Great party

SEASON’S GREETINGS!

I’m unhappy that my Toshiba isn’t big enough to show off the grain, which I recall quite clearly from my own cinema experience of this movie, at the late lamented Odeon Clerk Street (where I also saw STAR WARS and two KING KONGS). Apparently the camera negative was smooth as a baby’s bottom, so the grain was something we are to presume Kubrick wanted. Although on the other hand, he wasn’t around to supervise the prints with his usual rigour, being as he was dead, and his heirs do their best to follow his wishes but they’re not him, of course.

The movie is EYES WIDE SHUT. Meet the Harfords, played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Right from the start, after we get over gaping at Nicole’s splendid bottom, I’m amazed at the slow dissolves. Once had a student tell me he thought dissolves were old-fashioned, which I thought was silly. But THESE dissolves are old fashioned.

Kubrick told Michel Ciment he didn’t even LIKE dissolves, but sometimes they were the simplest way to get across a change of time and place. By that standard, they’re completely unnecessary here, as is the sitcom-like exterior view of the Harfords’ apartment building. But, when you’re unable to do principal photography in New York, you settle for second unit, and then those shots become, I guess, immovable blocks in your continuity.

“My name is Sandor Szavost. I’m Hungarian.”

“This dialogue!” gasped Fiona. “This film was written by an artificial intelligence!”

“He taught me to write a screenplay,” I said in sloooww mmmotion, “Would you like to hear it?”

The Cruiser flirts with two Anglo fembots. Nicole and Tom are suddenly very drunk. Tom saves a girl who has O.D.’d. This is where Kubrick and his camera crew were reflected in the shower screen, originally, but this has been digitally removed. Now, either Kubrick wanted this done, in which case Warners disobeyed him and released the film at the cinema with the unintentional cameo intact, or else Kubrick was happy for it to stay, in which case they violated his wishes by scrubbing him out of his own movie.

While we’re on the subject, it should be noted that the only director-approved digital version of EWS is the 4:3 DVD, because at the time apparently SK had no faith in widescreen TVs. In fact, for one as particular as Kubes about how his films were watched, the widescreen TV would be a nightmare, since many many people are content to watch films in any old aspect ratio, usually erring on the side of filling up as much of their TV as possible, regardless of how much of the original image they might be cropping out, or how badly distorted they’re making it.

Then the already-familiar Shostakovich takes us through a superfluous montage of Nicole’s bum again, Tom treating another busty nude, domestic stuff with the Harford’s daughter, and then the looong scene where the marriage is thrown into jeopardy by the revelation that Nicole once fantasised about another man. Here, Kubrick and cinematographer Larry Smith go for a sort of Leon Shamroy effect, with warm yellowy interior light and blue night exterior. But I don’t know that New York has blue streetlight, and moonlight isn’t blue, so Kubrick is following a movie convention here. Which is inconsistent with his real candlelight fetish in BARRY LYNDON. But that’s OK.

So, this dialogue. Kubrick hadn’t lived in New York for a long time. Had Frederic Raphael ever? And had either of them heard a human conversation? Raphael hadn’t had his name on anything that got made for quite a while. But I’ve always found his writing impossibly arch. I quite like NOTHING BUT THE BEST (Alan Bates leans into the archness) but DARLING and TWO FOR THE ROAD give me the pip.

Still, he was a distinguished expat American-born writer living in Britain. It was a convenient match. And we got an interesting book out of it, Eyes Wide Open, FR’s memoir of working with SK, whose rapid publication caused the Kubrick clan to close the iron door on him.

On meeting Kubes, Freddie can’t decide how intelligent he is. John Fowles said exactly the same thing about that other one-take wonder, William Wyler. Perhaps directors have a different FORM of intelligence from novelists?

Half an hour into the film it settles into a pattern: thrown into a rit of jealous fage by Nicole’s confession, Cruise starts cruising, encountering a series of available women and failing to have sex with them. It’s noticeable that Kubrick’s Steadicam basically just follows Tom around, or tracks back as he advances. The most basic kind of movement. After the twitchy bereaved woman, there’s the student/sex worker, and more brill dialogue.

“What do you want to do?”
“What do you recommend?”
“What do I recommend?”

It’s the beginning of the echolalia that will reverberate through the rest of the film. Dr. Bill may escape catching HIV from the girl he shies away from crewing, but he catches the tendency to repeat whatever’s said to him.

Oh, and he’s being haunted by blue-tinged monochrome fantasies of Nicole getting it on with her fantasy figure. His fantasy of her fantasy. But why do we need the special grading? It has no equivalent in any other Kubrick film. Alex’s fantasies in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE weren’t photographically different from the rest of the film. The trick seems cheesy.

I suppose though the blue echoes the light behind Nicole during her confession. It’s quite a colour-coded movie: the sex worker has a red door for passion, and a green lobby for disease. That kind of thing.

Oh, and Tom does a bit of palm-punching, to show he’s angry. Emulation of Jack Nicholson’s crazy walk in THE SHINING, or did Kubrick just give him the same direction: think of the crazy people you see on the street, ranting at nobody?

Dr. Bill gets queeerbashed by fratboys, a change from the source book, where the doctor is Jewish and his persecutors are anti-semites. Raphael proposed to Kubrick that Bill could be Jewish. “A doctor in New York?” “I don’t want him to be Jewish,” said Kubrick, apparently not giving any reason. And then saying to Raphael, who was also Jewish, “We don’t really know what they say about us when we’re not around, do we?” In which case, wouldn’t a Jewish protagonist be easier to write?

He also didn’t want the story to be a dream. “There’s no movie if it’s all a dream.” FR, by his account, offered logical arguments as to why it was pretty inescapable that Dream Novel is a dream. SK just said no.

The New York street sets are impressive, and arguably the film’s most dreamlike aspect is the way the production took hundreds of Polaroids of Greenwich Village and environs and then built a set in which all the familiar places are jumbled up.

Somewhere in here, too small for me to detect on the Toshiba, is a neon sign saying Vitali’s, a rare Kubrick in-joke.

Apparently Kubrick hired every yellow cab in the UK (a dozen or so) and tied them up for fifteen months, inconveniencing several other shoots. You never see more than two yellow cabs in a shot.

The piano bar interior is lovely. “Nick Nightingale” is an impossible character name, though. It’s a straight anglicisation of the name in the Schnitzler original, and gives a clue to the weird affect of this film: it’s a dream narrative played in realistic-fake environments, a Viennese fin-de-siecle sex story transposed to modern America and in the hands of men who don’t know modern America very well. I presume the adaptors thought “Nick Nightingale” sounded convincingly showbiz, but in what era?

Rade Serbedzija and Leelee Sobieski’s scene kicks things up into what passes for high gear. Thing always get better when the good actors come on. RS seems to be under the impression he’s in a comedy, something SK seems to have hinted to Alan Cummings also, but not to anyone else. This could be quite a funny film if anyone knew it’s what was wanted. Kubrick did consider casting Steve Martin in the eighties, but it’s not certain he would have asked him to be funny.

What does Leelee whisper to Tom? It’s like Twin Peaks all over again.

She recalled that Kubes always wore the same black smock to work, “But he must have had lots, because he didn’t smell bad or anything.” Clearly, he was following the practice of Einstein, who had multiples of the same suit so he didn’t have to expend any extra mental energy deciding what to wear. He had already adopted Napoleon’s practice of eating soup, main course and dessert all at once, so he was clearly susceptible to emulating his fellow geniuses.

(The smock had many pockets, making it very practical.)

“Orgy! Orgy!” in the wise words of Dyan Cannon. The masked ball is cinematic, at least. It has my favourite dissolve, and the follow-cam actually becomes atmospheric. And then we get circle-cam too. It’s a corny and incredible set-up, but the colours are nice.

This was, apparently, the trickiest thing, in SK and FR’s minds, to translate to a modern setting. Raphael typed up a fake document purporting to be an FBI report on secret sex cabals within the Democratic Party. Kubrick FREAKED, got very paranoid. “This is classified material, how’d you get hold of it? I need you to tell me.”

This I find very funny. But the pair decided that this would indeed be the unstated backstory of their big daft sex party, resulting in BELATED RESONANCE. Sidney Pollack as Jerry Ziegler as Jeffrey Epstein, ladies and gentlemen.

“Is the orgy so banal because that’s how this unimaginative character would dream it?” asked a friend of the friend I saw the movie with first time. I hadn’t felt the orgy was imaginary, and Kubrick seems to have not wanted it to be, but obviously in the book it is and that’s sort of crept into the film even if he didn’t want it. I think, when Kubrick was at the height of his powers, things wouldn’t creep into his films without his allowing it. But then, I did write this. Raphael has said he felt Kubrick wasn’t really on form — he was, after all, heading towards death.

Fiona wonders “Where do they find all these identical women?” Apparently such women couldn’t be found for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, where we see various types of body, but they could in 1999 for EYES WIDE SHUT.

Kubrick tried to figure out what the maximum level of sexual explicitness allowed by the MPPA, but still ran afoul of their arcane rules about how many pelvic thrusts were permissible in a single shot, so had to digitally superimpose voyeurs to blot out the action. What he needed was Clive Barker’s List,

When Clive was shooting HELLRAISER he got to a point in discussions with lead Clare Higgins where they felt they needed to define what the character’s sex life was like with her former lover Frank. The days of Dorian Gray, where you could keep it on the q.t., were gone. “I think she’s into spanking,” declared Higgins. “Great!” replied Barker.

They shot a scene. The producer cabled him the next day. “I’ve just seen the rushes. Fan-tastic stuff. We can’t use any of it.”

Barker protested that he needed guidance, in that case, as to what would be acceptable. He was sent a detailed list of the dos and do-not-dos. “It did wonders for my sex life,” he said later. “I now knew exactly the point where I was crossing over into obscenity.”

Part two: Tom retraces his steps, at great length.

Alan Cummings plays, essentially, Mr. George Swine, hotel receptionist, from LOLITA (just as Leelee Sobieksi played Lol). He’s funny. Cruise is retracing his steps, trying to work out what’s really happening. This part of the film is quite slow and plodding. We’ve been to all these places and met all these people, and the film doesn’t seem to know how to condense or elide. We follow Tom into and out of various rooms, down various streets. He revisits the fancy dress shop, he revisits the orgy house, revisits the sex worker and learns from her flatmate… well, first she comes onto him in a stilted fashion, then she tells him the girl from the other night has tested positive for HIV. They both pretend to be upset about this.

Tom leaves and buys a newspaper that says LUCKY TO BE ALIVE. A sinister man is stalking him. The only new location here is the morgue, where the OD girl from the first party, who we guess is the girl from the orgy, lies dead (and naked, of course).

Finally he meets Ziegler again, who tries persuading him there’s nothing sinister been going on here. He doesn’t do it very convincingly, but Dr. Bill clutches eagerly at this as a way of returning to normal life and forgetting all this weirdness. “This is the only detective story I’ve ever seen there, when they warn the guy to lay off the case, he DOES.”

Mind you — Red Cloak at the party (Lord Bullingdon himself, Leon Vitali) warned Dr. Bill not to pursue any investigations, OR ELSE he and his family would face dire consequences. And then they had a terrifying manservant hand him a threatening note. Now, anyone who threatens you with dire consequences should you do something, and then merely warns you again when you do it, is not serious and can be ignored. That’s my advice to you. So maybe these guys really are harmless lechers.

Tom finds his party mask on the pillow beside a sleeping Nicole (good whip-pan). He tells her the whole story (but the movie remembers to leave this out — though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Kubrick shot it).

“That was a very sad story,” says Fiona, filling in for Nicole, “It made my Touche Éclat come off.”

Christmas shopping scene in Hanleys. I’ve heard podcasters (Chapo Trap House, Death is Just Around the Corner) suggest that, while the Harfords are making up, their daughter is being abducted in the background by evil Ziegler minions, but I think there’s not even a subliminal suggestion of this. The bald guy standing there isn’t a minion seen earlier, and he’s apparently shopping with another man. I would love to have discovered a macabre Easter Egg like that, but all I’ve done is discover it isn’t there.

So I’ve finally done a Late Show on EYES WIDE SHUT, a late film, a final film and a posthumous film. It didn’t seem to reveal anything new. Frederic Raphael was never really able to work out why Kubrick wanted to make it. Kubrick wouldn’t or couldn’t tell him. The honest thing to do would be to turn down the job under those unpromising circs, but who would refuse Kubrick? Maybe the writer he needed was Jean-Claude Carrière, who described his remit as “helping the director understand why he wanted to make the film.”

The film is strange, and I should give it credit for that. I don’t know what to DO with the strangeness, though. Basic screenwriting books warn against having characters constantly repeat what they’re told. Bill picks this up 45mins in, and by the end, his wife is doing it too. The French New Wave taught us that we don’t have to see every step of a journey, we can jump from spot to spot and let the audience catch up. It’s fine to break those rules if you have a better idea. But if the result is… plodding and repetitive… maybe you need to rethink. Kubrick made slowness work brilliantly in some of his previous films. But here, when Dr. Bill says “Was she the woman at the party?” Ziegler pauses for ten full seconds (“THIS SHIP HAS ONE HOUR TO LIVE!”) then says “Yes,” then pauses for another five seconds and says “She was.” It’s not a dramatic pause, in my view, if it reveals no new dramatic information. “Yes” has already given us everything, and “She was” is pathetic redundancy.

I don’t feel I don’t get the film — it’s about the balancing of fidelity and fantasy life. The ur-text may be John Baxter’s Kubrick biography where the Great Man’s collaborators talked about Kubrick’s fondness for casting couch head games. He DID get all the actresses in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE to take their tops off while he videoed them (save for Adrienne Corri, who refused: “Suppose we don’t like the tits, Adrienne?” “Tough.” Kubrick cast someone else, she got injured being lugged about on Warren Clarke’s shoulder for days, and he then cast Corri as replacement). He got them to mime being raped. But he didn’t touch them.

An assistant found him looking at a catalogue of models during 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. “Look at these girls! We could get some of them in, pretend it’s for the TV screens.” The assistant suggested Kubrick could just approach them openly, lots of them would be excited to meet the great Stanley K. He backed off immediately. Then he got obsessed with Julie Christie. Suggested inventing a project so he could audition her. The assistant said, Look, I know Julie Christie, why don’t I just call her up and say you’d like to meet her? Again, Stanley backed off. “Everything had to go through the fantasy department,” concluded the assistant.

So his big sex film, a project which might have made sense maybe twenty pr thirty years before, turns out to be about spousal fidelity in a world full of temptation, and the essential compartmentalizing of fantasy and reality — in a film where those compartments don’t exist or can’t be made sense of.

Always On Sunday

IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY — the title was almost literally true in those days, since the factory smoke seeded the clouds during the week, and on the one day when the factories didn’t belch their fumes skywards, the clouds would take the opportunity to drop their watery payload.

Rain predominates in Robert Hamer’s post-war British noir, a genuinely oppressive and glum film, typifying the Ealing fondness for “network narratives” (David Bordwell’s useful phrase) branching out from families or neighbourhoods or institutions. Here, a group of honest and dishonest citizens in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, go about their business, breaking hearts and by-laws, while housewife Googie Withers shelters her ex-lover, John McCallum who’s just escaped from Dartmoor Prison.

When we learn that McCallum’s been given “the cat” — his back is a lattice of scares from the prison whipping — I believed it, having learned that this appalling punishment was still being practiced in postwar Britain after raising doubts about Burt Lancaster’s flogging in KISS THE BLOOD OF MY HANDS. But I think I would have believed it anyway — Hamer’s movie reeks with authenticity, unlike Norman Foster’s slick comic-book thriller. Despite a reliance on studio work, the movie convincingly evokes East End life, with a surprising emphasis on Jewishness and a reasonable authenticity of dialect all round. Of course, the cockney’s have all had V-chips installed so they can’t swear, but I always get a kick out of characters saying “Sweet Fanny Adams” in Ealing movies. The expression may need some explaining for non-Brits. The etymology of the phrase is pretty convoluted, but my favourite reading of it sees it as word substitution code for “sweet fuck-all.” So its frequent use represents a triumph over the British Board of Film Censors.

Here’s Hamer’s fellow Ealing director Alexander Mackendrick, quoted from On Film-Making ~

“Though common in television, group stories seem to have died as a form of cinema these days.” (Well, they’re back now.) “They used to be much more common, and if I have a prejudice against them, it is probably because the English studio at which I got some early training was addicted to the kind of stories that had multiple protagonists (the Ealing comedies PASSPORT TO PIMLICO and WHISKY GALORE! for example).

“I have never been sure why writers and directors of that era were so happy with this formula. I think they believed it provided the opportunity for not only more variety of characters but also a lively pacing that could be achieved by intercutting the progression of the subplots. After one film of this kind I began to dislike the structure because I felt it weakened the drive of the narrative rather than strengthened it. All of the characters essentially became cameo roles that couldn’t be developed in any depth, and the multiplicity of minor tensions was apt to reduce the tension of the main theme.”

Now, it seems to me, we have enough successful, artistically interesting examples of the network narrative to see Mackendrick’s objection as signposting a potential pitfall rather than a necessary weakness of the form. And IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY stands as perhaps Ealing’s finest achievement with this manner of storytelling, centered upon the Withers storyline but spreading out to take in the adventures of her different family members, various east End characters, and the detective trailing McCallum (Jack Warner, Ealing’s favourite copper).

Flashback to a blonde Googie, echoing her early screen appearances (see THE LADY VANISHES).

When I looked at the movie years ago, I found its persistent gloom oppressive, stifling and itchy, which it is, but that’s the brilliance of the filmmaking. Hamer manages to make his widespread narratives all as claustrophobic as the adventure of the escaped convict in the tiny two-up-two-down house. I was also struck by the mysterious resemblance the film bears to Clive Barker’s HELLRAISER: in both films, the mother secretes her fugitive lover within the marital home, betraying her husband and clashing with her (step)daughter. The main difference is the substitution of Doug Bradley’s Pinhead for Jack Warner’s detective, and the fact that the lover in HELLRAISER has no skin. I wonder if Hamer’s film was an influence on Barker. It’s a powerful storyline, which seems capable of shifting through yet more genres: it has one foot in bedroom farce (“Quick, in here!”) already.

Hamer, who two years later would triumph with that greatest of black comedies, KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS, largely shuns humour here, defying Ealing’s usual chirpy manner and sinking us in meanness and corruption. There is a persistent strain of pessimism in British film of this period, perhaps stemming from our disappointment with the “land fit for heroes” we’d been promised in the war. This acerbic strain was gradually extirpated by the bureaucrats running the film business in the fifties, but would make a savage return with greater realism in the sixties.

The movie’s climax, a chase at the railway yard, magnificently lit by Douglas Slocombe, is marred by a couple of rather inexplicable model shots, but is nevertheless tense and expressionistic and dynamic — the crime story really does seem like the best way to make realism palatable to a wide audience as entertainment.

IAROS is based on a novel by Arthur LaBern, whose Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square was filmed much later, by Alfred Hitchcock, as FRENZY. In that movie, realism is no longer the keynote…

Ealing Studios DVD Collection – Champagne Charlie/The Maggie/It Always Rains On Sunday/Whisky Galore

Legs Wide Shut

The uncensored version contains what seems to me a near-impossibility: performing oral sex while wearing a full-face mask. Don’t try this at home!

Thanks to the ever-great DVDBeaver for these images*. I was always very very amused by the idea that the U.S. release of Kubrick’s dirty swan song EYES WIDE SHUT had been censored, by having additional figures inserted into key shots to block our view of the orgiastic activities taking place at Sidney Pollack’s Bilderburg-like exclusive shagging palace. It sounded so goofy!

(It should be noted that the U.K. version was also censored, but in this case the issue was with the soundtrack, which contained sacred Islamic texts chanted over the scenes of illicit rumpy-pumpy. The score was re-jigged to defuse religious wrath.)

Now at last I’ve seen frame comparisons of both versions. Pretty funny stuff. Fiona was particularly amused by the nude blonde sitting, her head resting on her masked and cowled beau’s shoulder, as they watch the hot boy-girl action. So sweet.

Why did the scenes have to be occluded in this way? Kubrick apparently researched the U.S. censorship system as best he could, to find out what was acceptable, but still found himself looking down the barrel of an X Certificate when he presented his film to the industry bluestockings. The principle in question was one of buttock-thrusts, and he should really have researched further, because Alan Parker had come up against the same problem with ANGEL HEART. The M.P.A.A. had strongly objected to the sight of Mickey Rourke’s heaving buttocks, arguing that more than three consecutive thrusts of the buttocks in one shot constituted obscenity. Parker, ever the street-fighting man, protested and won, but the principle that obscenity has a numerical value measured in pelvic thrusts obviously remained on the sexy statute books.

(The M.P.A.A. being the odd organisation it is, did not object to the blood pouring down the walls of the room, over Rourke and his paramour, Cosby Show graduate Lisa Bonet. In Britain, the censors for a long time maintained that any conjunction of blood and breasts was liable to act as a Rape Trigger, turning male audience members into slavering beasts. They squabbled with Michael Winner over his prurient remake of THE WICKED LADY, in which Faye Dunaway bullwhips a topless Marina Sirtis, and again, a stroppy Brit managed to overcome a censorship decision just by making a big fuss over it, aided by respected industry figures like Lindsay Anderson coming to the defense of his, er, art. Maybe Kubrick should have done the same. Happy ending — at least Marina S., who has to get nude in every one of her WICKED LADY scenes, had Star Trek: The Next Generation to look forward to.)

From Parker to Barker: the other person who could have helped Kubes out would be Clive Barker. When making his first feature, Barker had run up against a narrative problem. Clare Higgins’ character in the film is besotted with a particular lover, so much so that she raises him from the dead in order to continue enjoying his affections. At a certain point in rehearsal, it became clear to Barker and his cast that it would be necessary to spell out what, exactly, this kinky couple were into. Eventually, Higgins said, “*I* think she’s into spanking.” Barker clapped his hands together: “Great.” They shot a scene.

Barker’s American producer called the next day. “We’ve just seen yesterday’s footage. Sensational. We can’t use any of it.” Turns out there was an absolute Thou Shalt Not Spank commandment in force. Barker was frustrated: “You’ve got to come clean and tell me what the rules are, then. I can’t go on guesswork.” It turned out that there WERE rules, despite the M.P.A.A.’s insistence that each case was judged on its merits. Censors don’t like to make their rules known because it makes them look silly. Splitting pubic hairs is not an occupation with a lot of dignity. It’s similar to the way that executive producers and funding bodies often don’t like to admit that they’re looking for particular kinds of material, since it implies that they’re not creative and flexible.

Anyhow, Barker was DELIGHTED with his new set of rules. “It did wonders for my sex life,” he attested. “I now knew the exact moment when I was crossing over into obscenity.”

That fourth thrust is the one that does it, folks. Try to climax before then, to stay out of trouble.

The kinkiest touch — one girl holding the other’s wrists — is also hidden. Fiona points out that the same couple is back in this shot, having presumably darted through a side exit, scooted ahead of Tom Cruise, and assumed their seats moments before his arrival. “People in masks are not to be trusted.” ~ Fessick the Giant in THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

Anyway, Stan’s difficulties with this sequence illustrate again my ground-breaking thesis re Kubrick.

*DVDBeaver is a terrific DVD review site. Not porn.