[No spoilers.]
The Bloody Brood (dir. Julian Roffman, 1959). Life and death among the beatniks, with bongos, poetry, and a Leopold and Loeb murder scheme. My favorite line: “I think you’re beginning to dig the scene.” Peter Falk’s second movie. A YouTube find.
*
For You I Die (dir. John Reinhardt, 1947). Life at Maggie Dillon’s Place, a roadside café with cabins. A convict forced to take part in an escape hides out there, leading to romance and other consequences. Comic relief from Mischa Auer as an actor/painter/taxi driver, and pathos from Roman Bohnen as a husband and father who went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never went back. But the café, I’d say, is the star. My favorite line: “Those travelin’ salesmen ain’t no steadier than the squirrels in the trees.” A YouTube find.
*
Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (dir. Maria Schrader, 2016). I saw this film in July in a theater and was happy to watch it again on DVD with friends. I was disappointed with the subtitles, different from the ones we saw in the theater, and sometimes nearly unreadable. And in a film that foregrounds matters of translation, with dialogue in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, a parenthetical indication that someone is praying, singing, or speaking “in a foreign language” is more than a little absurd. What, after all, is foreign? (The languages in question are Hebrew and Portuguese.)
*
The Loved One (dir. Tony Richardson, 1965). From Evelyn Waugh’s novel, a satire of the American way of death, with a screenplay by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood (I suspect it’s mostly by Southern). It’s a treat to see Jonathan Winters in a double role, and there’s a great turn by Liberace as a coffin salesman. Advertised as “the motion picture with something to offend everyone.” But this sort of épater la bourgeoisie hasn’t worn well. My favorite line, from Liberace, is about coffin fabrics: “Rayon chafes, you know.”
*
Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary (dir. John Scheinfeld, 2016). It’s a gift to see a handful of performance clips (some silent). It’s a gift to see home movies of Coltrane smoking a pipe, wearing his robe and slippers, playing with his children, joking around for the camera. But so much of this documentary (the documentary?) is devoted to adulatory blather. Bill Clinton, Wynton Marsalis, and Cornel West are the worst offenders. Example: “The totality of his consciousness expresses itself most fully on that record.” Thank goodness that Benny Golson, Jimmy Heath, and Sonny Rollins are also here to say something of value about their colleague and friend. And notice that Rollins more often that not speaks of Coltrane in the present tense.
*
After Hours (dir. Shepard Traube, 1961). “This is Swing Street, and this is my favorite spot, a little club called After Hours”: William B. Williams takes us to a jam session in this pilot for an unrealized television series. The rehearsed proceedings, starring Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, turn into genuine spontaneous excitement in “Just You, Just Me.” Exciting for me to hear Milt Hinton speaking, with the same sweet, foggy voice I heard when I met him in the late 1980s. At YouTube.
*
Jazz Dance (dir. Roger Tilton, 1954). A reminder that before jazz became an art of the soloist, its was an ensemble music made for dancers. In that spirit Jimmy McPartland leads a band at New York’s Central Plaza Dance Hall — Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy Archey, and Willie “The Lion” Smith are among the players on hand. A raucous, even frenzied twenty minutes of music and movement. If Weegee were to have made a film at a jazz dance, I think it would look much like this one. At YouTube.
[Leon James and Albert Minns, who appear in After Hours as a doorman and waiter given to dancing, appear in this film as what they were: dancers.]
*
Freaks and Geeks (created by Paul Feig, 1999–2000). I know that an eighteen-episode television season isn’t a movie, but still, it should count for something. This series is the best thing I’ve ever seen about high school. The intimidation, the insults, the doomed efforts to be cool, the exile to right field: it’s all here. The line that resonated most strongly for me: “What’s the point?” Why, peers, do you have to be so inane? A clear influence on Stranger Things, I now realize.
*
Forgotten (dir. Nadia Beddini, 2016). Life among the homeless people of Los Angeles, at Venice Beach, in Hollywood, and on downtown’s Skid Row. What’s most striking is the variety of people who meet the camera: a lawyer (or so he says), as a former college student, a young mother, an electrician, another electrician. Domestic turmoil, substances, and mental illness loom large in their stories. Worst moment: a woman who describes giving birth “in the open” — in other words, on the street.
*
Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2017). I admired Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha and 20th Century Women, and I expected to like Lady Bird. I wanted to like it. But as with La La Land, I’m bewildered by the praise given this movie. It’s based on Gerwig’s life as an high-school student in Sacramento, with Saoirse Ronan as Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, at odds with her family, at odds even with her name: “People go by the names their parents give them, but they don’t believe in God.” While there are a few moments of genuine comedy and emotion and social criticism, too many plot devices come from the world of a trite sit-com, and the characters remain inert. Give me Freaks and Geeks or, for a better comparison, Ghost World.
*
Voyeur (dir. Myles Kane and Josh Koury, 2017). The story of Gerald Foos, a motel owner who peeped on his guests, taking extensive notes and masturbating, and Gay Talese, the writer who met Foos, peeped with him, and, years later, revealed the man’s secret life in the New Yorker. I like the Gay Talese who in a previous century wrote for The New York Times about odds and ends of New York life. I don’t like the Talese of this movie, egomaniacal, manipulative, and shamelessly self-serving — much like Foos. (And like Foos, Talese works in a private space: a basement, not an attic.) Most appalling scene, for me: Talese, who has called Foos a nut, writes an e-mail telling him to “hang in there, as athletes and pioneers must.” Runner-up scene: Talese pitching the story to a New Yorker editor.
*
Shockproof (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1949). “Corrosion.” “What?” “That’s what’ll happen to us.” Love and criminality, as a parole officer and a parolee (Cornel Wilde and Patricia Knight, real-life marrieds) flee the authorities and move toward an improbable end. There’s more than a touch of They Live by Night (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1948) in the story. With Esther Minciotti (Mrs. Piletti from Marty), Arthur Space (Doc Weaver from Lassie), and Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building.
What have you seen that’s worth recommending?
Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
