Two Hundred Million Maniacs!

The Blogathon is GO —

David Ehrenstein visits the land of THE DEAD here. The last John Huston.

I try to consider the merits of BUDDY BUDDY in five-line verse at Limerwrecks. The last Billy Wilder.

But here on Shadowplay, the very-much still active Matthew Wilder considers the not-quite-last effort of Herschell Gordon Lewis and finds it TIMELY —

 

TWO HUNDRED MILLION MANIACS! by Matthew Wilder

Why, just this morning Donald Trump and Marco Rubio were trying to out-harsh each other in coming up with “Muslim registry” scenarios—the crescent moon perhaps subbing for the yellow Star of David. At the same moment, there was some question as to who it was that Ben Carson was calling “rabid dogs”—bad apples among the Syrian refugees (not sure who that might be) or just Muslims generally? In any case, the top three Republican options as of Nov. 20, 2015, were Trump, Carson, and Carly Fiorina—the unsuccessful CEO of Hewlett Packard who has successfully marketed herself as a mixture of Sheryl Sandberg and old-time religion. (Her dominant campaign meme is a description of a late-term abortion that appears never to have existed.) It’s clear that showmanship trumps substance—or is it? Are voters aware of what they want, and wish to “act out” more than act? (That’s what all the Occupy protesters, save maybe a few in New York, did.) Are Americans being sold a bill of goods, or are they, as per this interactive economy, writing their bill of goods themselves?

The most trenchant movie analysis of the politics of 2015 comes from 1972. And no, it’s not Michael Ritchie’s THE CANDIDATE, an inquiry into the bake-off nature of modern American politics that still entertains; nor is it TOUT VA BIEN, Jean-Luc Godard’s and J.P. Gorin’s whirlwind farce about strikers and bosses and the delirium in between. Instead, it’s a little, almost lost movie called THE YEAR OF THE YAHOO! by one Herschell Gordon Lewis. Now—is this “late style,” you ask? Well, it literally is: HGL abandoned the cinema full time after THE YEAR OF THE YAHOO!, and went, oh so tellingly, into the world of marketing. (People in the world of marketing tell me that Herschell Gordon Lewis is a known name—and not for his splatter movies.) What is appealing about THE YEAR OF THE YAHOO! is that it deconstructs the smoke-and-mirrors aspect of the contemporary marketing of candidates in strangely hyperreal, real-time terms: there are moments as literal-minded as the key scenes of PRIMARY or THE WAR ROOM or other classic campaign docs. One expects cartoonish buffoonery from Herschell Gordon Lewis, but instead he paints a queasily familiar world.

A giant riff on the Elia Kazan/Budd Schulberg A FACE IN THE CROWD, YAHOO is less histrionic, less preachment-filled and more convincing. Here, a group of party consultants—the 1972 ancestors of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove—tell the powers that be that their candidate (who remains off camera, but is described as a Mitt Romney-like dullard) just ain’t gonna cut it. The incumbent is a liberal as gray and anemic as Gore Vidal in BOB ROBERTS, maybe a little more so: as played by Robert Swain, this Senator Burwell looks like a cross between Robert Lowell and the mad-doctor character from REPO MAN. Anticipating the Reagan revolution to come, the party analysts see that Burwell can be beat. The incumbent Governor has a long list of hacks to put up against Burwell, but the analysts aren’t having it—they want a pop star.

One of the glories of THE YEAR OF THE YAHOO! is that it never moves in the direction you expect. When the string-pullers decide they want a country singer, we expect Hank Jackson (Claude King) to be a grinning, manipulative ape like Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes in FACE IN THE CROWD. Instead, our first glimpse of him at work shows him wowing a crowd with a Goth-dark slice of psychedelic country that rhymes “no hope” with “rope”: Jackson and his band are like the Joy Division of Nashville. Soon enough, in a brilliant touch of Lewis-ian irony, Hank’s gloom song has been repurposed as a campaign song…for a commercial where the word HOPE hangs in space like a mothership filled with Obama t shirts.

Shot, like all Lewis’ movies up to this point, in the rancid, postcard color of Educational Films, YAHOO! never quite reaches the level of frenzy of, say, HGL’s equally exclamation-pointed TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! But what fascinates about it is how Lewis’ fascination with the mechanics of marketing drives him to render the making-of-a-fascist scenes in eerie, unfurling microdetail. In one dazzlingly virtuosic scene, the main handler, Hollywood-born Sid Angelo (played by terrifying HGL veteran Ray Sager) shows his chops: Hank Jackson plays before an adoring throng who, when he announces he is running for the Senate, shriek and crash the stage in a giant mob. Sid calls “Cut!”—jarring us out of what seemed like a plausible case of spontaneous hysteria—and then directs the mob in how to be spontaneous and hysterical, drumming beat after beat into their thick skulls like a factory foreman. The movie is a relentless deconstruction of every kind of emotion-stirring political image, yet its invention never flags—Lewis always has some fresh weirdness in the wings.

THE YEAR OF THE YAHOO! marks the point where governance ended and spectacle began. It was shot at the moment when Richard Nixon, still smarting from the first Watergate revelations, won a staggering landslide victory over George McGovern: Nixon’s Silent Majority theatrics overwhelmed McGovern’s almost unimaginably indie campaign slogan—“Come Home, America.” (If you’re gonna go down, go down like a saint, seemed to be McGovern’s motto.) YAHOO anticipates our present moment, where candidates have moved from being objects of fantasy projection, like Ronald Reagan, to the kind of magnetizing sheer trainwrecks seen on reality TV—one doesn’t want to be them, one wants to watch them writhe and squirm. This is a new phase of devolution: Voters want not to identify with a candidate and play make-believe, but rather want to sit and passively watch a nutjob’s antics, the more grotesque the better. In an age of the real-time Internet, all politics is as remote and creepily giggle-inducing as webcam porn. It’s not really meant to stir a fiery mob, it’s designed to be passively consumed by a supine spectator on a laptop.

YAHOO is the origin story of the depoliticization of politics—and somehow it’s eerily perfect that it was one of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ drive-in movies and not a sober, inside-baseball work of mature satire like Ritchie’s THE CANDIDATE. It also seems right that this augury of a post-ideological future was essentially HGL’s kissoff to the directing life. (He has been roused out of retirement a couple times in recent years to direct features that pay homage to his sixties splatter self.) It ends on a hopeful note—with a character who could’ve popped out of Ford’s THE LAST HURRAH as an ironic victor—but Herschell isn’t fooling anybody: tomorrow belongs to him.

 

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM (and only Bergman holds the key)

Our first guest Shadowplayer, filmmaker Matthew Wilder, looks at a late-ish Bergman — Bergman spent more of his career making late movies than anyone before or since — I think he first announced his retirement with FANNY AND ALEXANDER but then kept writing and directing up until his death, and has authored several post-mortem works.

***

In a moment fraught with resonances at once Freudian and Kafkaesque, Ingmar Bergman was arrested at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in the midst of a rehearsal of August Strindberg’s DANCE OF DEATH for income tax evasion. The subsequent stress—though all charges were dropped against Bergman and he was entirely exonerated—drove him to a nervous breakdown and hospitalization. There is an irony here that no doubt Bergman appreciated most of all: the great auteur, known for woman problems in his own life, attempts to “exorcise” them through staging the notorious misogynist Strindberg’s folie a deux on the subject of marriage…and in the process gets pinched by two plainclothes Superego Cops, putting the cuffs on him for a crime he didn’t commit…but perhaps he did commit it: the crime of being Ingmar Bergman.

Let’s remember that this act—the act of being put under arrest—caused Bergman to crack. And let’s view this crack-up as the bridge between Bergman’s two superb crack-up movies, FACE TO FACE (1976), where ill-treated-by-Ingmar Liv Ullmann is the cracker-upper; and FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES (1980), where Peter, a male who may or may not be an Ingmar stand-in, is he-who-cracks.

The subject of FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES is inexplicable trauma. And as analysts of the traumatic event that is FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES, we must, like the dislikable, Simon Oakland in PSYCHO style shrink in MARIONETTES itself, look at the facts. Yes, Bergman was arrested for tax evasion; yes, he “broke down” and went into a mental asylum; and yes, he transformed that crack-up into the coolly objective (feeling) “dossier on a crack-up” FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES. However, Bergman had no problem finding money for projects outside of Sweden (AUTUMN SONATA and MARIONETTES were British/German coproductions); he easily re-routed himself to Munich; and his problems were solved in the homeland in time for him to slide into home and create FANNY AND ALEXANDER, perhaps the most cannily devised farewell-tour, wasn’t-I-great-folks? Swan song in the history of cinema.

I would venture to say that what was traumatic to Bergman had nothing to do with his finances, or his auditors’ view of them. It was the sheer trauma of that act of arrest. Its concomitant air of persecution and its presumption of guilt were what snapped the string in Bergman’s head. Hitchcock spoke of his lifelong fair of getting pinched by the cops; and to be sure, we read that into that traffic cop with mirrored sunglasses knocking on the window of the sleeping Marion Crane’s car in PSYCHO. Bergman (like Fritz Lang, who saw the actual inside of a Gestapo questioning room) actually experienced it.

The effect of this trauma was transfiguring. From it came one of Bergman’s strangest but most mature works. There are earlier Bergman films that seem entirely carved out of self-pity born out of some jarring events in Bergman’s life. The almost unbelievably preposterous NOW ABOUT ALL THESE WOMEN (1964) derives from Bergman’s agony at the hands of critics, and of the many women in his life; THE RITE (1969) is a free-floating fantasia of persecution, staged in the manner of a Living Theatre bacchanal merged with a movie—it’s about every kind of Establishment force cracking down on a troupe of sensitive artistes.

FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES, on the contrary, does not depict its melting-down protagonist as a righteous character violated by an unjust society. Its attempts to decrypt an abominable act of violence are entirely equivocal.

The genre MARIONETTES belongs to, I would insist, is the giallo. This Italian pulp form features many narrative shapes: some are Agatha Christie-like whodunits, some are cop sagas, others are in the vein of Gothic dark-old-house yarns. But what yokes them all together is fetishized images of highly sexualized, then highly vandalized, female bodies.

To break it down: they all feature a bare-breasted hooker, strangled with her eyes bugged out, or perhaps slashed, a bloody gout zigzagging her torso, also with her eyes bugged out.

Sometimes (more often than not) this image is eroticized; other times it is sheerly horror-ized; in all cases it is wildly fetishized.

FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES does not quite give us that precise form of visual satisfaction. The protagonist, Peter, kills a prostitute at the outset. In the seconds counting down to that murder, we are very much on the side of the hooker, Ka, as the runs about a tiny, windowless, foul-smelling strip joint and tries to find a place to hide before Peter can kill her. And, unlike the equally sober Bob Fosse film STAR 80, MARIONETTES tells us that Peter anally rapes the corpse, but does not show us the goods.

What I would suggest is that FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES is a deconstruction of the giallo. (Is the giallo really derived from Hitchcock’s FRENZY? If so, there is an interesting family tree revealed here. MARIONETTES seems in many ways an oblique commentary on, or at least wink at, PSYCHO; FRENZY was Hitch’s attempt to steroid up, to make a contemporary, R-rated PSYCHO, and it would seem the giallo form was in large part spun off from FRENZY—with the most famous topless, strangled-tongued, bulgy-eyed victim in the history of cinema.) Where the conventional giallo gives us garish, lurid repetitions of the primal scene of bulgy-eyed-hooker, MARIONETTES takes that eroticized image away and gives us a geyser of potential explanation, psychologizing, motivation. And Bergman never lands on one satisfying “Rosebud” password that opens the door to Peter’s psyche.

Before killing Ka (Rita Russek), Peter (Robert Atzorn) fights with his sexy, proud, self-possessed wife (Christine Buchegger), with whom he has a relationship that is described as more sibling-y than conjugal. “We have good sex,” he says, “we do it without emotions.” He has a seemingly dismal job in business—in one virtuoso sequence, Bergman has him dictate a business letter in its entirety, its bean-counting prose a dazzling feat of imaginative writing—but he seems quite happy with it, and with the status it affords him. His mother (Lola Muthel) is a one-time big-shot actress who still thinks a great deal of herself though the spotlight has moved on; we see how this could be destructive, though it doesn’t seem to land with Peter very strongly. The strangest element, the one likeliest to contribute to his psychopathology, is his relationship with the rather sinister shrink, Professor Mogens Jensen (Martin Benrath). This character is reminiscent of all those cold-blooded, quietly sadistic men of science in Bergman movies who go by the name of “Vergerus.” Peter visits him and tells him of the thoughts that dog him about killing his wife. Jensen callously tells him to “take a long walk, then have a coffee and some cognacs,” and is generally smugly dismissive of the younger, more attractive man. Peter pretends to leave, but hides near one of Jensen’s bookshelves. A moment later, his wife arrives…kisses Jensen…and they talk about Peter. Jensen wants to bed her at last; she says no, she is too devoted to her husband, as irritating as he may be. They are, she says, permanently joined. We see Peter hearing this—seeing her step away from infidelity with the doctor—and it would seem this moment of loyalty saves her life.

Or is the whole scene a fantasy? It is one thing for Scorsese to stage Travis Bickle’s final encounter with dream girl Betsy in TAXI DRIVER; or Rupert Pupkin’s triumphant return to late-night TV at the end of THE KING OF COMEDY, as maybe-it’s-all-a-dream-or-maybe-not. Those are the closers to the movie…and the movie has said its piece, made its points, longer before that INCEPTION-like pivot of ambiguity arrives in the last inning. Here, Bergman plants this crucial scene—maybe the one that comes the closest to “explaining this whole thing”—somewhere around the one-third point. All the other possible reasons ping off this critical moment…and we don’t even know if it’s real.

There is something a little subjective in my fascination with MARIONETTES: there is a certain way of speaking, of being, that I think of as signifying “Bergman’s people.” The pinnacle of it is in the 1974 SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, to which MARIONETTES is supposedly a sequel or an offshoot. (Peter and his wife are meant to be doubles of the unhappy couple who visit Johan and Marianne in SCENES.) There is a certain kind of dialogue Bergman wrote in that largely noble string of movies extending from PERSONA to MARIONETTES, which sometimes cries out in terror and pain, and oftentimes lacerates another character in language so acid and indelibly cruel, the scenes are almost intolerable to watch. The characters in MARIONETTES…they are not really these people. They are not as self-assured, self-regarding, self-aware. They seem harbingers of a newer, post-self-conscious society…closer to today’s society of people who constantly speak and tweet of themselves, yet seem to have no particular deep awareness of themselves. Katarina, Peter’s wife, stages fashion runway shows; Peter works in some form of sales that is opaque. The characters know they have feelings but don’t seem to know where they come from—possibly a first for Bergman.

There is a shock to some of these scenes that recalls opening Andy Warhol’s Diaries for the first time and discovering that his telling of “Cab Ride–$13” and “Drugstore Pickups–$23” were entirely unironic. Bergman seems to be trying to speak in the voice of, and perhaps analyze, a new, different kind of person. (This is certainly borne out by his ending the movie with a blast of disco music from the strip joint—as if he thought that were what we, like the strip-joint habitués, wanted.) It has always struck me, from my first viewing of MARIONETTES, that Bergman was, for the one time in his career, influenced by the work of someone working at the same time as he: in this case, making MARIONETTES at Munich’s Bavaria Film Studios, it is Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was just down the hallway making BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ at the same time. The film seems an attempt to step up to what Bergman considers Fassbinder’s level of coolness or indifference—there is even a character who screams in German of her terrible “fear of fear”: the title (Angst vor der angst) of a particularly baroquely cruel late Fassbinder movie.

Though the vignettes are laid out in cool, objective, pseudo-journalistic fashion, MARIONETTES is as nakedly the artist’s attempt to put himself on the examining table as any late work by Lars Von Trier. For instance, Bergman reveals more about himself than the character in a strange vignette in which Katarina hangs out with a co-worker, an aging homosexual who is almost literally an encyclopedia of all the clichéd traits associated with “aging homosexual.” At one point, half preening, half self-loathing, he delivers an entire speech with his face smooshed against a mirror. Childless, afraid of aging, pathetically vain, he confesses to Peter’s now rather cop-like shrink that he planned to weasel his way into Katarina’s marriage and steal hot young Peter away from her. One wonders whether this toxic portrait is a legitimate snapshot of Bergman’s own loathsome homophobia, or a deliberately jacked-up grotesque character that Bergman plunked down in this story to thumb his nose at the PC types in the audience—or, perhaps, in Munich. (Could it be a va fongu to the BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ guy down the hall?)

If nothing else, FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES is a giallo with all the misogynistic pleasure taken out. The hero’s dreams, that swirl around violence toward his wife, are more empathetic and cringe-inducing than sadistic and aestheticizing a la set pieces of DePalma. Even the black and white seems superegoic punitive. For all intents and purposes, FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES spelled the end of “Ingmar Bergman” the filmmaker. The work that followed—FANNY AND ALEXANDER, AFTER THE REHEARSAL, SARABAND, and other odds and ends—were more part of Valedictory Tour, Inc., than part of the main body of Bergman’s work. No, this trauma finished him—and he ended in a far-off land, the land of Vergerus, the Nazi doctor in THE SERPENT’S EGG, doing an eighties take on something like Oskar Kokoschka’s MURDERER HOPE OF WOMEN: a German Expressionist saga of Liebestod with many a grimacing dead hooker’s face. MARIONETTES is as complete a testament to the unknowability of human evil as David Fincher’s ZODIAC. It is a truly terminal work, like Pasolini’s SALO, an edge past which there is nowhere to go.

So it makes sense that Bergman would, as Pauline Kael so succinctly put it, “go sprinting back to Victorian health” with the widely beloved FANNY AND ALEXANDER. Like many other film artists who hit a wall at the end of the seventies, Bergman gave the people what they wanted in the eighties. And he had a long string of no-really-this-is-it finales. But as a last gasp of the monster he was, FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES is Ingmar Bergman’s real testament movie.

omg gramps u r totes mbrsng me : )

Wilder on Wilder — filmmaker Matthew Wilder joins the fray with an impassioned, possibly insane defense of Billy Wilder’s despised last picture show, BUDDY BUDDY — a film maudit to end them all. He makes a good case…

As a kid who became aware of cinema in the late seventies, then moved into adolescence in the eighties, I had an experience of the Old Masters of Classical Cinema that I suspect is shared by many Gen-X people now shading –or careening—into middle age. We got the “late style” first; then the heyday second; then the juvenilia last of all. Which is to say, many an X kid’s first pungent taste of Alfred Hitchcock was FRENZY (coupled, of course, with its well-behaved cousin PSYCHO on the late show). Then came VERTIGO and THE WRONG MAN and NOTORIOUS; and much later—as one ticked off filmographies in a more academic fashion—came UNDER CAPRICORN and YOUNG AND INNOCENT.

For X cinephiles, sometimes catching these dementia-praecox classics first run, sometimes on an also-ran VHS tape (still a novelty in our puberty), we encountered the Grandmasters in Benjamin Button fashion. How exciting to see George Cukor mature from LOVE AMONG THE RUINS and THE BLUE BIRD into THE WOMEN and HOLIDAY! Imagine that that guy who made SEVEN WOMEN would go on to do THE SEARCHERS! And who would think that the hot mess who squirted out SKIDOO would go on to craft such elegant films noirs!

I may have a different emotional take on this than other once-green youths who got the dregs before the red red wine. Perhaps because of a chemical combination of critical hosannas for these architects of the Golden Age + the late, fubsy works themselves, I have always had a special affection for these shambling late films—so much so that I feel that affection steers me out of the realm of any form of objectivity altogether. Could one really, with a straight face, and wanting to appear of sound mind and body, say that one passionately loves Rossellini’s MESSIAH more than OPEN CITY? But I do, I absolutely do. The reasons are, I think, so personal and anecdotal, I would have to reverse-engineer a whole boring memoir to explain them. But let’s sum it up like this: even in forgetful ruins, dusted in dandruff you had to brush off their shoulders, the Grandmasters brought the touch of another, better world into the era of Atari consoles and Flashdance sweatshirts. Profoundly out of step with a high-tech Reaganite America, their work felt—and feels—like artifacts of a long-lost alien civilization.

There is late work, in the seventies and eighties, of these old masters, that feels elegiac, exquisite—the last sigh of a show horse that once flaunted its glory at noontime. Bunuel’s THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, Huston’s THE DEAD, Visconti’s CONVERSATION PIECE and THE INNOCENT, Preminger’s THE HUMAN FACTOR. Then there are those works where the antiquated sensibility of the maker clangs against the surface of the modern world in ways that are partly noble and stirring, partly uncomfortable-making.

And then there is BUDDY BUDDY.

To my knowledge, there has been no real defense mounted in a serious way—hell, in an unserious way!—of Wilder’s final 1981 feature. It is generally viewed as either giggle-worthy or grim, a signal that Grandpa needs to get with reality and hand over the car keys at last. The only kind word I have ever heard on BUDDY BUDDY came from longtime blue-chip auteurist and Wilder detractor Dave Kehr, who stood next to the police tape and wryly grinned, like a cop out of James Ellroy: “Well—it’s funnier than most of his recent movies.” BUDDY BUDDY was part of a pile-up of Christmas 1981 movies that signaled the end, no, really, the real end, of the seventies: oddities like the film adaptation of Dennis Potter’s PENNIES FROM HEAVEN, the seventy-one-minute Andy Kaufman sci-fi quirkfest HEARTBEEPS, the bizarrely morose Alan Pakula/Gordon Willis banking-apocalypse thriller ROLLOVER, a macabre film version of WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY? with Richard Dreyfuss and John Cassavetes, and above all, Warren Beatty’s bank-breaking salute to left-wing deludedness REDS, all hit the multiplex like pumpkins flung off a highway overpass. None received as little love as BUDDY BUDDY.

A final reckoning for the Lemmon/Matthau/Wilder trinity, BUDDY BUDDY collides suicidal schnook Lemmon with hardcase button man Matthau, who is screwing in his silencer about to clip his target when a despairing Lemmon literally lands on his head. (If your skull is pinging with memories of Jerry Lewis’ failed hanging attempt at the beginning of CRACKING UP a k a SMORGASBORD, you’ve come to the right place: these pictures are incestuous cousins.) Of course, beta Lemmon moves from literally falling atop Matthau to falling all over him with an effulgence of puppylike good spirits; Matthau wants nothing more than to finish his deadly job. And if you guessed that stammering schlemiel Lemmon has to help pokerface bulldog Matthau close the deal, you may have seen one or two American adaptations of French farces!

BUDDY BUDDY would make a brilliant double bill with another 1981 comedy that played to crickets, John Schlesinger’s HONKY TONK FREEWAY. Both films are built on the quicksand of borrowed glory: HONKY TONK is a kind of spritzing lapel flower based on Altman’s NASHVILLE (but broader), and BUDDY harks back to many happier days for the three craggy comedians. But in its way, BUDDY BUDDY is unique. Shot in widescreen in brilliant Bel Air sunshine, with an insinuating Lalo Schiffrin score proffering sinister mock elegance, BUDDY BUDDY comes on strong with the confidence of a movie made by a thirty-year-old. In that, it resembles a more financially successful ’81 comedy by a chap of a certain age—Mel Brooks’ HISTORY OF THE WORLD PART ONE. The difference is that Mel embraced humor addressing the body parts of the middle regions. Billy’s humor is more behavioral and, how you say…cultural? Only whose culture is it, anyway?

It is hard to describe to a reader in our twitfeed era the sensation of seeing a picture in 1981 in which Lemmon and Matthau’s path is obstructed by a couple of dirty hippies in a hospital who birth a baby, and, after the kid is born, burst into song: “Happy birthday…Little Elvis!” (The looks across the theatre on “Little Elvis” spanned the generations.) For topical gags, there is a quackpot sex doctor whose typically Californian mumbo-jumbo seduces Lemmon’s wife, the statuesque, goosey Paula Prentiss. He tells a hotel conference of premature ejaculators to think about the names of the Seven Dwarfs, and he is played, with cocaine-hangover shades and a salon tan by a perfectly cast (and in-on-the-joke) Klaus Kinski. (A flyover attempt at doing some Youtube research on the subject yields the notion that Kinski, while a pain in Billy’s ass and vice versa, did not make any attempts on his life during shooting.)

Lemmon’s Victor Clooney—who is not victorious and does not resemble Clooney—is a TV censor who brags to Matthau’s Trebucco that he pinched a would-be clever writer who hatched a Spanish character named Senor Cojones. To launch Wilder’s kind of dated gibes at far-out sex therapy and wheat-germ-era California culture, you have to be quite a Senor Cojones yourself: the gags here inevitably play to “Springtime for Hitler” stares, as when faux milkman Trebucco blows away one of his victims, and Wilder cuts to the façade of Matthau’s milk truck: “Drink Milk. Live Longer.” BUDDY BUDDY brought a storied career to an ignominious close—so much so that Quentin Tarantino now cites it as the reason directors shouldn’t go on working into their old age. Billy got no more shots after that. Later, when Cameron Crowe met Wilder at an awards function, he asked with typical cheer, “So, what’s next for you, Billy?” “What’s next for me? Death!” was the candid, and accurate, response.

It’s not hard to see why BUDDY BUDDY was greeted with grimaces, but the picture is not so bad it’s good, it’s so weird it’s beautiful. Wilder has the poise, conjures the assurance, knows the rhythm of a joke. It’s just that the material he’s serving on a silver platter only tastes like food on a distant planet. His similarly derided—and genuinely great—1964 comedy KISS ME STUPID also felt detached, the product of a bubble, but its premise was a visitor from the sex-forward, decadent big city bumbling into Dogpatch, with comic, then tragic results. The movie looks all the better now because it describes the changing sexual styles of its moment without being “of” its moment. BUDDY BUDDY, on the other hand, is purely otherworldly. Don Rickles used to make jokes about Japanese snipers still hiding in the palm trees in Pasadena. The Billy Wilder of BUDDY BUDDY may as well be one of those snipers—the difference being, Billy climbed up a palm tree at the Beverly Hills Hotel some time in the fifties.

In an era when comedies are group-conceived spitball sessions where a bunch of comics throw out their best shots, and an anonymous committee cobbles together the zingers, you have to admire the brazenness, the naked risk, the cojones of this era of auteur comedies. For instance: every female person I have ever showed Blake Edwards’ 1981 S.O.B. to finds it grim and repellent beyond belief, but you have to hand it to him—it is a perfect rendering of Edwards’ acrid worldview, and it is as full an expression as any of his form of comedy. Spielberg’s 1941 is nothing if not the auteur theory writ large; and other mavericky efforts of the period, from Albert Brooks’ masterly MODERN ROMANCE to Hal Ashby’s dastardly HAMSTER OF HAPPINESS, have the personal signature we now associate with indie drama. None of them is quite so rich and strange as BUDDY BUDDY, though, where the grace of Wilder’s highly formal style—every set-up, every location is more beautiful than anything you’d see in a studio comedy now— and the perfection of the performers clash with gag-writing on the level of the smart-ass remarks at a Dean Martin roast of Doc Severinsen.

Is that such a bad thing, finally? Isn’t the pleasure of late style really “belatedness”—that aspect of the poet’s gift Harold Bloom describes as if it were some form of late-blossoming genetic defect that turns out, in fact, to be a treasure? And can’t we enjoy—or appreciate—aw, at the very least, love—the embarrassing grandpa, the Inappropriate Blurter, the alluder to that which no one remembers (or should), as much as the Serene Old Master, the unhurried one-take voice of wisdom, the repository of a long-dead classicism that shames us all? The mausoleum coldness of late style in movies can be bracing. But the spills, stains and overhang of BUDDY BUDDY prefigure 2013’s now highly commercial forms of “awkward comedy”—not to mention the truly awkward comedy that is the way we live now.

Matthew Wilder