Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/25/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

The Ritz (Richard Lester, 1976)

The Ritz (Richard Lester, 1976)

Cast: Jack Weston, Rita Moreno, Jerry Stiller, Kaye Ballard, F. Murray Abraham, Paul B. Price, Treat Williams. Screenplay: Terrence McNally, based on his play. Cinematography: Paul Wilson. Production design: Philip Harrison. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Ken Thorne.

The Ritz is not as funny as it wants to be -- or at least as I wanted it to be. Richard Lester sets the wrong pace for the action: uninterruptedly chaotic. Farce needs discipline and precise timing, but Lester lets everything devolve into a haphazard jumble of situations, one -- the identity switch between the brothers-in-law played by Jack Weston and Jerry Stiller -- intruding on another -- characters with elaborate fixations, like Paul B. Price's manic "chubby chaser." Noise drowns out many of Terrence McNally's best lines, though Rita Moreno and F. Murray Abraham in particular still manage to get a few good laughs with them. Unfortunately, time has also cast a pall over the anything-goes sexuality that takes place in the film's setting, a post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS gay bathhouse, which makes The Ritz very much a period piece.