The teleplay Prescription Murder (1968) contains one of the earliest manifestations of Lt. Columbo — played for the first time by Peter Falk.
Here’s a bold touch by director Richard Irving, a typically prolific TV director who worked in that medium exclusively from the early fifties to the mid-eighties, having begun as an actor and then a dialogue director at RKO.
He has a gigantic scene to cover, a two-hander played out on a single set — the set of another, unknown TV show — I would assume they thriftily recycled something already built — eight and a half minutes long. Quite hard to keep something like that visually lively enough to sustain interest, though he’s helped by the fact that people rarely really WATCH television. So if you get bored of this one set and two faces, you can look at your kitchen or something.
But Irving CARES, he does something, as I say, bold. He lets both his actors turn their backs on us, and holds on a static wide for forty-three seconds. Continuous dialogue from Columbo, who is a bit meaner here than we’re used to seeing.
Irving escapes the charge of boredom with this prolonged and sort-of inexpressive angle, which robs us of much of his capable thesps’ performances (Falk and Katherine Justice). The reason there’s no tedium seems to me that a sustained shot creates its own kind of tension — we start wondering, even if only unconsciously, how long this is going to keep up. A sustained shot with no faces in it has a redoubled power, because we really can’t believe they’re holding on this.
“Cinema is just like theatre,” said Brit director David Leland, a one-hit wonder, “only there’s only one seat, and it always has to be the best.” Which is sort of true, but only sort of. It excludes all the stuff about camera movement and editing which makes cinema quite different from theatre, and it also implies, even if Leland didn’t intend it, that the director’s job is to provide a perfect view of the action, allowing the audience to feel they have the best seat. This holds true for much of the time, but is also pernicious nonsense. Think of cinematographer William A. Fraker’s account of this shot in ROSEMARY’S BABY:
Polanski had asked Fraker to set up a shot from Rosemary’s (Mia Farrow) POV looking through the doorway at Ruth Gordon. Fraker set up something he thought was pretty decent, affording a nice view. Polanski looked at it and shook his head. He moved everything until he got the above composition. Fraker couldn’t understand it at all, until he saw the film with an audience and every head in the cinema tilted to one side to try to see past the doorframe.
Both the examples are from ’68 but that’s just one of those coincidences. I’m not setting that year up as some kind of golden age of the imperfect view, although maybe such a thing is possible. Maybe the influence of, say, Antonioni, who could hold a shot and exclude stuff… But Irving may have been influenced instead by Jack Webb, who churned out Dragnet with tremendous speed and simplicity, milking his shots until they squeaked.
Yes, I’ve bought a Columbo box set, seasons 1-7. May cut into my film viewing. But hopefully it will give rise to some more observations like this one.
A week of posts inspired by my recent reading. Here’s an excellent book by Sam & Bobbie O’Steen — Cut to the Chase: Forty-Five Years of Editing America’s Favorite Movies.
Sam O’Steen cut THE GRADUATE and ROSEMARY’S BABY and became Mike Nichols and Roman Polanski’s go-to editor. His book, “as told to” his wife and edit-room assistant, is full of good creative advice, often encapsulated in handy mottos — “Movie first, scene second, moment third,” — and also full of terrific gossip and anecdotes, as O’Steen was frequently on-set and witnessed the activities of a lot of very strange, talented, obnoxious people…
Some of the best stories arise from one of the worst films O’Steen was involved with, HURRICANE — Dino De Laurentiis’ epic turkey remake of John Ford’s group jeopardy potboiler, which was already not very good, despite sharing a lot of credits with Ford’s next film, STAGECOACH. The rehash was planned by Polanski but dropped due to his legal difficulties — it’s tempting to say that Polanski dodged a bullet, but you can’t really say such things, can you?
Jan Troell landed in the hot seat, with Lorenzo Semple on script, Sven Nykvist shooting, Danilo Donati designing, and stars Mia Farrow, Timothy Bottoms, James Keach, Jason Robards, Trevor Howard, Max Von Sydow and non-star Dayton Ka’Ne. And with all that talent, it’s deadly dull to watch. David Wingrove disagrees with me, and suggested that the film was a promising one that had been butchered in the edit, as evidenced by awkward jumps in the story and huge sets that are barely used. But O’Steen’s account makes it clear that many scenes were never actually filmed, and the imposing but underused sets are a regular result of Donati’s work — the crew on FLASH GORDON also complained that Donati never read the script, just a breakdown of scenes, so he would spend his budget freely on whatever interested him, building vast interiors for scenes that might only play for moments in the film, and skimping on others so you might find yourself shooting twenty minutes of action in a broom closet.
Many of the problems O’Steen was vexed by didn’t strike me as terribly serious — Mia’s hair and makeup may not be flattering, but I’ve seen worse. O’Steen had to create passion between the leads where none existed — Farrow eschewed any on-set romance with her unknown co-star, instead bedding Troell, then Nykvist, then (it’s heavily implied) Bottoms, leaving a trail of broken hearts in her wake. And they were all stuck in Bora Bora for six months while this was going on. There’s a big swimming scene which isn’t sexy or romantic (because it’s not there in the script or performances) but sure looks nice. It’s bloody looong, though. I guess O’Steen had to lay it on thick to compensate for the chemical inertia.
The crew arrived at a specially built hotel… that was still being built.
Franco Rossi was leading a second unit shooting waves, but they all got drunk and left their film cans to get flooded on the rocks.
Mia was seen at dinner with her beautiful son Fletcher on her lap… and all her adopted kids sitting on the floor, ignored.
Jan Troell’s love for Mia resulted in him ignoring the scenery and the story and shooting endless close-ups of his adored star. In the final film, O’Steen must have used every camera move he could find, because he complains Troell wasn’t shooting any.
Bottoms urinated on De Laurentiis’ shoes in a fit of pique, then hastily wrote an apology, in fear for his life.
Troell was promised final cut… then paid off with $25,000 to stay out of the edit room.
When Mia was feeding poor Dayton lines for his close-ups, she wouldn’t bother looking at him. She could read lines and do crosswords at the same time. Well, he’s no Jon Hall.
“Four down, nine letters, a mighty wind.”
She was also reportedly heard to refer to him as “the animal.”
Dino: “All directors are stupid. Anybody who gets up so early every day to say ‘Good morning’ to all those sons-of-bitches has to be stupid.”
Symbolism! God caber-tosses a crucifix at Trevor Howard!
With all this, and the drink and drug consumption, the VD outbreak (“You’d be surprised who has it,” said the unit nurse) and the malfunctioning toilets, plus all the grade-A talent, it’s amazing how dull the film is. The actual hurricane is good, especially as it wipes out a lot of the characters who have been boring us for two hours, but the natives are used as colourful cannon fodder, as usual, so it’s also kind of offensive. When our young lovers are left alone on a lifeless, flattened atoll at the end, it’s questionable whether we’re meant to expect them to survive or not, though we don’t actually care one way or the other.
Worse than KING KONG. But the behind-the-scenes action might make a good movie.
Got into quite a debate with The Chiseler’s editor Daniel Riccuito on FaceBook about whether Woody Allen is guilty of child abuse, which led to him posting a fascinating account on his site. Opening this up again here could lead to a comments section that stretches to the crack of doom, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. Danny’s elucidation does make somewhat clearer where he’s coming from — the accusation, if I understand it, is that cinephiles are predisposed to believe Allen innocent because they like his films, this leads them to disregard the accusations of an abused child, and this is symptomatic of a whole “rape culture” where accusations generally are ignored and powerful men are protected. And that agnosticism — saying “We can’t know” — is merely a pose, a defence that allows us to continue to suppose Allen innocent and the accusations against him false.
If you’re first reaction is to dismiss this as preposterous, I would suggest that you try not to. There’s something there that’s at the very least worthy of consideration.
I first want to say that my agnosticism seems to me a very correct attitude to disputed events which I did not see involving people I’ve never met. It is, I think, the only possible attitude.
I had a discussion with a filmmaker friend recently about Amanda Knox — he thought she was definitely guilty, I thought she was probably innocent. Mainly because her collaboration with her partner in this rape-murder starts to look very strange if you factor in “the third man,” the guy who DID leave DNA behind and DID flee the country and DID have a serious criminal record and who has also been convicted. There’s no evidence that he’d even met his supposed co-murderers. But my friend said, “She’s obviously guilty — she and her boyfriend were laughing and turning cartwheels after they were released.” And while that IS very strange behaviour for someone who’s just been falsely accused of murder, I would argue that it’s equally strange for somebody who’s guilty, and so it tells me nothing I can use.
Allen’s enemies point to creepy jokes about fancying young teenage girls in his early films (is it LOVE AND DEATH, and is it a line about “two fourteen-year-olds”?), and his character’s relationship with a sixteen-year-old in MANHATTAN, which certainly prepares the way for his real-life liaison with Soon-Yi, but ephebophilia is not paedophilia, exactly, and there is a difference between a man having sex with a teenager and with his seven-year-old adopted daughter — even if you don’t admit a moral difference, they are different activities appealing to somewhat different desires, though both could certainly exist in the same person.
Allen’s starting an affair with Soon-Yi while he was engaged in a relationship with Mia Farrow is, as everybody on both sides except Allen admits, hugely wrong. Zachary Scott in MILDRED PIERCE wrong, and look what happened to him. The trouble with this inciting incident is that it serves both narratives. In one, Mia Farrow is a psycho bitch from hell driven over the edge by Allen’s betrayal, coaching her daughter to say and eventually believe she was abused in order to revenge herself on Allen. In the other, Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi was just the tip of a vile iceberg, as he sexually abused another of Farrow’s adopted children. Everybody has motivation to lie, and those who have no trouble seeing Farrow as a passive-aggressive schemer tend to believe Allen, while those who see him as a degenerate predator have no trouble seeing why he might lie.
Allen doesn’t help by acting exactly as he would in a movie if accused of a terrible crime — see SHADOWS AND FOG for example — whining and stalling and coyly denying and convincing nobody ~
At 1:45 he refers to the alleged incident as “a total non-event,” presumably meaning “an even that never took place” but actually translating as “an insignificant event that I don’t know why everyone’s making such a fuss over.” Allen, a writer, ought to be able to use language more compellingly. He argues that he “would never” molest his child, rather than saying he didn’t, and his reasons have to do with it being an awkward time to embark on such activity. It’s like the old horse thief’s protestation, “I didn’t steal your horse — I don’t steal horses, and anyway you have a lousy horse.” The second reason seems to reinforce the first, but really it doesn’t.
But Allen’s failure to be convincing is exactly what I’d expect from him, based on his movie character. I think it’s folly to guess at what somebody may have done based on your reading of their manner, or based on other, different things they’ve done. We can’t help but form our own suppositions, but to become passionate in our belief in them seems odd to me, even when the issues at stake are so emotive.
If Allen is telling the truth, there are a few witnesses who do actually back up some aspects of the Farrow version, and these aren’t so easy to explain. And Allen’s own story is also a little inconsistent. If the Farrows are telling the truth, actually not much needs to be explained — Allen’s passing a polygraph is certainly within the bounds of possibility, and the doctors who weren’t convinced by little Dylan’s account were simply wrong.
Part of the reason Danny Riccuito was so passionate about this was his contention that to sit on this particular fence is to call Dylan a liar, or crazy. I don’t think that’s the case, and in the Mia Farrow false memory brainwashing scenario, Dylan is still honest, sane, and a victim rather than a perpetrator. D.R. says that false memory is a rare, exotic and unlikely phenom to haul into this storyline when a simpler explanation exists. I’m generally inclined to regard those claiming rape as highly trustworthy, since the advantages to be gained from lying about such a thing seem virtually non-existent. Exceptions for me are cases of “recovered memory,” which I don’t, on the whole, believe to be a real thing, and cases where some obvious reason to lie exists — in such cases, the needle wavers midway between True and False.
Danny also argues that, since Woody is now quite safe from legal pursuit, we should simply accept Dylan’s account — the negative consequences of failing the victim are worse than those of vilifying a maybe-criminal who can’t actually be legally punished anyway. But I can’t actually choose to believe something because I’m told it’s the best belief to have. I believe what seems to me believable, and in this case both sides of the story fall within the grounds of possibility.
The most damaging accusation is that cinephiles don’t want to believe an idol to be guilty of such a foul act, and so we will ignore any evidence and concoct any lunatic theory to find him innocent. Not having seen an Allen film since DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, I at first dismissed this. But I have fond feelings for a lot of earlier Woody movies, and I have to admit I don’t want to believe he did this. I don’t want to believe Mia Farrow poisoned her daughter’s life either, but there’s less of a sentimental attachment involved to Mia as celebrity. But ultimately I don’t think Allen’s case is that weak or bizarre — but it could certainly stand being stronger.
Since neither psychiatrists nor judges, contrary to what they themselves believe, are any better at detecting when they are being lied to than any regular member of the public, we can basically discount their opinions about who is being honest. Justice Wilk’s 33-page analysis of the case, which takes Farrow’s side, isn’t perfect either. Wilks puts a lot of faith in the fact that Mia came forward with the claim that Dylan had been abused before she knew that Allen had been alone with the child for fifteen minutes. Later, corroboration was obtained that showed that despite Farrow’s request that Allen shouldn’t be left unsupervised with the children, there was a period when he was out of sight. The problem with that is that since Dylan apparently was alone with Allen, she could have reported THAT to Farrow even if nothing happened, something Wilk apparently never considered. So all that’s proved there is what had already been corroborated — Allen and Dylan were out of view of the nannies and maids. Wilk’s report gives a good account of the Farrow side of things, but the trouble is he’s so one-sided he makes you suspicious. “Ms. Farrow’s statement to Dr. Coates that she hoped Dylan’s statements were a fantasy is inconsistent with the notion of brainwashing.” This is so naive it’s surreal — a circuit judge is apparently unfamiliar with the idea that somebody might say something without meaning it. Certainly Farrow may have been completely sincere, but the fact that she said that does not prove her sincerity.
If Allen were guilty, it wouldn’t change the fact that he’s made some brilliant comedies and quasi-comedies. It might make the experience of watching them still more uncomfortable — it already became a bit awkward after the Soon-Yi thing broke. (A director friend actually said, “The one thing that would make me think he’s innocent is the fact that you get the impression from his films that he’s quite ethical.” Which is true, but the Soon-Yi thing — about as vile an act as you can imagine within the realms of the adult and consenting — kind of disabuses us of that idea. He’s clearly not terribly ethical.
The timing of the revival of this story bothers me. Is it designed purely to hurt BLUE JASMINE’s Oscar chances? Dylan Farrow’s open letter almost says so — but then, if I’d been sexually abused and the man responsible was potentially about to be publicly honoured, I’d probably want to shout denunciations at that time too. The only thing I don’t like about the letter is that it calls upon us to — do what, exactly? What do the Farrows want? For us to stop liking Woody Allen films, because of what he did? Which he hasn’t been convicted of, or even charged with. I’m not willing (or able) to do that. What an artist does should have no effect on their art.
As with a huge number of things, I hover between disbelief and belief. I can suppose both sides, but not wholeheartedly believe either. It would be reassuring to have absolute knowledge. But I’m not prepared to absolutely believe without it, and I rather resent being told I must.
shadowplay 