pmullinsj Reviews

That Man: Peter Berlin (2005)

Exotic and Unexpected Documentary

[8/10 · 9 February 2006]

The persona was always unique, but I didn't find him sexy--rather exactly the visual object he mostly saw himself as, and continually sought to create.

This was very worthwhile, though, and he was very much an interesting part of the Andy Warhol Pop period. The snippets of 'Nights in Black Leather' prove that the film work was inferior even for porno of the time. A short such as 'Chute' with Al Parker and the far more gorgeous and naturally sexy Colt model Toby (it would be interesting to know what has happened to this long-ago, never-surpassed porn icon as well; I only know he is apparently still alive, but there must be something, since such illustrious authorities as 'Smutjunkies' have decided that, if they do know anything, it's on the q.t.) was actually a nice, even poetic bit of work, and not sloppily edited like the Warhol things with Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, etc. Peter De Rome's 'Adam and Yves' was exciting when it arrived in 1974, although De Rome can be a bit corny.

I do agree with the porn spokesmen in the film that the concentration on this persona was very intense and that does make him a real artist, although quite minor. It was interesting that there was a lot of footage of him in informal appearances during the 70's. However, calling him the 'Greta Garbo of porn' is a bit much, as this film alone proves he wants some more visibility. As solipsistic as she became, her knowledge of life and art was considerably wider than his appears to be. Furthermore, his work is of interest, but not that of a cinematic genius, which hers is.

And what is interesting is that, even with this strange persona still intact, he is to me visually by now quite beautiful--there was a cheap look to the self-conscious Peter Berlin of the tight white pants; by now, the mouth has widened and is more relaxed and he is by now at last a truly beautiful man. I paid little attention to him during his heyday, when his face, in particular, looked like that of an inflatable girl dildo.

So that he and others concentrate on his look as well as his imaginative use of various forms to capture it--most fascinating perhaps was his hiring of Tom of Finland to give him even more exaggerated self-images. However, facts such as his long friendship with James, which was very touching and showed his less purely narcissistic side, and his confession that he had fornicated no one in the U.S., were quite rarefied, given his street performance.

There was interesting commentary by Jack Wrangler, who apparently also has rooms made into self-shrines but is much more the part-hetero guy his parents must surely have preferred to his burlesque 'n' porn days (even if his wife is 20 plus years older than he, himself no spring chicken, is.) The problem of this kind of neurosis, even when successful, is that there is a peculiar lack of interest in much of anything else. Anti-war comments are merely childish, but some of the family background was interesting. This kind of 'dream person', though, tells about early childhood, and there is no follow-up about any further relationships with his family, leading one to assume he left them for good, and remains intoxicated with the days when he can still walk the streets and be told he's 'cute.' He is definitely 'cute' now, and could afford to wear a lot of dressy things and be a great stylish older beauty by now, and the looser clothing he is seen in when interviewed in the film shows that his taste is still sharp. Some of us have even found it to be improved. I didn't remember until the very end of the feature that I did see him once around Christopher Street in his 'That Boy' period, which I found interesting but not alluring. He definitely had his audience, though.

Best wishes to Mr. Peter Berlin.

Boys Don't Cry (1999)

Useless as a feature film. The documentary was infinitely better

[1/10 · 29 January 2006]

This has been recommended by countless people, but the story contains nothing worth making into a film. It is a sad story, full of weak people--all of them. The documentary on Brandon Teena is much more useful for something that needs facts, not romanticizing.

The main character is not even particularly sympathetic herself, and there is no way the story could have been of interest to anyone unless she had been murdered. A 'successful' Brandon Teena would not have captured people's sympathy.

The reason I find her completely unsympathetic is not because of her sexual confusion, but because it did not follow that it was okay to use dildoes on girls in actual sex, tricking them into thinking it was the usual member. In the documentary, some of these girls are so ignorant they still claim it was 'real.' Given that the whole milieu is as redneck as possible, it is (while not at all excusable even so) unsurprising that the murder would have occurred, once her identity was discovered by piglike young men.

The one possible use of this film is to make you look into the story itself, and to see this very beleaguered impoverished low-life tragedy, which perhaps one might not have done with the documentary alone. So that the semi-fiction film publicizes a story that is not worth dramatizing, but does lead some of us (who were mystified at the way it was celebrated as something important, which it certainly is not) to find the documentary and learn a bit more about these half-literate people we usually associate with the South a little more than the Midwest. Maybe it puts Nebraska on the map. Again, the story itself is very sad and moving, but it is only meaningful as a piece of filmed journalism, which the documentary provides.

It doesn't matter to me who gets Oscars, so if Hilary Swank has 2 that's fine with me, even though I thought her performance was perfectly suited to this mostly meaningless film (therefore quite like it.) The Oscars mean so little: Garbo never got one, nor did Deborah Kerr or Robert Mitchum or Marilyn Monroe (whom they never even had sense enough to nominate) and Hilary Swank got 2. Katharine Hepburn got 4, only 2 of which were truly as 'deserving,' if that word can be used for these ignominious awards, as some of her greater roles, such as 'Long Day's Journey Into Night.' That says it all to me.

I think Hilary Swank should get 5 Oscars, given how absurd they are.

The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

Beautiful People Doing Beautiful Things

[9/10 · 22 January 2006]

This is an utter delight, although I will agree with one commenter that the choreography itself is quite pedestrian. In fact, neither of the divine sisters Deneuve and Dorleac can dance, but it is wonderful to see them together; it is heartbreaking also, as if a document of the grief that Deneuve has always clearly suffered since: their fondness for each other, given the tragic event to come, is one of the most bittersweet real things about the film.

On the other hand...Chakiris and Grover Dale CAN definitely dance, and they can make even the repetitive choreography work. They aren't brothers, but there's one scene in which they sing of their rejection by girls which, as it ends, seems to indicate that they were probably not exactly hostile toward each other...and who can blame them? With the gorgeous sisters, they are a mirroring beauty contest, and Chakiris is stunningly hot here, whether dancing or not. Their costumes were unashamedly and sublimely sexy, with those funny neckties; and when I first went to France in 1970, their were two brothers in Fontainebleau who dressed very much like this--and these are the only two times I ever saw such clothing with this touch of ballet to it. I definitely think they were imitating Chakiris and Dale, just a couple of years later for a little provincial town not far from Paris is not too long...Even Gene Kelly, who looks remarkably youthful and whose presence is as welcome(and slightly out of place in a very nice way) as always, wears white pants, a pink shirt, and a lavender jacket--all of it a natural sensuality that almost evokes the 18th century.

I will admit that the sadist's murder is not handled with any grace. Everyone reverts to cheer immediately after any mention of it, and this is just silly. It should either have not even been part of the story, or there should have been an appropriate gravity given it: That shouldn't have been too difficult; as it was, such things as Maxence and Yvonne joking about 'immi-Nantes' immediately after talking about the newspaper report were idiotic--it takes the rococo attitude way too far, and merely makes the charming Rochefort provincials seem unfeeling and cardboard. This is the film's one serious flaw, which other mediocre aspects, e.g., preposterous amounts of street dancing of the same lame sort and to no purpose, are not, since it just seems all rather good-hearted even though superfluous.

Legrand's music is often like this, pretty and serviceable, just as it was in 'Parapluies' and later in 'Yentl.' I think one of the most magical things is the way all the lovers are finally matched up except for Delphine and Maxence. Maxence hitches a ride in the 'caravan' to Paris, and we know that Perri and Deneuve will find each other there; but in a film that has not relied too much on subtlety, this ending up in the air with something implied, however obviously, is delicious and unexpected.

Dangerous Liaisons (2003– )

One of Deneuve's Ultimate Mutations

[9/10 · 21 January 2006]

*** It is strange that I could have gotten them mixed up.

But perhaps not really.

I don't think Deneuve laughs or cries in 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses.' But the laughter I mentioned before in'Indochine'.

I don't think I remember any laughter in 'Indochine.' It now comes back.

Those sounds of Lalique were Deneuve's acting of weeping.

It is a most oddly inhuman sound when she "cries" on screen.

I wonder if her emotional range is limited to "great-actressy" sounds, because it is undeniable that she is a great actress.

Yes, those sounds are DIFFERENT.

They are parallel to the voices one hears that are mechanically produced and you hear them on the telephone.

Somehow robotic, but the sounds of Deneuve crying are moving. They sound like someone who can't quite cry. There hadn't been room for it before, so the ability was lost for her.

Or maybe they are the cries and tears of a kind of nobility. Maybe all her real grief is mute and experienced without any sounds, so that when she must weep in a role--and that weeping has to bow to convention in that it has to be heard as some kind of tears that a general public can understand as such--it inevitably sounds artificial.

Her most convincing emotions are anger and disgust. Expressions of dissembling are frequent, but an unadulterated joyousness does not seem to be in her repertoire.

We hear "French National Treasure" and we hear the inner revolt against this form of high machinic enslavement, a Deleuzian concept that can be found at the higher social levels just as at the lower. (I should have pointed out in my long notes on 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses', for anyone not familiar with 'Wild Palms', that I saw the former film in some ways an "heir" to the latter. 'Wild palms' was of course the Oliver Stone/Bruce Wagner miniseries of 1993, in which the Church of Synthiotics is a mutation of the Church of Scientology.

'Wild Palms' was more obviously cyber-oriented than 'Liaisons', but the modernization of 'Liaisons', a thing I can rarely bear personally whether in theatre or opera, does here make the thing even more menacing, regardless of the fact, pointed out by other reviewers, that a few things just will not quite translate from the bewigged period.)

They All Laughed (1981)

Mediocrity on Speed; Hepburn's Tragic Fall from Film

[1/10 · 19 November 2005]

I have this film out of the library right now and I haven't finished watching it. It is so bad I am in disbelief. Audrey Hepburn had totally lost her talent by then, although she'd pretty much finished with it in 'Robin and Marian.' This is the worst thing about this appallingly stupid film. It's really only of interest because it was her last feature film and because of the Dorothy Stratten appearance just prior to her homicide.

There is nothing but idiocy between Gazzara and his cronies. Little signals and little bows and nods to real screwball comedy of which this is the faintest, palest shadow.

Who could believe that there are even some of the same Manhattan environs that Hepburn inhabited so magically and even mythically in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' twenty years earlier? The soundtrack of old Sinatra songs and the Gershwin song from which the title is taken is too loud and obvious--you sure don't have to wait for the credits to find out that something was subtly woven into the cine-musique of the picture to know when the songs blasted out at you.

'Reverting to type' means going back up as well as going back down, I guess. In this case, Audrey Hepburn's chic European lady is all you see of someone who was formerly occasionally an actress and always a star. Here she has even lost her talent as a star. If someone whose talent was continuing to grow in the period, like Ann-Margret, had played the role, there would have been some life in it, even given the unbelievably bad material and Mongoloid-level situations.

Hepburn was a great person, of course, greater than most movie stars ever dreamed of being, and she was once one of the most charming and beautiful of film actors. After this dreadful performance, she went on to make an atrocious TV movie with Robert Wagner called 'Love Among Thieves.' In 'They all Laughed' it is as though she were still playing an ingenue in her 50's. Even much vainer and obviously less intelligent actresses who insisted upon doing this like Lana Turner were infinitely more effective than is Hepburn. Turner took acting seriously even when she was bad. Hepburn doesn't take it seriously at all, couldn't be bothered with it; even her hair and clothes look tacky. Her last really good work was in 'Two for the Road,' perhaps her most perfect, if possibly not her best in many ways.

And that girl who plays the country singer is just sickening. John Ritter is horrible, there is simply nothing to recommend this film except to see Dorothy Stratten, who was truly pretty. Otherwise, critic David Thomson's oft-used phrase 'losing his/her talent' never has made more sense.

Ben Gazarra had lost all sex appeal by then, and so we have 2 films with Gazarra and Hepburn--who could ask for anything less? Sandra Dee's last, pitiful film 'Lost,' from 2 years later, a low-budget nothing, had more to it than this. At least Ms. Dee spoke in her own voice; by 1981, Audrey Hepburn's accent just sounded silly; she'd go on to do the PBS 'Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn' and there her somewhat irritating accent works as she walks through English gardens with aristocrats or waxes effusively about 'what I like most is when flowers go back to nature!' as in naturalized daffodils, but in an actual fictional movie, she just sounds ridiculous.

To think that 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' was such a profound sort of light poetic thing with Audrey Hepburn one of the most beautiful women in the world--she was surely one of the most beautiful screen presences in 'My Fair Lady', matching Garbo in several things and Delphine Seyrig in 'Last Year at Marienbad.' And then this! And her final brief role as the angel 'Hap' in the Spielberg film 'Always' was just more of the lady stuff--corny, witless and stifling.

I went to her memorial service at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, a beautiful service which included a boys' choir singing the Shaker hymn 'Simple Gifts.' The only thing not listed in the program was the sudden playing of Hepburn's singing 'Moon River' on the fire escape in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's,' and this brought much emotion and some real tears out in the congregation.

A great lady who was once a fine actress (as in 'The Nun's Story') and one of the greatest and most beautiful of film stars in many movies of the 50's and 60's who became a truly bad one--that's not all that common. And perhaps it is only a great human being who, in making such things as film performances trivial, nevertheless has the largeness of mind to want to have the flaws pointed out mercilessly--which all of her late film work contained in abundance. Most of the talk about Hepburn's miscasting is about 'My Fair Lady.' But the one that should have had the original actress in it was 'Wait Until Dark,' which had starred Lee Remick on Broadway. Never as celebrated as Hepburn, she was a better actress in many ways (Hepburn was completely incapable of playing anything really sordid), although Hepburn was at least adequate enough in that part. After that, all of her acting went downhill.

La Parisienne (1957)

The Ultimately Perfectly Delicious Confection

[9/10 · 27 April 2005]

I have to agree with all the previous commenter's--this is simply the best of all frothy comedies, with Bardot as sexy as Marilyn Monroe ever was, and definitely with a prettier face (maybe there's less mystique, but look how Marilyn paid for that.) I don't think I've ever seen such a succulent-looking female on screen, so perfect that even a gay man like me got excited by it--and not just for purely aesthetic reasons (if the idiot evangelicals really want to do their 'convert-a-queer' number, they are really going to need to up their standards, as no church mice need apply here...)Her breasts, the rest of her figure, her adorable voice, the hilarious way she shakes as she walks across a room...only to arrive in front of a man, breasts literally pointed as if in exquisite confrontation...

I think Boyer is one of the greatest leading men in all of film history. No one played opposite more great female stars than did he: Garbo, Dietrich, K. Hepburn, Colbert, and here Bardot, among many others. And he was also in 'Fanny' with Leslie Caron, and had small parts in 'How to Steal a Million' with A. Hepburn, as well as being in the Deneuve movie 'The April Fools' (although not opposite her.) The only thing I could disagree with in remarks is that even the loud, obnoxious music over the opening credits is appropriate--I mean, Bardot is not meant to be subtle on top of everything else, and her essential loudness (I don't mean her voice) is part of her irresistible and, one might even say, exemplary charm.

Vidal is thoroughly handsome, even if pouty Brigitte says toward the beginning 'I don't know why I am in love with you, you're not even handsome.'

Dear, dear Bardot! Truly one of the wonders of the 20th century, not to mention the joy that she is still with us, when so many of the truly characterful are passing away so fast, in all her eccentric glory.

Pandora's Box (1929)

Totally innocent femme fatale seems contradiction in terms

[4/10 · 10 April 2005]

This is a beautiful movie, but I am going to be the least popular person to comment on it here, because I cannot see a totally 'innocent' femme fatale except maybe in a ballet, where the prostitution and virtual brainlessness won't show as they do here. Of course, a silent film, poetic like this one, is closer to ballet than films would become later, so it is a fine movie in a sense anyway.

However, Louise Brooks plays Lulu as literally wholesome. I was never able to see her as at all sexual, but only affectionate with any and all of the men who were her lovers and/or clients. And the Wedekind plays had more emphasis on actual sexuality than is ever given here.

Louise Brooks's Lulu therefore seems more or less retarded. She is around the vice of society but does not seem to know any of the rules of that society, which is just too far-fetched to be plausible: Even if she's just a simple, lovable and loving 'animal', she would most likely grieve at some of the deaths that occur, but she seems to have no feeling really at all, except a kind of dumb acceptance of any and all men who favour her in any way, and perhaps an inability to remember anything. You would think she was a transplanted Tahitian or some other 'noble savage' rather than someone German.

Can Lulu even read? One has to assume that she cannot. And if she is so low-class and 'animal-innocent,' she would not know how to dress sleekly and seductively, which she does--while still conveying nothing of the 'whore with the heart of gold,' but rather the 'child whore' of the sort we read about now frequently occurring in the Philippines, Thailand, etc. (but those are locked up, and they are surely not all brainless anyway.) Brooks has a sexy body, but doesn't convey sexiness that I can see. She smiles beautifully, but it looks like it would be on an old cover of 'American Girl' or even 'Seventeen.' Either Garbo or Dietrich would have, with no effort at all, even if they tried to hide it, exuded enough smoky sex to let you know what profession they were in. With their acting technique, either would have been able to project as much innocence as was really needed. Brooks is exactly the same from beginning to end, and her portrayal is more like some child-whore Alain Robbe-Grillet would possibly imagine among the many in his novels.

Well, everyone seems to think she's wonderful in the part, comments astonished me by saying she was the greatest actress who ever lived, beyond Garbo and Dietrich.

I suppose this may be true (except that she is beyond Garbo and Dietrich, which is just ridiculous.) Nevertheless, I see that she plays only a waif, never a prostitute of any kind, and it is not convincing: the Countess says something about 'spending your whole life in cabarets' as means of defending Lulu. There is no prostitute who does not pick up some of the necessary hard-edged characteristics and looks of her trade, and Dietrich would have shown this quite as she did shortly in 'the Blue Angel,' even if it had been toned down for Lulu. Prostitution does not exist without a trace (at very least) of earthiness or lewdness, and Louise Brooks never once conveys lewdness. She plays Ondine more than Lulu, and this is probably how Audrey Hepburn would have done the part--so that Brooks's Lulu seems very much like Hepburn's Rima the Bird Girl in 'Green Mansions', with the apparently minor detail of cultural placement. With touches of 'The Little Match Girl.'

It has not been my experience that it is innocence in women that 'drives men mad.'

Only toward the end does Pabst's poetics really fully open, with a taste of Christmas Cake, with the extravagantly handsome Francis Lederer walking away from the scene (he seems not to know that Lulu has been killed, only that she has been with another man). I had not been aware of Lederer's extraordinary career and life--he lived to be 100 and had been the 'mayor of Canoga,' so says his bio herein--but I had remembered him from 'Midnight' with Claudette Colbert.

Hair (1979)

Superb Forman Adaptation of Legendary Vietnam Era New York Show

[27 May 2004]

Milos Forman celebrates the hippies: people should be able to remember with this how beautifully right they often were. They are still usually put down as much as they were when they were operational.

The best "HAIR" is beautiful Beverly D'Angelo's, blowing in the wind as she sings "Good Morning, Starshine" in the Pontiac convertible with her new friends as they zoom across the Nevada desert to find Claude (John Savage.)

Berger (Treat Williams) has two fabulous arguments with "the authorities," both of which are very painful to watch, because you can feel the military-social force over what is considered to be his irresponsibility and paltriness. The first time is at Sheila's wedding party when he resists eviction from the party, and ends up mostly prevailing by dancing on the table--although he and all of his friends end up in jail for it. The second time, at the army base, he does not prevail and the other well-known solution is arrived at. But both times you can feel the quiet violence of authorities against gypsies.

Actually, society tells you to be like the Flower Children, then punishes you if you actually do it.

Just because a lot of the original Flower Children became Yuppies doesn't mean they didn't do anything important when they were hippies.

The 60's were NOT over because of what some otherwise fine writers have "authoritatively" said had already begun to occur before the Manson murders. Anything artistically beautiful leaves living traces that endure forever: this film documents one of those movements that mattered.

They called this writer "media poison" and she wasn't always that. She just called them "children" who she more or less said were just "living this way" and left it at that.

They had been smart not to tell her everything in Haight-Ashbury when she drank gin and took ups to do the story.

In the same group of essays, she claims not be interested in "paradises, real or artificial."

Well, that explains a lot.

She said she was too unstable to take acid when they offered it to her; but this was only partially true: It was fear of paradises.

Otherwise, it is impossible to miss how this extraordinary film, made almost 15 years after Haight-Ashbury and the East Village would cease to exist as they had (remaining primarily only as weak mutations reduced to unspeakable New Age ashrams, where the pot was all gone and heavily enforced k.p. duty--vilely called "karma-yoga things"--was prevalent) captures so much of the happiness that some of us remember so well still as we continue on as kinds of older hippies...

Twyla Tharp's choreography and Ann Roth's colours are all that that strange moment was and is supposed to be--I remember the way people who had used LSD drew stars; you could always tell a psychedelic star, a psychedelic moon, a psychedelic sun. I went to a New York head shop where I was referred to an "84-year-old morphine addict" who lived in Paris, who I was to look up as I bought two velvet hats.

Some hippies lasted. I saw Adam Purple at the Union Square Market in 1996 riding a bicycle festooned with many balloons and told him how much I had loved his tulip garden in concentric circles grown in a vacant lot in what was then a wino neighborhood on Eldridge Street, about 1977--and then razed for high-rise apartments. He said "yeah, if it's good it won't last..."

Well, that's not exactly true, of course, but he wouldn't have been a pure hippie artist if he hadn't been able to put it that way, and not try to see it another way.

His wife was Eve Purple. I hope he hadn't really married her. They obviously wouldn't have needed to.

Beautiful Beverly D'Angelo seems to love Berger and Claude and Hud (Dorsey Wright) and she is never corny about it. Nobody is corny.

Corniness has little to do with love.

Hud's fiancee is Cheryl Barnes and she sings "Easy to Be Hard" full of deep Gospel that resonates dark sounds in Central Park.

It is this song that proves the comprehensive intelligence of the show: Hud has just tried to shirk his responsibilities to Cheryl and their young boy. He wants to "wish them away." In this song she talks about how easy it is to be hard, "especially people who care about strangers...who care about evil and social injustice.." those same people who will walk away from those close to them when they get in the way of their easy time of it. Gradually, Jeannie and Sheila and Berger and Woof make Hud go back and gather Cheryl and the boy up. Even the hippies were being given a strict test for hypocrisy; the beauty of this is that they pass the test so we can love the hippies.

The 'carpool' going across the desert would never have been possible if Cheryl and the baby hadn't been part of the "mornin' singin' song."

Central Park has never been more of a movie star than it is in this one, and New York is sure *lookin' good* in this memoir of collective rapture.

That same essayist said "New York was no mere city" and that she would always have the feeling toward it as of "the first person who touched you."

She was often right, of course. It's not my fault she wouldn't give the hippies a break. They had time to help bring on the resistance to the Vietnam War that forever changed the course of what America could then be, no matter how hard it tries to forget it.

"Let the Sunshine In" makes it impossible for the song in the Pontiac Bonneville convertible to be called "Good Mornin' Sunshine," and that is a true blessing, it goes without saying.

It's about those psychedelic stars even though they are under the sun in the morning in Nevada and this moment in the film is like a magic carpet ride all its own. This is where the hippies just get to be hippies (like in THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA when Mrs. Faulk (Ava Gardner) says when Richard Burton finally lets loose "That's Shannon bein' Shannon!"):

"Good mornin', Starshine...the earth says 'hello'...you twinkle up above..we twinkle below...

"Good mornin,' Starshine...you lead us along...My love and me as we sing...our early mornin' singin' song...

"Glitty clup cluby...libbee lubbee loobee..oh la la la lo..

"Saba sibbie saba...Dooby aba naba.. lily lo lo..

"Dooby ooby wama...Nooby aba naba.. early mornin' singin' song..."

"Singin' a song, song to sing...

"Song song song, si-ing sing sing sing-song... "Song song song, si-ing sing sing sing-song... Song song song, si-ing sing sing sing-song.."

(This is not a cereal song, but it would make cereal seem okay and even macrobiotic food more bearable if one remembers beautiful Beverly D'Angelo and beautiful Treat Williams-it wouldn't even hurt Anita Bryant and Pat Boone and other Baptists, but they couldn't sing it either.)

A song about song. Very perfect singin' song, I'd say.

Young at Heart (1954)

Strong Musical Contrasts, Subtle Character Development Make this one of the Best 50's Musicals and the TWO CAKES

[19 May 2004]

(spoilers included)

For about half an hour, there are parlour songs and clambake songs with the whole family around and these are sung by Doris Day (as Laurie.) These are somewhat loud (as Doris Day usually is a bit) but not too loud (as she is sometimes, as in THE PAJAMA GAME, when a strident sound is produced). However, even this would have been hard to take much longer.

During this early part of the film Alex (Gig Young) appears as the son of an old friend of Day's father (Robert Keith). He makes himself well-liked, which may have to do with a milieu I am no longer a part of, because it is beyond me why the 3 girls (Day, Dorothy Malone, and Elisabeth Fraser) find him so charming: He is loud, pushy, obnoxious and even overtly inconsiderate. He's gonna write a MUSICAL...wow...

Almost as suddenly (Barney Sloan) Frank Sinatra appears as Alex's arranger and this opens up a fantastically dark new mood immediately. If you didn't know something about the film or story before hand, you would never have thought all that sugar-coated artifice of the first half hour would be toned down to the point that it is almost like one of Rothko's paintings, like "White Over Red" maybe. Sinatra even looks very sleazy and literally half-starved (as the character is supposed to be) when he is inside this house that stops just short of Hansel and Gretel.

This is what separates this musical from the other fluffy things Doris Day made during the first part of her career, before the non-musical fluff took over. Of course, it had the advantage of a real story to base itself on--by Fanny Hurst.

Barney's "bad attitude" is Day's missionary material. He sees himself as a hard-luck guy, a loser, second banana to Alex. His self-pitying attitude is actually refreshing here, albeit it may not be helping the character in his own life.

In the cafe where he plays, while living in Connecticut to work for Alex, he does 3 standards--"Someone to Watch Over Me," "Just One of Those Things," and "One for My Baby, and One More for the Road."

Well, Gershwin, Porter and Arlen never had it so good--these are definitive performances of songs all the big singers did.

The last is the great moment of the picture, when toward the end of the song (and after a quarrel with Laurie about keeping Alex's old bracelet), she appears in the club and sits down enjoying his extraordinary singing of the Arlen. When she appears, a change comes over his face, and the whole atmosphere of the melancholy song changes as she exposes her wrists to let him know that she is no longer thinking of Alex--she has gotten rid of the bracelet.

Alex's lack of consideration is overt twice: when he and Laurie decide to get married, he insists upon announcing it at her father's birthday party that night--but she asks him to please not do so, to let it be her father's night, to let him be the center of attention. Even after agreeing to this, as the party ends he pushes again and goes ahead and announces it. This is a most agreeable family, and they take almost everything in stride, so they barely notice.

The second time is more severe. Near the very end, before Barney's accident, Alex is alone with him in the car and offers him some money--this is mainly to show off his own success, which assuages his wounded ego that he did not win Laurie's hand in marriage. Barney refuses it, but when Alex is leaving on the train, Alex literally shoves the money on Barney and tells him to spend it on Laurie.

This actually causes Barney's immediate depression and makes him so suicical that his auto accident is not precisely an accident, as is clearly seen.

Earlier, at the family Christmas Eve gathering, Laurie had even told Alex that she was going to have Barney's baby before telling Barney himself. This prompted Alex to tell her almost literally that Barney was not worthy of her; her face does at least register the rudeness of this remark.

Also, Amy (Elisabeth Fraser) had been in love with Alex and somehow it never worked out for them even after Laurie was out of the way. She may well have found him out for what he really was in the interim.

So that, when we finally see the whole gathering of friends and family together again after Barney's recovery, Alex has finally been excluded: Not a word about his "villainy" has ever been expressed; it has been merely understood.

Sinatra and Day sing together only once at the very end--and both were in marvelous voice throughout this picture. The way the new songs and the old standards were so casually integrated within the plot is most unique and satisfying. And the whole picture is framed with Sinatra's fine rendition of the title song.

The cake at the birthday party for Mr. Tuttle interested me, for purely subjective reasons. I had just re-watched PICNIC a few days before, and in the opening scene, when Bill Holden is approaching Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton) to ask her for a little work, she holds out a freshly baked coconut cake that she will bring to the picnic to Millie (Susan Strasberg) and says "Oh, Millie, doesn't it make your mouth water?" And this cake IS almost palpable, you immediately want some of it. The cake in YOUNG AT HEART is not nearly so alive--it may have been prepared by Aunt Jessie (Ethel Barrymore) but it still looks "bought." These 2 films were made within a few years of each other. If YOUNG AT HEART does not quite reach the poetics of PICNIC, it is nevertheless also one of the finest examples of 50's Americana, and I highly recommend it as a great film musical.

Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995)

SPOILERS HEREIN: Ending discussed at length. Do not read if this is a problem

[10 May 2004]

It is well-known that the novel OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS ends with Joel's choice FOR Randolph, NOT against him, although this unbelievably coarse film relates the latter for the Sunday School set, for the Christian Right, for all the other graceless bigots.

Joel knew about Randolph's accidental shooting of his father, now lying up in the bedroom and nursed by Zoo Fever, BEFORE they go to the beautiful old ruin that is the Cloud Hotel--where Little Sunshine lives. He never held that against him, nor did he hold against him the fact that Randolph had taken him to the Cloud Hotel because he knew that Ellen had come from New Orleans looking for him. On the next to last page, Joel's thoughts turn toward the cynical regarding Ellen Kendall: "But Ellen had never answered his letters. [It's beside the point that Amy and Randolph had made sure the letters never arrived.] The hell with her. He didn't care any more. His own bloodkin. And she'd made so many promises. And she'd said she loved him..."

In the film, when Randolph and Joel get back, it is only then that Amy announces to Joel about Randolph: "He shot him!" And then this absurd series of movements--Joel throwing out the favourite things Ellen had brought him, Joel packing up, Joel telling Randolph "I loved you!" quickly followed by "I hate you!" and saying that Pepe Alvarez (the boxer for whom Randolph had become an 18th century countess at a Mardi Gras ball--the moment that Randolph has chosen to prize above all memories as he sends letters out to Pepe every day to all parts of the globe...) could by now only see him as a "ghost" were he to come back, by some miraculous chance; and climaxed by Joel's leaving the place in full view of Randolph who moans "Don't go, don't go."

Why anyone would make this movie like this is completely beyond me.

Joel GOES to join the "queer lady" in the window at the end.

Joel does not leave Skully's Landing.

He goes back to the house, having chosen homosexuality.

Yeah, he's pretty young, that's a fact. But THAT is what he does, whether you like it or not.

He is going to be as Pepe as he possibly can for Randolph.

He's going to COMFORT him.

It has to be because Rocksavage wanted to save Joel from the "fate" that is the whole point of the book. In this case, why not just make a film about a sexual predator and a young boy who manages to escape him--a young boy who escapes him because he does NOT want to have sex with Randolph.

Joel DOES want to have sex with Randolph and is going upstairs to do so.

*********************************************************************

In the novel, after Randolph, who has gotten quite drunk coming back from the Cloud Hotel, has gone back in the house, Joel stays outside in the stillness of the summery garden.

The whole passage is worth quoting to anybody who doubts that Joel made the choice FOR Randolph and not AGAINST him (or they can look at Gerald Clarke's biography of Capote).

"A sound, as if the bell had suddenly tolled, and the shape of loneliness, greenly iridescent, whitely indefinite, seemed to rise from the garden, and Joel, as though following a kite, bent back his head: clouds were coming ove the sun: he waited for them to pass, thinking that when they had, when he looked back, some magic would have taken place: perhaps he would find himself sitting on the curb of St. Deval Street, or studying next week's attractions outside the Nemo: why not? it was possible, for everywhere the sky is the same and it is down that things are different. The clouds traveled slower than a clock's hands, and as he waited, became thunder-dark, became John Brown and horrid boys in panama hats and the Cloud Hotel and Idabel's old hound, and when they were gone, Mr Sansom was the sun. He looked down. No magic had happened; yet something had happened; or was about to. And he sat numb with apprehension. Before him stood a rose stalk throwing shadow like a sun-dial: an hour traced itself, another, the line of dark dissolved, all the garden began to mingle, move.

"It was as if he had been counting in his head and, arriving at a number, decided through certain intuitions, thought: now. For, quite abruptly, he stood up and raised his eyes level with the Landing's windows.

"His mind was absolutely clear. He was like a camera waiting for its subject to enter focus. the wall yellowed in the meticulous setting of the October sun, and the windows were rippling mirrors of cold, seasonal color. Beyond one, someone was watching him. All of him was dumb except his eyes. They knew. And it was Randolph's window. Gradually the blinding sunset drained from the glass, darkened, and it was as if snow were falling there, flakes shaping snow-eyes, hair: a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled. She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge where, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."

It seems almost conceivable that Rocksavage and Flanigan may have thought that "he knew he must go" meant that he would, in fact, need to vacate the premises since he had made the assessment that he was in grave danger; that perhaps they may have needed the text to read "he knew he must go to her" for them to know for sure what the text meant. That cannot have been the case; this has to be that they wanted to make one of the most original stories in all of American literature a "morality play" about a sexual predator--they had to know they were destroying everything Capote's work had stood for. Astonishing that they would bother with all the trouble and money for something this appalling.

I have quoted the entire passage because the only other possibilities are "the garden's edge" and "looked back at the bloomless, descending blue" that could have involved some literal working-on of the minutiae of the "set," as it were, in the text. Clearly, he had been just outside the garden, and was going in, clearly the "bloomless blue" is finally to be seen on all sides at sundown, as easily looking back from the house as toward it..in any case, Joel wouldn't have left that night in the novel with not a thing of his own on his person and defied the odds of a dark Southern swamp at night...

..and anyway, this is not Robbe-Grillet, where the same stairway can lead to any number of different rooms, full of drug dealers, full of a dead prostitute on a bed, now in the wrong room; or a pier that is the same one but that is sometimes composed of several planes, sometimes just one; or a cord in the pocket that has been lost (definitely lost) and is then there again (without having been found; or an Oriental commercial wrapper of some item or pack of cigarettes which keeps reappearing with exactly the same properties in highly differentiated places and lines of plot completely antagonistic to each other.

We know this, we just want to point out AD INFINITUM that this kind of usage of a classic text is symptomatic of the very worst dishonesty in all of world culture today. I appointed myself to point it out here, since this novel is sacred to me (there are only a handful of really good hardcore homosexual novels, and Jean Genet did a few of the others), but it is by no means an isolated incident of artistic obscenity.

George Davis hilariously told Capote that "somebody had to write the fairy HUCKLEBERRY FINN." This is funny, because it is as if Randolph's Countess is saying to Joel "Come back to the raf', Huck honey..." but we know that here Foucault's (more than Plato's) "keenest of pleasures" does prepare to occur.

This film is on a level with Trump's THE APPRENTICE.

A lot of people would rather hear Joel say to Randolph "YOU'RE FIRED!" than face the fact that he went up the stairs afterward with something a lot more like "TELL ME HOW YOU WANT ME TO GIVE IT TO YOU, BABY..."

Picnic (1955)

Cine-Musique Incarnate

[10/10 · 10 May 2004]

Most of what we see in 'Picnic' doesn't need too much to say. We don't want to mar it with our heavy America of today that used to have this decade that I read somewhere is called "The American Decade." To be sure, this is one thing that could not have been made in Paris or anywhere else in Europe.

The famous musical themes don't even begin to show themselves until well into the picnic--about halfway through. The opening credits are accompanied by other very American sounds by George Duning, that remind us of all the other great artists of the period--Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, those artists that defined America artistically in the brief period allotted it to be free of corruption occasionally.

That odd, acceptable suspension of reality that is always to be found in musical comedy occurs here when Madge (Kim Novak) begins to make the slapping rhythm for the "dance I learned in L.A." that Hal (William Holden) is demonstrating to Millie (Susan Strasberg), Madge's younger sister. Madge makes her way to Hal, having lost interest in what was probably 15 real minutes since she was crowned queen of the "Neewalloh Festival," the kind of thing that still sometimes is found in small midwestern towns.

Then there is that dance on the deck, and the famous themes of Picnic and Moonglow open up. I believe it was martinis that Holden had to use to loosen himself up for this.

It is hard to know how to be grateful enough for these martinis.

Or for that famous pink dress Jean Louis made for Kim Novak to wear (it is even part of the plot; Madge's mother Flo (Betty Field)is taken aback when it is this dress that Madge all of a sudden has on for the picnic.) There is no dress in all of cinema I remember quite the way I remember this one.

The musical comedy suspension would not have remained acceptable, though, and fortunately that seemingly could not have occurred anyway--the film does not tend to point out its inability to countenance failures, it just moves on effortlessly. Once they are dancing, there is already such sex of a sort that musical comedy has never been able to hold.

People should own copies of this film. These are the films that make us remember when we believed in American Romanticism, which was cinematic and it didn't matter if you were small-town if you were Novak and Holden. They ought to own it, because there is no way to remember this any more if you don't have a definite document that it once existed. And you might not go out and get it.

It is strange to hear someone say "I love you" and it not sound idiotic. And it's Holden that actually says it, not Novak.

I can think of nowhere else that the music is more perfectly wedded to the cinema itself.

Even Joan Didion wrote a piece called "John Wayne: A Love Letter."

I guess I want an excuse for what wells up in me when I see this movie, those things I said can only be held by not saying them.

There was this American beauty. It can't be thought anymore.

A Night at the Adonis (1978)

Use of "Moonlight Serenade" in A NIGHT AT THE ADONIS

[8 May 2004]

There used to be a large wooden bar at the old Adonis.

This was brought to full life in the film.

Drinks were served to the guys and "Moonlight Serenade" was played in the background so they could sashay around in a low-blase and nonchalant-cool low-slung way.

This was indeed a lush treatment and was probably Glenn Miller.

Eventually this bar was removed, although before and after the film it was used as a private relationship-development location.

A number of beautiful organisms could occasionally be found there...

It might have been Benny Goodman, but I think Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day did versions, too. In any case, this was big band sound and Jack and his buddies seemed to luxuriate in the chorus that starts with "Glam-uh..."

The African-American known in the film only as "Bertha" who sold tickets at the "box office" had held the actual job before the film was made.

She continued to work there in the same capacity for several years after the film's release...

A Night at the Adonis (1978)

I Saw this Movie about a New York Sex Theatre in the Sex Theatre the Movie is About

[7 May 2004]

The Adonis Theatre was originally a legitimate theatre built by Billy Rose for Fanny Brice.

That alone should have made it a landmark on 8th Avenue between 50th and 51st.

In the mid-70's, the Adonis Theatre opened as "The Flagship Male Theatre of the Nation." Such ephimeral folklore of the 70's era pornographic movie houses is unimaginable to most people.

There is no such thing as a porno theater--straight or gay--anymore. Only videotape and DVD is used, never film. The interiority of life comes more quickly to some realms than others.

It was a vast movie house, very grandiose with a large orchestra area and a big balcony with its own "lobby," which had wicker chairs that gradually were broken down.

In 1977, when Jack Wrangler was the top gay male film star, this film was shot inside this thriving den of male furtiveness.

This had a most extraordinary effect to go into a theatre and to see a movie about the theatre that was showing it.

I thought Wrangler very exciting at the time. It was possible to find the exact parts of the theatre while they were showing on the screen. It was possible to become a mimesis of Wrangler in the exact theatre seat he is filmed in in the film.

Later,in 1990, I met Jack when his wife, Margaret Whiting, the great 40's and 50's pop singer and I (a pianist) were both performing in a mutual friend's wedding.

I no longer found him particularly attractive, but he was charming and funny.

I took a cab with them from the wedding at Marble Collegiate Church here in New York to the reception on Sutton Place.

Jack sat in the middle and at some point told me about a drug of some sort that was "used for sex."

I thought that that was hilarious since it seemed so ineluctable once it hit the air. I am always relieved to find people who don't pretend to be completely other than their image.

I suppose I didn't exactly respond well with a mild pause and then saying "Is Bessie Love still alive?" which Margaret would be the only one of the two to be likely able to answer. However, Jack did know about other old Hollywood stories, about Rudy Vallee's museum to himself in the Hollywood Hills for one; and in his 1983 book WHAT'S A NICE BOY LIKE YOU DOING? he details some experience he had directing Betty Hutton and some other legit names in stock companies--Ruth Roman, some others I can't recall just now. It was fun.

He quit the porno business after AIDS became widespread and has done a good bit of directing--including directing the couple who got married in 1990 in comedy routines for Caroline's and Don't Tell Mama.

But the Adonis was interesting. You could do anything there; it was a kind of Dark Paradise.

The Adonis was moved to 44th Street and 8th Avenue in 1990, and that closed also in 1995 (although that was just turned into a peep show sex toy place called The Playpen and is still there), when all the adult theaters began to be closed.

The old Billy Rose-Fanny Brice Adonis Theatre building was razed in the late 90's to make way for another high-rise apartment building in the Worldwide Plaza complex.

A former roommate of mine moved into an apartment with her boyfriend in this new building. I managed to get in there where I helped her with her English--she was Slovenian--in a college paper; I wanted to see what it felt like to be in the building where an old classic had once ruled. Her boyfriend was Korean and my current roommate, her Slovenian best friend was showing him around Slovenia while she had to stay in New York, because she had hit a wealthy woman in the face with a purse in a cab near NYU and could not leave the country, although she only had to do a little community service, during which a black fellow offered her money for a blow job.

My current roommate came back to stay with me another year and the Korean kept the apartment in the building where the Adonis used to be, but my former Slovenian roommate moved out.

She discovered his porno collection and the coconut oil he used for masturbation--which he preferred to actual sex with her.

Nevertheless, with all this paltry new vice, there was was a real sense of loss, that the place had changed.

Very shortly afterward, I had little choice but to go to Hollywood to find a controlled version of what had been thrown away here, bulldozed.

Fortunately, it was there. (These things usually are not.)

Welcome to L.A. (1976)

Styles of Affluent-Bright Jade in 1970s American Displayed in Welcome to L.A.

[7 May 2004]

When Karen Hood (Geraldine Chaplin) tells Carroll Barber (Keith Carradine) "I love Greta Garbo," he responds with the slightly cryptic "Yeah, she's nice when you're by yourself."

Profound, but too offhand to be a predictable rejoinder. It's very striking, one of the most original of the film.

Especially do you get the flavour of the upper-middle-class world-weary young disappointed in Baskin's lyric:

"At first I loved your sweet complexion, your tawny cheeks and lip confections--they photographed you for your style.

your body held me for a while; you could disguise with such beguile

now lying her remembering it better than it used to be is loneliness, but it doesn't really matter now, I never really loved you much, I guess."

That's from the title song.

From "The Best Temptation of all" there is "there's so many bodies and scenes...so many faces and feelings...dreams...wet tasting dreams

when those silky infatuations come, enticin' me...invitin' me..excitin' me.."

The world of "bodies and pleasures" that was Michel Foucault's vision of the future of sexuality in the first volume of THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY was being lived out in L.A. in particular before he even wrote that it would come to this.

At a Malibu party where Carroll and his wealthy father Carl (marvelously played by Denver Pyle) confront each other, Carl's mistress Nona (Lauren Hutton) spends some stylized, posturing time with Carroll up the stairs overlooking the stylized party, the kind of party in stark white stylized modern LA houses where being comfortable must be impossible, and being controlled is an impossible necessity; and he says to her "Do you really care about that old man?" She says, knowing it won't do to say anything "less," "He sure seems to care a lot about me."

Earlier, before Carroll sees Susan (Viveca Lindfors) for the first time since his return, she says on the telephone "don't you want to see me?" and he says "I've seen you." As the older woman, somewhat desperately clinging to an unshared wish, she says "I've seen you too. I liked it."

To the love-and/or sex-starved real estate salesgirl Anne Goode (Sally Kellerman), Susan says, when she makes the arrangements for Carroll's apartment, "I pictured you plump and tiny with curly black hair--AGGRESSIVE. And here you are--soft and blonde and pretty." Anne, always trying to hard to please: "And here you are so beautiful."

Kellerman drives Carradine to his new Silverlake digs.

She says "this is Hollywood. I just love it. I don't know a thing about it, but I love it...(long pause)....does that sound like a line?...I didn't mean it to..I guess everything sounds like a line these days...Shameless, aren't I?...what are you thinking?....

Carradine: "About your shame."

************************************************************************

"People deceive themselves here, don't you think? Yes. And that's how they fall in love. And then, when everything is over, it's the other person that gets deceived. Am I right? Yeah. Van Nuys Boulevard...(long pause)..I don't need to be loved by anyone...I don't mind waiting...it's how you wait that's important, anyway..I think.. but everyone gets deceived...don't they..."

These are the opening lines of the film, which Chaplin intones in a cab going through L.A., riding all over it as she does every day, all dressed up in fur and pearl earrings and hat all for herself's own formality in the anonymity of a taxi ride.

I knew a number of people like this in 1976 and 1977. They were over-sophisticated and living in the strange limbo between the volatile, but vital 60's and the beginning of the carnage and sterization that began to open its fully tarnished flower with the Reagan era and has escalated to the deafening roar we have only 24 years later.

Bars were full of people who weren't on cellphones all the time.

They weren't ever on cell phones--even the ones you can still see.

Talk to Her (2002)

Variations on the Overcomatose

[5 May 2004]

Giorgio Agamben's HOMO SACER describes the overcomatose patient as an individual whose coma is one "in which the total abolition of relational life functions corresponds to an equally total abolition of vegetative life function" (Mollaret and Goulon in HOMO SACER.)..."a stage of life beyond the cessation of all vital functions" (HOMO SACER). In his ANGELAKI article on Agamben, Benjamin Noys says that this "produces a problem with the definition of the time of death, because it renders obsolete the ancient criteria of death: the stopping of the heartbeat and the cessation of breathing. By these criteria the overcomatose patient is alive, but yet they seem to waver between life and death as an uncanny figure of our potential fate as modern subjects."

The comas in HABLA CON ELLA seem a lot more old-fashioned in that you don't see a lot of apparatus around, only a beautiful young comatose girl who is carefully tended by an abnormally brought-up male nurse and then "cultivated" in a most unique way; and a bullfighter feminist whose lover, though virile, is unable to help with any of the nursing (however, she hadn't been able to tell him he'd been dropped before the accident and coma, so he hung around until the old lover, Nino, informed him.) With Pina Bausch Dance Company on hand at the beginning to see if we have updated, that is to say, lowered our dance standards and expectations well enough, we can almost say that when the comatose Alicia is impregnated and brought back to a full consciousness despite the loss of the child and what may or may not be a lifetime dependency on a crutch, physical therapy notwithstanding--why,we can almost say that it is almost as if we see Martha Graham being interviewed and talking about "my garden in New York," in which some green shoots seemed to be able to grow their gnarled way through some wire fencing, thus proving once again the "power of the life force!" (Of course, it was only the power of Graham doing the talking about this that made it striking: There isn't a thing uncommon about seeing how the spring makes its way through the ironclad machine of New York--every year. We have once again the banal made magical; almost anyone with a fame mystique can do it. Although, there is one bit of uniqueness here, in that the phrase "my garden in New York" is fairly rare; most people find it difficult to situate their talk of gardening in the middle of large cities, even if they have one there as well as in the country; this is the result of the fear they harbour that people might not have known that they definitely owned a country house and garden as well as a city one...)

As if that ghost were not pungent enough, Geraldine Chaplin in a superlative performance as Alicia's ballet mistress eerily resembles Graham in her 90's, precisely when she would have spoken of this "New York Garden" and, as well, of "the body as a garment..." To her credit, Chaplin also resembles Margot Fonteyn in her 60's. She is elegant and puts one in mind of Suzanne Farrell in ELUSIVE MUSE directing her class in which she instructs the students at the barre: "Do NOT look at the floor. YES, we are servants of the DANCE... but we are MAJESTIC servants...we are NOT washing the floor." Ms. Farrell, a deeply religious ballerina, would have been the first to admit that, despite her near saintliness, she was NOT going to subsist on the diet that would have been a prerequisite for working for Mother Teresa (soup and tea) rather than George Balanchine ("Mr. B taught me to roast veal with the fat side up--and he was right." Of course, this is the banal made magical again by fame; all roasts, even if not veal, are made with the fat side up...)

These variations on "bare life" bring into close communication people who would not have chosen each other as friends for any other reason except common distress and proximities to each other's involvements in these distresses.

It is quite unfathomable that Marco would actually become so close to the nurse Benigno for purely "like-interest" reasons. This is a tale within the whole film that shows a magnificent arc of almost unbelievable humanism. It seemed believable enough that Marco would leave the beach in Jordan and make the long journey back to Segovia in order to do what he could for Benigno, but things like that seem less and less believable, it seems like fewer and fewer people are doing them. People can be troubled by other people only in the most minor, easily solved problems; they are willing to throw friendships out on a moment's notice if anything becomes the least bit pressing. It is also moving how deeply Chaplin's ballet-mistress cherishes her former student while she seems to be doomed forever to her coma.

New connections are made between the "bare life" figures and the sentient ones. The two comatose girls are said by Benigno to be talking to each other (possibly). Marco is less interested in this sort of sentiment. Benigno idealizes "bare life" and tries for it for himself as a means of communication with someone else in a variety of bare life. Is there an equation in the fact that he cannot achieve it because a well-spring of life where he least expected it has occurred without his knowing (and surely without his truly wanting, because the dependency on him would be totally unimaginable by then; already he's been separated from the reality of it)--so that he, rather unexpectedly arrives for himself at something that is, by still-current definitions, nay, even very modern ones, well-beyond even the over-comatose?

And it is in that state that Marco can talk to him, and it is hard to say whether that is moving or not. With the new forms of "bare life" showing their new species every minute, is it not possible that any number of phenomena heretofore defined as "inanimate" or "buried, so that must mean dead" will be called into question? Even a slab and headstone may eventually present no obstacles to the new sociopaths. Already I know many people who have "online communities" who do not know that that is "bare life" if anything is.

The prisoners at Marco's Segovia jail are not "inmates," but are rather "interns."

Perhaps they could be said to be "loose-structure-challenged."

All these wonderful new ways we have to communicate with each other through adversity!

We can now go and befriend all of the people we have no natural attraction to whatever!

What's more, we must even be forced to if we won't move toward that goal of equality-brutality on our own.

For example, a demonstration of how a shrinking cinematic man can remain with his lover whose body does not follow suit: So that she does not roll over onto him on the bed while asleep, he takes off his clothes (which have deliciously shrunk with each stage of his own shrinking--an exorbitantly expensive wardrobe his mother had had to keep him in) and climbs into the garden of earthly delights that is her vagina...and is said to have stayed there...whether there was enough oxygen for his miniscule lungs is a matter which may or may not have to do with yet another variety of "bare life..."

In any case, the matter of the fact of inequality was glossed over by the production of a pleasured, new womb-apartment.

On a less exotic level, many of us can even learn how to keep from blowing up Kinko's when we have to get something copied there and are told on purpose by repressed-bad-attitude clerks that it will be ready earlier than it ever is...

Hollywood (1980)

An Utterly Superlative and Beautiful Episode of a Powerful Miniseries

[1 May 2004]

Until I found this page, I had thought the very first episode was all there was--I watched very little television in 1980 and had never even heard of the series. I just checked this VHS out of the NYPL and watched it just now--but I will search out all the other episodes.

This one is the one I would want to make a few comments on. As a real aficionado of Los Angeles and its history--which is not entirely composed of its bond with Hollywood, but most aspects of it are somewhat suffused with it even now, even when Los Angeles has long had a reputation as a volatile place--there were things I saw and, perhaps even more, heard, that I had never seen and heard before; and I have done a LOT of research and made a lot of journeys to and within Hollywood and Los Angeles.

In this first hour of the series (I assume it must be, because it is called "In the Beginning") I was able to see the incredible photographs and footage of geographical Hollywood when it was still rural. I had seen only a few in a D.W. Griffith volume (which I recommend: It has excellent commentary by the great film historian Aileen Bowser), and one--a battle scene from 'Birth of a Nation' filmed right down in the Hollywood Flats--I xeroxed in 1998 and framed and placed it on my living room wall. These pictures of earliest Hollywood are breathtaking to me; they show the fragility of a bucolic and special land just before it is rendered unrecognizable--and there may never have been a more violently rapid transformation of an environment. Of course, there are houses from the silent era that can still be seen in the Hollywood Hills and in Beverly Hills (but Pickfair can't be; a few years after this production, Pia Zadora had it razed--an astonishing act, it would seem), but the photos from about 1903 till about 1920 are almost all of landscape that has disappeared: I was even vaguely surprised that when the transformation from 1903 to the present is dramatically shown, that the Hollywood Hills in the background still had their general shape--at least the far-off taller one did; I think one closer to the foreground had been leveled.

And, especially in Agnes de Mille's inspired description of the "virility" of the grass in Los Angeles at that time "that was so exciting," of the "lupine, marigolds, the poppies.." that were "just growing wild" and that "we just gathered by the armload.." this is just so moving. In fact, Miss de Mille's love for the place itself is perhaps the strongest of those who speak of their memories; she also describes wonderfully a moment when she and her mother were stuck at a location shooting and all the actors changed their clothes without a thought, her mother telling her not to look, but instead to "think of God." What a glorious lady she was, as was Lillian Gish, one of the greatest actresses of the period , primarily for her work in the great works of Griffith, and who also offers fine commentary here.

There is wonderful footage of 'Intolerance', of Douglas Fairbanks's sets for 'Robin Hood' and 'The Thief of Baghdad' (which ends with the remarkable words "Happiness Must Be Earned" streaked across the movie sky). There is a wonderful history of Pickfair and the fantastic reception given Fairbanks and Pickford in Europe and even in Moscow.

I can't wait to see the rest of this glory of a documentary, but this one alone captures the spirit of camaraderie and fun and experimentation that preceded many of the harsher elements we now associate with the business of Hollywood.

James Mason narrates and his voice is appreciated, as always.

Carl Davis, who has written so much glamour-sounding music for movies and TV, as for THE RAINBOW by Ken Russell, does the same for this superlative production, and the "Englishness" of the music is not at all obtrusive.

Wonderland (2003)

Highly Skilled Sewer Atmosphere

[28 April 2004]

I was also interested in the way that David Lind talked to the two detectives he was telling his story to. He completely ignored that they lived in no context at all similar to his (although cops, especially in LA, can, as we know from the annals of Suge Knight and Death Row Records--the Gaines case), but continued to talk his own language, especially striking when he praised the "fearlessness of Ron," describing him as this wonderful creature. He seems to be easily confiding all his own appalling behaviour to the cops in a form of boasting. Of course, they will definitely find the murders more important than the drug-dealing and thieving, which is a correct assessment; but another part here is seen almost as though he feels they are on the same side-a perception which the two cops most assuredly do not share. His excited discoveries do not interest them in the personal way he wishes they would.

Holmes's description of the same matters does have an important difference from Lind's. Yes, he's a drug addict and he had been an ambitious and successful smut star; but he has fallen into a band of hardened criminals only relatively recently (on the one hand, on Ron's and Dave's side, and on the other, on Eddie Nash's side). He is mainly, as Aristotle might say, an "incontinent man," whereas the dealers on either side of him seem to be examples of "the intemperate man." The latter is the far more incorrigible.

The nature of their stories is so different in tone it is difficult to believe that the filmmakers would have done this by themselves, but rather recorded with some fidelity, however imaginative, the actual narratives given by the two men. What therefore comes across is that Holmes is more naive and has not dealt in hardcore crime--hardcore smut notwithstanding--as a matter of life and death until rather recently. Although he does lie about not having been in the house during the murders (we learn this at the end, when we read--and it is inexcusably difficult to make out these texts, much like old subtitles that were white on white--that John's wife Sharon did reveal after his death that he had come to her place bloodied that night), his ABILITY to lie appears much less slick than does Lind's. He had not been doing lying of the sort that "his life depends on it" all that long, whereas Lind would have had to. It is not hypocritical to point out that drug dealers are tougher liars than mere drug addicts (although the dealers usually are addicts, too, they are more identified with being on the other side, have more to lose if they give anything away, so develop defenses that are much more elaborate.)

The one glaring surprise is that the film shows Holmes bludgeoning one of the victims. I had thought that even though it was now sure that he was there during the murders that it was not sure that he had committed any of them himself. Any testimony in 2000 by Eddie Nash could certainly not be construed to be untainted (and I don't know what that exactly was.)

The first scene with Dawn and the "holy roller" (played by Carrie Fisher) and then John's violent impingement into the house where he and Dawn do several lines of coke in the bathroom before fornicating right there is electric psychotic stuff. They live talking this fast and talking a lot of bull all the time, with quick segues from violence and hatred to those horrible "I love you, baby"s that are famous among deep drunks and addicts when they have got their fill of fix.

The first time the after-the-robbery scene is shown (in Lind's account), these vile creeps drink "to Eddie Nash" and it is just as if one were all of a sudden in the most putrescent sewer. Very effective scene.

The film would have been better had it been able to comprise some of the years of Holmes's heyday, because there is no reason to assume that everyone any longer knows who he is, to wit, message boards herein. I remember the way the films opened on 8th Avenue almost with the regularity that Donald Barthelme's stories would adorn new issues of The New Yorker. He was sometimes even very good--as with Carol Connors,(also of THE GONG SHOW previously) in THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF CANDY--which now looks veritably halcyon.

Any message about the certain death at the end of the porn career need not be read into this or any other. Jack Wrangler is proof of this, and is still married to Margaret Whiting, the great 40's and 50's songstress. Of course, he'd come from Beverly Hills, not Circleville, Ohio, like John. They mentioned his mother as living there; I wish there had been some description of this. She was in the address book which would have been Nash's hit list if John hadn't agreed to cooperate.

The Los Angeles canyons have become lurid, legendary crime scenes over the years. Not only the Sharon Tate murders on Cielo Drive in wealthy Benedict Canyon, but in Laurel Canyon, as well as the Wonderland murders, there was also in the mid-60's the murder of the great silent star Ramon Navarro by two hustlers who had lived with him up there.

This story was worth telling. I remember reading recently that there is something of a fashion in making films about criminal minor celebrities--as in AUTO-FOCUS and PARTY MONSTER--and together these add up to some interesting conclusions about the over-ambitious minor talent; the minor celebrity has apparently become a fad in reality TV, and that in itself is a horror that sounds as if it could lead to drugs, drink and crime, if not every form of career depression conceivable. (I have seen AUTO-FOCUS but not PARTY MONSTER.) It brings another dimension to the story begun in BOOGIE NIGHTS, which was actually too artful to fully convey the horror and ugliness; it was garish, but there was nostalgia and charm in the style nevertheless. In WONDERLAND there is the barest glimmer of humanity in Holmes, a slight amount still left in him, but mostly reflected in the women in his life, as pointed out by another reviewer here. Otherwise, it's just desperation, devastation, and explosion.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Keenest, Most Searing Moment in Great Lynch Movie on Hollywood

[23 April 2004]

This movie lets personas and bodies really be the reality; it seems to have some Robbe-Grillet play to it (although there are "fewer" variations here than one finds there--but certainly more depth of feeling as well.) The most interesting is, of course, the metamorphosis--almost worthy of Kafka's--of Naomi Watts's Betty into Diane. We see her giving back a grimy-looking pile of household items to a neighbour; they have such a worthless aura to them they scarcely seem worth the energy to even walk next door and retrieve. She is drinking heavily now and the apartment radiates only irreversible decline, hopelessness and shame: She has gone well past merely "circling the drain," as Bruce Wagner might put it.

On her funky slum-land sofa, she masturbates, remembering her girlfriend (played by Laura Elena Harring); and we get a devastating portrait of loneliness that has become the deepest grief.

There is a phenomenally cold shot of the Hollywood sign toward the beginning.

There is Ann Miller as the landlady and her name is "Catherine 'Coco' Lenoix," and she doesn't seem all that French.

The apartments all seem straight out of Nathaniel West.

You're on your own in L.A.

Nutcracker: Money, Madness & Murder (1987)

Brilliant Lee Remick Performance as New York City Ballet's Nightmare

[20 April 2004]

I think I recall some legal problems in getting the full details of Frances Schreuder's involvement with the New York City Ballet into the miniseries; those details can be found in the Shana Alexander document, in which Balanchine at least is mentioned as having seen her from a distance.

She wanted to buy out of her Mormon background and her skinflint bore of a father. As an unscrupulous person in the extreme, she trained her sons in crime and got one of them to kill his grandfather, her father.

With his money, she gave a huge sum to the New York City Ballet and got on their governing board, major equipment for her ambitions as a Manhattan socialite. Balanchine's most expensive ballet up to that point, 'Robert Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze', was financed with Schreuder money (it was interesting to see the ballet after knowing the story: Suzanne Farrell was still appearing in it in 1986; I doubt if any of these glorious dancers gave this another thought--although I certainly did; in any case, a number of them had known her before she was found out. Even after her trial was well under way, she would follow them up to Saratoga in the summer, I think as late as 1983.) I believe it was Lincoln Kirstein's testimony which ultimately saved her from the death penalty.

In any case, Frances Schreuder died just over a month ago.

Beautiful Lee Remick, of the ravishing smile, a hardworking and occasionally brilliant actress if ever there was one, died in 1993. This miniseries could have been a lot better if the NYCB involvement could have been emphasized and developed in some reasonable depth, but it got the essential story across, especially if you also read the Alexander account. And Remick's performance was pyrotechnical, fabulous with vitriol and every conceivable nuance of rage and hate.

Such governing boards began applying more stringent measures such as doing some research into the backgrounds of overly generous donors whose money they might not find as useful as once it has seemed when it just arrives unannounced in the mail--and an angel is not necessarily behind it...

The Virgin Spring (1960)

The Two Children

[20 April 2004]

The rape and death of Karin is what the movie is, but the (probably accidental) killing of the boy, which is over in a second, is perhaps even more tragic--it occurred in a moment of rage by someone not evil and in no way a murderer--although it is interesting how Tore (Max von Sydow) does not dwell on this for even a second; you see briefly that he cannot believe the boy is dead, shaking him, but then it is back to business. The killing of the boy is perhaps the most searing moment in all of the horrors which had been set into motion by the crimes begun earlier.

The ritual preparation for revenge by Tore rubbing himself with the tree limbs is powerful--I am not familiar with the history of this practise.

Birgitta Pettersson is the most Easter-looking child one could imagine. As the rape begins to encroach as a reality, you fight as hard as Karin did against believing that such a thing could really happen to one so pure. Miss Petersson conveys something interesting here, in that her Karin's realization takes far longer than does that of the viewer.

The little boy would most likely have grown up to be like the horrible criminal family he was a part of, but that is beside the point, since he is innocent up until the moment of his death of the crimes against Karin that the slime have committed.

'Through a Glass Darkly'(with Harriet Andersson and Gunnar Bjornstrand) is also very powerful, 'Wild Strawberries'(with the magnificent, recently deceased Ingrid Thulin and a young Bibi Andersson), 'The Silence', and 'Winter Light' are a few of the other great pictures from the same Bergman period. Even a bit earlier is the gorgeous 'Smiles of a Summer Night', a happy paean to young lovers, with contrasting jaded characters like the actress played by Eva Dahlbeck.

Ingmar Bergman: POTENT artist!

Tommy (1975)

The Who's Great Rock Opera Well Made by Ken Russell

[18 April 2004]

"I have no reason to be optimistic But, somehow, when you smile I can brave bad weather."

That's one of the unexpected lyrics Pete Townshend has written, among many in partial rhymes and blank verse (this one was toward the beginning, as Ann-Margret (as Tommy's mother) falls for Oliver Reed, whom she met at Burnie's Holiday Camp.)

Tommy has been deaf, dumb and blind since his real father was dispensed with by Frank Hobbs (Reed.) That's the beginning of the refrain "Hear Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me" (until he no longer needs it.)

At a Christmas party, already full of some of Russell's palette of horrible garish colours, Nora(Ann-Margret) scream-sings "I believe in love, but how can men who've never seen light be enlightened." This is not entirely honest, of course, because Tommy had been able to see for a few years.

As she accompanies his healing moment, Nora, a ravishing mother if ever there was one, sings to the opening-up of Tommy: "You're rich, but it's so absurd....to try to explain the things you've done."

As his success grows (not merely from pinball anymore) Tommy (Roger Daltrey) sings: "Come to my house, be one of the comfortable people...We're drinkin' all night and never sleepin'..."

These kinds of lyrics are not that easy to find song-music for, so they are reserved for the recitatives.

You get some real rhymes for the great songs like "Pinball Wizard" that is lavishly produced with Elton John singing:

"Since I was a young boy, I played the silver ball, From Soho down to Brighton I must have played them all I've seen nothing like him in any amusement hall That deaf, dumb and blind kid SHO' PLAYS A MEAN PINBALL."

Of course, everybody knows that...and it's pretty thrilling every time.

Equal to it is Tina Turner's fabulous star turn as "I'm a Gypsy Acid Queen," in which all the stops are pulled out. This is one of the great musical numbers in movies, with her face and body as expressive as her voice, working overtime to evoke a high-powered prostitute-junkie.

There are Rex Beans (like pork and beans) coming through the television for Ann-Margret to have to deal with by wallowing in--and here is one of the prime examples of Russell's hilarious love for mud, vomit and feces colours that remind one of similar predilections in 'The Devils' and 'The Music Lovers.'

It looks indeed quite nasty, but, as always, Ann-Margret is quite the trouper and never seems to let it go to her head what a great actress she is. And Nora does a lot of back-and-forth (during the period in which the fame is purely from Olfactory Pinball that has stunned the world) between a guilty conscience about how Tommy has provided her with all of this and just going ahead and indulging in all the champagne and pink feathers and posters of herself in her own room she can muster.

The opera and movie drag one through them, as one hypnotic bombardment after another is introduced. The movie goes fast, you cannot easily stop watching it even after several viewings because of how smoothly one seemingly totally opposed scene is modulated into another.

Jack Nicholson has a small role as a quack doctor Tommy has been taken to. He is the third man we see Nora dancing cheek-to-cheek with--a curious bit of serialization--and Ann-Margret always wears that quiet, pleased look at such times. I think that is Jack actually singing, because there is no need to use a dubbed voice like that.

This film is wonderful, there's nothing like Russell's energy when it is somewhat under control--and The Who made the one truly great rock opera. Andrew Lloyd Webber's attempts came nowhere near, with putrescent songs like "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from 'Jesus Christ Superstar.'

Valley of the Dolls (1967)

Haunted Movie

[18 April 2004]

It is impossible to watch this movie now without seeing how haunted it is, primarily with the realization that it is the major popular archive of Sharon Tate, murdered 2 years later by the Manson gang. This is the place you get a good long look at her, and it was a luscious sight.

It feels haunted like that from the very beginning. Here is another movie where the credits and the title song are easily the best part of the movie: Dionne Warwick's somber voice (always a touch of "light sadness" to its peerlessly singular definition) made this song a gold record. The credits look a little like those of the film of 'Peyton Place' (New England pastoral), although even this is less distinguished. It is really only about the song, this movie--in terms of matters of high standards. The lyrics seem to refer mostly to the Barbara Parkins character, otherwise known primarily for the TV serial 'Peyton Place'.

It's a fine song, with a distinctive rhythmic motive by Andre and Dory Previn, and would have been one of their last collaborations before Mia Farrow set in.

The flip side of the record, one of Warwick's great Bacharach-David songs, "I Say a Little Prayer for You," became a Top 5 in the the R & B and Easy Listening charts, making the whole record gold--she wouldn't break up with them for a few more years.

We won't know if Sharon Tate Polanski would have been a real actress or not, so we see her here.

It was Susan Hayward's next to last performance. She had taken over the role after Judy Garland had not been able to do it. Judy Garland did an interview in the old Saturday Evening Post about how saddened she was that she had been dismissed; she would die 2 years later herself.

The movie is very bad, but we get to hear Hayward's famous, campy "Sparkle, Neely, Sparkle!"

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Robbe-Grillet is Play that You Have to Work At

[16 April 2004]

You don't worry about people calling this pretentious once you have gotten the hang of Robbe-Grillet's style. Read some books about his novels and films, and read some of the novels--'La Maison de Rendezvous', 'Le Voyeur,' 'Project for a Revolution in New-York,' 'La Belle Captive,' are the ones I've read. If you have some French but it isn't great (like mine) read one in English, then go back and read it in French to savour the full deliciously perverted flavour. Read one of the cine-romans like 'Les Glissements Progressifs au Plaisir,'. Robbe-Grillet wants you to play, but he expects you to work at it. If you do, the dreamlike elements that are repeated and reconstellated can be deliriously seductive.

In 'Marienbad,' M. Robbe-Grillet has got an opulent production, as he works with Alain Resnais, the director; and two incredible leads to go along with the confused and opposed histories thought by X (Giorgio Albertazzi) and A (Delphine Seyrig.)They disagree on when they have met and even if they have met--and the period in question is only the one year that has just passed. The stylized movement is hypnotic if you can relax and stop resisting it--it does not mean to address social issues, if one may say...it is far more interested, for example, even in how a diamond necklace looks on Mme. Seyrig (although it doesn't say anything about things like this.)

One has to relax into all this seemingly irresponsible chic and see what it has to do with the structure of the way dreams are made only to evaporate and remake themselves elsewhere and only partially. 'La Belle Captive 'is especially good at instructing one in reading Robbe-Grillet--in reading both his fiction and his films: the volume contains 50-plus prints of Magritte paintings that often illustrate the meandering, weirdly skewed "narrative" (but they don't always; Robbe-Grillet is never going to draw hard impermeable aporias; rather, dangerous facets filter in and infect and add colour and sometimes kill.)

Delphine Seyrig in this film is one of the most beautiful women ever to appear on screen, and she is also worth seeing in 'Muriel' (usually considered her greatest performance), in 'The Milky Way' and in 'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie' of Bunuel, in Losey's 'Accident'; she can be heard in a marvelous CD narrating Debussy's 'Les Chansons de Bilitis.'

Anyone who wants to see how different a writer can be from what he seems to suggest he is by his work (especially work as exotic as Robbe-Grillet's is) should also read his autobiographical 'The Ghost in the Mirror' and 'The Last Days of Corinth.'

Scorchy (1976)

Costumes for Miss Connie Stevens...by Pleasure Dome Boutique of Hollywood

[15 April 2004]

That gives you an idea of this textbook American International Picture with a lot of heroin in valuable objets d'art and many vehicle chases,as well as some on foot, with some very good, some inept beyond belief.

Bill Smith in his 'Falconetti' period is the main reason to watch this: when he runs criminally away, darting here, darting there, it's so gracefully tigerlike it looks like surfing or serious dance.

There is some wonderful footage of Seattle cityscapes in a long chase in which Connie changes from a taxi to a hot rod and Bill gets off the train to get in a beautiful orange Pontiac Bonneville, and later--aided by one of those conveniently passing trains--manages to get a motorbike whose owner he kills in that just-for-the-hell-of-it way that started happening in the early 70's; and so we get a little nice nostalgia for his fabulous biker flicks. This he takes right on into Puget Sound, but Connie just pulls up--then, inexplicably, jumps into the water as if to catch him now by swimming--with all of her clothes, including a full-length coat, still on. As the scene dissolves, she hadn't swam very far, and momentarily is back in her apartment, holding far less of the wet clothes she had been wearing, but still wearing the coat (which looks dry by now) and an orange scarf over her head, whose hair looks dry by now.

And to think that all these garments, but part of all she owned in the film, came from Pleasure Dome Boutique of Hollywood...

This cannot have been synonymous with Frederick's, already an established name, although perhaps Marlene Schmidt had some of those kinds of items when she was primping in her soft-porn-style apartment...

Connie also sometimes screams like a real street feline, the kind that has fights in alleys, a most remarkable horrible snarling sound.

She'd played the Marilyn Monroe character in 'The Sex Symbol'. She would do better to portray Mary Hart of "Entertainment Tonight," even if she is older than the subject, as she is temperamentally suited for this role (not yet projected, alas.)

There is a far too explicit-looking scene of Connie making love with her boyfriend who is then shot in the back by Smith through the window with a spear.

This was a pioneering moment in the new coitus interruptus styles: Having made a clean break with the past, we were on our way to a most thoroughly unbrave new world.

Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995)

Wrongly deformed adaptation of Capote masterpiece

[14 April 2004]

(I say "wrongly deformed," because Capote often was attracted to deformed things, carnival freaks, monstrous children and more; by "wrongly deformed" I mean purposelessly destroyed.)

This is the kind of adaptation that one could forgive even still in the early 60's, as in the endings of SUMMER AND SMOKE or BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, complete untrue to the whole meaning of the original.

But in 1997 it is just a disgrace that such a gross deformity would be made when the chance was really there. Whatever had been said about any problems with the cast are still minor. If M. Bluteau is not perfect, that is not very important. He was fine, as far as it went, even if he wasn't the older, fleshy Randolph that was clearly Capote's Randolph.

Before viewing this, I was able to tell from the cast list that probably one of the most quintessentially Capote scenes had been omitted. When Joel and Idabel run away to the travelling carnival, they actually get to the carnival and meet the lonely, pretty older midget Miss Wisteria, who fondles Joel on a ferris wheel ride. Later, in a storm Miss Wisteria searches for Joel,still desperately stalking him sexually, needing a boy to match her smallness that grown normal men cannot stay with. She cannot find him in the drafty old house,as she calls out "Little boy! Little boy!" and he is later found cold and passed out, and taken home for a rather lengthy recuperation. In the meantime, Idabel herself has fallen in love with Miss Wisteria and Joel gradually begins to turn away from the sentimental charm of the exoticism of the rural South and his fondness for his tomboy pal Idabel; and to find himself drawn to the elegant exoticism of the world-weary homosexual Cousin Randolph.

This was very radical stuff when it came out, and still is: You see the bridge between two cultures that Joel decides to cross as had Capote before him himself had done, now remembering it. At least it is radical insofar as it is a delicate matter that is of the essence of Capote but that he does not address again, perhaps because he had executed it so thoroughly this first time.

In this treatment, Joel's breakdown is done via a snakebite quickly administered in crossing a muddy stream before Joel and Idabel can even get near town--I thought for a brief moment that there were just some uncredited players when the Joel narrator does say that he and Idabel will go off to join this carnival, but that was quickly dashed by this CHEAP snakebite cop-out; I wouldn't be surprised if the snakebite weren't some kind of "saviour" from something much worse in these inept creators' minds. In any case, this is how he goes home and we never meet the haunting Miss Wisteria.

The carnival scene and its immediate aftermath in the abandoned house was one of Capote's most evocative passages--he had a special fondness for carnival people--and this alone proved that something would be as badly gone wrong as the commentary in 1997 indicated.

That the follow-up distortions would completely ruin everything the novel stood for was NOT something I could have predicted.

For about 15 minutes, the movie is beautiful, very much in the spirit of Capote's Alabama (though filmed in South Carolina). The scene at the country store where Jesus Fever has come to take him to Skully's Landing is excellent, as are the first few scenes in the house: All the scenes with Joel (David Speck) and Zoo Fever (April Turner) are golden; they are like the similar scenes in THE GRASS HARP, an infinitely better film of a far less important Capote work. However, tomboy Idabel is not sufficiently embodied by Aubrey Dollar at all. Elizabeth Byler as her more feminine sister is much better cast, with a real Southern accent.

This is the novel that brought Capote enormous success, that made him world-famous--and he never came close to equalling it again. He became absorbed in celebrity. He had written a story that was almost like an impossible modulation from a country Gospel song into a Mozart opera (or at least Sonata or early Symphony). It was too perfect to be followed up, and it never really was. OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS had something that no other novel has ever had: that peculiar alternation of a combination and differentiation of the exotic and elegant, making new definitions of what those have been, are, and can be.

For years, I had thought it incredible that OTHER VOICES,OTHER ROOMS had never been adapted, and also thought how horrified Capote had so often been by the various adaptations of his work: It seems that at least he was pleased with some of the songs he and Harold Arlen wrote for the Broadway musical of his story HOUSE OF FLOWERS. But it was usually a matter of messes--wrong casting (to his mind) in the film of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, a disastrous Broadway musical adaptation of the same story with Mary Tyler Moore. There were some fine numbers in the Broadway THE GRASS HARP (provided by Karen Morrow primarily), even though it, too, was a flop.

At least the film of THE GRASS HARP conveyed much of what that simple story had been intended to--but while fine actors like Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie made this a gem, the subject matter wasn't controversial and likely to offend.

The homosexual themes of OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS are just circled around and skirted nervously--as if the filmmakers were already mystified audience members, or amateurs putting on something prestigious for a puritanical small-town audience. What sometimes emerges--whoever is in charge of what decisions, be it director, star, or writer(s), the whole system of points you can find explained by John Gregory Dunne--can be just abysmal, as in the ridiculous tacking on of one plot line fragment to a completely unrelated story thread as in LA CONFIDENTIAL. There, additionally, the most important crime theme, the smut racket, is simply omitted--the result is a terrible movie, but it doesn't matter so much.

However, it is a serious artistic offense when finally a really important piece of literature like Capote's masterpiece is about to become visualized on film--and is trashed to such a degree that it is literally an example of artistic incontinence.