Five Easy Pieces reconsidered

 I’m not sure if I’ve seen Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970) since the time it originally came out. But it was quite the film in its day and is still considered one of the seminal films of the era, and in American movies generally. Why it was one of the seminal films of the era had to do with what that era was all about – disillusionment with American consumer culture, the anti-establishment counterculture and the rise of social alienation in an IBM world where individuals no longer counted. Well, in Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson as Bobby Dupea is Mister Alienation Plus. The film (screened recently on TCM) opens with him on a drill rig. He’s a good ol boy, or acting like one, and pals around with his jocular friend Elton (Billy "Green" Bush) whose life on and off the job is One Big Party. Bobby also has a girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), whom he at turns can’t stand and is embarrassed by. Rayette, a waitress, aspires to be a country and western singer. And she’s a bit of a ditz. Bobby is perpetually brooding. He doesn’t like his job, is sick of life with Rayette (who gets pregnant), and obviously wants something else - but what? One day the phone rings and he's told his father has had a stroke. This offers Bobby a chance to escape. And he almost does, but conscience tugs and he asks Rayette to go along. They pick up a couple of hippie hitchhikers, one of them a bizarre early eco type who incessantly complains about the “filth” in the world. "Alaska,” where she's headed, “is very clean.” They head north to Washington State where Bobby’s family lives. Along the way there is the iconic restaurant scene – epitomizing America’s so called unwavering consumer culture, where Bobby confronts a waitress who won’t give him the breakfast he wants. Later, Bobby dumps Rayette at a motel and drives to a bucolic island where his family’s grand house is. Turns out everyone in his family is cultured, including him, who once had the makings of a great pianist. There he meets Catherine (Susan Anspach), with whom he has sex, despite her being engaged to his brother. But Catherine soon wants no part of someone “who has no respect for himself.” The moody, angry Bobby continues in his meandering ways at this sour family reunion of sorts, and later, as the film goes on. Okay, I get the alienation part. But the film never explains why Bobby is as he is. And the problem with the film’s plot is that most of it sinks into a cul-de-sac of a soap opera at the family house. I didn’t really care. Nicholson was heralded for his performance. After having done another seminal film, Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) the year before, with a similar theme, the accolades kept rolling in. But, for me, the best acting of the film was Black as Rayette, playing the unsophisticated rural gal to a T. And I was also pleasantly surprised to discover Lois Smith as Bobby’s sister Partita – a rather cute and endearing character. The last time I saw Smith was almost 50 years later as an octogenarian white haired mother in Michael Almereyda's 2017 Marjorie Prime!

The film which epitomizes London's 'Swinging Sixties'

To me, the film which most epitomizes Britain’s “Swinging Sixties” is John Schlesinger’s 1965 Darling (Criterion Channel) starring Julie Christie. And Christie, in turn, most personifies the archetypical “It Girl” of the period (both on screen and off). This movie has it all as a testament to its time – mid-Sixties pop fashion, social commentary in the age of Ban the Bomb, and an oh-so-bored rising sophisticate encircled by the height of self-satisfied post-war pop culture and its subsets in the London modelling, arts and media worlds. The movie opens with a billboard of an emaciated African child being postered over by the newly glamorous model-du-jour Diana Scott (Christie). Not long after Robert (Dirk Bogarde), host of a TV arts show, accidentally meets Scott doing a “streeter” and they fall in love, jettisoning their married households. From there it’s a tour of London’s elite art and fashion sets with parties and charity balls, one in particular descending into obscene farce by the hypocrisy of the over-the-top fat cats attending it. Robert, however, is bookish. Diana is not and becomes restless. She meets Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey), an advertising exec (Brand, get it?), and they begin a relationship. Miles exploits and backhandedly disparages her by starring her in a trashy B movie. Miles, a jet setter par excellence, takes her to Paris and a party filled by the avantgarde where bizarre dance rituals and cross-dressing take place. As the face of a chocolate company’s advertising campaign Scott is dubbed The Happiness Girl, ironic given her increasing descent into depression and loneliness. While on an Italian commercial shoot she meets a prince (José Luis de Vilallonga, perhaps best known for his role opposite Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards 1961)) who proposes marriage. She rejects it and heads back to England, where she realizes the emptiness of her high-flying set and decides to seek stability. She marries Prince Cesare after all, and, like Grace Kelly who married the prince of Monaco, becomes an Italian princess and stepmother of the prince’s brood. But even the opulence in a Medici villa proves, well, unsatisfying. The princess dines all alone (her husband presumably with a mistress) in evening dress surrounded by impassive servants. In the end, modelling, glamour, elitism – it’s all a crushing bore and crashing nosedive into personal oblivion. Christie won the Oscar for best actress for the role and it’s obvious why – personifying a rebellious vacuous character who doesn’t know what she wants. And, oh yes, the louche score by John Dankworth beautifully underlines the theme. 

Ah, The Conformist, after all these years

Watching Il conformista (The Conformist) the other night on Criterion Channel took me back to the early Seventies and my glorious (or not so, ha) university days. This 1970 classic, possibly Bernardo Bertolucci’s best film, was released at a time when colleges were still in their post-1960s student ferment. And so a film by a Marxist film director on an anti-Fascist theme, shown by the weekend campus film society, was all the rage. But of course the film transcends mere two-dimensional politics. And one doesn’t have to be a Red to see the utter villany of Benito Mussolini’s wartime regime. Take for instance, the score by Georges Delerue, with its beautifully mournful opening to its ironically sprightly juxtapositions at key dramatic turns in the story. Then there are the characters. A very young-looking Jean-Louis Trintignant as the lead Marcello Clerici, a shrouded in mystery Humphrey Bogart type with long coat and fedora. He’s on a mission to assassinate, in Paris, an exiled anti-Fascist professor, Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). The film is not just a political tract but a psycho-sexual and sociological one, with various explanations for Marcello’s affinity to Fascism and his desire to be “normal.” There is a homosexual overture by an adult in his youth, which initially entices but repels him. A scion of a rich family with a frivolously indifferent mother and father in an asylum, he seeks ordinariness. So much so that he pursues forgiveness by the Roman Catholic Church and marries a very average, dimwitted, girl, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli). Then there are the scenes I remember best: the professor’s bi-sexual wife Anna (Dominique Sanda) trying to initiate an affair with Giulia, the group of acolytes like bodyguards – other obvious intellectuals – guarding professor Quadri. The film’s opening sequence of Marcello lying in a hotel room cast in violent red as the neon sign outside blinks on and off, the lesbian-inspired nightclub scene where both wives lead a crowd of dancers cheerfully encircling the alienated and morose Marcello. Then there is Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography: the angled camera shots from above as Marcello walks the dark Paris streets on the way to his mission, his diminution by towering monuments in Rome’s Piazza Augusto Imperatore, the beautifully stark art deco interiors. And, again, the characters, almost iconic, after all these years: the utter frivolity of Marcello’s wife Giulia who speaks in cliches and giggles inappropriately. And, in the end, Marcello’s ultimate cowardice who, after Mussolini’s downfall, turns colors and denounces even his best friend as a Fascist, a stand-in for himself.

It's that severe black chin wave cut

 Constantly disappointed by Netflix offerings – I know I know – I did discover - surprisingly - that Netflix offers back episodes of Rod Serling’s famed 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. I almost fell out of my chair.....Also on Netflix I started watching a British TV series Behind her Eyes which is a good psychological drama of a threesome set in contemporary London. The only problem is that the creator (Steve Lightfoot) had to fit the story into the full six

episodes. In doing so dragged it out incrementally into a slogging bore. I stopped watching after episode four. But speaking at that series the woman who plays the wife Adele (Eve Hewson, top photo) bares an uncanny resemblance to another woman in a movie I watched yesterday, Diane Baker (bottom photo) in Hitchcock’s 1964 Marnie (TCM). She also had that jet black severely cut chin hair wave and that malevolent “behind her eyes” look. In Marnie Baker plays Lil, Mark's (Sean Connery) former sister-in-law who has designs on the spendthrift entrepreneur but daggers for his new wife Marnie (Tippi Hedren)…..I’ve taken a pass on the HBO series Allen vs Farrow, a reportedly harrowing account of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow’s relationship and Allen’s alleged sexual abuse of adopted daughter Dylan. It’s a one-sided doc told from Dylan and Farrow’s POV. Those who’ve seen it say it’s totally convincing and you’ll never watch an Allen film or think of him again in the same way.  A few months ago I read his memoir Apropos of Nothing (the title isn’t about the controversy) in which he contributes about 75 pages to the allegation and his highly controversial love affair and marriage to Farrow’s other adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. And I thought that was the final word on the matter. But no. The HBO doc is one-sided since Allen didn’t participate and he has denounced it as full of fabrications. Ok, I realize the book is also one-sided and I remain to be convinced otherwise. But, as with virtually all highly controversial and charged subjects of this nature, I come down on the side of the law. And two investigations found Allen not to be at fault……And, yes, speaking of Woody, I can see where his humor comes from, at least in part. In his book he talks of how Bob Hope was such an influence. I watched two Hope films yesterday - My Favorite Brunette (Elliott Nugent, 1947) and The Iron Petticoat (Ralph Thomas, 1956) and I see the same type of witty zingers. Told he has an old face Hope's character replies "It comes with the body, it's a set," and facing the gas chamber, "This is the worst last meal I've had"..... Interesting, I subscribe to the remarkable Criterion Channel but I find myself more inclined to watch TCM. And the only thing I can conclude from that is that TCM dictates a schedule. Criterion allows me freedom to choose. Obviously I can’t handle the freedom! 

Playing hooky for Dirk Bogarde's films

 

I played hooky last Tuesday this week because after all it isn’t every day I get a chance to watch seven Dirk Bogarde films in a row, courtesy of TCM. And Bogarde, hands down, is one of my favorite actors, perhaps my favorite. I always associate him with psychological thrillers, (The Servant, Accident, The Night Porter) having a persona evoking intelligence and sophistication hiding a malevolent nature. But as these films show – and he actually starred in more than 70 others – he had a kaleidoscopic range. Bogarde was also an intellectual having written several novels, a sweeping memoir, journalism, and he was a painter.....The first film was Cast a Dark Shadow (Lewis Gilbert 1955). It has Bogarde at his film noirish best, the killer of women – wives – for profit. Bogarde said he loved the “unwholesomeness of the hero.” See what I mean? The superb Margaret Lockwood plays opposite and “pound for pound” they are a dual who have met their match. The next film was Libel (Anthony Asquith 1959). Again we have Bogarde as the alleged nefarious character, an imposter concealing his true identity even from his wife (Olivia de Havilland). He also plays a dual role as a wartime buddy and an uncanny lookalike, the basis of the story’s plot. The flic also features a terrific courtroom drama and is a whodunit that will keep you guess right to the end. Next, The Angel Wore Red (Nunnally Johnson 1960) a very different kind of film where Bogarde plays, of all things (but then he

played a wide character variety) a Catholic priest. A rebel, he quits the Spanish church during that country’s civil war, finding himself on knife’s edge as he appeases the ruling Communists yet is constantly suspected of being a Franco rebel. It’s really a love story with his character surreptitiously becoming involved with a prostitute played by Ava Gardner. A bit draggy but still worth the watch. The next film was Victim (Basil Dearden 1961) in which Bogarde plays Melville Farr, an up-and-coming barrister investigating, with personal implications, a blackmail ring targetting London gay men during a time when homosexuality was outlawed. Here Bogarde’s is a character of high integrity employing some skullduggery against those – self-described moralists – who sought to do major harm to very innocent men. The fifth film The Password is Courage (Andrew L. Stone 1962) has to be a model for the 1960s hit TV sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, the similarities are just too many. Based on a true memoir of a Brit POW, this amusing take has Bogarde as the protagonist who leads a group of Stalig prisoners as they mock, undermine and sabotage various German works. The camp leadership appear as imbeciles as Bogarde (in the subsequent Hogan role) proves the real one in charge and yes there is even a heavy set model for the TV sitcom’s “I see nothing!” Sgt. Schultz. Sixth on the agenda was Our Mother’s House (Jack Clayton 1967), a dark drama of a group of children whose mother dies leaving them to run the house by themselves. Bogarde as Charlie Hook, their dad, estranged and a carousing

womanizer and gambler, haphazardly returns to take over the household, with mixed results. Finally, there was the sublime Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti 1971) an atmospheric piece based on the Thomas Mann story of a famed composer trying to recover his health in the Italian city. A study of fame, loneliness, art, homosexuality, beauty and longing, if you’re not swept away by the stunning visuals you will be by the Mahler score. Bogarde’s character is restrained with few words but these and his physical gestures are enough to define an aging artist coming to terms with his career and life.

You can catch more Bogarde when the Criterion Channel highlights several of his films March 28: The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954), Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), Victim (1961), The Servant (1963), Darling (1965), Accident (1967), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), The Night Porter (1974).

Rapid-fire reviews from two weeks of flick watching

Here are rapid fire reviews and observations of movie watching over the last couple of weeks, in chronological order dating from last night. Kicking and Screaming (Netflix), Noah Baumbach’s 1995 first feature. Pedestrian and stilted compared to his later great films and – wow – college grads were so preppy then…Roger Vadim’s 1964 La Ronde (Criterion) featured a French-speaking Jane Fonda in this remake of licentiousness and male chauvinism…They Live by Night (Criterion), Nicholas Ray’s 1948 noir, featured Farley Granger (even then open about his bisexuality – bravo) and the sweet Cathy O’Donnell as a latter day Bonnie and Clyde…I love 1960s romantic comedies but Jack Donohue’s 1965 Marriage on the Rocks (TCM), with Sinatra, Martin and Kerr, descends into phoned-in silliness…Earl McEvoy’s 1950 The Killer That Stalked New York uncannily presages the Covid epidemic told from a public health perspective about a smallpox outbreak. Even the vaccines runout and officials have to kick drug companies’ asses to produce more…1950’s A Life of Her Own (Criterion) is a quintessential George Cukor “woman’s film” and a searing personal tale of ambition and greed starring Lana Turner…Lovers and Lollipops (Criterion) (photo) is a refreshingly candid window – with a documentary feel – into the lives of two people meeting and falling in love all the while trying to balance their relationship with the demands of a seven-year-old. Great 1950s NYC visuals and directed by Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin. My fave of all listed here..John Stahl’s 1935 version of Magnificent Obsession (Criterion) suffers I suspect from the same problem as the 1954 version, of which I’ve seen only part: a worthy but non-too-interesting story of loving devotion following tragedy, with Irene Donne and Robert Taylor…Finally Jacques Rivette’s 1957 Paris Belongs to Us (Criterion) follows a group of “lost” intellectuals, alienated to a T, in this kind of existentialist thriller, though don’t expect your adrenalin to overflow.  

Good to see theatres have re-opened again, at least in Michigan, as of Feb 1. And at 25 per cent capacity. Thrilling to see full page movie listings in Detroit dailies. Still locked down on Windsor side however as we’ve finally reopened into ‘Red’ phase but no indoor theatres and outdoor drive-ins, well,  too frozen! Emagine’s CEO Anthony LaVerde told me it’s still “nearly impossible” to be viable at a quarter full. Art house Landmark Main is also using the same safety protocols devised by National Assoc. of Theatre Owners. Only question is: will they close a third time?

Hard to watch but a stellar performance

The first 30 minutes of the new critically acclaimed Netflix film Pieces of a Woman are not particularly easy to watch. And overall the film depicts the angst of a woman stemming from the death of her newborn child. But the film’s actors, pacing, score and realistic melancholy makes for something of an artistic achievement. Hungarian Kornél Mundruczó directed from a screenplay by his partner Kata Wébe, based on their own experience of losing a child. (Martin Scorsese is the film’s executive producer.) Vanessa Kirby (The Crown) plays Martha, and her partner Sean by Shia LaBeouf. The film’s story takes place on a number of intertwined levels. There is the post-partum depression Martha undergoes and how it affects her own life and those around her. There are the ensuing relationship strains with Sean, who superficially seems incompatible as he’s just a regular guy construction worker (“I’m not an intellectual,” he protests during an argument) and she a more sophisticated professional. Add to the mix the dynamics between Martha’s mother Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn), overbearing and guilt-tripping - “if you’d done it my way you’d be holding your baby in your arms right now”. Her way would have been giving birth in a hospital but Martha opted for home birth. The problem – the crux of the story - is the chosen midwife couldn’t arrive fast enough when Martha went into labor. So a substitute, Eva (Canadian actress Molly Parker) arrives. All goes well until it doesn’t. And the midwife ends up being charged criminally. The story is supposed to take place in Boston but Montreal is the set for most of the story, the movie shot during frozen winter days in December 2019 (I knew right away the outdoor scenes were  too frosty for Beantown!). The acting all around is very good – especially Kirby as she slides deeper into depression and psychological fissures become fractures. But I was most impressed by Sarah Snook as Martha cousin Suzanne, whose nonchalance performance captivated me. I was surprised Shia LaBeouf was used, given his stream of various personal controversies including plagiarism and alleged sexual assault (Netflix removed LeBeouf from the film’s publicity). But he’s a stellar talent, I suppose. Besides the acting and pacing Pieces of a Woman is underlined by a gentle and contemplative score by Canadian composer Howard Shore, known for his work with David Cronenberg.