So Exstase is one of those talked-about films that fully repays the wait and the search. It is brimmingly sexual and not at all dirty. Machaty is a subject for further research—but so is Hedy Lamarr. She ended up so oddly, as an old-lady shoplifter in Florida, suing her own ghostwriters for stories they told in her “autobiography.” We need a movie of The Hedy Lamarr Story—but is there anyone lovely enough to try the part?
The Exterminating Angel (1962)
Do you remember the cinema as a child? Wasn’t it the first great chamber you had ever known in which there was no natural light, or windows? (Incidentally, just consider how that absence prepares us for the brightest light and the biggest window of our lives.) Do you remember in the absolutely packed circumstances of, say, Rear Window that first, tingling feeling of being unable to get out, certainly as long as the show continued? (By the way, do you see how the “rear window” at the movies must be that small rectangle of glass through which the projector pokes its searching finger?) In other words, do not be too surprised if the lifelong filmgoer develops a certain claustrophobia. And don’t look vacant when people wonder what on earth The Exterminating Angel could mean.
At a very nice, rather well-to-do establishment on the Calle de la Providencia (“a wealthy district”), society people gather for an event. It is somewhere in South America, yet all the obvious European niceties are being observed. People wear evening dress. Dinner is expected, with drinks and small talk. But then when that hour is approached when people might be expected to leave, to go back to their homes, an inexplicable and irrational inability to quit overtakes them. We see no booby traps over the doorways, no firing squads waiting in the courtyards. There is nothing like a ravenous mob ready to eat the well-fed guests after the party. Still, collectively, they cannot muster the energy—or is it the belief—to be out of the place.
Luis Buñuel did the script, from a treatment by himself and Luis Alcoriza called “The Castaways of the Calle de la Providencia,” (which originally came from an unpublished play by Jose Bergamin) and it is quite true that this becalmed soirée turns into a kind of desert island in which people succumb increasingly to privation and neurosis. The picture was made in Mexico, and the esteemed Gabriel Figueroa was in charge of the photography, in which anxious gloom steadily usurps the bright light. Jesús Bracho did the art direction, and it is another mark of the film that the physical splendor of the house decays like a place abandoned.
In my opinion, this is the first of Buñuel’s modern masterpieces: serene, sardonic, sinister, witty. It is a movie in which the comedy and the menace are hand in glove. Buñuel no longer seeks to shock or shatter the bourgeoisie. Instead, he invades their confidence in one of their central rituals, the party. And, of course, he declines always to stand up for a meaning. The Spanish version of the film actually had a title warning against that search. With English-speaking viewers, saying that would only provoke them. Of course, it is the multiplicity of meanings that is important. But this is a great film, and the first clear proof that in marrying stylishness and bourgeois tastes, Buñuel had become his title.
With Silvia Pinal, Claudio Brook, Antonio Bravo, Enrique Rambal, César del Campo, Luis Beristáin, Augusto Benedico, and Jacqueline Andere.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
This is the last film of Stanley Kubrick—indeed, he died so soon after delivery of his cut that the legend quickly grew that he intended doing more things to his movie. But it’s hard at the end not to see the substantial gulf between the man who knew “everything” about filmmaking but not nearly enough about life or love or sex (somehow, over the years, those subjects did get left out). Not that the film lacks intrigue or suggestiveness. Mastery can be felt. It is just that the master seems to have forgotten, or given up on figuring out, why mastery should be any more valuable than supremacy at chess or French polishing.
Bill and Alice Harford live in the Manhattan that can be built at Pinewood studios. He is a doctor; she is mother to his child. They also look like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who at that time were probably the most contentious romantic couple in the world. They go to a god-awful party, and in a very mild way they both flirt with strangers. What other things are such parties for, except immense business deals and the arrangements for assassination, all done over the pool table?
Later, Alice admits to Bill a sexual fantasy from her past (the fleshing out of a passing and innocent encounter), which then turns into a vivid blue-and-white movie in Bill’s mind—the first sex Stanley had ever shot, I think. This haunts Bill and sends him closer and closer to infidelity, a bizarre chain of events, ending at the kind of Long Island orgy you’ve always been warned about, where—possibly—a woman is killed. Or did she die of ennui?
Eyes Wide Shut comes from Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, and Frederic Raphael has written an engaging and funny book about how he was called in to do the screenplay with Kubrick. It is the first clear cross-fingers over the fate of the film.
It took an eternity to make: Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh shot a lot of film, only to be replaced. There are several piquant supporting performances (do we know this pattern?), from Todd Field, Sky Dumont, Rade Serbedzija, Leelee Sobieski, and Alan Cumming; there is a ponderous contribution from Sydney Pollack. Cruise seems out of his depth in every instant, and very uneasy, whereas Kidman seems alert, wicked, and emerging from storage.
There was a film to be made, I suspect, in which Kidman (in savage, comic disguise) was all of the temptresses sent to lead Bill astray. And Bill should have been Jim Carrey. I am not being facetious. The terrible fake dread in the picture cries out for comic explosion—Alice in New York?
Of course, Eyes Wide Shut is immaculate: Les Tomkins and Roy Walker did the décor, Larry Smith was the lighting cameraman, and Marit Allen did the costumes. The music is diverse, highbrow, and rather boastful, like an intellectual’s Name That Tune. It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison.
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
The strange career of Georges Franju (1912–87) is in danger of being forgotten. So let us stress first that he was cofounder, with Henri Langlois, of the French Cinémathèque (film archive). In addition, he was a celebrated director of documentaries in whom it was easy to detect the vision of a poet: Le Sang des Bêtes (1949) is ostensibly about the industry that slaughters animals for meat, yet in truth it concerns the cruelties we elect to ignore. Hôtel des Invalides (1952) was intended (by its sponsors) as a record of the French war museum, yet in Franju’s hands it is a warning against war itself. Those and other documentaries made it clear that Franju was obsessed with everyday uneasiness.
Eyes Without a Face, or Les Yeux Sans Visage (it sometimes goes under other titles, like The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, that show the business’s efforts to pass it off as raw horror), is one of the cinema’s great evocations of the tragedy of isolation. Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) is a sophisticated cosmetic surgeon living outside Paris. He has a beloved daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), whose face was ruined in a car crash suffered while he was driving. And so, as a sideline to his regular work, he makes it his business to kidnap beautiful young women, remove their faces, and give them to his daughter.
This story came from a novel by Jean Redon and was adapted for the screen by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (the team responsible for the book behind Vertigo) and Claude Sautet, who also worked as an assistant director on the film. Pierre Gascar did the dialogue. Of course, the setup does resemble that of Frankenstein, and Pierre Brasseur’s Génessier is another brilliant, arrogant scientist who is overstepping ethical considerations. With his assistant, Louise (a grim Alida Valli), he hunts for victims in a Citroën, prowling a nocturnal Paris superbly photographed by Eugen Shuftan.
But the film shifts toward the lyrical as it identifies Christiane as a hopeless beneficiary of all this mayhem. Edith Scob was more a beauty than an actress, and she wears a mask most of the time, but the image
of her in a flowing white gown, in command of her father’s Doberman pack, is one of the most moving and ambiguous sights in horror films. I don’t think one can claim that Eyes Without a Face transcends the horror genre. In some ways it is not as subtle as Franju’s La Tête Contre les Murs (1958), about a man who is sent to an asylum by a strict father (Brasseur again). But the two films could easily play together as a haunting package on fathers who have betrayed and damaged their children. And Eyes Without a Face finally wonders what is beauty—if it is exceptional, then perhaps the hideous will qualify? Are we sure we know one from the other?
Made almost entirely at night, in Shuftan’s lustrous black and white, Eyes Without a Face has production design by Auguste Capelier and a great score by Maurice Jarre. It also stars Juliette Mayniel, François Guérin, Alexandre Rignault, Charles Blavette, and Claude Brasseur.
The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989)
The Fabulous Baker Boys is increasingly hard to explain or understand as the years pass. On the one hand, it is rich entertainment; a fascinating glimpse of another way to make a musical; one more proof that Jeff Bridges is the essential, if still unknown, actor of modern American cinema; and the most serious testimony in the agonizing question, Whatever happened to Michelle Pfeiffer? One other thing: The film is unmistakably an example of the kind of picture nobody would make nowadays. Yet the pleasure in watching it does not diminish.
The Baker boys are Jack (Jeff Bridges) and Frank (Beau Bridges). They have a double act that Beau, the fusspot, has managed to screw into the ground or into the safe but diminishing entertainment circuits of the Pacific Northwest. But Jack, it is clear, is moody with crushed aspirations of being Seattle’s Bill Evans. As their act sinks a little, they think of taking on a girl singer. There is a very funny audition passage where we get to realize how dreadful and copycat girl singers have become. Then in walks Susie Diamond (Pfeiffer), untidy, a mess, but a singer who could be playing the old Keystone Korner in San Francisco. It is cloud-cuckoo-land that this girl is looking for a job. But it is only another kind of cloud-cuckoo-land that Michelle Pfeiffer has never been used this way again. She can sing. Right, you may reply, but she could act once, too, and find herself in terrific pictures. There’s so much she seems to have given up.
The movie was written and directed by Steve Kloves, and it still leaves one with the feeling that Kloves ought to be making a couple of films a year, in the way that Michael Curtiz did once. Yes, you know what’s coming in The Fabulous Baker Boys, and it’s not brain surgery. But you have lost faith that anyone can deliver it so sweetly.
Jeff makes a lot of a thinly written part, but be careful what you wish for: If this were the real Bill Evans, it would be a horrible tragedy, whereas what the film does deliver is a Diamond in the rough. Beau Bridges is a good example of a little goes a long way, and it’s not quite plausible that Jack has stuck around so long.
Dave Grusin did the real piano playing. Michael Ballhaus does a superb job as cameraman, and William Steinkamp did the editing. The supporting cast includes Ellie Raab, Xander Berkeley, Dakin Matthews, Albert Hall, and a comic Jennifer Tilly. But it’s the Susie Diamond show, and while everyone remembers the fully choreographed “Makin’ Whoopee” on top of a piano, Pfeiffer also sings “Feelings,” “More Than You Know,” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” “The Look of Love,” and “My Funny Valentine” as if they’d just been written. Time was when the thought of Michelle Pfeiffer was as thrilling as the sound of Carole Lombard, but something clouded her sun or moon, and that red-rimmed sadness in her eyes took over.
A Face in the Crowd (1957)
This is another of Elia Kazan’s rather paranoid visions of the South—it was shot largely in Arkansas and Memphis—when deep down he seems to be most hostile to television and a kind of acting that has abandoned responsibility. So it’s a tricky film to handle, especially since its central character and villain, Lonesome Rhodes—surely ugly enough in the movie—helped launch the career of the “lovable” Andy Griffith on TV.
At the outset, Lonesome is a dormant force, discovered by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) and turned into a radio personality clearly founded on Will Rogers—a raconteur, a homespun philosopher, and a casual political guide. But there’s a point in the film, never really explained, where Rhodes becomes a monster seemingly directed by much larger political forces and set on a national career. You can say that the warning is clear and that there’s a natural arc to the rise and fall of Rhodes, but the film seems a touch too tidy or tame in the way it wraps Rhodes up instead of leaving America looking like a flock of sheep he surveys.
The film is based on a short story, “Your Arkansas Traveler,” written by the screenwriter, Budd Schulberg. Schulberg is a writer who caught fire in the 1930s, and this exposé has a certain touch of Preston Sturges to it—of sheer idiocy rampant—until Lonesome’s career is tangled romantically with the Patricia Neal character and the way he dumps her for that cute drum majorette played by Lee Remick. What the film now lacks is the formation of an entourage like the group that carried Ronald Reagan to power.
Of course, A Face in the Crowd came only five years after Kazan’s “deal” with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and it could be described as a bold comeback. But in truth there is muddle over comedy and melodrama and a failure to sustain an overall satiric drive. It’s the ordinary characters—as played by Neal, Walter Matthau, and Anthony Franciosa—who are least surely defined. Whereas when Lonesome gets his hands on the song “Vitajex,” the exhilaration is brilliant and terrifying, in that it points to a way in which we like to bamboozle ourselves. It also lets the wild energy in Andy Griffith seem dangerous and infectious.
So leaving Lonesome as a ranting wreck, unaware of his own oblivion, is too easy or cute. Neal may save herself, but only at the cost of Lonesome’s thundering on, ready to treat America in the same way. And Kazan could probably have been sharper in showing how a ham actor comes to believe in his own performance and is lost to reality. We need to see a second part in which Lonesome becomes someone like Lyndon Johnson: verifiable and understandable, yet out of his own control. There are good supporting performances from a range of Southern actors, and Harry Stradling does his best with the camera, trying to match the harshness of TV coverage before color with the noirish interiors of Lonesome’s world.
Faces (1968)
After 1959’s Shadows, John Cassavetes had two adventures in conventional film-directing, Too Late Blues and A Child Is Waiting, that ended badly. He was still acting: The Killers and The Dirty Dozen, and Johnny Staccato and other things on television. But this left nearly ten years between the first screening of Shadows and the opening of Faces. Faces began life in 1964 as a script (around two hundred pages) that Cassavetes had written and that he was using in “rehearsals” as he tried to assemble a cast. There was thought of doing it as a play, but that shifted to a 16 mm film. It’s a very simple setup: Richard (John Marley) is married to Maria (Lynn Carlin). He picks up Jeannie (Gena Rowlands), and Maria has an affair with Chet (Seymour Cassel).
The action covers twelve hours, but the shooting filled the first half of 1965. The cast and crew assembled at the Cassavetes house; they had dinner; they started to rehearse and improvise; and then gradually the camera came into use in long takes. Cassavetes was far more concerned with the actors than the shooting. Al Ruban, a novice, became director of photography; but he was given very little instruction as to where to put the camera or how to light the scene, so he did what he could to follow the action. They regularly shot until the ten-minute magazine was empty. And they ended up with about 150 hours of film, which Cassavetes and Ruban then edited.
The film cost about $225,000, though no actors were paid until the profits came in. The final cut was 130 minutes, but there had been much longer versions. The method—letting the scenes develop slowly—was such that the film could have been twelve hours or longer. For there is this conundrum about Faces: It is fiction,
written and shot, yet it aspires to a reality that resists shaping, form, or anything other than duration.
As a portrait of middle-aged people who are “successes” (Richard is financially secure), it is grueling, depressing, and yet so filled with truth and good acting that it’s very worthwhile. It’s rather as if the characters from a Nicholas Ray film of the 1950s had assembled, without plot, and just begun to interact in ways that would uncover their unhappiness and alienation. What is depressing is the odd feeling that film’s helpless recording process is only hammering the despondency home. And making it self-dramatizing. Faces is always said to have been a family experience, yet clearly for Cassavetes family was a very unhappy place.
At first screenings, the film was poorly received. But at the Venice Film Festival, John Marley won the acting prize. In New York, critic Andrew Sarris prevailed on Richard Roud to show Faces at the New York Film Festival, and it won admirers, Martin Scorsese for one. Pauline Kael said the acting was so bad it was embarrassing. But the film was talked about, and it got a release. Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin were nominated for supporting actor and actress Oscars. The film took in $8 million in rentals, an astonishing coup, and a figure that now looks so large as to be questionable. The year 1968 was a troubled time, and Faces is part of the proof.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 45
