Street Scene (1931): King Vidor and Sylvia Sidney

Posted on April 26, 2022 by 4 Star Films

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Film at its finest is able to use images to leave an indelible impression on an audience. King Vidor’s Street Scene opens with a telling montage. Kids being sprayed by a hose in a street. A slab of ice being carried off by a worker. A man swatting gnats away from his horse. A dog sprawled out on the pavement. There’s more, but we already get the idea: it’s a blisteringly hot day in a New York neighborhood.

The foreknowledge that this is a stage-bound studio street corner makes the “scene” no less engaging. There would be later pictures to channel the same intimacy and sense of a world — some of the Warner Bros. Cagney pictures or Dead End spring to mind. However, here we also get a sense of a myriad of voices — even immigrant stories — and plenty of people chewing the fat all across the city.

While it’s faux reality, it does feel like a wonderful piece of world-building. We get to know the whole row of people for minutes at a time. What Vidor has done is pluck out a moment in time for us to just sit in and relish. People shuffle by in and out of frame, down the sidewalk, poking heads out of second-story windows, or lounging on the front steps.

Beulah Bondi, in her debut (God bless her soul), is one of the first we get to know. When she’s not out walking her dog or bemoaning the weather, she’s gossipin’ about other folks. Namely, Mrs. Marraunt (Estelle Taylor), who is rumored to have a male suitor. She’s married of course. The busybodies love to titter on about this juicy piece of scandal. They fail to recognize how lonely she is with a husband (David Landau) who is totally absent from her life.

Sylvia Sidney doesn’t show up until 20 minutes into the movie although she could be considered the star of the picture. Recently, she’s been accompanying a local boss (Walter Miller) who has the hots for her. It’s possible he can get her out of her humble community. It’s not the nicest place. Her father is the same absent, aloof breadwinner and her mother is constantly agitated and beside herself with nerves. Their home life is hardly stable, and it’s quite public given the close-knit existence with folks window to window in the tenement.

In one of the intermittent visual montages, Vidor captures daily life in the community adding some lovely touches you couldn’t get any other way. With the very focused framework of this individual housing complex, the story builds out from here, layering in the moments on top of one another.

When Sidney asks her Jewish neighbor and childhood friend Sam (William Collier Jr.) how you’re supposed to act in the synagogue — she has a funeral to go to — the very pointed question feels genuine. She’s hardly interrogating him. Instead, she’s curious and surprised he has no spiritual beliefs.

All his knowledge and truth come out of the many books he consumes. She holds the sentiment “You gotta believe in something to be a little happy.” We hear little more about such matters but the hope might as well color her entire outlook on life even in the midst of tragedy. Their Romeo and Juliet friendship feels like a minor caveat underlying entirely different familial issues.

In one particular scene, Vidor instantly mobilizes what feels like the whole mass of humanity to overwhelm the movie. At its apex, New York comes alive. In fact, a moment must be taken to make a stunning acknowledgment. There’s an uncanny resemblance to Spike Lee’s incisive tour de force Do The Right Thing.

Surely as such a prominent cinephile, Spike Lee has seen the picture or somehow imbibed it. The cursory similarities begin with the heatwave and the cross-section of humanity, and then come down to the same inherent eye for human drama as well as intercultural relationships. Both directors feel fully engaged even immersed in their worlds.

For his part, King Vidor intuitively understands the material coaxing a great deal more depth out of it than what initially meets the eye. Part of what differentiates this picture is its lead. Sidney is the picture of stoic beauty going on bravely in the face of unimaginable tragedy. There’s a strength and assurance present in her being but also a quiet dignity. We watch her actions and responses and each and everyone feels enriched with candor.

It’s the contemporary world distilled into a moment — the street bustling with people of all sorts of backgrounds, beliefs, and fears. The picture is 90 years old, and yet I look at it rather incredulously. Not because of what doesn’t translate, but because so much still resonates within its frames.

There are gossips, lonely people, bullies, and young dreamers trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The world is still made up of all sorts, and when we’re thrown together, we very rarely agree. We have to learn how to live with one another each and every day. Sometimes we fail miserably.

In its closing moments, the world returns to the same shorthand of children playing in the street. Sidney walks off determined to move forward with her life by getting away from the street that has represented her entire existence thus far.

At the same time, it has so many memories attached to it and also instigated the greatest traumas she’s ever had to endure. For such a short, stagy endeavor, Street Scene is deceptively rendered. Vidor somehow makes it chockful of what can only be described as human pathos. From the days of The Crowd, he still gets it and puts it to good use. Sidney does the rest.

Alfred Newman’s theme would take on a life of its own as a motif recurring again and again in numerous of the studio’s movies. Here it plays almost as ironic counterpoint. A straightforward score would have brimmed with some kind of dramatic crescendo. Newman’s work, which I have heard referred to as Gershwinesque, is far more playful. I would stop short of saying it’s unfitting. More so, it accentuates a different kind of tone altogether.

3.5/5 Stars

The Incident (1967): Psychological Torture on a Train

Posted on February 17, 2022 by 4 Star Films

Before there ever is an incident to speak of in Larry Peerce’s film, we open on the lowest scum of the streets, played by Martin Sheen and Tony Musante, shooting pool and kicking up any trouble they can manage. Between catcalling after women and ambushing pedestrians for 8 lousy bucks, they’re still starved for more action.

It’s all a game to them, an adrenaline rush to get their Sunday night fix before the week sets in. What’s most telling are the perspective shots that can best be described as sociopathic POVs. Even momentarily they get us inside their heads, and we realize just how debased they are.

The opening display shows us who we are dealing with and what we are getting ourselves into. Because they all but evaporate from the movie for a time. But in the back of our minds, we know they will not be gone forever. It’s inevitable that they will return to wreak some kind of havoc.

The rest of the movie is an act of building out from here. We meet other supporting players from other cross-sections of society. There’s the husband and wife (Ed MacMahon and Diana Van der Vlis) who stayed out late with their daughter and quibble about hailing a taxi or not.

Another elderly couple (Jack Gilford and Thelma Ritter) bickers about their grown son who seems to have a perfectly situated life with a wife and kids and still seems ungrateful. Then, there the young lovers — the guy’s quite the Romeo (Victor Arnold), and he’s only interested in a girl if she puts out. His tentative girlfriend (Donna Mills) feels pressured but also anxious to win his aggressive affections.

If it’s not evident already, almost all of the characters come in couplets because there is something poetic and practical about it. Everyone has a talking partner, someone to nag and gripe with over the course of the movie. They all have their petty problems and individual relational dynamics.

These are the seeds of conflict, ready to combust under the right circumstances, and they do. One of the more light-hearted pairings includes two soldiers (Beau Bridges and Robert Bannard) who are currently on leave visiting some of their parents. Just wait…

We can see what the screenwriters are working towards already. All these stories are slowly interwoven together, crosscutting between each individual pair as they make their way to their respective train stops. Each group has its bit of business to take up as they file aboard all but oblivious of everyone else.

Although the black and white does wonders in making the film feel older than even its release year of 1967, there’s probably one thread that signifies the cultural moment better than most. Brock Peters and Ruby Dee play opposite one another, not as a groveling black couple but as a husband seething with militant desires and his high-minded social working wife who evidently listened more to Dr. King than Malcolm X. Even here we see the tension stretched out taut between them.

What coalesces almost feels like a psychological experiment put to film. Sure enough, Joe (Musante) and Artie (Sheen) come on the scene cackling and drinking like they have all night — going crazy and swinging their way through the train car like a pair of monkeys. For anyone who’s ridden the subway, you can witness some weird things to be sure, but there’s an immediate knee-jerk reaction to mind your own business.

This movie tests these principles whether it’s Good Samaritan syndrome or the diffusion of responsibility. The crux of our story is triggered when the two malcontents accost a homeless man snoozing on the train, prepared to light his boot on fire. Only one bystander (Gary Merrill) tries to casually get them to stop their antagonism, and it’s the first time where the invisible bubble is broached. When he encroaches on their anarchic freedoms, they look to intimidate him.

What’s made plain throughout the movie is the horrifying indifference as the thugs have free rein to perpetrate infractions and humiliations on the people around them. Sheen now is the big name of the two thugs, but Musante is arguably the most chilling, giving a performance that makes the insides crawl with its cruel manipulation. He literally walks through the camera, lumbering around and ruling the car like a vindictive prison warden where the prisoners are now running things.

Although all these moments of duress feel compartmentalized; no one is let out of their incisive games, and each group is hustled and harried with all sorts of mind games laced with the threat of menace. Old men, old women, children, pretty girls, soldiers. Each one has a weakness and some pressure point to be prodded.

Oddly enough, this is the black man’s paradise watching white people degrade and torment each other for his personal pleasure. Little does he know, he can’t be an impartial observer forever. He too is thrown headlong into the fiery inferno. He too comes face to face with a mortifying breaking point.

By the end, Sheen and Musante aren’t human anymore, and not just because they are movie characters. They feel like evil demons looking to undermine everyone and bring their victims faced to face with their greatest fears and humiliations as they systematically make their way through the car triggering just about everyone.

There’s no conceivable end to this movie other than Beau Bridges taking on Martin Sheen as they look to beat each other to a pulp. It seems almost prescient because these men would become fairly big names in future generations, but for now, they represent the youth movement and where it could take us in the ’70s.

The aftermath of the picture feels equally indicative of the times. When the police rush on the scene, they are quick to apprehend the one black man and pin him down, only to realize their mistake and amend it in the heat of the moment.

There’s something poignant about the final coda: The drunk remains sprawled out on the floor and each and every bystander steps over him. It’s like one final symbol to show the threshold they’ve bypassed. There’s no turning back and whether they realize it or not, The Incident might embody an event that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. They managed to live another day but at what cost? It’s the kind of trauma causing heroes to come out of the woodwork and others to totally capitulate.

It feels like a film perfectly caught between two decades. It’s grittier and more audacious than I was expecting. But then again, this is a low-budget film and the year is 1967. We’re already getting Virginia Wolf, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, and Bonnie and Clyde, the forerunners to a generation of New Hollywood films that would blow the cover off what was permissible in the Hollywood scene. The Incident has some of that, but it also has a wealth of players and a premise that feels planted in a different era.

I recently watched The Silver Thread and it has the same distinction. Although it’s far less graphic, these are films totally suspended in time, hearkening back to the ’50s and still somehow forewarning the films of the future. The Incident, in particular, feels like an antecedent to Mean Streets, Badlands, The French Connection, and even Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3. It’s fascinating to see glimpses of this emerging generation, especially in a film that, while rarely being discussed in a broader context, is still full of genuine heart-stopping drama.

4/5 Stars

The King of Comedy (1982): Celebrity or Notoriety

Posted on December 7, 2021 by 4 Star Films

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“Better to be king for a night than shmuck for a lifetime.”

The opening moments of The King of Comedy, as iconic star Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), is ushered to a waiting car surrounded by the chaotic frenzy of thrill-seekers, capture the essence of celebrity in the modern age.

Jerry gets shoved about and manhandled as an obsessive young fan sneaks into his car and nearly squeezes him to death. The freeze-frame credits capturing her outstretched hands on the windowpane of his car has Scorsese’s sense of the cinematic. As Ray Charles’ “Come Rain or Come Shine” plays, we become increasingly aware of film’s ability to capture time and halt it completely.

The punchline comes in the form of one Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro). He’s an avid admirer of Jerry Langford in his own right, and he just happens to sneak into the car with Jerry as it drives away, leaving the hordes behind. Now he has his chance to consort with his agitated hero.

Rupert lets him know how he’s biding his time until he gets his big break. He’s trying not to be pushy, but he still manages to cross some invisible like as he uncomfortably follows Jerry all the way up to the steps of his apartment.

Lewis builds his performance out of playing it straight and a bit harried and belligerent. He feels much more close to home than one of his prototypical clowns. The buffoonery is mostly left for Pupkin. What Jerry Lewis brings is true-blue Hollywood pedigree and celebrity.

Meanwhile, Rupert has his own private delusions. For example a lunch with Jerry Langford where the old guard is positively begging him to take over the show for 6 weeks. This is the scenario he plays out in his head.

He also shows up at the bar presided over by a pretty girl — Rita (Diahnne Abbott), who he knew from school — and they wind up going out to dinner together (probably). Because at first, we question whether this is an illusion as well. Does it matter?

Because Rupert is enveloped in a world of hero-worship, although he takes it a step further. He wants to get to the top of the mountain with his heroes — to be one of them — with the same kind of praise and adulation. He’ll be the new king of comedy.

And yet we get a sense of how ludicrous this is. He is a man who’s done of up his living room with cardboard cutouts of Liza Minnelli and Jerry Langford (Lewis) to look like his own personal talk show. In the day before mobile phones, he clings to a payphone like a security blanket hoping to get a callback. Jerry’s going to call him back. He just knows it.

It functions as an extension, or a further perfection, of Taxi Driver‘s melding of fantasy and reality. What sets it apart is De Niro’s truly unprecedented performance; it feels more off-kilter and oaffish than we’re accustomed to seeing from him. He’s an alienated outsider, yes, but also a shmuck.

The scenes between Jerry and Rupert somehow are the richest for me because they remain at the heart and soul of his fantasy — his desire to be well-liked and accepted as a comedian — this want to actually break bread and be buddies with his hero. Haven’t we all been there? But for Rupert, it is a legitimate obsession.

There’s an imaginary marriage sequence presided over by his old high school teacher with the wedding march supplied by none other than Victor Borge. In another sequence, he gets thrown out of Jerry’s office after the umpteenth time only to show up at Jerry’s house with his girl in tow.

How did we get from one moment to the other? In the brain of Rupert Pumpkin, it’s not difficult to extrapolate. As this prolonged agony gets strung along, it becomes more and more uncomfortable and cringe-worthy with each passing minute. The servants let them in. They make themselves at home. Only for Jerry to return from the golf coursed miffed.

Because it becomes more and more apparent how unsubstantiated any relationship between Jerry and Rupert actually is. For the actors, it is par excellence with De Niro and Lewis riffing off each other for minutes on end — keeping this grating sense of conflict going.

It’s already been alluded to that The King of Comedy is about this kind of idolizing and super fandom, but it also examines what happens when fellow lunatics clash or worse yet join forces. In this picture, Rupert has Masha (Sandra Bernhardt). He makes every effort to differentiate between the two of them, but who else would hatch a nefarious scheme to kidnap Jerry Langford?

Of course, that’s what they do. There he is duct-taped in his chair — and they really do a job on him — he’s practically mummified, stuck to the seat of his chair. It’s the first phase in Rupert’s plan to get his face in front of the biggest audience possible. Forget about guest host Tony Randall. He’s going to be the new talk of the town, at least for an evening. If not for his middling standup, then certainly for kidnapping one of America’s most beloved public figures.

The key to The King of Comedy is how Scorsese seems to understand what it is to be the TV generation and to be raised on the medium of the small screen. Although he is considered one of the great cinematic directors of our times, he also understands the world a film like this engenders. Case and point is Rupert Pupkin’s climactic monologue.

He cuts away before we ever see it live. Instead, it is shown later from a bar over the fuzzy frequency of a television screen as it was meant to be. In this augmented reality of canned laughter and studio audiences, people can become like family, and they are household names. But there’s also something phony and uncomfortable about it if it’s done poorly.

Because it’s become more and more apparent there are people out there who are not looking to accumulate a currency of trust with their audience. They only want their 15 minutes of fame.

I’m not sure if The King of Comedy always works, but it does leave a lasting impression with its meandering road of awkwardness where Pubkin is a man who seems delusional, shrewd, and overwhelmingly conventional all at the same time. The final punchline is how he gets his wish and becomes a celebrity. Notoriety might be a better word for it, but in our modern landscape aren’t they really one and the same?

3.5/5 Stars

Middle of the Night (1959): Chayefsky Does May-December Romance

Posted on June 3, 2021 by 4 Star Films

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Middle of The Night proves instantly placeable thanks to its black-and-white, New York streets aesthetic. Although the name Paddy Chayefsky, emblazoned over the credits, gives us as much of an inclination of the story we are about to experience.

Because to this day, his name carries with it a hallowed note of reverence and a few distinctives. Not only did he garner the unprecedented acclaim of The Academy, his films were also always centered on characters in their individual spaces and mundane lives. His prose propelled the script into a place of primacy and his words were a form of gospel to center the story around.

While he did time in the nascent days of television where the lines between stage, screen, and theater were relatively thin, he ultimately propelled himself into the movies by maintaining his personal ethos and letting his words speak for themselves.

You might term them kitchen sink dramas, but whatever the phrase, they tackle issues of life as they happen in unfiltered ways. Analogous examples might be Marty, A Catered Affair, even a non-Chayesfy piece like Love With The Proper Stranger.

These roles were delivered on the stage by stalwarts E.G. Marshall and Eva Marie Saint, then another illustrious pair: Edward G. Robinson and Gena Rowlands. In the film, they fall to Frederic March and Kim Novak. Who you like most might fall to personal preference.

Far from having ice in her veins, Novak is nervous and skittish in all circumstances. It almost takes some getting used to and yet when you do, she feels more relatable than any other point in her career. Because she’s given up her self-assured cool and husky tones for a voice of a far more timorous nature.

March is always a splendid performer — he has a likability and an innate honesty to his characterizations. In principle, the same can be said of his overall performance here, but the element getting in the way at times is his lapses into an ethnic patois. Authentic backstory or not, it doesn’t quite suit him nor does he need it. But then my feelings started to evolve.

Because I became aware he seems to change how he speaks depending on who he’s talking to. After all, it’s not too farfetched as I have friends who lapse back into shorthand and slang to accommodate certain friends or family from a certain cultural subset. Whether or not this holds true in Middle of The Night, it hints at the complicated patchwork of interpersonal relationships human beings are constantly grappling with.

Recently I watched another Kim Novak romance, Strangers When We Meet, and its strengths fall to its extravagant Technicolor and a certain Hollywood opulence augmenting the middle-class romantic drama burning between Novak and Kirk Douglas. It is a West Coast counterpart to Middle of The Night because they are poles apart, both thematically and in the environments they take time depicting.

Here our main tension builds out of a May-December romance between an aging widower (March) and his beautiful young secretary (Novak). But while it gives the pretense of a superficial affair on the page, the brilliance of Chayefsky’s script is how he’s able to tease out the warm and tentative love budding between two people.

Lee Grant and Martin Balsam’s screentime might only accumulate to a few scenes each. However, even on the outskirts of the drama like they are, they still manage to leave a lasting impact on the story. It’s a testament to the scripting and the veteran caliber of the performers.

One scene, in particular, feels like a masterclass in stringing conversations together through overlapping ideas, cut-off sentences, and the types of asides that dot real-life conversation. Jack (Balsam) is talking about getting a sitter so they can take a vacation before tax season hits him. His wife Marilyn (Grant) — Jerry’s daughter — is preoccupied with her father’s romances. They are mismatched and going off on their own separate tangents.

Jerry doesn’t want to end up like his contemporary, the ostentatious shell-of a man (Albert Dekker), who talks a big talk about his romantic exploits while feeling generally regretful of the life he’s led. Jerry’s far from envious, especially as his live-in sister constantly tries to subtly influence his love life in unwanted ways.

Despite their mutual affinity, the disparate couple has their share of reservations. Because for the here and now, they are happy; they need each other and they love each other. But they can’t help but consider the obvious barriers around them.

If I’m remembering the underlying themes of Marty, the same elements hold true here too: the imprint of family and related peer pressure shape our decisions and ultimately our happiness. Since the days of Romeo & Juliet oftentimes family influence only serves to make matters all the more confusing. If romance happened in a vacuum, it might be a lot more manageable.

Because Betty and Jerry get away together and have a grand ol’ time at a rambunctious New Year’s party where everyone and their wife seems to be their new best friend. The age gap feels inconsequential when you’re full up on bubbly and at the top of the world.

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Still, they must return home to reality and with their mutual feelings not quite sorted out. They tell themselves the only thing that matters is them, and yet that’s a fallacy because there are so many strings attached. It’s a reminder of how serious relationships make those involved come to terms with everything. Because every person brings with them a plethora of familial relationships they must navigate.

Mother raises hell yelling down the stairwell at her daughter’s suitor with all her nosy neighbors crammed in the hallway to get a good look at Betty’s Spencer Tracy. And that’s not the end of it. Everyone else is agitated and high-strung, compounded by their own problems, and it’s these prolonged scenes providing a platform for the talents of Grant and Balsam.

My heart really breaks for Novak when her scuzzy ex-husband stops by from the Vegas circuit to try and win her back along with the “half hours” she used to give him. But she’s tired of it. Tired of being desired or more exactly objectified in this manner. She deserves better.

With Jerry momentarily out of the picture, it gives us the time and space to realize the gravity of her individual predicament and the struggles of her own life. She desperately needs Jerry. Constantly clinging to him, wringing her hands, biting her thumb as signs of her constant uncertainty and distress. Because there has never been any type of stability in her life.

Meanwhile, he’s continually obsessed with her but also about how others perceive her — jealous of any younger man who might have eyes for her. His fits of temper become exacerbated over time as he’s overcome by chippiness on the turn of a dime. It’s inconsequential until it totally blinds him, almost crippling their relationship. You could call these neuroses or you could simply acknowledge them as traits of two frightened little people.

Later, they share a fateful exchange in the snow. It looks like what they have has finally imploded. Can it be salvaged? We can’t be sure. He says, “It’s a lousy kind of love.” She replies tearfully, “It’s the only kind I know.” It’s pitiful and real and honest. Sometimes I feel like Chayefsky is on a soapbox — in a movie like The Americanization of Emily — here he just seems human.

This sums it up, doesn’t it? None of us are perfect at love. We have our own hangups, issues, and idiosyncracies getting in the way of loving our spouses and the significant people in our lives well. Whatever the outcome of The Middle of The Night, surely we can agree it intersects with all of us on some primeval level. This is the brilliance of Chayesky at his best. Because the humble origins allow him to shine through.

3.5.5 Stars

Klute (1971): Starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland

Posted on March 5, 2020 by 4 Star Films

There was arguably no man more well-versed in 70s paranoia thrillers than director Alan J. Pakula and if we want to consider the genesis of his “paranoia trilogy,” we must begin with Klute. Aside from the thematic elements and Pakula’s evolving pedigree, it is the partnership with the ever-meticulous Gordon Willis that truly stitches this loose grouping of films together.

Klute is set in New York and though you never forget this fact exactly — we spend a lot of time watching Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda) move around town — the film is not built out of the seedy streets like The French Connection (1971).

The majority of the action takes place within interiors where the low-lighting and limiting factors of the space add a certain psychological depth. There is something unnerving out there reflected in the characters themselves.

In his first film score, Michael Small evokes the perturbing tinkling sounds no doubt found in many Columbo episodes and all such fare from the 1970s. This film does feel like a case of localized dread.

It involves suits and pimps, but the scale is fairly small, even if it’s indicative of situations throughout the city. Next, the conspiracy would get larger and corporate in Parallax View. Finally, it would be at the very top, in the federal government, and in this case, it wasn’t simply fiction; it was real, a la All The President’s Men.

In this particular iteration of the thriller, a top-level businessman has all but disappeared, and his concerned wife is aided by the services of a mutual acquaintance and private investigator: John Klute (Donald Sutherland). He is hired on by the man’s firm to get to the bottom of the issue.

Some incriminating letters to a New York call-girl seem to suggest a Jekyll and Hyde existence that his wife knew nothing about. It’s deeply troubling, but it gives Klute a point of departure. Soon he’s questioning Bree (Fonda), who doesn’t remember the man — she’s in high demand these days — and she’s not about to be pumped for information.

Still, the persistence of this enigmatic out-of-towner eventually gets to her as he doggedly keeps after her with quiet persistence. 2 years prior she was beaten by a client and in the past, she has received a string of prank phone calls, not to mention being tailed on occasion. It comes with the trade.

What’s striking about Bree is how real and pragmatic she is about her life. With her brown helmet of hair and undisputed confidence, she takes the day-to-day in stride. She’s not ashamed about being good at what she does, and it’s even a bit empowering to be in such demand while so easily controlling her emotions. With clients, she’s able to maintain a cool and detached demeanor, totally in control of her situation.

However, she’s also not a stagnant individual, trying to move away from her past, tied down to an abusive pip (Roy Scheider), and a certain lifestyle that comes with the territory. There were formerly aspirations to be an actress, and she spends hours with a therapist talking through her issues. It becomes apparent she is one of the many who is an adherent to external processing.

Thus, John Klute is her perfect foil in all regards. She openly lambastes his kind as “hypocrite squares,” leaving their ivory towers in the country to look down their long noses in scorn at the corrupt city dweller. The dichotomy of the sinful folk and the methodical morality of this suburbanite is being drawn up.

Still, he doesn’t fit such a convenient definition. His is a constantly unphased, totally imperturbable demeanor. His words are chosen very carefully and sparingly; his actions are taken with a certain purpose. Then again, the same might be said of her. Regardless, their aspirations are of a very different nature.

The title itself seems a near misdirect. One can easily contend the picture is named after the wrong character. After all, Fonda is the undisputed shimmering star of independence. And yet the film is bolstered by all its main characters because out of them the narrative is made compelling and essential, based on the bearing it has in their lives.

Screenwriters Andy and Dave Lewis whip together a script that revels in these figures, even as they themselves play against a larger, harsher milieu. It works in strokes of lingering dread and an unnamed apparition out there somewhere.

No scene is it more apparent than when Sutherland literally chases a phantom out of Bree’s apartment only for the person to vanish into the night without any resolution. It is this open-ended nature that supplies tension.

Except there is ultimately a conclusion and it comes in a very real and present form. Given that we are dealing in a world of call girls, loneliness, and sexual desire, it makes sense our solution would tap into these deep-seated issues.

Without giving away the punchline completely, Klute‘s ending makes my insides crawl. In an admission that might have well come from Norman Bates, one character even acknowledges, “There are little corners of everyone which are better off left alone.” It hints at the dark, rancorous proclivities of human nature. They lay dormant only to erupt in vengeance.

Supposedly Jane Fonda thought the film was preaching a message that if a woman has a good psychiatrist and a man at her side, everything will turn out right. This might be the implicit conclusion of the storyline when we take it out of the confines of what we see. However, there’s also still a sense that Bree has a personality and a will to be her own person. She is strong, at times self-destructive, and she has been through hell and back again.

What resonates is the complexity of this independent person who also has frailty. It’s not simply women but all people who need a bulwark of others around them in order to survive. When two or more are gathered together something powerful forms.

It is not solely about weakness, or maybe it is, because in some form we are all weak, even if we don’t wish to acknowledge it. We cannot stand up to the onslaught of outside oppressors every waking moment of every day of our life. At some point, we must let our guard down.

Thus, Klute is not a film that leaves us thinking someone is weak for requiring help. Instead, I am reminded of the coarseness of this world and the necessity to find others to help us push through it. Alone we will not survive. We cannot survive.

4/5 Stars

Dog Day Afternoon (1975): Al Pacino’s Fury in a Great Heist Film

Posted on February 12, 2020 by 4 Star Films

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We usually think of filmmakers like Woody Allen or even Noah Baumbach for their portrayals of New York. There’s no doubt they have left their imprint on the city, so it’s difficult not to envision it without their influences. However, in his own right, Sidney Lumet also deserves to be viewed in this light, even if it originates from a fundamentally different perspective.

Lumet is a director who seems to know this place intimately, but he hardly sugarcoats it. He gives us something loose and engaging, full of human drama. We saw it in everything from 12 Angry Men (1957) to Serpico (1973). With Dog Day Afternoon it’s much the same.

The film starts with a boat, before making its way across the city with imagery of both the vocational and leisurely activities of the general populous. People are bumping tunes as these city-wide scenes hum with the familiar rhythms of daily life. It seems a curiously wide net to take from the outset, only to make concrete sense minutes later.

Alongside these typical shots is something highly irregular within this same context: The attempted robbery of a local bank. One can easily champion Dog Day Afternoon as the greatest heist film for the very fact it is a comedy of errors because the sub-genre has always been defined by all hell breaking loose as everything eventually goes awry.

This picture never even gets there. It’s the purest articulation of the core tension flowing through any heist movie, going back to the days of The Asphalt Jungle (1950) or The Killing (1956). However, in this case, we are provided none of the same space for a setup or earlier preparation. It’s all the mechanisms of the job going haywire right in front of our eyes. It’s not even that the perfect plan hits a fateful snag or there’s a turncoat or what have you. These robbers are obviously sunk before they’ve even begun, and the story pivots on this, becoming something novel in itself.

It commences with their youngest accomplice who doesn’t have enough stomach to go through with it, and he literally bales on them during crunch time. Sonny (Al Pacino) and his buddy Sal (John Cazale) muddle through because the gun has already come out. They’re committed to what they’ve started. Soon the manager and female tellers are rounded up along with the security guard. No one’s looking for trouble.

But this is just the beginning. Because when they finally get to the issue at hand — the money in the vaults — there’s barely any cash. It was all taken out in the latest shipment. Strike two.

Though Sonny professes to know the ins and outs of bank work, he’s none too bright and in one of his most gloriously idiotic blunderings, he burns up the bank’s register only for the smoke from the wastebasket piquing attention out on the street. Just about everyone needs to use the toilet; they’re the kind of complications you don’t usally make allowances for in such a scenario.

Meanwhile, the police swarm the sight and Sergeant Eugene Moretti (Charles Durning) takes on the point to strike up a line of communication with the criminals. This is phase two where Dog Day evolves into a story where the aftermath of this event takes the most prominent place but for altogether different reasons than we usually expect. We reach this point of extended stalemate.

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The security guard is plagued by asthma and gets sent as a sign of good faith, but Sonny’s not about to take any double talk. In the galvanizing moment that forever vaulted Dog Day Afternoon into the conversation of anti-establishment cinema, Pacino walks out on the streets and dares the cops to back down.

This is his stand, and it catalyzes the rest of the film’s action. He knows he has power because the crowds are watching him — if not the entire city. In a moment of inspiration, he starts screaming “Attica” and as his chants, evoking the contemporary prison riots, sweep through the onlookers, and they begin to cheer him on almost as if he’s one of their heroes, and he has found solidarity with them.

TV coverage makes everything live and visible to the viewing public, and it’s the same game we can play with Network (1976). If the media was invasive back then, just imagine how much more of a parasite it is now with smartphones capable of capturing everything.

One might say Dog Day Afternoon documents a very specific cultural moment because we have only continued to progress from there with the media getting more and more intrusive as time goes on.

This strange almost absurd strain of insanity becomes acceptable. Where we have stalemates and compromises with people trying to communicate and defuse a situation of the most volatile nature. All because of a measly bank robbery running afoul.

The drama settles into a strange equilibrium where everyone is trying to work with everyone else to get out of the current situation. The captors and their captives on the inside form a rapport over time. A type of Stockholm Syndrome sets in. Then you have the uneasy symbiosis of the perpetrators and the cop on the outside looking to defuse the situation so the hostages get away safely.

It’s a shortlived truce blowing up again when someone tries to sneak into the back and a shot goes off, sending the police and crowds into a frenzy. On the inside, it isn’t much better. Pacino is at his most intense following up the slow burn of the Godfather Part II (1974) with something equally grating. It’s not exactly documentary, but there is a certain sensibility to it that makes it continuously tense and strangely funny, in its most organic moments.

It only falters with its substantial length, because after losing some of its tautness as an out-and-out thriller, it falls into the strangely comically strains of theatrics before getting distracted by any number of things. These are the lulls that are weathered by the sheer ferocity of Pacino’s performance.

There’s the complication of paying for t the sex change operation of his partner. His mother comes to the scene of the crime to coax him to give up, and it’s another distraction he could do without, in between the phone calls he’s constantly fielding with the police.

In his semi-delusional mind, he develops grand plans to get a car to take them to the airfield where they’ll head to Algeria. Sal is menacing but generally composed, played with matter-of-fact sentience by John Cazale. You almost forget he’s there. The only moment he seems obviously perturbed is when the news outlets make out that he’s gay. He wants Sonny to set them straight.

At the center of this insanity, sweating it out and trying to balance all the pressures thrust upon him is the man himself. He orchestrated this whole thing only for it to blow up into a local phenomenon he could hardly control. He becomes the ringleader of his own form of media circus — albeit on the inside — on par with anything whipped up by Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s Ace in The Hole (1951).

The ending wallops equally hard like cold air hitting the face. Again, we met with this weird sense of total equilibrium restored. Life can settle back into normalcy. It’s simultaneously a welcome sigh of relief and still a hollow victory.

Because even if it was momentary, we were in Sonny’s corner too — right there with his hostages — and maybe after spending so much time with him, we were inflicted with a bit of Stockholm Syndrome ourselves. There is this wishful hope that he just might get away and things could turn out. In this austere, pragmatic world of ours, such sentiment seems like folly.

Lumet documents the milieu while Pacino captures its ensuing despondency with his usual unflinching fury. At its best, Dog Day Afternoons is driven by performance, and its director creates an impeccable world for incubation.

4/5 Stars

They All Laughed (1980): Peter Bogdanovich’s Melancholy Screwball

Posted on December 30, 2019 by 4 Star Films

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A version of this review was published over at Film Inquiry.

I recently watched an interview between Peter Bogdanovich and Wes Anderson reminiscing about the film. One of the most striking suggestions is the inferred sadness in “They All Laughed.” It takes its title from a song but while we think of laughing as an action full of joy, the past tense of the word sets it off. It is something transient — bound to change at any time. Unwittingly it becomes the perfect encapsulation of this most intimate project.

To describe it as a private investigator infused screwball romance is merely confining it to typical genre fare. Realistically, it is none of the above. At least not in the sense we might expect.

We have to play catch up with most of the story although we do settle in eventually. What helps are not only the characters but the actors themselves who are of a generally affable breed. We like getting to know them even when we don’t quite grasp their circumstances.

Also lets clear this up. This is not What’s Up, Doc? (1972). It’s lacking all the goofy witticisms of screenwriter Buck Henry or the wonderfully epic set pieces. Many have probably written it off because of this; furthermore, it was not very commercially successful upon its initial release (this must come with an asterisk).

However, They All Laughed is a surprisingly good-natured effort and some of the same cadence can be found, especially in Charles (John Ritter) and Christy’s (Coleen Camp) conversations, mirroring Howard and Eunice from the earlier picture. Names are swapped with every other sentence while their patter is frantic and harried in a similar manner.

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Is it wrong to see a bit of Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) in between the lines as well? Perhaps it’s the obvious strain of country music that cuts through the New York scene, of all places. If anything, it is a condensed version of the former film shot on the streets of New York with a skeleton crew and fewer actors. The same fresh near-improvisational feel is present with interweaving narratives.

Camp probably gets her best scenes not with dialogue but when she’s singing and simultaneously giving people wandering by an evil eye or a wink of acknowledgment. Like The Last Picture Show, we have another musical collage of classics composed of Jazz tunes of Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Sinatra with the more earthy diction of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. It just works.

It’s not executed in the same fashion as Nashville, with fewer moving parts and lacking the same brand of weighty commentary underneath the humor but nevertheless, there’s something here. It’s memorable just for the characters and moments and themes of love Bogdanovich seems to be having a grand old time playing around with.

The relatively plotless meanderings might test the patience of some viewers, but if your itching for authentic views of New York and a handful of hi-jinks and neurotic characterizations, you will get some.

Ben Gazzara is the quintessential dashing philanderer who holds something quietly mischievous in his eyes while still providing a sense of regret. He has two young girls from his first marriage and rarely sees them. We understand the scenario.

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John Ritter exerts his comedic chops as a gutless private eye on a tail. From a purely visual likeness, he can easily be seen as a stand-in for our director who was himself in love with Dorothy Stratten. Like Antoine Doinel’s attempts at private-eyeing, he seems like a hopeless case, but once again, the film is hardly about his day job. Nor is it about Gazzara, another P.I., or their partner in crime, the frizzy-haired, roller skating, joint -smoking pick-up artist Arthur (Blaine Novak).

It’s all merely a pitch-perfect excuse to further complicate the scenario by throwing all sorts of situations together. And if there are glimpses of Doinel in Ritter, by transitive property there must be Tati-like scenarios as well, not least among them positioning the viewers on the outside looking in at apartment buildings seemingly made entirely of glass.

Like the worlds of these French filmmakers (Jacques Demy included), the version of New York depicted here verges on the most agreeable of romantic fantasies where relationships are forged in meaningful even momentary encounters. There is a sense of preordained fate wafting through the air even as a wistful malaise lingers too.

Dorothy Stratten manages to be an ethereal beauty of simultaneous youth and maturity. Bogdanovich’s obvious affection for her is on display in every scene she is in front of the camera. Meanwhile, Patti Hansen — Mrs. Keith Richards — has a part to play as “Sam” the cabbie, which is no less charming. It does appear as the world is made up of attractive women although she is someone with a different type of experience. She’s been around and you cannot phase her. There’s something simultaneously charming and disarming about her self-assured confidence.

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But, of course, I must save the best (subjectively speaking) for last — it’s time to talk about Audrey — who gets top billing, understandably so. Though I barely recognized her at first behind her shades, she still maintains the same congenial elegance, even in eighties attire. If anything she’s more grounded. Somehow she almost doesn’t belong but she didn’t belong in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) either and yet her warmth made the movie special.

In fact, it struck me momentarily, this picture is a full 20 years after Tiffany’s and New York, while it has evolved, still holds a nostalgia about it. Because looking back in time with rose-colored glasses, we cannot help seeing it in such a light — not like the grungy, noisy dump of the here and now.

With every one of these characters, there manages to be utterly transparent shades of reality. The details are there if you’re willing to look at them in the most personal light possible. It’s a prime case of when real life seeps into fiction and they feed into each other in a continuous loop. Where one ends the other seems to begin and vice versa.

Take each character and examine their reality and see what sings with the sound of truth. I think Bogdanovich would heartily acknowledge the best films and the best actors are in some way, shape, and form audaciously personal — in this way, they bear something and offer it to the audience.

But even in its themes of infidelity, heartache, and loneliness, They All Laughed somehow manages to cling to the humor found in its title. There is a pervasive conviviality that might feel counter-intuitive to both our plot and the location our story takes place. But it’s indisputably light.

Due to a lack of commercial success — Bogdanovich tried his luck distributing the film himself unsuccessfully — They All Laughed is considered to be one of the ending markers of The New Hollywood Era instigated by a generation of dynamic, young American directors. No one can completely blame him for his decision as he was stricken with immense grief at the time. Because of course, the aftermath of such a warm picture was marred with a tragedy of the worst kind — the murder of rising talent Dorothy Stratten. It proved to be the darkest possible closing note on this story.

Then, for New York a full 20 years after this film came out, The Twin Towers (visible in the opening credits) would be gone. There is so much suffering visible and yet invisible at the same time. Because They All Laughed is a film managing to capture a happy time even if a sobering road was waiting up ahead. Sometimes we need light, frothy movies to remind us of such things.

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When Peter Bogdanovich revisited the film at a public screening, he was openly emotional to the point tearing up. One can gather it was not simply because of the pain at the loss of someone dear to him, but also because those were happier, dare we say more innocent years. We can never have them back as they were before. Still, no one can take away the memories.

For others on the outside looking in, The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, or even What’s Up, Doc? might ring of superior film stock but it’s not too difficult to understand Bogdanovich’s own sentiments. This is about as personal as a movie can come even as its weaved into a hybrid private eye screwball tale. It’s not the content speaking, but the moments and happy accidents with friends and people he deeply cherished.

This palpable exuberance exuded by the director and his cast is infectious if also a bit doleful. Bittersweetness has to be one of the most maddening of human emotions. It points to something not yet satiated within us. We are always waiting for the next time we will laugh again or better yet when we never stop laughing. The tears won’t hurt as much then.

4/5 Stars

Marriage Story (2019) and Being Alive

Posted on December 22, 2019 by 4 Star Films

In full transparency, I’ve often considered Noah Baumbach as heir apparent to Woody Allen and a lot of this attribution falls on their joint affinity for New York City. It is the hub of their life and therefore their creative work even as the broader art world often finds itself seduced by the decadent riches of Los Angeles.

Allen most famously set up the dichotomy between the two places in Anne Hall (1977), where Annie and Alvy ultimately part ways because the woman he liked decided she likes L.A.; he loathes it above all else.

It’s hard to get these elements out of my head even as this film features two former Allen collaborators in Scarlett Johansson and Alan Alda. And yet, to his credit, Baumbach has allowed for a more robust dialogue between two people. It’s not merely a humorous juxtaposition, it becomes indicative of so much more.

Audiences should be forewarned Marriage Story is about the messiness of divorce full of hurt, troubled communication, and explosive moments of lashing out. It also features some of the most substantive and sustained pieces of fearlessness you’re probably going to see this year in terms of acting.

Scene after scene is carried by one or two performers in tandem. In fact, with the extended takes, fluidity, and intimate interiors, the relationship between film and the stage is close, going so far as to break up sequences with curtain-like fade-outs.

Yes, this makes Marriage Story unwieldy as it ranges all over the place. It somehow strikes this agreeable adherence to Baumbach’s intuitions as both writer and director, while still relying wholeheartedly on what Adam Driver and Johannson bring to their respective roles.

Right at the center of it all are their soulful performances lithely running the gamut from devoted affection to bitter resentment. But it’s the notes in between which become so crucial. Because it goes beyond mere technical ardor; there’s another kind of palpable investment present.

Their story is set up exquisitely by the words they use to recount one another. Perfect trailer fodder in fact. What they provide are observational affirmations of each other’s characteristics. Nicole is an actress. She is a mother who plays. She’s brave, knows how to push her husband, and she’s competitive. Charlie is a theater director. He really likes being a dad. He’s driven, neat, and always energy conscious. He’s also very competitive.

However, they never get to share these words because now they currently sit in the therapist’s office drifting apart. It looks like they’re already too far gone to salvage the thing. What could have been the passionate musings of love letters exchanged in a bygone era, instead find them at the precipice of separation.

The point of no return is dropped in Charlie’s lap in an oddly hilarious scenario of dramatic irony — somehow worthy of a Hitchcockian time bomb — where Nicole enlists the help of her good-natured mother (Julie Haggerty) and sister (Merritt Weaver) to help her serve notice. As can be expected, it unfolds in the most cringe-worthy and somehow the most perfect manner to suit the story.

It’s one showcase among a plethora of long takes supplying a formidable framework for the script to rest on. As such, it relies so heavily on its stars to be up for the task and to any degree we might adjudge as an audience, they come at it with impeccable aplomb.

Soon what looked to be an amicable dialogue between two rational human beings is being overhauled with lawyers. We begin to see how what started as a riff, between two solitary individuals, soon becomes complicated by well-meaning legalese, fees and the aggravation incurred from the middleman now bargaining between the former couple.

It gets to the point the relationship feels so far removed from where it began. You begin to question if any of it was worth it. Words get twisted. Feelings get hurt. They’re doing things because their lawyers say to and they become suspicious of motives. I was reminded of how our language makes it so arguments are literally equated to a war. There are winners and there are losers as the two sides become further alienated. The void in the courtroom never felt greater.

Laura Dern has an impeccable pulse for the kind of cajoling attorney with business acumen and bedside manner to get what she wants. Namely, the best for her clients. She’s ruthless yes, but it’s all within the confines of the game. There’s still a person there who has a life outside the 9 to 5.

Ray Liotta seems equally built for this cutthroat business-minded artificiality. We despise him even as we realize — much like Charlie does — he’s very good at his job. If you want to get out with you’re shirt, you’ve got to put up and buy into the game.

Alan Alda gets a bit as a sagacious saint of a man who plays as the antithesis of a lawyer (or any of his rivals). His spot feels like a hallowed place in a film filled with other prominent names who probably get to do more. He gets to be warm and wise, reminding us why he is such a dear soul to us all.

I came into Marriage Story expecting callbacks to Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979). Certainly, this is a film about parents and divorce and how they must tiptoe around their issues for the sake of their kids. But this is a bit different than the Hoffman picture where Meryl Streep at times feels non-existent. At least I always remember it as a father-son film.

This rendition is meant to provide equal footing two both parents with the onus of victimhood and blame distributed. Because that’s just it. You can’t draw it up so easily. Everyone contributes to the problem in some way.

There are also no clean breaks because time has a curious way of working on the human psyche. When you’re used to spending time with someone, you know all their quirk, and it’s hard to let them go. They drive you up the wall, and they fill you with that electrifying energy sending your heart aflutter. Their family becomes your family. You can’t snap that wishbone without some residual effect. Try as you might, it’s impossible to totally obliterate the memory.

It feels as if Scarlett Johansson has laid herself bare, extending herself like never before, and we see the flaws coursing through Adam Driver to go with his finest everyman attributes. Their urgency and honesty become brutally transparent and that is the utmost of compliments.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Contempt (1963) — Jean-Luc Godard’s film about moviemaking that famously documents the dissolution of a marriage (between Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli), taking place within their house in one extended scene. These are the lengths Baumbach reaches towards in his own way through blocking and the relationship between his stars and the camera.

In one climactic confrontation among so many corkers, Driver and Johansson have it out in a fully ballistic, double-edged assault unearthing every wound and targeting every sore spot imaginable. Hurting each other in ways only they know how because they’ve been so intimate for so long. It ends with them red-eyed and huddled together on the floor totally spent. This is never what they wanted nor what they expected.

Where is the ending exactly? Because the film is substantial; it covers so much territory and the themes are wide-ranging from parental devotion to lingering love under new parameters. But with everything the movie allows us to be privy to, it’s obvious there is no easy resolution. Thus, with so many disparate reference points thanks to 80s icons like Julie Haggerty, Wallace Shawn, and Laura Dern, why not mention something altogether different.

In Hirokazu Koreeda’s After The Storm (2012), you have a vagrant husband trying to win back the affections of his wife even as they figure out how to raise their kid. They’ve entered a new chapter of existence, and sometimes that’s hard to cope with. So when they walk off into the sunset it’s hopeful, but something’s inexplicably altered. There is reconciliation and yet they cannot undo everything. This movie, again, is also about moving forward from the most painful fission imaginable: between two human beings. It’s a work in progress.

To this point, I’m fascinated by the choice to have the movie called Marriage Story. Because if we wanted to, we could look at it purely from the point of view of divorce. After all, surely this is the all-important final outcome. How could we see it any other way? And yet it becomes so difficult to break two human beings apart from one another.

Interrelated is the impassioned statement made by Nora in one of her sole lapses in composure. Within an otherwise irreligious picture, she says the following:

“The basis of our Judeo-Christian whatever is Mary, mother of Jesus, and she’s perfect. She’s a virgin who gives birth, unwaveringly supports her child, and holds his dead body when he’s gone. And the dad isn’t there…God is the father, and God didn’t show up. So you have to be perfect, and Charlie can be an f—-up and it doesn’t matter.”

The misunderstandings in her statement feel immaterial, and I’m not invested in pulling them apart now. Instead, it teases some private hurt we cannot hope to know, but it also triggers ideas some might recall from the Judeo-Christian texts, which are pertinent to the conversation.

In discussing the union of marriage, it says, “A man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” This is both mentally, spiritually, emotionally — in every way imaginable. People are meant to be together. But if Marriage Story is a reminder of anything, it’s that pride, pettiness, and imperfection get in the way of our joy.

For Charlie, for Nicole, for all of us. It also cannot completely quell the love we breed in our hearts. Yes, our love is imperfect; still, it can see us through a lot. It can be a beautiful even an extraordinary entity. It’s part of being alive.

4/5 Stars

Someone to hold me too close.
Someone to hurt me too deep.
Someone to sit in my chair,
And ruin my sleep,
And make me aware,
Of being alive.
Being alive.

Somebody needs me too much.
Somebody knows me too well.
Somebody pull me up short,
And put me through hell,
And give me support,
For being alive.
Make me alive.
Make me alive.

– Being Alive

The Naked City (1948): One Out of Eight Million Stories

Posted on November 23, 2019 by 4 Star Films

The Naked City begins inauspiciously enough with a flyover of New York and an introduction by producer Mark Hellinger. It seems like we’ve seen this countless times before. It’s almost like a stock image. And yet in the case of this picture, it was really one of the forerunners of a movement.

Here we have one of the first pictures to give us a sense that this is only one story in a whole patchwork of stories. There’s a loose, stream of consciousness to the proceedings as we meet people and overhear their conversations only momentarily as they go along with their daily lives.

But initially, we are introduced to an entire cross-section of people in the dead of night when most are slumbering peacefully at home. Although the street corners, places of business, and entertainment hubs are still bustling. And of course, in other spaces, we have the murder. The topic of interest in this story.

We are afforded the same opportunity to get a view into the lives of our detectives, the bright-eyed veteran Lt. Daniel Muldoon portrayed by everyone’s favorite brogue-voiced leprechaun Barry Fitzgerald. Don Taylor comes on as the fresh-faced cop and family man taken under his wing. This is the picture that made me take note of his earnest talents as a dashing everyman.

Soon they are looking into the tragic death of a beautiful young model, Jean Dexter. Until it comes out there might be more too it than meets the eye. Also, another man’s body is fished out of the drink. For the time being, they are isolated events.

The Naked City is at its best giving this beat-by-beat rundown of the case as it happened. True, it’s a compromised documentation from director Jules Dasson; it’s not like we’re watching a docudrama. All the same, it proves a fascinating cultural artifact giving us so many authentic pieces of context. It becomes a matter of parsing through the real footage taken on the streets and then actors going through the paces of a Hollywood storyline.

Not only does Mark Hellinger supply a certain ethos to the picture, he actually remains an important piece of the story, adding his own glib commentary in a one-way conversation with the actors who play a part of the case. A more tragic note is the fact the producer and one-time journalist would die before the picture was even released. But his crucial fingerprints on the narrative cannot be disregarded as the case pushes on.

There is Howard Duff as Frank Niles, a man whose reputation begins to falter with every word that comes out of his mouth and every subsequent question he dodges. Corroborating his facts, it becomes apparent he’s lying again and again to the authorities.

Even his fiance (Dorothy Hart), a model who worked with the deceased woman, is oblivious to many of his dubious activities. But certainly, he cannot be the murderer. He has an alibi. There must be another culprit. Muldoon settles on his old friend, “J.P. McGillicuddy,” a convenient placeholder for the unnamed perpetrator they’re trying to smoke out.

The work of a detective is never done as the dead girl’s parents come to identify the body and bemoan the fact their girl went bad after having such a tough childhood. There’s a pursuit of a fugitive down a fire escape that leads through the streets and reaches a dead end when he’s able to shake them aboard the subway. But they’re getting close to something.

Detective Halloran gets the go head to follow a hunch of his own — a long shot that becomes surprisingly relevant to their case — and the legwork leads to an elusive wrestler named Willie Garzah (Ted de Corsia). However, as has a habit of happening, find one lead and a whole slew of others start falling in your lap. Things start happening.

They involve Niles, who of course, has been up to more than he was comfortable divulging. Also implicated are a doctor and Garzah as well. The others know they have been caught red-handed, but what is a police procedural without one final showdown? The chase for Willie Garzah takes off and finally finds him on a bridge climbing for his life as the police flood the area.

The final outcomes are not altogether unexpected but the fact New York plays such a concrete role in this drama greatens its appeal, and it helped develop a tradition, an affection even, for on-location shooting in The Big Apple.

Fittingly, everything is wrapped with those indelible words that would become immortalized on television forever, “There are eight million stories in New York City. This has been one of them.” It really is a producer’s dream for a serialized television show, but in its day it made a darn good crime movie too.

4/5 Stars

Do The Right Thing (1989): The Legacy of MLK & Malcolm X

Posted on October 5, 2019 by 4 Star Films

The opening images are charged with the beats of Public Enemy matched by a provocative palette and a vibrant kineticism. One is reminded up a very particular point in time and a particular subculture — rap music is a part of it, certainly — but it’s indicative of so much more.

Because Do The Right Thing is shot on Spike Lee’s home turf in Brooklyn so there’s no denying the intimacy he has with the material. However, it was actually the obligatory “all persons and places” disclaimer that instilled the idea this film could be about any city. This could be Watts. This could be Detroit. This could be Ferguson. And unfortunately, in another year or two, it might just as easily be another city we’ll have to reckon with, whether due to prejudice or police brutality.

The film overwhelmingly succeeds in developing a world — that is a neighborhood — with the players who live within it. And in this regard, it does feel a bit like the Hollywood movies of old (which Lee is well aware of) where people have their types and their shtick. Take, for instance, the three stooges who shoot the bull on the street corner.

The stuttering Smiley is always making the rounds to pass out his personalized pictures of Dr. King and Malcolm X. The swaggery Radio Raheem does his own version of Reverend Harry Powell’s love-hate performance art for the benefit of the audience a la Night of The Hunter. It makes him as much as a thematic symbol as he is a larger-than-life character.

These relational dynamics feel authentically lived in, even going so far as casting his sister as his sister in the film. Likewise, the real-life couple Ruby Dee (Mother Sister) and Ossie Davis (Da Mayor), play out an antagonistic autumn romance on screen.

It gives the impression of minimal camera movements (aside from a few pans) because Lee cares about focusing on his characters head-on, photographing them in an often stylized manner with low angles. It’s not quite as precise as Ozu but having people placed up against their backdrops so overtly, it is hard not to remember. His own distinct visual language stands out emblazoned with color and the patois of his town.

Samuel L. Jackson is the groovy, smooth DJ, Mr. Senor Love Daddy, part Magnificent Montague, part Wolfman Jack. He provides the atmospherics — the soul — for the entire community, even as the heat hits record temps. It’s a portent of future attractions.

One doesn’t always think of Spike Lee as an actor per se, but it’s fitting he’s central to the action in Do The Right Thing because this feels like an extremely authentic context for him. Mookie’s current job as a lax pizza delivery boy allows him to mosey his way around the neighborhood.

Again, it acts as an invaluable narrative device to keep the story moving and yet it never feels totally manipulating. Each beat brings a fresh scenario worth discovering with every chocked sidewalk or spewing fire hydrant. Because this is a film about people and their relationship to one another.

Up until this point, the majority of the characters mentioned beforehand are African-American though that doesn’t necessarily suggest they have an entirely shared point of view. However, what gives Do The Right Thing it’s inherent conflict is bringing in a menagerie of starkly different individuals.

The prime example is Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, a pillar of the community’s social and economic scene, run by an Italian-American (Danny Aiello) and his two sons. There are the Koreans “fresh off the boat” running the grocery store across the street. Then the Puerto Rican subset of the community including Mookie’s put upon girlfriend and mother of his baby son, Tina (Rosie Perez).

Their problems and their passions feel like real 9-to-5 reality we are privy to. And the police who patrol the streets come off a bit oblivious, if not completely fat-headed. What’s gripping is how each one conveniently points their ire in another direction manifesting this never-ending cycle of bigotry.

Mookie can always be found repping number 42 (Jackie Robinson) and one of his street corner chums wears Magic Johnson’s 32. These are obvious cultural touchstones just as the white guy clamoring into his apartment wears a Larry Bird jersey. They represent the current social moment impeccably.

It’s as if everyone has misconceptions of everyone else. They are driven by ignorance and small-mindedness and no one is immune to this disease. In a telling conversation over the jukebox, Sal’s oldest boy, a general malcontent fed up with working in his father’s business (Richard Edson), talks to Mookie about how his favorite athletes and musicians like The Michael Jordans and Princes of the world aren’t just “black” they’re more than black.

Let’s put this straight. I think his assertion is totally absurd and yet I found myself thinking just before how ironic these African-American young men wearing Robinson and Magic because their lives and reputations feel so contrary to the young men who idolize them. That should hardly be seen as an offense against them.

Regardless, Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) feels affronted because there are no brothers on the “Wall of Fame” next to Pacino, De Niro, and Sinatra in Sal’s. He wants to start a boycott and at first, it’s an admittedly ridiculous idea.

No one takes him seriously because most everyone loves Sal’s pizza pies. And in his softer more hospitable moments, he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy. But this is one of the greatest revelations, even normal people — especially normal people — can seethe with hate, anger, and fear. Because the heat is not only about upping the temperature, it proves to be our dramatic barometer. We know at some point the story must blow its top.

Sure enough, Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem are talking each other up and wander into Sal’s ready to make a stand. It’s utter idiocy. They’re being a pair of punks. They know full-well what they’re doing and yet in the same sense, I don’t think they do. It’s as if they don’t see the writing on the wall. No one does.

And everyone is once again on a different wavelength. Like Cool Hand Luke, we have a failure to communicate. Violence ensues. The fuses blow and the images are relatably chaotic and terrifying as they verge of the brutal and tumultuous. It’s insanity.

Fire shoots up the building and there’s something deeply affecting about seeing the portraits of the likes of Sinatra and Sophia Loren being licked by flames. Again, they feel like odd figures of collateral damage. All of this destruction feels directed across racial lines but surely it’s misdirected. What’s the real problem? What caused such an evening?

Is it merely angst and discontentment with the situation? Are they really mad at Sal? Are they mad at his establishment? Did he really want this boy dead? Were the police acting out of pure malice, fear, or both?

In the aftermath of the violence, I couldn’t help but bemoan the Twitter age we now live in. If this film is any indication, physical violence and confrontation is not the answer. However, I feel social media has polarized us even more — making our communities even more fragmented and our modes of communication either echo chambers of like-minded enlightened people or rival camps we can so easily demonize.

I must even admit one of the ones exacerbating this problem is President Donald Trump himself. It seems almost prescient he gets a mention in the film because some would say he is emblematic of where our country has gone in 30 years’ time. Surely, a country coming out of the Reagan years would never have guessed the future ahead (including a black president).

Ultimately, to say this is a film about racism is too vague. It needs some unpacking, some grappling with what it really brings to the fore. The issues run deep. They are partly economical. There’s de facto segregation. They have to do with police and deep-rooted traditions of tension. Racism is something taught and learned creating a feedback loop or closer still a vicious cycle. I am hardly the person to explain them all. But I’m willing to listen to others — to dialogue.

Do The Right Thing is the most unnerving piece of cinema I’ve seen in some time and I mean that only as the utmost compliment. It’s a bold expression full of energy but also more profoundly still the unmistakable threads of humanity. It’s as ugly as it is honest. Honesty, in a sense, it feels like Lee is making a valiant attempt to call out the inhumanity while still empathizing with all sides.

This even is reinforced by the two contrasting quotes he fittingly pulls from Dr. King and Malcolm X, a final testament to the picture’s message.

I must admit I wasn’t surprised by the substance of Dr. King’s quote but I do acknowledge being slightly taken aback by the sensibility of the second quotation. It’s this same duality visible in the film. Where there is a problem. Each of these men and their stances and the worlds they come out of have inherent flaws. The issue is how we get together and solve them. History has shown how messy and complex they have been and will remain if we fail to do anything. Strike that. If we fail to do the right thing.

4.5/5 Stars

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by destroying itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”–Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t even call it violence when it’s self- defense, I call it intelligence.”–Malcolm X