Noises Off (Peter Bogdanovich, 1992)

Cast: Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Denholm Elliott, Julie Hagerty, Marilu Henner, Mark Linn-Baker, Christopher Reeve, John Ritter, Nicollette Sheridan. Screenplay: Marty Kaplan, based on a play by Michael Frayn. Cinematography: Tim Suhrstedt. Production design: Norman Newberry. Film editing: Lisa Day. 

Classic farce is all about timing, entrances and exits and gags executed with mechanical precision, which is why a play like Michael Frayn's Noises Off works best on stage, where the only point of view is the audience's. But movies are all about motion and montage and seeing things from different angles, which is why Peter Bogdanovich's Noises Off doesn't achieve its full effect on screen. The funniest scenes in the film are the ones in which the camera stands still for long takes in which the performers can execute the action without being interrupted by a cut or a pan or a zoom. There aren't enough of these moments in the movie. That said, it's still a very funny movie, exactly what you'd expect from comic actors like Carol Burnett and John Ritter, from old pros like Michael Caine and Denholm Elliott, and even from surprises like Christopher Reeve, who fits into the ensemble smoothly. But if you've ever seen Noises Off on stage, you know how much better Frayn's gimmick of deconstructing a farce -- seeing it first in rehearsal, then from backstage, and finally in a disastrous but hilarious botched performance -- works there, where it belongs. 

Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)

Boris Karloff in Targets

Tim O'Kelly in Targets

Cast: Boris Karloff, Tim O'Kelly, Nancy Hsueh, Peter Bogdanovich, Arthur Peterson, James Brown, Tanya Morgan, Mary Jackson, Sandy Baron, Monte Landis. Screenplay: Peter Bogdanovich, Polly Platt. Cinematography: László Kovács. Production design: Polly Platt. Film editing: Peter Bogdanovich. 

Catching Up

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Movie: Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973) (TCM).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer. 

TV: Station Eleven: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren't Dead; The Severn City Airport (Netflix).

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Movie: Mind Game (Masaayuki Yuasa, 2004) (Criterion Collection). 

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.

TV: Chopped: Pasta, Pasta, Pasta (Food Network); The Book of Boba Fett: Stranger in a Strange Land (Disney+); Death to 2021 (Netflix). 

In quick succession, Peter Bogdanovich made three terrific movies: The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon. And then ... who knows what happened? Some blame his abrupt career decline on his infatuation with Cybill Shepherd, whom he miscast in Daisy Miller (1974) and the musical At Long Last Love (1975), after which he never recovered his status as a director. Whatever the reason for Bogdanovich's decline, there's something valedictory about Paper Moon when we watch it today, and not only because it was the precipice from which he was to fall, but also because it launched the troubled career of Tatum O'Neal, who won an Oscar for her debut performance, but became fuel for gossip as she grew p. It also marked the peak of her father's career: Ryan O'Neal went from being a star of the magnitude of contemporaries like Robert Redford and Al Pacino to fodder for tabloids, winding up as a supporting player on TV series like Bones. But set aside all that, and appreciate the crispness of the black-and-white cinematography of László Kovács, the skill with which Bogdanovich brings Alvin Sargent's screenplay to life, the cherishable Trixie Delight of the great Madeline Kahn, the superb work of Polly Platt in recreating small-town Kansas in the 1930s, and the easy rapport of the two O'Neals. One quibble about the closed captioning on the movie: In the diner scene below, Moses orders what the captions call "a knee-high and a Coney Island" for Addie. The "knee-high" is actually a Nehi, a now-defunct soft drink, as you can see on the label in the film.

Tatum O'Neal and Ryan O'Neal in Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)

After finishing Troilus and Cressida, I have to conclude that the only way it could be staged today is as a knockabout bitter comedy. Taking it seriously is to endorse either the antidemocratic politics of Ulysses's speech on order or the nihilism of Thersites. A problem play indeed. 

The two episodes of Station Eleven I watched Tuesday night brought me up to date, but left me still confused about where it's going. So far, the series has alternated scenes from the immediate outbreak of the virus and scenes from 20 years later, the group of survivors it has chosen to follow continue their journey as traveling players. The function of Station Eleven itself, the graphic novel created by Miranda Carroll and cherished by Kirsten, remains one of the more intriguing mysteries of the series. I'm beginning to glimpse how things connect: Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony, and Clark (David Wilmot), the Rosencrantz to Arthur Leander's Guildenstern, and his outpost at the Severn City airport, but there are so many characters that it's hard to keep them in mind. Thank god for IMDb. 

I've always been fascinated by the Japanese imagination, which seems to bridge surrealism and pop culture with ease. I'm no devotee of manga or anime, so I can't speak with any confidence on the subject other than to express my appreciation of what bits of it I encounter, usually filtered through the films of Hayao Miyazaki or the novels of Haruki Murakami. I stumbled last night on Mind Game, the 2004 animated film by Masaaki Yuasa which is somewhat about the afterlife, and was left grasping for stability. I can't say I enjoyed it -- the film induced eyestrain as I tried to keep the images whole -- but I can see where its cult status came from. It's certainly a barrage of styles of animation, so much so that I can't choose any one image to represent it. The one below is from a "realistic" moment in the film.

A quiet moment in Mind Game (Masaaki Yuasa, 2004)

From Shakespeare to D.H. Lawrence. St. Mawr is a short novel (or a long short story) about Lou Witt, one of Lawrence's sexually frustrated women, who buys a beautiful but high-spirited stallion named St. Mawr. There doesn't seem to be any canonical saint by that name, and Wikipedia tells me that mawr just means "large" in Welsh. I've only just begun the story, so no reliable opinions yet, other than it seems to be following the author's familiar pattern of conflict between the civilized and the wild. 

The first episode of The Book of Boba Fett was promising, setting up the characters of the bounty hunter (Temuera Morrison) and his sidekick Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), but not giving us much clue as to the direction of the story. I also watched Death to 2021, a spoof of year-in-review shows featuring some very funny performances by actors like Lucy Liu, Stockard Channing, and William Jackson Harper playing commentators, the standouts being Hugh Grant as an über-Tory Brit outraged by what he sees as the decline of everything that made Britain great, and Tracey Ullman as a Fox News-style personality. 

The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston in The Other Side of the Wind

Jake Hannaford: John Huston
The Actress: Oja Kodar
Brooks Otterlake: Peter Bogdanovich
Julie Rich: Susan Strasberg
Billy Boyle: Norman Foster
John Dale: Robert Random
Zarah Valeska: Lilli Palmer
Pat Mullins: Edmond O'Brien
Maggie Noonan: Mercedes McCambridge
Zimmer: Cameron Mitchell
Matt Costello: Paul Stewart
Jack Simon: Gregory Sierra
The Baron: Tonio Selwart
Max David: Geoffrey Land
Themselves: Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Curtis Harrington, Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran, George Jessel

Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Oja Kodar, Orson Welles
Cinematography: Gary Graver
Art direction: Polly Platt
Film editing: Bob Murawski, Orson Welles
Music: Michel Legrand

Inevitably (and intentionally), Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind is going to remind us of other films, including movies about making movies like Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) and such garish post-Code counterculture movies as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Zabriskie Point *(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970). But what it doesn't remind me of very much are the movies made by Orson Welles. In his most troubled and inchoate films, like Mr. Arkadin (1955), Welles always gave us something to look and marvel at, even if it was only Michael Redgrave in a hairnet. The long-posthumously assembled Other Side doesn't give us much we haven't seen before, aside from a naked Oja Kodar wandering around the ruins of old Hollywood studio sets. Welles's intention is to spoof those counterculture movies while telling a story about how hard it is to make one. I think perhaps the chief problem lies in Welles's casting John Huston as the ill-fated Jake Hannaford, the aging and put-upon director, when he should of course have cast himself. Hannaford's young leading man, John Dale, has left the film in a huff, and what forward drive the narrative part of the film has consists of the director's response to that defection. Huston's predatory grin feels all wrong -- I never sense that his Hannaford has lost control of anything, except perhaps his libido. We need the vast imperturbable presence of Welles in the role, if only to make the point that this is the most personal, the most autobiographical of all his films. It's lamentable that it took almost half a century to bring The Other Side of the Wind to the screen, but the truth is, the story about why it took so long -- which Morgan Neville tells in his 2018 documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead -- is more interesting than the film itself.

*Some of The Other Side of the Wind was shot in a house across the street from the Arizona house featured (and blown up, at least in miniature) in Antonioni's movie.

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)

Sam Bottoms, Eileen Brennan, and Timothy Bottoms in The Last Picture Show

Sonny Crawford: Timothy Bottoms
Duane Jackson: Jeff Bridges
Jacy Farrow: Cybill Shepherd
Sam the Lion: Ben Johnson
Ruth Popper: Cloris Leachman
Lois Farrow: Ellen Burstyn
Genevieve: Eileen Brennan
Abilene: Clu Gulager
Billy: Sam Bottoms
Charlene Duggs: Sharon Ullrick
Lester Marlow: Randy Quaid
Sheriff: Joe Heathcock
Coach Popper: Bill Thurman
Joe Bob Blanton: Barc Doyle

Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Screenplay: Larry McMurtry, Peter Bogdanovich
Based on a novel by Larry McMurtry
Cinematography: Robert Surtees
Production design: Polly Platt
Film editing: Donn Cambern

Not having seen The Last Picture Show for a long time, I was startled to realize that the protagonist of the film is Sonny Crawford, played by Timothy Bottoms. Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars for the film, Jeff Bridges and Ellen Burstyn were nominees, and Cybill Shepherd and even Randy Quaid went on to more prominent careers than Bottoms did, but his quiet, shyly withdrawn character is the one that carries the movie from beginning to end. The role could have been played by Bridges, but I think director Peter Bogdanovich made the right decision: Bridges is too up-front an actor for the role of Sonny. Bottoms's ability to fade handsomely into the background makes him a perfect actor for a character who needs to be quietly passive. He shouldn't outshine the rest of the ensemble, but instead bring home the film's message about the damage that can be done in a dying community like Anarene, Texas -- an antithesis to the sentimentalized small towns that for so long dominated American movies. What emerges from the starved lives of the citizens of Anarene is not a sense of community, a willingness to love and help one's neighbor, but a kind of deep meanness, a self-righteous self-centeredness. For me, the scene that best captures this emotional and moral stuntedness is the one in which the town goes out in hysterical pursuit of Joe Bob Blanton, the preacher's sun whom we see being bullied and mocked throughout the movie. In our times, I suspect, Joe Bob's revenge would have involved shooting up the local high school, but instead he picks up a little girl and drives off into the country with her, setting off a frenzy. But when he's found and carted off to jail, everyone seems to forget about the little girl: We see her tagging along, virtually unnoticed, after the mob that's rejoicing in its victory. We remember how surprised and disgusted people were when Sam the Lion left Joe Bob a thousand dollars in his will -- probably to tell the boy to get the hell out of Anarene before it's too late. Unfortunately, it seems to be too late for everyone else. Duane goes off to Korea, but he promises to return if he doesn't get shot. Jacy, we hear, is in Dallas, but she'll maintain the carapace of vanity and manipulativeness she evolved in Anarene wherever she goes. At the end, we're left with Sonny and Ruth, reunited in lonely hopelessness.

What's Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972)

As a film genre, the screwball comedy flourished for about a decade, from 1934 to 1944, or from Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934) to Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944.) Like so much else in movie history, including the Western, it was killed off by television, by half-hour sitcoms like I Love Lucy that slurped up its essence and made the 90-minute theatrical versions seem like overkill. We can still glimpse some of the heart of the screwball comedy in films like David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013) or Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), but Peter Bodganovich's What's Up, Doc? is probably the last pure example of the genre as it was in its heyday. Like the masters of the genre -- Hawks and Sturges are the masters, but Gregory La Cava, George Stevens, Mitchell Leisen, and Frank Capra made worthy contributions -- Bogdanovich followed a few rules: One, get stars who usually played it straight to make fools of themselves. Two, make use of as many comic character actors as you can stuff into the film. Three, never pretend that the world the film is taking place in is the "real world." Four, never, ever let the pace slacken -- if your characters have to kiss or confess, make it snappy. On the first point, Bogdanovich found the closest equivalents to Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn (or Clark Gable, Joel McCrea, James Stewart on the one hand, Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur on the other) that he could among the stars of his day. Ryan O'Neal was coming off the huge success of the weepy Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970) and a five-year run on TV's Peyton Place and Barbra Streisand had won an Oscar for Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968). Granted, O'Neal is no Cary Grant: His timing is a little off and he overdoes a single exasperated look, but he makes a suitable patsy. But has Streisand ever been more likable in the movies? She plays the dizzy troublemaker with relish, capturing the essence of Bugs Bunny -- the other inspiration for the movie -- to the point that you almost expect her to turn to the camera and say, "Ain't I a stinker?" As to the second point, we no longer have character actors of the caliber of Eugene Pallette, Franklin Pangborn, or William Demarest, but Bogdanovich recruited some of the best of his day: Kenneth Mars, Austin Pendleton, Michael Murphy, and others, and introduced moviegoers to the sublime Madeline Kahn. And he set it all in the ever-picturesque San Francisco, while making sure no one would ever confuse the movie version with the real thing, including a chase sequence up and down its hills that follows no possible real-world path. And he kept the pace up with gags involving bit players: the pizza maker so distracted by Streisand that he spins his dough up to the ceiling, the banner-hanger and the guys moving a sheet of glass, the waiter who enters a room with a tray of drinks but takes one look at the chaos there and turns right around, the guy laying a cement sidewalk that's run over so many times by the car chase that he flings down his trowel and jumps up and down on his mutilated handiwork. This is masterly comic direction of a sort we don't often see -- and, sadly, never saw again from Bogdanovich, whose career collapsed disastrously with a string of flops in the mid-1970s. Here, he was working with a terrific team of writers, Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton, who turned his story into comedy gold.