fosse beat him to a Best Director Oscar in 1973. My dim memory tells me that the balance of songs and story in CABARET is much more successful, the two seem genuinely planned to go together whereas ENCORE has some songs which, lovely though they are, just happen. The strongest deja vu moment was when Fishburne and his gang beat up a nasty Club employee — it felt weirdly like the Nazis beating up the bouncer. A strange connection to make.
Coppola films some of the dancing extremely well, and other bits he hacks up into closeups of feet and stuff. Even aged seventeen I knew that was wrong. And there are lots of MONTAGES, usually a sure sign of a film in trouble. They’re very pretty, but they’re period pastiche filmmaking designed to glue together a disjointed narrative.
It’s a shame to feature mob boss Dutch Schultz so prominently and not include his last words (“A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim…”) but in fairness its difficult to see how the authors could have worked them in meaningfully. Intercut them with Cab Calloway’s scat singing?
The elusive onstage/offstage conversion does finally happen, though, right before the end creds (which are beautiful, a bunch of spare montage elements) — Coppola intercuts a stage number with “real” action at Grand Central Station and blends the two into something really magical. Coppola’s best endings are usually based on cross-cutting, aren’t they?
THE COTTON CLUB stars Zack Mayo; Josephus; Ellen Aim; Louise Little; Lou Landsky; Sam Starr; H.I. McDunnough; Louis B. Mayer; Herman Munster; Specialty Dancer – ‘Beale Street Blues’ (uncredited); Delores Dodge; Billy Bump/Billie Bump; Jimmy Jump; R.M. Renfield; Kane; Momo; Baby Houseman; Joe – the Hustler; Gloria Capulet; 1st Sgt. Braxton Rutledge; Dicky Speck; Gus Fring; Grandpa Booker; Mary Corleone; and Stokely Carmichael.
THE CURE is generally admired, and genuinely good, but coming after EASY STREET as we watch in sequence, it seems a far less ambitious work. The narrative is super-slight, there’s no real drama. But you can turn that around and say that the ambition lies in structuring a comedy WITHOUT those things.
There’s much to enjoy. After starting the film with himself in the role of orderly, Chaplin restarted from scratch, taking the role of a rich, straw-hatted dipso. He could almost be the same character from ONE A.M. Which is odd, because that film underperformed and was regarded by CC as a failed experiment. It’s hardly surprising, given his back ground of extreme poverty and his sudden, inexplicable wealth and fame, that Chaplin didn’t feel secure in his success. What’s more surprising is the risks he ran, avoiding settling into one formula with his films — probably his comedy just couldn’t function within a set pattern, which would be why he kept trying to escape the Tramp character. The other reason would be the way the character reminded him painfully of his origins.
In his memoir, Chaplin only discusses THE CURE in relation to Nijinsky’s visit to the set. (He doesn’t mention EASY STREET at all.) The great dancer solemnly watched him perform, never laughing once, but was very flattering: “Your comedy is balletique, you are a dancer.” Anticipating W.C. Fields. For a day or two, Chaplin acted without film in the camera, because he knew he couldn’t use anything he shot in front of this tragic fellow.
Nijinsky’s insanity seems to have impressed Chaplin — he writes more about Nijinsky than about Eric Campbell, Albert Austin and Henry Bergman, none of whom rate a mention — but doesn’t connect it to any worries about his own equilibrium. Despite regularly playing dipsomaniacs, and having an alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Chaplin doesn’t admit to any concerns on that score. I guess, like most of us, most of the time, he simply felt sane.
His manager and half-brother Syd seems to have said not long after this time that he was only waiting for Charlie to crack up finally so he could sell the studio to a supermarket and retire on the proceeds.
Loyal Underwood is the founder of THE CURE’s health spa, and he’s a physical wreck. This broad satire allows Chaplin to treat the place as a system to be destroyed. It’s a place full of rich people pretending to get healthier. A romance with Edna will provide Charlie with a motivation to change his way of life, but nothing serious will result from this.
Eric Campbell plays a gouty villain. Gout being mainly a disease of the rich, it doesn’t have to be treated sympathetically.
An attendant (John Rand) tries to steer a veering Charlie towards and through the revolving doors into the establishment. Drunk and disoriented, Charlie tends to take off in random directions, stepping over the wellspring of the healing waters, teasing us with the suggestion he’s going to fall in — a set-up whose pay-off is saved for the very end.
Swing doors, with their tendency to keep swinging, have given Charlie’s drunk characters a lot of trouble. The revolving doors don’t bother him at all — he just always seems to find himself outside when he goes in. But this infuriates John Rand only — Charlie doesn’t mind in the least. In Unknown Chaplin we see him accidentally catch his cane (one part of his signature look, along with moustache and baggy trousers, that he’s retained) in the doors, then hurl it away in sudden fury. But then he incorporates the mistake into the routine, beautifully. Charlie is dazedly delighted with the way he’s trapped Campbell and Rand in airtight glass compartments, bellowing silently at him.
The impetus from the doors, when Charlie is finally spat out into the spa interior, sends him all the way upstairs, spinning like a top, while Rand, a servile Hoskins, gently guides him to his room. His steamer trunk arrives: a giant booze cabinet. This is psychologically quite true, of course: anyone seeking to be cured of an addiction takes along a bit of what they’re addicted to, just in case. Thereby defeating the whole point, but what are points for, if not to be defeated? We don’t want to ever let points get the upper hand.
Albert Austin, another attendant, arrives to take Charlie to the waters. Prolonged flirtation with nurse — almost three minutes of this single locked-off setting, and I feel it could have been productively pruned. But there’s a bit of amusing salaciousness, and Charlie’s avoidance of the water. The scene ends when he finally takes a sip and then goes scampering around looking for a place to throw up. Digestion is a favourite Chaplin topic. And then, since Chaplin likes to do vulgar jokes and then de-vulgarize them, we find out he was racing back to his room for a proper drink.
Now James Kelley as an aged attendant is showing signs of drink — he’s been at Charlie’s steamer trunk, the first sign that our hero’s state of intoxication is going to spread through the population like a virus.
That Bad Man Eric is bothering Edna again. I suppose it’s slightly odd that he’s been mistreated before he’s done anything wrong (just as in THE RINK) but Charlie is depending on the gout being unsympathetic and also on Eric being in melodramatic villain guise, and being known to the audience as his regular antagonist. Edna proves well able to defend herself, stamping on the bandaged hoof then stomping off. Eric, however, simply can’t take “Take that!” for an answer.
Charlie blunders into this situation, sitting between annoyer and annoyee, so that he thinks Eric’s repulsive coochy-cooing is meant for him. Ever-mutable, he flirts back, becoming a winsome coquette for as long as the moment demands. So the next blow to Eric’s inflamed foot is delivered flirtatiously.
Good gag with the wicker chairs. There are two joined together, so when Charlie repositions his, he removes the one Eric was about to sit on. All this guys were great at falling over without getting hurt. Only Jerry Lewis, who didn’t have the training, went on to have terrible back pain. Eric, alas, didn’t live long enough to regret his tumbling.
The manager, or some other important figure, comes to impose order and rebuke Charlie, but Edna springs to his defense — Eric goes into a melodramatic pose, tugging the twin points of his beard which somehow conveys that his perfidy is rumbled, and Charlie, protean as ever, steps forward to his audience, the film having been transformed to a play by the situation and Eric’s posturing. An amazing moment, when you think about it.
Having caused a little more chaos, Charlie is whisked off to have a massage. Henry Bergson is the aggressive masseur.
Meanwhile, two more attendants have gotten bevvied up on Charlie’s stash. The manager orders them to throw out the liquor. Albert Austin, incapably pie-eyed, tosses the bottles out the window into the healthful well…
Charlie’s undressing behind a curtain in the changing room annoys Eric and another patron, as he carelessly flings shoes etc. When the curtain is whisked open, he strikes fey poses. I’ve never been sure what this is a reference to but it always struck me as funny, regardless. Some kind of Windmill Theatre tableau vivant thing is being spoofed, I guess. Or bathing beauties? But it’s a chance for Chaplin to be graceful and effeminate and impudent.
Chaplin had engaged a contortionist for this bit, but initially struggled to find the right role for him (as seen in Unknown Chaplin). The eventual solution is excellent: Bergman twists the guy into impossible shapes while Charlie watches in alarm. It’s a plan he’d re-use in THE IMMIGRANT: visualise, using some hapless subject, the terrible fate awaiting the hero, then see what he can do to escape it.
Charlie the drunk isn’t particularly alarmed, though — he seems the activity as a wrestling match. Charlie is generally devoid of sympathy towards others at this point, except maybe Edna. But he has no intention of taking part in a bout himself. Bergman is astounded when Charlie wrestles back, halfnelsonizing the big guy. All the sliding back and forth on the table to escape Henry’s grip is great. As is Charlie’s aggressive wrestling stance. As with ONE A.M., we get to see the Chaplin legs. Even more so.
Strange bit where Charlie tries to grab Henry by the stomach. He almost succeeds. If the bay window protruded any more — it would have to extrude like a Dali buttock, and probably require a crutch or unicycle to support it — the judo move might have worked.
Meanwhile, Edna is alarmed to find everyone drunk. The spa has acquired a post-apocalyptic quality, like THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS or DAWN OF THE DEAD. Society has broken down. The alcoholics have taken over the asylum. It’s like All Fool’s Day, or St. Patrick’s Day or something. i like the orderly using a lamp as a trumpet. Is it John Rand, in his umpteenth role?
Charlie, having dunked Eric and Henry in the pool, comes upon a scene of pure rambunctiousness. He is now almost the most sober person present, and he doesn’t like it. Things get a bit dark when he has to save Edna from two randy inebriates. I think the beard guy is William Gillespie, a Scot from Aberdeenshire. I wonder what WG thought of Eric’s phony Scotsman act?
The temperance theme — Chaplin really disapproved of overindulgence, sounding kind of priggish when criticising Barrymore’s excesses in his memoir, as if congenital alcoholism was purely a choice — doesn’t stand a chance of being treated seriously. Edna urges Charlie to try the waters. He’s saved her, and she wants to do the same for him. But the waters are now 20% proof. Initially reluctant, Charlie becomes rather keen on the stuff. Edna may soon need protecting from her protector. He throws his leg over her knees, Harpo-fashion.
Eric, having been in the pool while everyone else was getting plastered, is still sober, but the attendant pushing his bath chair isn’t. Well, somebody was bound to end up submerged in the healthful well. Chaplin’s water features exist for no other purpose. Freeze-framing it just allow us to see that a padded stuntman, in Eric’s elaborate makeup, performs the dive.
Looking for a way to end this sequence, Chaplin falls back on a reliable gambit, and has his character stagger about until he falls into the tiny swimming pool. I’m not much of a swimmer but I reckon I could manage a length of that thing. By stretching.
The next day. Everyone is horribly hungover, except Edna and Eric, who does not appear. I don’t suppose he actually drowned. Actually, he might have a hangover too, depending on how much he swallowed when upside down in the well.
Charlie now learns that the well was full of liquor, but not that it was his. Now Edna is urging him NOT to take the waters, and the temperance pledge can be done semi-sincerely. But having already lampooned it, the film can’t really be seen as particularly moralistic now. The curse has been taken off in advance.
Charlie falls in the well. The End.
Unknown Chaplin supplies us with two fine gags I rather wish had been used. In one elaborate routine, Charlie acts as traffic cop to the drunken attendants pushing wheelchairs and bath chairs. He shot this multiple times, first in his disorderly orderly guise, then again after switching roles and becoming the rich drunk. Everyone says that he discarded this because he realised his character is supposed to create chaos, not order, but that’s just a (plausible) assumption. I think it could have worked, because once everybody’s smashed, Charlie DOES become the adult in the room.
Chaplin also shot a bit more ending, where he bobs up and down in the well like a cork, kissing Edna on each surfacing. Again, this seems like a nice way to develop the gag and make it romantic — after all, we’ve already seen someone fall in there, so a plunge alone is not too surprising. I think it’s even possible the gag WAS included — so many of Chaplin’s films seem to have lost frames from the end, that a missing shot doesn’t seem impossible. But I have no evidence to support this idea, except for the fact that Chaplin shot the gag, and it was good.
Next up: Chaplin takes everything he’s learned and applies it to one film.
Watched two Vincente Minnellis this week, without having planned it. BELLS ARE RINGING (top) was a rewatch. The combination of the timeless and simple source material — Cinderella — clever-clever screenwriter/songwriters (Comden & Green) — a crazed aesthete for a director — and the comedy powerhouse that is Judy Holliday — make this one that shouldn’t be missed if you like any of those kind of things.
We’d never seen LUST FOR LIFE. We didn’t initially take to Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh, although he certainly looks the part. He rants a lot, and it feels like the usual Kirk schtick amped up to eleven, rather than anything new or insightful. We admitted the thing was extremely beautiful. We pondered at the fact that Vincent’s letters to Theo (James Donald) were read on the soundtrack by Donald, not Douglas.
Slowly, the film gets better, or its better qualities come to dominate. Donald is the emotional centre, the one who can enlist our sympathies most strongly, so that’s why he gets the VO. And there’s more going on with the imagery than “just” beauty or even an attempt to mimic the look of specific Van Gogh paintings.
When VVG, close to his first crack-up, sits in a gloomy bar, Minnelli shows us his tormented face and then his POV.
We don’t know yet that Minnelli plans to use the image of the lamp as a symbol for when VVG’s mind overheats. It returns later, precipitating the ear-lopping.
What it does here, instead, is suggests the artist’s ability to find beauty in unexpected circumstances. Combined with Kirk’s glowering features, it suggests that he’s oppressed by this ability.
And then the ravishing landscapes, the film’s incessant picturesqueness, start to take on an added value. They go by too fast for us to really study them, seize them with our minds. We feel like the artist, struggling to capture fleeting beauty before it vanishes forever. (No replay function for real life.)
The lantern having assumed a prominent role, Minnelli can simply pan away onto it when VVG is about to make with the straight razor. Exactly as Tarantino does in RESERVOIR DOGS.
Lacking the ability to make Kirk’s ear disappear, Minnelli has to simply avoid shooting him on one side after the bandages come off.
Fiona remembers her art teacher inveighing against Don McLean’s song Vincent and its bogus sentimentality. I remember my art teacher answering a question about why VVG cut his ear off with the line, “He wanted to see what it looked like.” Quite a logical answer. He was an artist, he painted self-portraits… Not true though.
Kirk quietens down in some scenes. James Donald continues to quietly engage. Anthony Quinn brings the entertainment, and doesn’t overact. And he makes things a bit less formal.
The ending had an unexpected emotional impact, especially for Fiona, bringing back her feelings at her own brother’s death. “My poor brother,” says Theo, which is simple and absolutely right. What else can you say?
We’re inclined to look at some more cinematic Vincents. There are lots! The Richard Curtis Dr. Who episode is the worst thing ever, though — way beyond Don McLean.
shadowplay 