I, Hamlet

The BBC in the 1970's made the decision to tape performances of all of Shakespeare's plays, and when they came to Hamlet (first broadcast in 1980), they chose the most versatile actor of his generation to play the title role, Derek Jacobi. Jacobi has been appearing in Shakespearean films since 1965, when he played Cassio in Olivier's Othello; in 1996, he played Claudius in Branagh's Hamlet. Even though many British actors have played different roles in Hamlet at various points in their careers, I don't think that many could achieve the combined quality of these performances of Jacobi's . He is directly in the line of British transformative actors I've written about before, such as Charles Laughton and Laurence Olivier, but is subtler in his use of make-up and facial putty to change his appearance. He even tackled a role that took Charles Laughton so long to get ready for that it imploded the movie he was to star in: that of the stammering C-C-Claudius in Josef von Sternberg's adaptation of Robert Graves's I, Claudius, of which Jacobi later did the TV version.

All that said, Jacobi's performance, while supremely intelligent, is not moving enough for me. I find myself more admiring of it than becoming involved in it. His line readings are full of wit, passion, and beauty, and I would like to like his portrayal more than I do. Frankly, I think his Claudius for Branagh is better: subtler, more revealing of the character's constant need to remain under steely control, the level of his apprehension only betrayed by his eyes. You, however, might find his Hamlet more moving than I do.



This production also has the strongest Claudius and Gertrude of any version in Patrick Stewart and Claire Bloom. Students always get a kick out of recognizing Picard under the curly wig and beard; his Claudius is full of bravura and chutzpah. The rest of the cast, though, is very weak, until you get to Ian Charleson's Fortinbras, who is a right cold bastard. Unfortunately, he comes in at the end of the play.

The production is videotaped, in color, with early seventeenth-century costumes and an eminently forgettable set design. The real joke of this version is its price: the BBC licensed these performances to a company who demands around $30 per DVD, probably because they assume that libraries will foot the bill. But even libraries get hit by budgetary constraints (and often are the first to suffer when they have to be applied). Charging so much for workmanlike and sporadically brilliant versions of the plays is no way to make Shakespeare palatable--or even available--to the masses.

Roundhouse

The other "greatest" Hamlet of the last half of the twentieth century was, according to some critics, Nicol Williamson's. It become so famous that he was invited to perform a one-man show for Richard Nixon at the White House, a circumstance that gives rise to multiple ironies, since Hamlet is a play full of spying, overheard conversations, and advice to be true to oneself given by self-deceivers. At any rate, the movie version of Williamson's Hamlet was filmed at the Roundhouse in London and directed by Tony Richardson. It shaves the text to a minimum (reducing the Ghost to a brilliant light and a clangorous sound effect), but is nevertheless worth seeing, because Williamson's performance is special, and some of the other casting is daring and works.

Burton's Hamlet paved the way for more choleric Hamlets, angrier princes; Williamson's keeps some of the anger, but no actor quite combines that quality with Hamlet's nervous tension, and above all, his intelligence. Add to that the hint of a burr in Williamson's accent (most previous Hamlets sounding as if they had all been born in Mayfair), and the interiority that Richardson's close-ups evoke (especially in the soliloquies, where the actors address the camera directly), and Williamson's becomes a very personal Hamlet.

The interesting casting choices include one of Anthony Hopkins's earlier notable performances, as Claudius, and it doesn't seem to matter that in this case it is not the Gertrude who is too young, but the Claudius--Hopkins is only a year older than Williamson (further irony lies in the fact that Hopkins later played Nixon in Oliver Stone's movie). Hopkins's voice also still conveys a Welsh lilt. Gordon Jackson is another splendid Horatio, and Michael Pennington (who has written a fine book on Hamlet) is a solid Laertes. One of my favorite actors, Roger Livesey, he of the gravelly voice, plays both the first player and the Gravedigger. Several other actors double roles, thus giving a hint of the kind of performance a repertory company like Shakespeare's would give.

The gamble in casting, one which at first seemed a capitulation to the Zeitgeist, was having Marianne Faithfull play Ophelia, but she does a creditable job. Only here Richardson makes the questionable decision of implying that Laertes and Ophelia have an incestuous relationship--their kiss in Act 1 would probably prompt cries of "Get a room" from today's audiences--or at least one person who shows it in his classes. When Polonius reports to Claudius and Gertrude about Hamlet and Ophelia, they are depicted as granting a general levee in their bed, greasily eating a meal, with their large dogs on the blankets. It's as if Richardson wants to remind us that he directed the "lusty" Tom Jones.

The film is shot in color, and the costumes are traditional early seventeenth-century garb. It is a short Hamlet, less than two hours long, but Richardson decides to keep in the rarely performed scene where Polonius sends Voltemand to spy on Laertes, as well as the fourth soliloquy. The second and third soliloquies are transposed. Unfortunately, the movie is available on DVD only in Great Britain, and no decent stills seem available on the net. Still, it pops up on cable and satellite from time to time, and it's worth watching--within fifteen minutes you'll know if this Hamlet is palatable for you.

No John-a-dreams, this

In 1964, just as he was about to reach the heights of gossip notoriety, Richard Burton starred as Hamlet on Broadway, in a production directed by John Gielgud, whose own performances of the role stressed the beauty of Shakespeare's line. The production immediately sold out, so the producers decided to enact what passed for "pay-per-view" in that day: one live performance was filmed, and presented simultaneously in movie theaters across the U.S. on one night. Then all the prints were to be destroyed. However, Burton kept one print for himself, and, of course--and thankfully--it's made its way to DVD.



The film was shot in black-and-white, on a stage devoid of scenery, with the minimum of props (and those used are ratty in the extreme), the actors wearing casual contemporary clothes. Gielgud wanted the words to shine forth, so he called it a "final run-through" Hamlet, with nothing to distract the audience from the text--most of which he used. The cast, besides Burton, was mainly American, with the notable exception of the Ghost, which was shown as a monstrous shadow with Gielgud's voice. Alfred Drake, normally a musical lead, played Claudius, and not too badly (except he died like a punk, as Samuel L. Jackson might put it); the most famous American was Hume Cronyn (pictured in the still), who got quite a few laughs as Polonius.

That fact points out the strength and weakness of the film. It is a performance, with a live audience, and thus is one of the few presentations on film of Hamlet as an actual drama on a stage. Unfortunately, the film is directed more like a film, in that during Hamlet's soliloquies, Burton is shot in various forms of close-up; scenes with two characters are done in a two-shot, with the entire stage shown only to establish a scene or when absolutely necessary (as during the final duel). An audience sees Hamlet in the theater as an entire image, as it were; if an actor is alone on stage, it is up to him or her to make us look and make our own mental close-ups.

And Burton does this chiefly with his voice, although at this stage of his life he was surprisingly graceful, and had not entered that degree of alcoholism that prevented him from holding a gun steadily in Where Eagles Dare, thus prompting co-star Clint Eastwood to do volunteer to do all the shooting. As I've mentioned a few entries ago, Hamlet is a role well suited to Burton's strengths, particularly his voice, with a superlative control of range both in loudness and pitch, biting the words off: "to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets," delivered in throaty growl, for instance. A friend of mine saw this performance in New York, and said Burton was amazing, which I can well imagine. His Hamlet is angry, intelligent, and witty.

My students generally do not like this version, but it provides magnificent examples of stage acting to contrast with movie acting, as well as a performance that some have called one of the two best Hamlets of the second half of the twentieth century. The other? That's for next time.

Some Sweet--and Some Sour--Princes

In honor of a film that's finally appearing on DVD this Tuesday, I decided to go over--here--a few versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet that have been captured in various media over the years. Every year I teach Hamlet as part of first-year course in composition and literature, and I show as many versions as I can, trying to cover most of the important parts of the play, also showing several different versions of key scenes--the play-within-a-play, the final duel and deaths--to show that actors and directors have to make all sorts of decisions at almost every line of the play to present it. How drunk is Claudius? How much of a buffoon Polonius? Should the fourth soliloquy ("How all occasions do inform against me") even be performed? Since Hamlet is a play, it should be watched as well as read.

Directors first have to decide what text should be used, how much of it, and in what order. Most modern texts of Hamlet are conflations of the three versions published during and soon after Shakespeare's life. The First Quarto (these name come from the size that the paper that formed the book was folded in) is often called the "Bad Quarto," because it's much shorter and rougher than the other two versions. Scholars once thought it was constructed from the memories of two actors who played minor roles in the play, but more recently some have argued that this is Shakespeare's "rough draft" for the play. The Second Quarto is the longest version; it contains all four soliloquies, as well as a famous passage about the tragic flaw. The Folio version was published after Shakespeare died in 1623 as part of his collected works. It's shorter than the Second Quarto (no fourth soliloquy) but includes some lines not in either version. Some critics thus claim it is Shakespeare's final version of the play, "streamlined" for performance in the theater.

Because the conflated Hamlet runs about four hours.

So: do you cut, what do you cut, why do you cut, and what do you do with perceived imbalances in the play? How do you set the play? One set, many sets? What time period? What sort of costumes? How do you cast it? What genders? (in Kenneth Branagh's A Midwinter's Tale, an "old queen," as he calls himself, plays Gertrude, and I've seen a Marcella, and heard about Bernhardt's Hamlet.) How Oedipal do you make the scene in Gerturde's bedchamber? Does Gertrude know the cup is poisoned? How do you handle the switching of the swords? Is the Ghost visible? Does Hamlet hear Polonius and Claudius when he asks her, "Where's your father?" Do you stage both the plays-within-the-plays, and if you do, how do you show that Claudius doesn't "get" the dumb show? And so on.

Laurence Olivier had proven he could sell audiences on Shakespeare in general with his Henry V, and when he did Hamlet a few years later, won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Actor, but I think his achievement as a director was even greater. I have never particularly liked his characterization: too pretty, too epicene, too weak (maybe it's that blond wig the Brits think a Dane should have). However, his physicality in the duel scene is amazing: the leap he takes on to Claudius is one he used to do every night in the theater. It does have one of my favorite Horatios, Norman Wooland (seen above next to Larry), and as strong a cast of actors in minor roles as any version: John Lawrie and Anthony Quayle in the still, Stanley Holloway as the Gravedigger, and Peter Cushing as Osric (or the Grand Moff Tarkin as I tell students today). But why is Osric usually always portrayed in British performaces as such a homosexual fop?

As far as directing, just watch the way Olivier presents The Mousetrap (he only shows the dumb show). The stage is set with the audience forming a "U" with Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius at the bottom of the U, the play at the top, Horatio at the top of the right side of the U, and Hamlet and Ophelia at the top left. The camera starts behind Horatio, then tracks down the U, behind the royal couple, who are kissing and thus missing what's happening, and then up to behind Hamlet, with Hamlet staring at Horatio, Horatio staring at Claudius, and the action visible on the stage. The camera then retracks, and this time you can see from behind that Claudius is watching the play (Polonius is very concerned), and back, till Olivier cuts to a close-up of Claudius shielding his eyes. It's masterful, with an economy of cuts, and every camera movement meaningful, purposeful. It's a shame that Olivier didn't get to direct more Shakespeare on film than the three he did.

Costumes: seventeenth-century. Black-and-white. Cuts: extensive, and the second and third soliloquies are juggled so that they are not as close as they are in the play.

"The Speech of the People"

When James Joyce created for Ulysses his modern analogues to Homer's Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, he intended them to be, if not anti-heroic, then at least a-heroic. The modern Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, is Dublin Jew, who suffers from his countrymen's prejudices; his wife, Molly, is anything but faithful; and Ulysses's "son" is, at this point, an artist manque, whose last name (Dedalus) only hints at his vocation. The political aspect of Joyce's decision to treat characters of this social stratum (lower middle-class) is that his main characters are of the people: not royalty nor aristocrats. However, the manner in which Joyce describes their thought processes (except perhaps Molly Bloom's) is such that the book becomes a coterie experience; while democratic in spirit, it is anti-democratic in execution.

In U.S.A., John Dos Passos gets around this modernist dilemma by concentrating the least readily intelligible texts into "The Camera Eye" sections, and even those are far more comprehensible than, say, the "Proteus" section of Ulysses (which nevertheless contains such immediately beautiful sentences as Stephen's wondering "Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand?" "Ineluctable modality of the visible" indeed). By allowing his characters their own language in free indirect discourse when describing their actions, Dos Passos fulfills the definition that he sets out in the preliminary section he wrote for the novels when they were finally published together, also called "U.S.A.": "But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people." And their speech is human, sometimes all too human. But as Hemingway observed, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," and the demotic strain of Twain is fulfilled in the works of both Hemingway and Dos Passos.

However, U.S.A. is also a vast novel of political ideas about American history, much more overtly so than most works by Hemingway or Faulkner. The first character we meet, Mac, becomes involved in the labor movement, as does Mary French, the last character we read about some 1200 pages later. Labor is constantly exploited by capital; America was hoodwinked by the mendacious Woodrow Wilson into entering the Great War; the laws and ideals of America are constantly bent by those in power: these themes are hammered home again and again over the course of the work. Although the impending Stock Market Crash of 1929 looms in the minds of readers as they approach the end of the saga, it is the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti that are crucial to the best characters in the book.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," complains Stephen in Ulyssses. And while Irish history permeates the fabric of Ulysses, Joyce presents no over-arching theory about it, as Tolstoy does at the end of War and Peace. Is history affected by great individuals, such as Napoleon, or are even they moved by intransigent forces? After finishing the novel, readers of U.S.A. can come away with the impression that all the characters have been swept along, except for the few who valorously labor against the system; however, the biographies that Dos Passos interjects into the flow show that individuals can make a difference, for good and ill. There is so much here, so much in this novel that especially now needs to be remembered, beyond the triumphs of its methods.

Note: One of the few examples of another author's adapting the methods and form of U.S.A. is the sf novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, which won the Hugo Award in 1968. In this near future dystopian novel, Brunner substitutes for Dos Passos's Newsreel sections the SCANALYZER, providing an "INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface" between the reader and "the happening world." Brunner also quotes tellingly from Marshall McLuhan at the beginning of the novel:

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Some Old British TV Show

To break up the monotony of my critical acumen on display ("Hey, Doc--can you use the word 'technique' just one more time?"), I decided to share this music video of one of my favorite XTC songs, "Mayor of Simpleton."



I don't know why I felt the need to watch this again.

Really.

"U.S.A." 2

One of the central ideas of modernism is the fractured nature of modern life, the loss of an organic unity both in reality and in art. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," as T.S. Eliot says in The Waste Land. The three novels of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) are written in a set of deliberately fragmented sections, representing the overt discontinuities of American life. These are

• The NEWSREEL. This title is somewhat anachronistic, since the first "newsreel" in the novel deals with events at the beginning of the twentieth century, when newsreels per se did not exist; it is also inaccurate, since a newsreel is made up of moving images, and Dos Passos presents us with snippets of texts from newspapers, popular songs, speeches, press releases, and slogans ("BONDS BUY BULLETS BUY BONDS"). These snippets can sometimes form a larger pattern (the lyrics to an entire verse from a song will be spread throughout one newsreel), but more often, when taken together, evoke a comprehensive mood of the period--a mood that Dos Passos himself selects. You soon get the impression that Dos Passos has a thesis behind the details that he chooses; someone could very well select other details and claim that they were equally representative of the period. There are 68 of these over the three volumes, the last entitled WALL STREET STUNNED.
• The Camera Eye. This section is closest to the stream-of-consciousness techniques that Joyce perfected in Ulysses. These are the supposedly unmediated thoughts of the narrator; they start in infancy and progress throughout the series. They are impressionistic, "poetic," and fairly opaque. There are 51 of these.
• "Biographies," for want of a better word, since that's what they are--lives of people that Dos Passos deems important and representative, for good or ill, usually introduced by a descriptive noun phrase, such as TIN LIZZIE for Henry Ford, or ADAGIO DANCER for Rudolph Valentino. The cast of notables is easily divided into heroes, often inventors/scientists like Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison, political figures such as Eugene Debs, or thinkers like Thorstein Veblen, along with villains such as tycoons like Ford, William Randolph Hearst, and Samuel Insull, or politicians like Woodrow Wilson. About celebrated performers such as Valentino and Isadora Duncan he is mainly neutral. The two most moving biographies are the ones that conclude the last two volumes: THE BODY OF AN AMERICAN about the Unknown Soldier, and VAG, about an out-of-work "vagrant" hitch-hiking across America. What is interesting about these biographies is that they adopt the techniques of what would become known much later as "the new journalism": the application of fictional methods to non-fictional subjects. To me they are the most brilliant--and successful--sections of the novel.
• Characters: these sections, taken together, most resemble a conventional novel, third-person narratives that trace the lives of twelve people throughout the series, each section introduced by that character's name and concentrating on him or her (CHARLEY ANDERSON, for instance). For example, there are 17 character sections in the last volume, covering four characters. Their lives can intersect, intertwine, collide, or just as often do not meet; sometimes a complete arc is described, while sometimes the story is broken off at what later seems at arbitrary point. For some of these we can assume the character will not change; with others, who knows?

In these sections Dos Passos comes up with his most conspicuous joining of modernism and democracy, one that I was surprised to find (while reading a book about film noir) that Jean-Paul Sartre praised. Dos Passos uses free indirect discourse in these sections to give the thoughts of his characters in their own words, without resorting to first-person narrative or stream-of-consciousness. Here is a paragraph about Mary French, one of the more heroic characters in the work:

She'd never been in Boston before. The town these sunny winter days had a redbrick oldtime steelengraving look that pleased her. She got herself a little room on the edge of the slums of Beacon Hill and decided that when the case [of Sacco and Vanzetti] was won, she'd write a novel about Boston. She bought some school copybooks in a little musty stationers' shop and started right away taking notes for the novel. The smell of the new copybook with its faint blue lines made her feel fresh and new. After this she'd observe life. She'd never fall for a man again. Her mother had sent her a check for Christmas. With that she bought herself some new clothes and quite a becoming hat. She started to curl her hair again.

The sentence "She'd never fall for a man again" is in Mary's words, as is the phrase, "quite a becoming hat." The other words and phrases are probably very close to Mary's thoughts, except perhaps for the description of Boston, but in Mary's case, they could be her words. The narrator's own voice only becomes plainly evident in these sections at such times of description, which can seem more highly charged, more "poetic," than the normal language of the characters. And the omission of hyphens from compound adjectives ("oldtime") and nouns is straight out of Joyce.

But what does this all mean?

See--and hear--the U.S.A.

Serious novelists were confronted with a problem after the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce had taken all the techniques of fiction, including some newer ones, such as what has been labeled "stream-of-consciousness," ratcheted them all up a notch, and produced a magic mountain of a novel--a Matterhorn that would loom over the rest of twentieth-century fiction, daring other writers to construct a more massive monument, challenging readers to scale it. And that was the problem, in both senses. Ulysses is a magnificent achievement whose summit leads--nowhere. It is inimitable. And for readers, while most acknowledge its significance, I'd bet that fewer than 10% of the voters in that bookstore poll that made Ulysses the greatest novel of the twentieth century read it.

So what does a novelist do in the wake of Ulysses (the problem does not arise with Joyce's final, oneiric peak--perhaps chasm is a better word, Finnegans Wake, which despite its circularity of form, almost shouts, "Dead End!")? Hemingway grasps a flensing knife and cuts away everything but the bare essentials, the 10% of the iceberg that is visible on the surface. Faulkner takes stream-of-consciousness to new levels (the beginning of The Sound and the Fury), but then relapses into baroque mellifluousness, since unremitting experimentation does not sell (and even Joyce had to have a patroness). And beside the omnipresent shadow of Joyce's achievement lies the other white whale of American literature--"the great American novel." Enter John Dos Passos. What better way to harpoon the latter than by writing a massive, triple-decker novel about America itself over the past thirty years (the first part was published in 1930)? The result is U.S.A., a trilogy of novels I've been traversing for a while now, with rest stops in 17-century Maryland and the realm of film noir. It is a tour-de-force, a panorama worthy of its subject--and yet I can also see why the book is, compared to the best of Hemingway and Faulkner, virtually unread today--a real shame, since its very technique is a triumphant democratization of the main methods of modernism.

To spare my readers (I think there's more than one), I'm going to break this discussion, like the meta-novel itself, into three parts. I want to mention here that the Library of America edition of U.S.A. that I read is, like all their editions, a joy to read: suitably heavy, but not overly so; nicely sized so that it can be held in one hand without fatigue; easily legible (I had to buy another copy of The Sot-Weed Factor since my original paperback copy's print was made for eyes 35 years younger than mine); printed on acid-free paper (so it will never take on that brownish-yellow tinge that made that paperback even more unreadable); and with just enough notes to explain obscure references, as well as a helpful chronology of the historical period covered. Superb value for the money.

Acting

When I was researching my review of a biography of British playwright John Osborne, I found a DVD available in Britain of a film by Tony Palmer about Osborne. It arrived too late to be useful for the review, but I'm still interested in Osborne, and I finally got around to watching it last night. It contained interesting archival interviews with theater people like Kenneth Tynan and Tony Richardson, as well as interviews with Osborne himself and contemporary playwrights who have been influenced by him, such as David Hare.

But by far the most fascinating bits were filmed excerpts from Osborne's plays as they were performed in the theater. This included extensive color footage of Olivier in The Entertainer ("you'll be out by half-past, uh, half assed"), as well as Osborne himself and his wife at the time, Jill Bennett, in A Patriot for Me. The performances though that astounded me were those of Albert Finney in Luther and Nicol Williamson in Inadmissable Evidence. The were revelatory, unbelievably transformative.



Take Finney's. His voice became deeper, his words seemed to be masticated and then spit out, his forearms corded and taut as his sleeves of his monk's gown kept rolling up. You could not take your eyes off him. I don't think this was merely due to the differences between acting on stage and in film. There is something about the transitory nature of dramatic performance that allows for this risk-taking; probably also the nature of film acting, with its breaks, pauses, and retakes, ameliorates the momentum a theatrical performace can build, especially with the long speeches Osborne gives his main characters.



Same effect with Williamson. His portrayal of Bill Maitland, a lawyer undergoing a breakdown, was riveting. In fact, this entry was going to be about what happened to Nicol Williamson's career, since at one point, to me, he had the greatest promise of any British actor. His Hamlet was original--barbed and acerbic--his Merlin suitably alien and chilling after the avuncular Merlin of Sword in the Stone, his Sherlock Holmes quirky and intelligent (the performance as well as the character). The IMDB mini-biography explains why his career kept self-imploding. He looked fine and was wickedly witty in his contemporary (2004) interviews in the film.

Interestingly enough, a film performance by Finney was also included in this documentary--his title role in Tom Jones, for which Osborne wrote the screenplay. And in it Finney seemed to be younger, less heavy, altogether lighter. Make-up was not the only explanation. He was acting, in the best British tradition. Olivier's Archie Rice is nothing like his Othello. Seems obvious, right?

Well, another movie extensively excerpted was Tony Ricardson's version of Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which stars Richard Burton as Jimmy Porter. And while I watched Burton's performance, I discovered that he really wasn't a very transformative actor at all. His Jimmy Porter is not all that different from his Hamlet. His voice is a magnificent instrument--to hear those soliloquies in the theater ("Frailty, thy name is wOMAN!") must have been thrilling. But he does the same vocal tricks with his Porter, modulating his voice and then jumping on a word (vIRGIN!"). Maybe he became a star too soon and didn't do enough repertory work, but he did not have all that much of a career to throw into the bottle when he finally did that.

But, as Finney said, it was Osborne's works at the Royal Court Theatre that gave him and other less "well-bred" actors opportunities to play leads in dramas instead of gardeners, and for that we can all be grateful.

Why Does Johnny Read?

In home movies my uncle took of family gatherings during the 1950s, one child is, more often than not, caught off in the corner, reading a book.  That child was me.  The first thing I did upon entering someone's house was to look for the books, and then start going through those that intrigued me.  Thinking about that child now, I feel mixed emotions.  I could not have acted otherwise, since most social occasions at the time sent me into the throes of a boredom that bordered on the depressive.  If I couldn't read, I was close to agony.  I did not care about other children's laughing or pointing, but I did not forget it.

Thus throughout my life I have always felt slightly guilty about reading.  Reading (like writing) is a solitary activity (except when you're reading aloud to someone else, an activity that unfortunately has fallen into disrepute, unless the listener is a child).  Thus when I am reading, I am not engaging myself with the world (even though such times are when I can feel most alive, aware); I am not living life, experiencing it.  I consequently feel more guilty when I read for "pleasure"--even though, happily enough lately, some of those pleasure-giving authors have turned into essay subjects and nice little paychecks.

Another, less obvious reason to read is as an anodyne for pain, usually mental or emotional.  Reading makes you think about something else, gets your mind off the wound you constantly keep gnawing at, lets time do its healing.  During one period of depression, I could only read essays by Joseph Epstein.  His lucid and sane voice accompanied me, even got me through a painful valley.

All that reading, though, paid off in that now I can read and teach pretty much what I want--within the bounds of academic integrity.  Of course, it also means that i have to teach writing as well, and as I tell my writing students, for me, introductions are much, much easier to invent than conclusions--as is the case here.

I'm going to go read.

Mnemosyne still speaks

A couple of recent incidents have reassured me that my memory is still functioning, at least in some particulars. The first occurred during my eager rewatching on DVD of Crime Wave, which I had first seen several years ago on Turner Classic Movies. I've mentioned before that the movie included an unforgettably weird performance by Timothy Carey, who has been referred to as a "Method character actor" (whose method? Stanislavsky's or Rasputin's?). This screen capture proves my memory was not at fault.

In this scene, Carey has been introduced to Phyllis Kirk, who plays the wife of an ex-con whom a group of San Quentin escapees are trying to enroll in a bank robbery. The lascivious intentions of the hoods have before been betrayed by the actor on the right of this scene, who is credited as "Charles Buchinsky"--and at that point in his career, Charles Bronson was at least attempting to act. Carey, the seated criminal, is trying to convey by this facial rictus that he is both charmed by Kirk and trying to charm her. Unbelievable.

The other event happened while I was rereading a book that I had first read probably 35 years ago. During one portion, I started laughing uncontrollably--every phrase, every clause, released gales of laughter, paroxysms of cleansing mirth--the kind of laughs that make you dizzy while you try to catch your breath. And I recalled that I had laughed at the exact same passage all those years ago. I don't think one's sense of humor changes all that much over time.

"I spit on metaphysics, sir"

I hate to shill for any upcoming product, but the release of an extraordinary set of DVDs of a sf classic does have me excited. For years, people have been talking about a possible multi-disc set of the various versions of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and it's finally going to happen. Several editions of the edition itself will be available, with this as the most elaborate:

Accompanying some versions of the DVD is the documentary Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner. A trailer for it, as well as four clips from the film, is available here.

Blade Runner is a seminal film, despite its being dated already as sf (if LA turns into a city with a polyglot language, it will be based on Spanish, not Japanese). The look, the feel of the film is film noir placed in the future (something the Philip K. Dick novel it was based on totally lacked.) This shot from the movie shows an iconic part of noir imagery, Venetian blinds, the shadows of which reveal that the characters are not as free as they might imagine.

And besides, any movie that has Edward James Olmos utter the line that is this entry's title has to be cool.

Ch-ch-changes

These are what make purists reach for their one-volume edition of LOTR to throw at the screen.  This is my take on the most important ones that JWB (Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens) made.

• Changes that strengthen the movie.  The excision of Tom Bombadil leads the list, since I have always had a problem with the versifying . . . just what is he, anyway, besides a creature based on a Dutch doll the Tolkien children had, and a means of linking the more childlike world of The Hobbit with the darker tone of LOTR?  Unfortunately, though, no Tom means no Barrow Wight.
• Some will take this as heresy, but the elimination of the Scouring of the Shire never bothered me that much.  People complain of an overlong denouement as it is. 
• Elves at Helm's Deep.  The JWB commentary track for TT is hilarious on this point, as each of the writers blames the other for this plot shift.  I have no problem with it, since without it, it appears the Elves are bugging out of Middle Earth, when in the books, much is made of the Elves of Lorien and Rivendell fighting in the North--if you read the Appendices.  You have to show events in movies, not just talk about them, a maxim that leads to the magnificent montage of the lighting of the beacons between Minas Tirith and Edoras.
• Thus also the Paths of the Dead.  Tolkien tells how frightened all of the characters are traveling through these caves, but you can't have actors telling each other how scared they are on the screen.  And anyway, Pete had to get some zombies in this movie.  The hill of skulls, though, was a bit much.
• However, the use of the Army of the Dead as a kind of green scrubbing bubbles to clean up Minas Tirith after the Rohirrim and Gondorians had displayed real heroism of the kind Tolkien loved was a major weakness.
• The exorcism of Theoden by Gandalf.  Again, making concrete what is implicit in the text.  Grima complains that Gandalf still has his staff, but all he does with it in the book is to cause some distant thunder.  Theoden then acts like he's taken a particularly large dose of Geritol, but he doesn't undergo the rejuvenation process depicted in the movie.  (Theoden's cinematic character arc--"I'm not a good leader either"-- is also confusing and unnecessary.)
• Super Arwen.  Her importance in the novels was only realized until Tolkien got to the end, so  JWB were forced to come up with a strong woman before Eowyn made her appearance.  Arwen playing Glorfindel's role in FOTR is no big deal, and fan pressure actually stopped JWB from committing real mischief in implementing their plan of AAHD (Arwen at Helms Deep), some of which was filmed, but not included.
• Gimli as comic relief.  No problems for me: I think JWB were always on guard against the Holy Grail syndrome--that an epic can become a parody of itself.  Humor helps prevent that--but the dwarf-tossing jokes could have been tossed themselves.
• What they got wrong.  All the changes to characters that had to do with a character arc.  Aragorn--too afraid to be king?  In the books, he does doubt that he can make the right decisions after Merry and Pippin are abducted and Frodo goes with Sam; no need for all the added hand-wringing angst about inheriting Isildur's weakness, as well as the sigh just after he is crowned.  Frodo too is wimpified; in the book he tells the assembled Ringwraiths to go back to Mordor at the Fords of the Bruinen, for instance.

The most grievous wound is to Faramir.  Once the confrontation with Shelob was replaced as the ending of Frodo's storyline in TT, then Faramir had to become a danger--Faramir, who for many readers is a special character.  The Ithilien Rangers become bullies too, working over Gollum like a band of rogue cops with a junkie.   As Filmamir, Faramir becomes the whiny younger son, who has to prove to Daddy that he's strong too.  This leads to the unbelievable moment where Filmamir changes his mind and lets Frodo go on to Mordor after Frodo's offering the Ring to a Nazgul!  I've tried to figure out JWB's justification for Filmamir's change of mind, and I'm still lost.  At least Faramir becomes himself in the last film, where much of his and Denethor's dialogue comes right out of the book.

But still, all in all, the good in these movies far outweighs the bad, and for anyone who thinks that Jackson's adaptation was so terrible, then just remember the names Ralph Bakshii and Rankin & Bass, and think of Glenn Yarborough warbling, "Frodo, of the Nine Fingers..." and then remember that JWB's cinematic version of the Field of Cormallen ("Praise them with great praise" in the novel) is an actual improvement on the text: "My friends--you kneel to no one."  Sniff.  ("You want my hankie, doc?")

Farewell to the Master

Ingmar Bergman, who investigated like no other artist the agony that silence can bring, is finally silent. But his films will still be eloquent.

What they got right

Peter Jackson and his team--that phrase should be understood throughout what follows, but from the documentaries that accompanied the various DVD editions of The Lord of the Rings, it's clear that the ultimate decision-making power for most areas of production rested with Jackson. Plans were not developed, concepts not pursued, models not made into reality, unless they were "approved by Peter."

(And I write from the point of view of a thorough-going, unadulterated fan of the novels. I read the works when they were initially--and unethically--published as paperbacks by Ace in America, and have read most of everything else by Tolkien published since then, multiple times, including the twelve volumes of The History of Middle Earth, although I have yet to get to the two volumes of drafts of The Hobbit. Once someone told me that she never got into Tolkien. I replied that I never got out of him.)

• Production design and realization. The key to the success of the movies. If they had got the look of Middle Earth at the end of the Third Age wrong, it would have ruined everything else. The wisest decision they made was to base the designs on the visions of the two best artists working on Tolkien today, Alan Lee and John Howe. And then they brought them to New Zealand, so their designs could be organically placed within the various New Zealand landscapes selected. From Hobbiton to the beacons of Gondor to the Grey Havens, from Frodo's clothes to Eomer's armor to the Orcs' weaponry--everything looks right. And down to the smallest detail--as Miranda Otto said when she picked up the cup that she was supposed to offer to Aragorn in Edoras, "It's heavy!" No need to act like it is.
• Casting. After numerous reviewings, I can't think of a single casting decision or performance I have a problem with. (I do have a problem with some of the lines they have to say--more on that later.) Some work so well--Ian McKellan as Gandalf, Orlando Bloom as Legolas, and Elijah Wood as Frodo--that I can't envision anyone else in the parts. I'm especially glad that McKellan's career achievements were finally recognized. I remember when the execrable Alec Baldwin Shadow came out in 1994 thinking, "Here's one of the greatest actors in the world appearing this piece of sh*t." Now if he appears in a piece of sh*t, it's because he wants to, not because he has to.
• Music. These movies needed a big, late Romantic score, with a variety of echoes of other kinds of music, and plenty of motifs and "tunes," all of which Howard Shore provided. Not only have I bought the soundtrack albums when they came out, I've been picking up the complete recordings, which contain all the musical cues in the works, and run around three hours each. From Dwarvish chants to the forlorn gallantry of Gondor, Shore gets close enough to the essence of what he is portraying (the two personalities of Gollum, for example) to be very effective.
• Direction. This might seem a given, but in all the arguments raging over the film, I think Jackson's skill as a director got lost. I realized this the last time I watched his remake of King Kong. Since I wasn't so heavily invested in it, I was able to watch more objectively the way he put a scene together, such as the offering of Naomi Watts to Kong: the camera angles, camera movements, editing, perspective, combination of music and action, the overall vision. When I watched the end of The Fellowship of the Ring recently, I freshly noticed all the touches: the slow motion as Aragorn approaches the Uruk-hai; the cut to regular speed with the first sword slash; the camera on a trolley as the Uruks run to Boromir; the use of silence as Lurtz shoots Boromir; the performances he gets out of Mortensen and Sean Bean. Jackson has learned the lessons of the masters well.

One more to go: the changes.

Some early "music videos"

Hopscotching around YouTube, I stumbled across some early Stevie Winwood performances (I don't know precisely when he became "Steve"--sometime during Traffic, I suppose). The first is a quaint promotional video for the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin," which was the first time most of us in America became acquainted with Winwood's voice--one of the best in rock history. I thought this was merely lip-synching of the single, but it is not the single version, since the band does not echo Winwood's cry to perform the title action. The second stanza is different too. (It's quaint to me because it's set in a department store; that was some British PR staffer's idea of being original.) And Stevie looks like he's about 15 and just got up.



The next is from Winwood's next group, Traffic--"Paper Sun" from their first album. Here the PR genius decided to have the group wandering through a museum as the long version of the song plays. What I also learned from other Winwood videos is something I had forgotten: Winwood might be a better guitar player than he is an organist. He held his own against Clapton when they were in Blind Faith.



Actually, this search started because I learned another artist who performed at the Concert for George had died, Jim Capaldi, Traffic's drummer. Rest in peace.

"Even the smallest person can change the course of [movie] history"

Thus (almost) says Galadriel to Frodo in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring: a non-Tolkienian line, but movies have never shied away from being explicit. Before I plunge into Kristin Thompson's The Frodo Franchise, I thought I'd set down my thoughts on Jackson's adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, which is, I think, on the whole, brilliantly successful.

Now I never got into the pissing matches on the Net before, while, and after these movies were released; it just wasn't worth it. Minds were often made up before the movies were even seen--it's like the person on Amazon.com who gave the latest Harry Potter book one star before it was published. I found that time, as it usually does, brought clearer reflection. Some points became more obvious; some weaknesses more apparent. But these movies became awfully useful to me in writing classes, as I used them as a method of showing how to provide examples to support a thesis--even their Appendices--and while doing so, engendered further thoughts on the motives behind the production.

The main point to remember--and one that the Harry Potter motives have reinforced for me--is that Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens decided to make a successful movie. To do that, they had to draw in as an audience people who had never read Tolkien. The latest Potter movies show that their makers are relying more and more on the audience's having read the books. To recoup the staggering costs of production, Jackson and his team had to engage a mass audience, not just the fans--who would probably come to the movie anyway.

The second point is related. When Bob Shaye at New Line gave Jackson the green light to make three movies, certain structural problems became evident. The team had to rewrite their two-movie screenplay. The first two books end on a cliff-hanging event, and I think Jackson did not want to alienate those members of the audience who might not even have realized that two movies followed The Fellowship. Thus each movie has a rounded ending--the last movie's being too rounded for some.

The third point is again related. How do you make a successful Hollywood movie (even in New Zealand)? Learn how to write a screenplay from a master: in this case, Jackson and Walsh attended a scriptwriting seminar given by the modern guru of the art, Robert McKee, author of Story, who is so famous he was portrayed by Brian Cox in Adaptation. All modern screenwriting manuals emphasize a character "arc," that characters change over the course of a movie (or three). Thus some characters in the novels with immutable personalities become more plastic in the movies, usually weaker (in some aspect) before they can become strong.

More to come...

Dear Readers

I'm like many other bloggers in that once I learned that I could find out who's reading my blog, I did. Since I usually only write about subjects that a) interest me and b) seem to me worth having a thought or two about, I know my numbers will never be high. Nevertheless, it's fun to see that one person has searched for "cork+soaker+pynchon" on Google and landed here. Or "no Caine on the Brazos," which is interesting since it's an intentional pun (and not that good a one), combining the spelling of Michael Caine's last name with the title of a song the Band and Bob Dylan did on the Basement Tapes. Or "hanging+clause," since it's a mistake on my part--it should be "hanging cause."

One reader I learned about initially shook me up a little. Right after I wrote about Albert Brooks,* and titled the entry after his latest movie, someone from Iran read my blog. Synchronicity? Yes, since it was one of those navbar searches ("next blog") that led him/her here. Still...

*One movie I forgot to mention in that entry was a movie Brooks acted in, Steven Soderbergh's excellent adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, Out of Sight. In it, Brooks plays a thoroughly repellent Wall Street insider who has been sent to prison for fraud. Here the whininess that underlies much of his comic persona is dialed up--and he still manages to be funny.

Random Notes

• That was the title of my favorite section in Rolling Stone in the days of Ralph J. Gleason and Hunter Thompson and Ben Fong-Torres and John Mendelsohn and Lester Bangs, so I'll happily steal it for here.
• My mind has finally recovered from the after-effects of finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The emotion was akin to the come-down after a sugar-high, or the sadness a child feels on Christmas afternoon, knowing that that state of ultimate expectation that Christmas excites will not return for another year. Did the novel meet the hype? Mostly yes, although Rowling almost swamped the novel with again more exposition about a mythology that she invented. At least by the middle of The Return of the King, for example, you don't find out that the fellowship maybe should have gone out and discovered Sauron's technicolor dreamcoat.
• Criterion keeps making excellent choices in the movies it is selecting for its editions. In October, these will include Godard's Breathless and a personal favorite I've written about before, Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. Not to mention Robinson Crusoe on Mars in September (big guilty pleasure).
• More reviews are appearing of Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4, and it looks better and better each time I look over the inclusions: films by Fred Zinneman, Don Siegel, Anthony Mann, Andre de Toth, Nicholas Ray, and John Sturges, with commentary tracks for each film, including one by James Ellroy for Crime Wave: all this for about $4 a film.
• The Frodo Franchise, a book on Peter Jackson's films of The Lord of the Rings by Kristin Thompson, an academic film critic who actually writes readable, interesting English prose worth reading, has been released early, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

We bring you the man responsible for all this

In a few hours, I, like millions of other readers around the world, will be plunged into the final adventure featuring Harry Potter. So I thought it only fair to present this YouTube clip of the writer indirectly responsible for the success of J.K. Rowling and virtually all of modern fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkien. In this interview from 1968, Tolkien explains some of the backstory of the various races in his entire mythology (and listen to the way he pronounces "meyethology").



In his memoirs, Kingsley Amis remarks that Tolkien was the worst lecturer on the Oxford English faculty (and C. S. Lewis the best), in terms of elocution and audience understanding. This clip reveals some of that. Many of the comments to it declare that his speech is incomprehensible, and the uploader has seen fit to append a translation of the remarks (although it gets "demiurgic" wrong, calling it "emerging").

I think it's nice that he at least got to see a little of the money his tales would earn before he died--even as a tenured professor in England, he'd had to grade exams during his vacations to supplement his income (no National Health then). Orwell, on the other hand, died before his works took off, and from what I've read, his wife, whom he married on his deathbed, drank up all the money.

Oh, well. Ave, Tollers, and Vale, Harry.

Ain't That a Kick in the Head?

Who says you can't dance to Led Zeppelin?



(The title refers to a unique dance step some 2:40 into the video.)

Goodness, Gracious, Great . . .

While watching a Billy Wilder documentary that accompanied Ace in the Hole, I was reminded that Wilder and Charles Brackett had done the screenplay for Howard Hawks's screwball comedy Ball of Fire. Since that was in my stack of DVDs-to-be-watched, I pulled it out and had a wonderful couple of hours watching a movie in which an English professor gets to be the romantic lead--and played by Gary Cooper, no less.

Of course, much of the comedy lies in listening to the normally laconic Cooper deliver the professor's sesquipedalian verbiage in his clipped bursts; much of the rest lies in the gulf between the slang that Cooper's character is trying to nail down and his own vocabulary, as well as that of the other seven dwarfs--I mean, professors. (The resemblance of its plot to that of Snow White is intentional; "Heidy Ho!" says Barbara Stanwyck as she greets the professors). Some of this humor must have flown in under the censors' radar, as Cooper explains the slang etymology of "Sugarpuss" O'Shea's first name as referring to her face, while those with more lecherous minds muse upon a more venereal location.

What was surprising--and also delightful--about the movie was its cinematography by Gregg Toland. He employs his deep-focus technique very effectively, such as in the still above, with Cooper and Stanwyck in the foreground, three professors in varying degrees in the middle distance, and one sneaking down the stairs in the background--all clearly in focus. The scene in which Coooper first mentions his attraction to Stanwyck is even more striking: Cooper confesses this attraction just as he is about to throw her out, that he particularly noticed her the previous day when she was standing in the window and the light hit her hair. Stanwyck moves back a few feet until she is framed by the window, and poof! it glows. No CGI, just a knowledge of light, lenses, and film, and how to combine them.

Wilder said that after he wrote the script, he hung around the set to watch Hawks direct the film, a kind of "working vacation." Wilder admitted that he became a director to have ultimate control over his scripts, and told the anecdote about Charles Boyer and the cockroach again ("If he won't talk to the cockroach, the sonovabitch won't talk to anybody!"). But he also said that he became a director because that's where the fun in movie-making is. Writing, he tells the interviewer, is, "to quote Winston Churchill, 'blood, sweat, and tears.'"

Amen, Billy.

Five down, two to go

A few thoughts after seeing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

• These movies are being made for people who have seen the books: little exposition or backstory is given, and what is offered is spoken by the younger actors, who do not have the clearest enunciation in the world. And even if you have read the book, you'll be digging around in your memory for names of characters, spells, and objects. Important flashbacks flash by. One character who will become enormously important later is hardly introduced at all; you suddenly realize, "Oh, she's the one who's going to become Harry's love interest."
• This series is really being carried by an group of excellent British adult actors: Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy, Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall, Ralph Fiennes as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Emma Thompson as Professor Trelawney (the last two almost cameos), Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, plus series newcomers Imelda Staunton and Helena Bonham Carter (who adds a nice dollop of mad sex appeal to the mix), as well as Brendan Gleeson (oops! he's Irish) and David Thewlis. I left the best for last: Alan Rickman as Snape, whose line readings are striking and unforgettable. In his performance, diction becomes a weapon.
• The set designers once again deserve a large portion of credit for making disbelief more easily suspendable.
• The special effects are fine, but really just an extension of concepts that have been around since the 1930s. What comes out of a wand? Out of a ray-gun? Glowing stuff. The results are just less laughable now.
• I still found myself moved at the end. One of the main messages of the Harry Potter books is the same one as Tolkien said was contained in The Lord of the Rings: "the ennoblement of the humble."

Now to see if the last book will make the last two movies worth watching.

You knew this would be coming

The Eddie Cochrane video was not quite a set-up, but I had to include this YouTube clip of the band who made "Summertime Blues" their own, especially after they were shown performing it in Woodstock, complete with guitar acrobatics caught in freeze-frame. ("Blue Cheer?" "Quiet, or you'll be taking a trip to Michael Vick's home for retired bears.") Daltrey used to introduce this song as "The only one we do that was written by someone else, so you know it has to be good," forgetting about Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues."

The Woodstock version of that song was the one they did with Moon, which they usually performed right after whatever version of Tommy they were doing live. They would start the song off almost in mid-beat, the whole band together, like a wave of sound hitting a beach. This version begins more like Cochrane's, with the beat slowly filled in on guitar. The notes to the clip say that this performance was a 1989 rehearsal version of the song, with the larger band that the group toured with after getting rid of Kenny Jones. Townshend is in his David Carradine-as-Caine-with-a-beard phase, and although he's surrounded by walls of transparent plastic to shield his hearing, he still shows the lead guitar player who's in charge by signalling the key change during the lead guitar break.



In the Cochrane version, the bass player looks supremely bored, probably because he's not very good. I like this live version by the Who because of the relative clarity of the sound; Entwhistle's bass is shorn of the fuzz overtones that accompany the normal Who version. And nobody--well, maybe Bill Wyman on "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown"--looked so cool doing a bass run. John, why didn't you leave that cocaine alone?

Ace [in the] Hole?

One director I find myself enjoying more and more as I grow older is Billy Wilder--not only for his dialogue, but for his candor in discussing his works, such as Cameron Crowe caught in Conversations with Wilder, and in the interviews he did on film with Volker Schlondorff in Billy Wilder Speaks. And now finally Criterion--who else?--has released its edition of one of the few Wilder flops in the 1950s, Ace in the Hole.

It's not hard to see why it bombed. Its hero is a reporter, played by Kirk Douglas, who prolongs the length of time a cave-in victim must spend trapped so as to build his own reputation back up. The victim's wife is a tramp, immediately signaled by Jan Sterling's hair being bleached to the same shade as Barbara Stanwyck's in Double Indemnity. And for the most part, the public is portrayed as gullible yobs, eager to vicariously participate in a story, uncaring after it's over, and preyed upon by scavengers of every size and shape. The few good people include the victim's parents, and the newspaper publisher who initially hires Douglas--he's portrayed in the still above, with the crucifix over his shoulder, while Kirk somehow defeats the laws of time and channels his son Michael.

The real fault of the picture is its ending--it doesn't know whether it wants to be Double Indemnity (lovers clash); Stalag 17 (antihero not as selfish as he appears to be); or Sunset Boulevard (what you sow, you reap). And it takes too long. Maybe it was because Wilder was between his strongest writing partners, Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond. But it has its moments: more visually composed shots than one usually associates with Wilder (including Douglas's face lit from underneath in the cave that turns him into a troll), and the usual Wilder touch in the dialogue:

Sterling (to Douglas): I've met some hard-boiled ones. But you're twenty minutes!

Summer Nights

According to what I've gleaned while teaching Homer, the phrase "dog days" refers to the appearance of the Dog Star, Sirius, during the month of August--something which many people know. But why is Sirius baleful? Its dominance of the heavens signified the most dangerous period of time for the plague: the rats get frisky and the fleas are jumpin' and the cotton is...oh, that's another allusion. At any rate, when Achilles races after Hector near the climax to the Iliad, his newly forged armor shining in the rays of the sun, he is compared, in a somewhat brief epic simile, to the fateful and dangerous Sirius.

I'm sure that was on Eddie Cochrane's mind when he penned his most famous song, "Summertime Blues." Here's a video from YouTube of Eddie, at the height of Fifties cool, doing that song. (The volume is extremely low on the recording.)



(I love the way he breaks up more and more when the backup singer delivers the punch lines.)

One more summer allusion--a song I very vaguely remember from the Sixties was titled "Summer Nights." All I could remember that it was sung by a British female singer and had a prominent harpsichord--as well as a few words from the bridge's lyrics: "there's a little cafe..." I thought the singer might be Linda Hopkins, but it was, as Google told me, the much throatier Marianne Faithfull. And thanks to iTunes, I found it was much better than I remembered, which, unfortunately, is not always the case. That vibrato contralto...

How's by You?

I had been planning to do a little piece on Timothy Carey anyway, but the mood I've been in lately is perfectly summed up in this still of Carey in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, in which Carey plays one of the three French soldiers (along with Ralph Meeker and Joe Turkel) shot for their unit's refusal to fight during a battle in WWI.

I first noticed Carey in One-Eyed Jacks, a Western initially directed by Kubrick, but then directed by its star, Marlon Brando, after a falling-out between the two. Carey plays a thoroughly odious piece of work whom Brando kills after Carey attacks a girl. His character seems just intelligent enough to be evil.

In Paths of Glory, Carey is more pitiable than hateful, but in his other work for Kubrick, he plays Nikki Arane, a racist member of the gang of robbers in The Killing. This wasn't the only time Carey worked for an A-list director; he was also in John Cassevetes's Minnie and Moskowitz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Carey also did a lot of television work; he appeared in a couple of episodes of Columbo as the proprietor of a greasy spoon--typecasting, if you ask me.

Carey has been dubbed a "Method character actor," and Quentin Tarantino dedicated Reservoir Dogs to him. Carey also worked for years, a la Orson Welles, on his own auteur project, The World's Greatest Sinner, in which he plays an insurance salesman who...ah, it's too ridiculous to summarize.

I was thinking about Carey because one of his films, Crime Wave, is being released as part of Warner Bros. fourth volume of Film Noir classics. And if you need any more proof of Carey's, ah, unique qualities, just check out his publicity still on IMDB.

Looking for Good Comedy in the Modern World

A couple of recent comments by my blogging friends have led me to think about the work of an actor/writer/director whose comic films I generally love--although a couple of his more recent works have not been up to his standards, plus he is just slightly more productive than Terence Malick. The first comment was by Muffy St. Bernard in our discussion about "The Up Series" below. She talked about reality TV and its hunger for ever-more "interesting" subjects. The other comment was thinkulous's entry about the evolutionary drive for humans to develop "big brains."

The name that immediately came to mind was Albert Brooks, and since 56 Up will probably be released before his next auteur effort, I figured I'd better write about him now, while we're both still alive, instead of waiting for his next film to come out.

Brooks's first directorial effort was Real Life (1979), a riff on the attempt by PBS to produce the first serious "reality" series, An American Family (1973). Brooks and a film crew set out to record a year in the life of a family. "And it's real!" as he yells at the end. This movie revealed how closely Brooks mined the border between the comedic and the discomforting: that what is humorous, if dialed up a notch, becomes disquieting, unsettling and embarassing.

A Modern Romance (1981) was Brooks's second movie as director, and I find it characteristically alternately hilarious and painful to watch--often in the same scene. Brooks's character is chronically jealous, which leads to some hilarious situations that teeter along the edge of, and by the end of the movie fall into, pathology. It's funny, but since we like his character, we don't want to watch him cause his romance to implode. The movie has a hilarious scene in which Brooks, whose character is a movie editor, works with the late Bruno Kirby on adding foley effects to a cheesy sf movie starring George Kennedy. I use it in my movie classes to illustrate how some foley effects are added to a movie, and besides doing that, it always gets some good laughs.

Defending Your Life is my favorite of Brooks's work. The central conceit--that the afterlife is like one huge, perfect time-share vacation spot where you await your assignment to your next life--is ingenious and affords an opportunity for satire on all sorts of levels. It's here that the "big brains" come in. Brooks's life on earth is defended by Rip Torn, who plays a more evolved creature who uses more of his brain--47%, vs. 3-5% by humans. We humans are thus called "little brains." In one scene, Brooks's character is eating a heaping plate of delicious food--none of which will make him heavy, or fill him up. Torn's character has a plate with a small amount of what appears to be burnt corned-beef hash.

Brooks: What are you eating?
Torn: You wouldn't like this.
Brooks: What is it? What does it taste like?
Torn: You're curious, aren't you? Good, I like that about you. You wanna try it?
Brooks: Yeah. (Reaches over and takes a forkful.) Looks so weird. (Puts it in his mouth and immediately spits it out in disgust).
Torn: (Laughs).
Brooks: Oh, my God.
Torn: A little like horseshit, huh?
Brooks: (Nods, with his napkin shoved over his mouth and audibly gulping with distaste).
Torn: As you get smarter, you begin to manipulate your senses. This tastes much different to me than it does to you.
Brooks: Eeeew. This is what smart people eat?

Brooks's comedy is overt and sly at the same time. There's the gag, that smart people's food tastes horrible, and then there's the subtext--that smart people like terrible things. Later, Brooks goes to a comedy club called "The Bomb Shelter." There, a smart comedian is making jokes about little brains, most of which are unfunny. When he asks Brooks, "How did you die?" Brooks answers, "On stage--like you." The audience laughs. Exactly how smart are these people?

Brooks manages to thrust in another almost unbearably painful scene, during which he has to watch himself as a small child witness an argument between his parents. Most of the scenes replayed from his previous life have been funny: this knocks the breath out of you.

Brooks's next two films, Mother and The Muse, each have their moments, but are generally disappointing. His latest movie, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, was generally panned, but I thought it was a return to much of his previous form. A joke on outsourcing requires the audience to pay attention to what is happening in the background of a scene, on two different occasions. Similarly, the main joke behind the comedy concert that Brooks gives contains several different layers, and takes time for the audience's realization of these layers to develop. This is the least unsettling of Brooks's movies, perhaps because of the potential for explosive adverse reaction if it became too unsettling.

Albert Brooks's comedy takes patience, intelligence, and sensitivity to understand, and ususally provokes some thought afterwards. To think that he and Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler owe the same TV show their first big breaks.

"And it's real!"

Added later: What makes those lines I quoted from Defending Your Life charactertistically Brooksian is Torn's character saying, "You're curious, aren't you? Good, I like that about you." It adds nothing to the joke per se, and it seems to make Torn into a nice guy, until we realize that he's (a) looking for anything that will buttress his defense of this loser, and (b) he's a condescending prat.

Mick Travis and the Deadly Quadrangle

I suppose this is as good a time as any to finally get around to watching Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968). I'm getting near the end of the "Up Series" of documentaries, in which at least three of the boys attended schools much like the public school depicted in Anderson's film. And in another ten (?) days, the final volume of the most celebrated series of novels about British public schools ever written, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, will be released.

The first thought that occurs to my mind is that I don't have enough "real-world" evidence to go on about British public schools ("public" here meaning upper-class and exclusive) to make a considered judgment, even though I've been absorbing British culture all my life. How realistic is the depiction of public schools meant to be in If....? Was corporal punishment by other students still allowed in the late Sixties? (I know the young Eric Blair and other Etonians were rejecting it in the early Twenties.) Was OTC mandatory in the late Sixties, as depicted here? The precise nature of reality is important because so much of If.... is a fantasy, and that fantasy is never clearly demarcated.

If.... is the story of three public-school sixth-formers who rebel against their school finally by shooting and blowing up their classmates, masters, and their families. Of course, the shadow of Columbine looms over such a depiction. And issues from that tragedy span reality and fiction: bullying, ostracism, labeling. The ending of the movie, almost everyone seems to agree, is a fantasy (one of the mothers, for instance, grabs a rifle and starts shooting at the rebels). Right here I'd like to make some sententious declaration, but I remember what happened to another maxim-giver at the hands of a college student ("Thou, wretched, rash, intruding fool...").

To J. K. Rowlings's credit, she does show the evils of prejudice (in this case ethnic) and of bullying as well at Hogwarts, but there are still the worship of sport (quidditch is like rugby) and the rivalries among the various houses. Harry Potter, like Mick Travis, is pretty much the outsider (again, often forced to be), and a rebel, but for a good cause.

The first time we see Mick, he is called Guy Fawkes for his hat and the scarf hiding the moustache he grew over the summer.

It's the first time audiences saw those eyes up close, those eyes that could be so faun-like, yet a centimeter wider, become a gargoyle's, and with a little liner, are those of a--well, use your gulliver and supply your own Nadsat phrase.

"La, la , la, la, life goes on"

A lot of what I'm doing lately is so immense (such as reading a three-volume, 1200-page novel written in fragmentary modernist mode) that I don't want to talk about it until I have gotten farther along. One longer viewing experience I can comment upon and recommend highly is Michael Apted's "Up Series," a seven-movie series of documentaries. Few documentaries have been constructed around an individual's chronological life as it is lived: this one does it with a group of people.

It began as a 1964 documentary about a group of seven-year-old British children selected for differences in social class, geographic location, and gender. One boy grew up on a Dales farm, three boys went to a exclusive prep school, three girls are friends at an East London school, two boys are from a children's home, two boys from a Liverpool suburb--the backgrounds and personalities are nicely varied. Most of the program consists of interviews with the children, but the narrator does come in at the end and announces the Jesuits' maxim: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man."

This bothered me--not because the Jesuits didn't say it (they did) and not because it isn't true (q.v. James Joyce). But I thought the series, which returns to this group of young Britons (and even that fact changes fairly quickly) at intervals of seven years, would show more the accuracy of Wordsworth's statement in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality": "The child is the father to the man." In other words, we'd see how much of a personality, a character, was present already in childhood and would remain in adulthood. Character is destiny--or would we learn differently?

But as the series wears on, as the filmmakers return to the same group every seven years, I learn that both points are true. What has been ground into these children as thoroughly as their gender roles are their positions in a class-demarcated society. Also, a lot of the adult is present in the child. But those are the generalizations. The heart of the series--and I'm up to 35 Up now--are the individuals. Some people's lives change abruptly--divorce, an unexpected child--some stay the same. I don't want to get into many specifics because, like fiction, one of the joys of "reading" these lives is to see what happens.

But life is not fiction in that it doesn't have an Aristotlean plot. Austen, Dickens, and other novelists often end their fictions with a marriage--but for many people, that's only the beginning. What is the shape of a life as it is lived? Its weight? And in this sense the "Up Series" resembles U.S.A.

The word that keeps returning to me in attempting to describe this series is deep. It is deeply moving at times, deeply human, and deeply humanistic. One story in particular is almost ineffably sad. I'm holding my breath, so to speak, for the last two installments.

What cold little hands...

One more Bjorling clip--I have to, because this one always makes my jaw drop and my eyes water. It's from Act 1 of Puccini's La Boheme, "Che gelida manina," and in this case, I do know what it means--it's the title of this post. Rodolfo, having met Mimi, is now beginning, in that quaint Victorian sense, to make love to her.

This recording comes from 1938, which means it was recorded on 78 rpm records. They have done a superb job of cleaning it up, but still--the power of Bjorling's voice is almost frightening. I used to think Pav was supreme in this aria--but he can't hold a candle to Bjorling. What was it like to hear him live? Soaring. Searing.

Rocking the Dikes

I wanted to put a song here that was the complete opposite of my last post's subject, so I was listening to a YouTube clip of the Who singing "Long Live Rock," where Pete Townshend is so drunk that he almost falls into Keith Moon's drum kit, and Moon laughs his ass off, when I noticed a clip from the same British show--The Old Grey Whistle Test--of a favorite song I had completely forgotten about for decades: "Sylvia" by the Dutch group Focus.

It's coupled with their only U.S. hit, "Hocus Pocus," which features the vocal--what to call them--acrobatics? pyrotechnics? inanities? of Thijs van Leer: let's say "unique vocal stylings." Jan Akkerman, the guitar player, was always more interesting to me.

"The sweet power of music"

In a famous passage in E. M. Forster's Howards End, the Schlegel sisters attend a concert that includes Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Forster describes Helen's reaction to its third movement as a vision of goblins marching across the world. Thus Forster proves that it is almost impossible to write about music in words or images that can bridge the gap between the spirits hearing the same piece.

In Merchant of Venice, Jessica tells Lorenzo, "I am never merry when I hear sweet music," and he answers, "The reason is your spirits are attentive." Much of this interchange was set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, itself a gorgeous work. All this is prelude to a piece I found wandering through the slim pickings of classical fare available on You Tube. I normally would not draw anyone's attention to a recording that is played over a static picture, but the music is so beautiful, and the voices so unforgettable, that I had to. It's Jussi Bjorling, the immortal Swedish tenor, and Robert Merrill, baritone, singing the duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers.



I have no idea what they are singing about, nor do I want to know. I want to bask in Bjorling's effortless purity of tone and Merrill's perfect blending with and support of Bjorling. I just want that stream of melody, that "concord of sweet sounds," as Lorenzo calls it, to reach inside me and touch that within me that is immortal. One response to this video on YouTube was, "It's because of stuff like this that I bother trying to stay alive."

Lorenzo says of the music of the spheres:

Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

When listening to this recording, I think I, at least, come pretty close.

P.S. I came across this comment to another video of Bjorling: "The beauty of Jussi Bjorling's voice is the clarity and his annunciation." Well, the word should be "enunciation," but in this case, it's a felix lapsis, a happy slip. The word becomes fleshed by the artist's voice.

Punks

Sitting here with actinic afterimages smoldering in my retinas, miniscule grains of spent gunpowder lining my air passages down to my lungs, and mosquito bites pebbling my thighs and biceps and forehead, I consider the primitive device I used in another vain attempt to discourage those summer pests--the humble punk, which also doubles as a fireworks igniter, and whose pleasant, slightly rancid odor always evokes memories of past summers in me.

I thought about the lowly punk because John Dos Passos mentions it in the first volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, The 42nd Parallel; according to him, young women walking out on a summer's night at the beginning of the twentieth century would place one in their hair to ward off mosquitoes. I found that fascinating--the same device used over one hundred years later, for much the same purpose. It is a unifying object, linking centuries together, and in my own life, linking decades. (The word "punk" with this denotation derives, it is supposed, from a Native American word, first applied to spongy growths on oaks used for tinder.)

A lot more about U.S.A. to come, but just this thought inspired by a summer night with fireworks: words are cement, glue, link, tinder, explosive--all at once.

Through the Eyes of a Child

No, not the Moody Blues--but the events of The Fallen Idol--a 1948 collaboration between writer Graham Greene and director Carol Greene. Their later work together included the iconic The Third Man, but this movie is almost as good, and covers some of the same themes, including perceptions, loyalty between friends, and when that loyalty has to be sacrificed.

A seven-year-old boy is friends with a butler, who is having a clandestine romance with a younger woman. Almost all the events of the movie are seen through this boy's eyes, and it is up to us to interpret what is happening--and what the boy thinks is happening. (As David Lodge points out in an essay accompanying the film, Greene probably picked up this twist from Henry James's novel What Maisie Knew.) The boy is played with remarkable skill by Bobby Henrey, and the butler is nicely underplayed by Ralph Richardson. The set--a five-level replication of a foreign embassy in London--allows Reed all kinds of shots showing the boy as an observer, and his judicious use of Dutch angles (those askew, out-of-plumb shots) is more effective, I think, than his flamboyant use of them in The Third Man.

The still shows the wealth of acting talent that Reed worked with--Jack Hawkins, Richardson, Bernard Lee, Henrey, and Denis O'Dea. Criterion's remastering is characteristically meticulous: during Henrey's nightmarish odyssey through London streets, each cobblestone, each brick, shines with reflected light. It's almost a rehearsal for Holly Martins's vertiguous chase of Harry Lime through Vienna's fitfully illuminated streets. Supposedly, Greene liked this movie even better than The Third Man, and I can see why.

Japan Confidential

A popular singer and an artist, staying at a resort, have their pictures taken together on the balcony of the singer's room and are accused of engaging in a torrid affair by a scandal sheet. They sue the rag. "Ripped from today's headlines"? No--it's the plot of Akira Kurosawa's 1950 movie, Scandal.

This sort of story, of course, was going on in the U.S. too, particularly with Confidential magazine, lawsuits against it eventually putting it out of business. It's fascinating to see it happening in Japan as well. In fact, they did not even have an equivalent for the word "scandal": they use the English word. The entire movie is about the influence of the West on Japan, after five years of Occupation.

Takashi Shimura (to the right in the still) plays the alcoholic lawyer who approaches the artist (played by a young-looking Toshiro Mifune) to sue the magazine, Amour (its title is another example of Western inroads). He has a daughter who is suffering from T.B., and the prelude to the climax of the movie occurs at Christmas, when Mifune brings a fully decorated Christmas tree for the daughter on the back of his motorcycle (when the neighborhood kids ask him who he is, he replies, "Santa Krausis!") When Shimura comes home drunk that night, his daughter is being serenaded by the singer (with Mifune on organ) performing "Silent Night." He runs out to a tavern, Mifune following, where a band is playing "Buttons and Bows," and later on, the entire tavern joins together in a drunken chorus of "Auld Lang Syne." Is all this Westernization good or bad? As far as the possibility of "scandal" goes, yes. Does this mean the same for Christmas and New Year's?

Four months later, Rashomon debuted, and Japanese cinema became widely known in the Western world. Mifune and Kurosawa would go on to one of the greatest collaborations in the history of cinema (Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, High and Low, Yojimbo, Red Beard), but this early movie shows that the influence of the West, while inspiring in its cinematic aspect, also brought dangers to Japan for which they had no words to express.