Joan Greenwood is ravishing as Sibella, but I think it’s worth saying that Greenwood’s breathy underlining of herself always had a suggestion of female impersonation—in other words, this is woman (treacherous, intelligent, greedy, and dangerous) such as confirms every gay suspicion (and delight).
Let me go further: If ever a movie deserved a sequel, this is it. Left on the steps of Pentonville, free, while recollecting his memoirs, the look on Dennis Price’s face is exquisite: He is an idiot, for once; he may be doomed; and yet—he is a writer—and writers long to be read.
King Kong (1933)
Some people are afraid of Kong, but me, I’m afraid of Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong). He is the reckless, fearless showman who is prepared to leave Skull Island and its civilization in tatters if he can bring Kong back to New York as the eighth wonder of the world. And the more you look into the history of this phenomenal cultural event, the less interested it seems in large monkeys and the more helpless it is with Denham.
In the 1920s, increasingly, there had been an interest in film crews that went to wild places and came back with documentary footage. Flaherty had started it, but Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper carried it on with films like Chang and Grass. Of the two, Schoedsack was the explorer and Cooper the showman—though it unduly restricts Cooper to call him that. Merian Cooper was an air ace and a man of many parts, and one of those parts was to succeed David O. Selznick as executive in charge of RKO.
Cooper had the idea for King Kong, and it was to turn on a figure half Cooper and half Schoedsack—a ranting producer/hunter. But the artistic thrust to the idea was that the beast they would find would be manmade in a film of special effects. So the work went on to write a script (Cooper, Edgar Wallace, James Creelman, and Ruth Rose all helping), but at the same time Willis O’Brien began to consider the special effects that would make the whole thing filmable in the studio.
The importance of that process is to see Kong as a dreamed creature, a large stuffed toy, a crudely animated model, engaged in fights with dinosaurs and the pathetic attempt to hold Fay Wray in his paw. And so it worked out that Denham rescues Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) from poverty and takes her to Skull Island, teaching her how to scream as she sees “it” along the way. The true stooge in the show is Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), Ann’s boyfriend—and clearly a bolder version of the comic-book legend would have Denham revealing the monster and his own beast to Ann and seeing which gets the bigger scream.
The camerawork was shared by several people, and Cooper and Schoedsack directed it all, but it’s the dynamic of Denham and the extraordinary inventiveness of O’Brien that carries the film along, all on the chest-pounding score of Max Steiner.
Two remakes have not crushed the spirit or the naïve intensity of the original—it towers over the slick, much longer color versions. King Kong is an unstoppable 110 minutes, without an ounce of irrelevance or small talk, crammed with classic situations—from Ann staked out for Kong, to Kong staked out for the theater audience. Everything on the island is savagely racist and deliriously exciting. Everything in New York makes you long for the simplicity of the island. And in the last set piece, the planes attacking Kong when he is the roaring Christmas star on top of the Empire State, how can we not see the prophecy of what is called 9/11? Eternal proof that sometimes America can make a trash movie that might have moved Lear.
The King of Comedy (1983)
Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) may be one of the most original, and alarming, creations in the work of Martin Scorsese. Bearing a massive, unfocused good nature rather in the way a parade float might be carrying an ICBM, he charges through American media society of yesteryear armed and crippled with his certainty that the celebrities—above all Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis)—know him in the way he knows them. Rupert is crass; he dresses very badly; he hardly listens to people who are talking to him; and he could bring the world tumbling down. He leaves us longing for the days when Travis Bickle was the most dangerous fellow you might meet out there on the streets.
It is part of Rupert’s lethal good nature that he believes he could be the King of Comedy, and, when all is said and done, after he has practiced a little genteel kidnapping and ransom, and been on the show, it looks as if he could make it. In that sense, he is Travis’s brother—for Travis does find the providential shoot-out situation where he can become a celebrity, the taxi driver who gives riders a thrill and who always gets the right change and a healthy tip.
The King of Comedy passed at the time as a one-off venture, a jeu d’esprit—until it was realized that there was little “jeu” in Mr. Scorsese and a very guarded esprit. The King of Comedy meanders and wallows sometimes. It lacks that lip-smacking thoroughness that Scorsese finds for gangsters, as if Scorsese didn’t entirely understand Rupert himself. But the problems and the doldrums are forgivable because there is a black comedy of embarrassment in much of the film that is enchanting and liberated compared with the tight, anal way in which many Scorsese jigsaws fit together so that they squeak.
There are so many unexpected things—like Rupert’s ghostly home life: Are there other people there, or is he in some institution already? Then there are the women—the decorous, dainty Shelley Hack, forgotten now, but tripping up to the reception desk with dulcet lies. There is even the receptionist, who I seem to remember was Mrs. Winkler (the producers are Chartoff and Winkler). There is Diahnne Abbott with nothing to do. And then there is Sandra Bernhard, whose existence in life and cabaret might otherwise have gone unnoticed in film. This proves she existed and was very weird and wondrous.
And so we come finally to Jerry as Jerry—Jerry Lewis as Jerry Langford, the sort of Carsonian figure this story needs, except that Langford has been in Carson’s seat half his life and is nothing but polish. It is a glorious performance, worthy of a book by Wittgenstein, the nonentity everyone knows. There is a sequence where he walks the street—in public, waiting to be mobbed, but not quite—that is perhaps the gentlest, finest comedy Lewis ever did.
Paul D. Zimmerman wrote it, and I’m not sure that Scorsese ever understood the script. But the film seems more barbed and cuddlesome every year. I love it. But when the Terror really comes, it will be like Rupert Pupkin.
The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)
Although it has persistently drawn less attention than Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens still seems to me Bob Rafelson’s most intriguing picture. If I had to answer why in one word it would be brotherhood. The idea of bipolarity acted out in two brothers is obvious, but the question as to whether David Staebler (Jack Nicholson) is more creative, more rational, or even more stable than his brother Jason (Bruce Dern) is endlessly provocative.
It was a BBS production, with Rafelson acting as producer and director, working from a screenplay by Jacob Brackman that seldom lets us relax in our feelings about the material. So the long, opening story by David only gradually becomes an actor on a radio show. For the most part it seems to ache with the actor’s sincerity—it is a tour de force of self-effacement in an actor identified with pleasure. So David emerges as a retiring person: a man who needs the dark security of the radio studio and a certain freedom from test or criticism. He can only be true by making it up—by turning the world into his sad novel. It is a part of that process that Nicholson seemed older, heavier, drabber, and so much less hopeful than ever before.
By contrast, Jason is the showman, the confidence man, the performer, the rabid dreamer and schemer who has some immense plan that will get them all out of the cold East Coast—Atlantic City and Philadelphia—and away to Hawaii. He is a developer, even if the concrete is not yet set in his own mind. And he is exactly the kind of madman who gets movies made—quite subtly the film is a story about the relationship between a producer (always in the light) and the member of an audience (nursing his dark).
The brilliance of the plan for brotherhood is casting Dern and Nicholson—longtime friends, colleagues, and contemporaries—at the moment when Nicholson
was beginning to accelerate and to leave Dern far behind. It goes without saying that the parts could have been swapped, without any loss. Nicholson thrived without Dern, but you can almost hear Dern complaining that Jack lost his integrity in doing so; these two guys lived with a dream, that each one kept the other honest.
Of course, there are two girls, too—Ellen Burstyn, not just magnificent, but the pivot of drastic action, a woman made raggedly self-abusive by her situation; and Julia Anne Robinson, wan, mysterious, seductive, and not long for this world. The women prompt the breakdown in the brothers’ world and the end of their rhythm, and it’s one of those rare films that really gets at the fear and loathing of women in American men. László Kovács did the lovely winter photography, Toby Carr Rafelson did the art direction. Bipolarity has become a huge subject since 1972, but this great film opened up the metaphor for us all. It’s a rare thing to see two people so dysfunctional who manage to keep going just by bouncing off each other.
Kings of the Road (1976)
While driving on the autobahn one day, Wim Wenders saw two trucks staying side by side for miles as the drivers chatted to each other. One is wary of challenging the movie director looking for inspiration, but it’s a surprise they weren’t locked together on the CB radios that are so vital a part of Jonathan Demme’s Handle with Care (1977). Never mind, Wenders saw the chance for a road movie in which Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler) travels the line of the “wall” between West and East Germany servicing projectors in dying movie houses, and one day picks up Robert (Hanns Zischler), who can hardly believe the solitude and the monotony of the life.
Kings of the Road is nearly three hours long—time enough for those qualities to sink in. Wenders said in interviews that this was a movie about men who just preferred to hang out with other men. They are not gay. They are not exactly antiwomen. It is more that they like to shelter from exactly those people who might ask them about such matters. But it could mean so much if the relationship between the two men were just a little bit more thorough or pleasing. Three hours and hundreds of miles gives them time to talk, but the talk—it seems to me—is enough to make us want to get off the truck. Is it that being a man involves being bored, without complaint?
Wenders is credited with the script, though he has said that he and the actors really improvised it together as they traveled. And there’s an opportunity for a lot of pseudo-tough pronouncements about women and the influence of America on Germany and Europe. And Wenders is smart enough to be critical and penetrating. But we know now that the American road—as celebrated by Kerouac and Sam Shepard—is more to his taste than the German highways. He has a real taste for boring or silent men and can find a nearly spiritual haven there in a film like Paris, Texas. But that’s in part because of his devotion to American music and movies and the underlying faith that—just like in Detour—a hell of a situation is just around the corner.
Kings of the Road is photographed by Robby Müller and Martin Schäfer in a solidly realistic tradition that extends to black and white and, shall we say, long-held shots where not too much happens. The editing is by Peter Przygodda. The most interesting point now, I think, is Robert’s interest in words and language, and the most entertaining point is the near-slapstick sequence on silent comedy. But if so little in the way of shaped drama is to be allowed into this journey, then it soon cries out for incident and diversion. There could easily be a story in truckers who become separated from their world to an unhealthy degree—and even dangerous because of it. But that’s the American scenario at work—it’s the impulse that spurred Spielberg’s Duel. And I have to say, finally, that Wenders allows himself to find more atmosphere in his books of still photographs than he permits in his movies.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
How could it be, working within the bounds of commercial cinema when many were still nervous of seeming to step out of line, that Robert Aldrich delivered a work of such scathing, brimming satire that was still so embedded in a “safe” genre (the old noir game) that there was no need to laugh out loud (that sort of giveaway could be incriminating still)? After all, you could say to any investigator, aren’t we simply watching your standard, brutalizing L.A.-private-eye-meets-gangsters stuff? And look, whereas the “literary” basis for all this—Mickey Spillane—has routine in-and-out sex passages every fifty pages or so, the dolls here stay as inert and insolently comic as household appliances—refrigerators, ovens, or flush toilets.
Kiss Me Deadly remains a miracle of tact and tone, real yet surreal, set in a city that is more than ready for the kind of atomic apocalypse that waits in the big, locked box—itself so close to the tantalizing object of desire in the game shows that would soon invade TV. “Open the box!” you can hear yourself yelling, just so that the severe photography by Ernest Laszlo can give us the stark beauty of a ground zero in Santa Monica.
It is not enough to say that Aldrich was great for a moment, and coarse thereafter. One really needs to know the exact circumstances of chance, opportunism, and devious luck that got this film made. For example, did Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer comprehend his own muscle-bound strut, or did Aldrich just let him go with it? Is there another film in which noir violence nuzzles up against real evil so suggestively? Remember the girl’s hanging legs and the idea of pliers? How do we forget the staircases, the steep streets of the old city, the sudden, punitive hurts that are inflicted and the bravura madness of “Va-va-voom!”
The women are to die for, ranging from the subcompetent but stacked Maxine Cooper to Gaby Rodgers, who is, arguably, so knowing a creature, so fixedly cruel and desirable, that a case could be made for keeping her out of pictures forever afterward (that did seem to be the policy, alas). And still I haven’t mentioned Cloris Leachman’s desperation, and how I know she’s naked, raw, and violated under that raincoat.
If you have to know the story line, it’s just that a phallus named Mike Hammer (it’s hard to type this stuff without cracking up) gets caught up in an intrigue which will end with a box full of atomic fire. Oh, I see, you say—it’s a film noir! But that satisfaction only demonstrates the ruinous state of noir criticism, when it is enough for a film to be saved or not saved. Kiss Me Deadly is so much more—a black comedy, a serious case of coitus interruptus (because the Spillane sex scenes never come), and the sheer rapture of stupidity and moral self-confidence going hammer, hammer, hammer on the eggshell world until it blows up.
Magnificent. And should there be a comma in the title?
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)
Kiss Me, Stupid stands directly in the path of anyone intrigued by the question as to whether Billy Wilder was more interested in making us laugh or throw up. It is also a fascinating picture in the awkward history of Hollywood in the 1960s, desperately trying to keep up with moral standards on the slide. No one doubted that Billy Wilder had always had an eager, dirty mind. But for years he had taken it for granted that he had to keep it out of his pictures. But now, by 1964, was smutty becoming fashionable? He was moved yet angry, and here he lunges at bad taste the way Hitchcock in the same years wanted his own sex and violence to be more disgusting.
At first, everything was promising. Kiss Me, Stupid came from a play, The Dazzling Hour, by Ketti Frings and Jose Ferrer, that had failed in the 1950s. Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond restaged it completely. The story now was as follows: Dino is a nightclub casino singer stranded in Nevada—in the town of Climax (let double meanings reign). This excites Orville Spooner, a songwriter, and his lyricist friend, Barney Milsap. If only they could get Dino to sing one of their songs. They think to detain Dino in Climax, and they recognize his steady need for sex. So they hire a local hooker, Polly the Pistol, who will pretend to be Mrs. Spooner and keep Dino interested.
As a first step, Wilder got Ira Gershwin to come on board: Orville and Barney’s songs would be some of those Gershwin songs the world doesn’t know—because they flopped. He got Alexander Trauner to do the sets for what was a Panavision film. Trauner toured Nevada, rec
koned that all construction there was temporary, and worked accordingly. Then there was the cast: Dino tickled Dean Martin, no matter that it was very close to his real bone—indeed, Martin’s production company came on board with funds. Polly the Pistol would be Kim Novak—casting that sort of said, Well, aren’t you Marilyn Monroe now? Felicia Farr would play Orville’s real wife. And Peter Sellers was cast as Orville.
Wilder was plainly intrigued by Sellers—he was already lining him up to play Dr. Watson. He loved the mimetic skill and the emptiness behind it all. But Sellers was exhausted and just married to Britt Eklund—this in itself sounds like a Wilder joke. He did not enjoy the way Wilder kept an open set and a partylike mood. In short, he had a heart attack so bad he had to be taken off the film—and was replaced with Ray Walston.
The result is a fascinating but uneasy film. It got a C for condemned from the Legion of Decency, and it did very badly. On the other hand, it deserves an important place in any series prepared to take on the breakdown of America as its theme. The nastiness goes all the way through—so often Wilder tried to throw syrup on his own bad moods. This is disturbing, often very funny, and finally sad and touching.
Kiss of Death (1947)
The material of Kiss of Death can easily make a dull film—as witness the 1995 remake by Barbet Schroeder, with David Caruso as the hero and Nicolas Cage as the villain. It’s just another story about a criminal, stirred by thoughts of family, who informs on his old cronies. It came from a script by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, when they were top-of-the-line, even if they were presiding over a factory of screenplays and many minions. It was directed by Henry Hathaway, who deserves to be regarded as a confident professional, and who would handle several of Fox’s documentary-type thrillers in this period. It was well photographed by Norbert Brodine. And it had a routine Fox cast, with Victor Mature as the hero, the underrated Coleen Gray as his wife, and then Brian Donlevy, Karl Malden, Taylor Holmes, and Mildred Dunnock.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 71
