Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  Let’s make a couple of great leaps forward to two movies in the spirit of these pictures. In 1984: This Is Spinal Tap. You have got to love a movie in which the guitar amps go to 11, which is, of course, one more than normal. Rob Reiner’s “mockumentary” maintains that standard consistently. It’s all wretched excess, perfectly sustained. There’s even a representation of Stonehenge in miniature, which is sublimely stupid. I suppose it’s sketch comedy (though there is a plot of sorts, something about the band breaking up), but the point of the exercise is simply to be giddy, at which it succeeds brilliantly. It just keeps rolling deliriously along, its parodies of the music and the attitudes of the band remarkably deft amid the hubbub. There are so few laggardly moments, so few miscues.

  Four years later, along came A Fish Called Wanda. It’s a caper comedy that turns on the communication skills of a man with a really bad stutter. Need I say more? The film was directed by Charles Crichton, a routine operative, who rose to something like greatness on this occasion. The movie has pace and sass, good jokes and nice situations—in short, a laff riot. But in its way it’s rather an intricate piece, which includes a psycho thriller, erotic folderol and plenty of bad luck all around, before everyone flies off to paradise. The performances by Jamie Lee Curtis (up out of horror films), Kevin Kline (up out of nowhere) and John Cleese (a onetime Python) are superb, though I think the acting prize must go to Michael Palin, stammering his way to glory. The whole thing is a beautiful piece of work—one of those comedies that does not make any important miscues, and which is very rare and treasurable.

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  Getting Started, or, I Thought You’d Never Ask

  I began reviewing movies in 1965, as I believe I said earlier, more or less by accident. I was hanging around the little section devoted to reviews—books, plays, etc.—at Life when its editor, Dave Scherman, always semi-short of copy, said he needed a movie review pretty quick. I said sure, why not. The movie I chose was called Sammy Going South, about a little boy trekking from one end of Africa to the other. It was a minor, agreeable little film. I wrote my review, I was rewarded at the going rate ($300) and the next week Davey asked me to do another. That was in the spring. By the end of summer I was the lead movie critic (I was even given a contract), and I hung on there until the magazine folded, in 1972. They had just paid me rather generously (they had just signed me for a new year) and I figured I would find something to do by the time I ran through that money. A few days later, Henry Grunwald, Time’s managing editor, called and asked me to move over there, which I happily did. I was making my first TV series, and I had to work pretty hard for a few months, but I had a lot of energy in those days, and it worked out. Jay Cocks had the Time job, but he was welcoming and thinking of doing some other things anyway. We shared the space for a while. Then Jay moved on to screenwriting, while I stayed and stayed, enjoying the work.

  I pretty much learned on the job, which I did respectably. I’m still doing it, though for another place nowadays, as I said. If nothing else, it’s a habit of which I’ve never tired. Truth to tell, it’s easy work. Counting portal to portal, it takes only maybe three hours to see a movie (a little longer if you stop for lunch) and a similar amount of time to write the review. It’s a lot easier than slogging through a book and not necessarily less stimulating. Additionally, there’s plenty of time left over to write books and make television programs.

  When I began reviewing in 1965, the heat was with films from abroad. There were large bodies of work building there (we’ve mentioned quite a few of them already) and they were quite stirring. Even Life wanted to pay attention to Bergman and other foreign directors. We paid due heed to American films, naturally, but for me it was marvelous to write about the films from foreign climes. Looking back, I am somewhat surprised by the amount of space we devoted to the likes of Blow-Up, My Night at Maud’s and The Red and the White. I am even more surprised that no one around Life objected to this bias. After all, it was not exactly Partisan Review. But it was desperately trying to reinvent itself just prior to its demise, and management wasn’t paying all that much attention to the review section. We sort of stood out by being so la-di-da. People noticed, and that redounded to our credit—lucky us. The grumbles from the bosses were few and far between. Lucky me.

  I want here to speak of the modern-day auteurs: Woody Allen, Scorsese, Spielberg, Eastwood (again). They have dominated our screens for a very long time. They remain productive, and they remain expert. They range in age from their sixties into their eighties, and they are still among our finest filmmakers. I can see no great falling off in their skills. I will start with Woody arbitrarily and move on to the others in subsequent chapters.

  By 1977 Woody Allen had made five movies, most of them genial and witty and all of them increasingly sophisticated structurally and technically. The world appeared to be his oyster—except, of course, to him. He let it be known that he was unhappy at not being Ingmar Bergman. People suspected him of a false modesty that was not entirely unattractive, yet not entirely attractive, either. I met him on a short-lived television program where he did occasional comic monologues and I reviewed books.

  I went a few times to a comedy club in Greenwich Village where I enjoyed his work. At some point we started having dinners and lunches on an occasional basis. It was clear to me, and by no means to me alone, that Woody had a kind of genius—for jokes. Good jokes. Before he was out of high school, he was taking the subway to Manhattan, writing jokes as he went—dozens, hundreds of them. Still in his teens, he was selling them and then venturing into stand-up on TV and so on, beginning the career that is now familiar to us.

  This business about his genius for jokes is, I think, worth pausing over. It is so easy for him. He has told me that he can work up a monologue while he’s standing in the shower. Therefore, he doesn’t value this gift. Art—and there is an art to comedy—should be effortful, painful. Ease betokens the casual. Did Bergman take his work lightly? Doubtful. Allen is trapped by his gift. I devoutly wish he could enjoy it more than he appears to. Maybe he does, in the recesses of his soul, but he’s never going to admit it in public.

  Over the years, I made a television show about him and wrote a book based on the interview I did for that program. I even appeared in court on his behalf, in some action I cannot entirely recall. We had mutual friends, and the meals continued to be agreeable. After I moved to Los Angeles, we continued to stay in touch, as we still do. He is an intelligent, sober companion, and I do not believe—have never believed—any of the preposterous things that have been said about him by Mia Farrow and others.

  Which takes me well beyond 1977 and Annie Hall, which was a huge hit—at least by Allen’s standards. It won four Academy Awards, including best picture, best director, best screenplay and best actress for Diane Keaton. The fact that its original title, “Anhedonia,” was changed to the one under which it was released certainly helped its cause. It was a charming movie, though scarcely an overpowering one. It holds up nicely. It represents a considerable step forward in his filmmaking skills.

  It is not, however, one of my favorite Woody Allen films, and I suspect it is not one of his, either. It seems to me too casual, less aspiring, than his best work. What I don’t think it predicted was his fecundity—virtually a movie per year every year since—or the ambition of many of those pictures. I don’t believe any American director has made as many films as he has (excepting, perhaps, the dimmest Hollywood hacks of the studio days), or so many that have their merits. He’s had his failures—inevitable, working at his pace—but it seems to me that his is one of the great careers in modern American film. It has a scale that is not epic. His films, to be sure, are modest, not overwhelming. But still, I am told by one of his associates that they never fail commercially, which is in itself remarkable, given the range and ambition of the topics he has taken up—a subject not much discussed by the critics.

  At the time Zelig was released, in 1983, all the talk was of the very demanding
work Allen and his crew did on the film to assure that it achieved an authentic antique cast as it records the history of a nonentity who yet contrives to be present at many of the twentieth century’s most significant moments. In this it succeeded brilliantly, but all the attention came at the expense of the picture’s larger meaning, at least at the time. The truth is that Zelig was (unknowingly) a fascist, rescued at the last minute from very dire circumstances. It is a movie at once scary and hilarious and one that Allen, for once, thinks well of, as he should. To most people it’s all about its superb trick, not about its very powerful message, which is, among other things, about how close we can come to being both innocent and ugly at the same time, how, indeed, they are aspects of the same all too human impulse.

  The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) is, I think, a wonderfully mixed bag. It is, at least nominally, a comedy—a good one—but it is also a rather serious film in its way. Cecilia (Mia Farrow) lives in a fantastic cinematic world—all white telephones and such—and Gil (Jeff Daniels) is a movie star, making a super-silly film that bears the same title as this movie. They form a connection, and for a time her bleak life is saved by film fantasies in which she lives virtually daily. Except that at some point she realizes that she must choose between delight and reality. She opts for the latter. As Woody puts it, “Some instinct in her tells her that she’s got to exist in the real world, because to exist in the fantasy world is psychosis.” He adds: “By choosing the real world, which we all must do, she is inevitably crushed by it, as we all inevitably are.”

  Doesn’t sound exactly hilarious, does it? But this is a movie in which Woody hides his hand expertly. It is funny—until it’s not. He is very firm on this point: You simply cannot live sanely within fantasy. Purple Rose is among the most exquisitely judged of Woody’s films. It veers neither too far toward satire nor toward the tragic. Its tone is perhaps best stated as wryly compassionate—the proportion of magic to realism in haunting balance.

  Radio Days (1987) at first glance looks to be a slight little movie. It is about—well—radio days, that comparatively brief period when radio was a glamorous enterprise in New York, and its curiously anonymous “stars” were the subjects of breathless profiles, which had them whisked here and there by carefully timed taxis as they fulfilled their many assignments on the airwaves. They led seemingly giddy lives, and the film has a gently busy, yet minor, air. We need not be taken in by that. It is, I believe, one of Woody’s most accomplished films. There is, to begin with, the disparity between the way these people look—unprepossessing—and the way they sound when they are acting before the microphones, with only a ricky-ticky orchestra and a sound effects man supporting their often grandiose work. It’s just inherently funny. But it’s more than that. Radio Days is a marvelous conceit, unlike any other movie. At the end of the film, the radio people head to the roof to see in the new year and see out the old. The electric signs of Broadway stretch out before them; optimism is in the air. The moment passes, and Wallace Shawn, one of the radio stars, reflects on the ephemeral nature not just of radio but—this being a Woody Allen film—of existence. It’s a brief, lightly managed moment, but the film’s heart and meaning are contained in it. This is the way worlds end, with a whisper. Not a word is said about television being just around the corner, or about the wreckers’ balls transforming Times Square into something unrecognizable, or about changes in fashion, rendering Woody’s more gracious New York an historical artifact. “I just wanted to illustrate, in an entertaining way, that there’s no God,” Woody said to me one time. It is probably my favorite sentence of his. He set himself a difficult—no, impossible—task. Yet it is here accomplished.

  Deconstructing Harry (1997) is possibly Woody’s most shocking movie. In its language alone, it’s utterly different from anything he’s ever done—a mad barrage of obscenities reflecting, I think, the impotent rage Woody felt at a time when he was engaged in a brutal custody fight with Mia Farrow—complete with charges that he had sexually abused their daughter (a nasty business that recurred in 2014). The film is about a trip Woody’s Harry Block (the name has a certain resonance) undertakes with a friend to drive to a college he once attended to receive some academic honor. The friend dies along the way. It is the most charmless movie Woody has ever made—deliberately so, of course. It simply refuses to insinuate itself with the audience, which was happy to oblige with its indifference. There was some bleak wit in the film—some things never change—and Woody felt that it represented a moment when his audience had to make a choice about him: They could indulge his dark whims or they could take their leave of him. They were nice about it, he thinks (no animus, no anger on the part of either party to their unspoken agreement), and they could in the future reconstitute their arrangement. But he had to go his own way when the spirit moved him.

  The obvious thing to be said about these movies is that they are extremely disparate—a charming fantasy, a larkish memory piece, a flat-out comedy, a very sober and aspiring film. It seems to me that critically, Woody does not get enough credit for the extraordinary range of topics he takes up—perhaps because he does not himself allude to it. He simply gets on with the ideas that occur to him. He speaks of finding scripts and ideas for them in drawers in half-finished form and returning to them as ideas for finishing them come to him. It is one source of his fecundity, which does not seem remarkable to him—only to us.

  Work rhythms are a mystery and carry no moral or aesthetic weight. It’s all right with me if the reader chooses one or the other of these films as his best. But I can’t quite leave him like that. In 1994, he made Bullets Over Broadway, which seems to me remarkable because it is a kind of reversion. It just means to be funny, which it gloriously is—the story of people putting on a show, with Chazz Palminteri brilliantly playing a gangster named Cheech, who has a gift for writing plays, and John Cusack as a playwright who has all the desire and none of the talent for his craft. It’s gorgeously funny, beautifully gagged and, come to think of it, has a point, one that’s ever on Woody’s mind: that our lives are always ruled, more than we care to admit, by chance. Cheech is an artist who has no self-consciousness. He is simply born with talent, which starts to leak out as a play begins to take shape in rehearsal. He also has the savagery to defend to the death what is increasingly his creation. This film is proof that Woody can just be funny when he wants to be.

  He is obviously a protean figure. He is one who is generally underestimated by a public that first met him as a star and director of comic productions and is, I think, reluctant to abandon that comfortable identification. There is a dubiety about him as a serious filmmaker, which needs to be abandoned. He has long since earned the right to succeed (and fail) on a higher plane when the spirit so moves him. It has been an amazing career, by no means finished, and his glum sense that he has mostly failed to make the great films he set out to make needs to be taken with a grain of salt. So he is not Bergman—who is?

  37

  The Wrath of God—Or Is It His Silence?

  In 1972 there came along a movie called Aguirre, the Wrath of God, directed by Werner Herzog. It is set in the wilds of South America, and it stars Klaus Kinski, who was, so they say, kept on the location under threat of murder by the director. It is one of the most astonishing movies ever made. Essentially, it is about being up the Amazon without a paddle—and, eventually, without sanity.

  It’s an important film because there were not many before it that were essays in pure insanity. Even after it, there are only a few. Significantly, this one made it all right even to take up the topic in the movies. Aguirre and his little band are simply lusting after gold, which is supposed to be located in El Dorado. On their raft they float toward it, beset by marauding Indians, disease, hunger and, finally, murder, madness and a troop of monkeys. It ends, inevitably, in chaos (as we always knew it must). It is, quite frankly, a horror show, though occasionally it is also a very, very dark comedy. It is an allegory—or is it a metaphor? For me, it’s a ce
rtifiable great work.

  But, putting it mildly, it is not everyone’s dish of tea. As the years wear on, it comes to seem more important than we perhaps realized. It opens doors to the possible—though only for the brave of heart. It suggests that there are now no topics that are necessarily beyond the reach of the movies.

  I don’t imagine that it is much seen today, or “liked.” But oh, those monkeys! and the sheer irrationality they represent—the sheer damn chaos that lies at the heart of all human enterprise. No mere movie so unblinkingly makes this point. You must see it, at your peril.

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  Marty

  I did not care for Mean Streets when it first appeared in 1973. It seemed to me clumsy, awkward—somehow unpersuasive. In this opinion I was virtually alone. I must confess: I still don’t like the film. Over the years I have made my peace with it—especially with Robert De Niro’s marvelously wacky performance. And, of course, Marty Scorsese has fulfilled in the four decades since all the promise others saw in him.

  I wrote a book about him and made a film about him and have enjoyed the pleasure of his company on many occasions. One time we discussed this issue. We came to the conclusion that I was too much the Midwesterner, he the New Yorker, for us ever to have a meeting of the minds about Mean Streets. Which raises the question of why I admire so many other pictures in his filmography.