Pre-Code Capsules 8: THE NARROW CORNER, WEST OF BROADWAY, HEADLINE SHOOTER, THE CROWD ROARS, TOP SPEED

THE NARROW CORNER (1933)
Directed by Alfred E. Green - ****
Finding this on TCM (part of Ralph Bellamy day) cemented the proof that 1933, not 1939, was, for me, the best year for movies. You never know what classic authors are going to age like wine, and which to vinegar, but the South Seas commonwealth parables of W. Somerset Maughm have become wine and THE NARROW CORNER is the good stuff you keep for yourself late at night after weird news shakes your soul. Why is it so forgotten compared to, say, the self-absorbed forgotten man badgering of THE PETRIFIED FOREST? Where Leslie's maudlin rambling smacked of self-pity, Maughm's dead-eyed stare into the riptide, where life is wrest from us as a berry from a branch by a half asleep Mexican gardener in the waves of the South Seas, is admirable, heroic, and damned hilarious! Cheers!

The role of the wan Brit boytoy who has to take it on the lam out of Australia when he kills... ahem... her husband, ahem, is perfect for this very young man of Hollywood royalty, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. We can see in him the natural actor who's absorbed everything he saw and heard as a spoiled child in the thick of silent era decadence and brought it to bear on this peevish dork who hates the women who fight over him, because then he has to kill their jealous husbands and fiancees, which here include Ralph Bellamy as the good-hearted Dutch plantation owner who dreads going back to Albany with mother. And the best character is a debauched doctor tells his trusting Chinese servant how many 'pipes' he'll have that night, "Seven pipes tonight, no more no less," rendering him useless at critical junctures.

The archetypal drunken or drug-addicted doctor was a staple of pre-code films, thanks largely to Maugham, who was very popular in his day, and I can think of ten movies with such a character without half trying --including a variation in ISLAND OF LOST SOULS. Dudley Digges is the doctor here and he's very droll and self-effacing and clear-eyed in his into-the-void stares; he's the type of character who no longer exists --cinema's too busy fighting and blowing things up to ever have time to address mortality head-on.

There's also Henry Kolker as a mean old Swedish sea captain, who boasts to Arthur Hohl that he used to pilot slavers, and that he wants to gut his son-in-law ( Reginald Owen) with a scaling knife. Patricia Ellis is the hot daughter, who's engaged to good-hearted Bellamy and it all makes Fairbanks feel the heel, but you can't argue with the beautiful scenery and sense that once upon a time it really was possible to buy passage on a boat from Sydney Toler pre-Chan and run out on your past, and then go repeat it.

WEST OF BROADWAY (1931)
Dir. Harry Beaumont - **1/2
Here's a curio starring former-matinee idol John Gilbert, caught like a fly in the midst of evincing why he will not survive as a leading man in the sound era: when he tries to sound manly and tough, he just sounds just guttural, hung over and drunk at the same time. Speaking in a weird pattern of halted syllables, he sounds like he's sending a morse code S.O.S. in the spaces between the words of his dialogue, hoping his buddies off-camera will translate and rush to his aid. In the early sound equipment days they were taught to take long pauses and say words... clearly.

But it's worth seeing for the brave way Gilbert captures the art of the shaky rebound. His character comes home from the war with four bullets in him, to find Ann (Madge Evans), his sweetheart off with some slime ball and his hired rebound girl Dot (Lois Moran) merely a bit 'pretty in a trashy sort of way.' "Dot the I and cross the Ann," he says, while introducing them to each other at the swanky nightclub. "Double cross."

And it's worth it for the sly way the waiter says "your package sir," and slips Gilbert a fifth wrapped in a white towel, low under the table, so the prohibition cops don't see it. I love those old tricks and trades! We here in America don't have a scene like that anymore: we do our drugs at home, except for crack. The crack den is our modern speak easy, but the class of people you meet is so much less sparkling, wouldn't you say? Hmmm?

And it's worth seeing for the sleazy, no holds-barred details of life as a hired girl who's brave enough to refuse Gilbert's hand-out (her and her girlfriend owe ten days' back rent), even as she notes of Gilbert's party there were "hands all over me." as she gropes herself in a resigned way.

And Gilbert's a good enough actor to use his personal desperation in a scene: You can feel his desperate stiff upper lip trembling as he finds out Ann's moved on; she could be standing for his entire female silent film fan base, which was once substantial, and just as suddenly nonexistent. Like Barrymore's drunken has-been in DINNER AT EIGHT, there's a feeling of being outdated and too drunk to care, and seeing the only way to go is to get drunker and plunge into the void like a cock-eyed  W. Somerset Maughm kamikaze. All else is vanity.

Also, Gilbert's shakes are incredible. The morning after he marries the hired girl, he's got the Saint Vitus dance. And for her part it's great when she gets all furious, racistly barking at the Chinese cook, or settling down into a chair to shoot the shit about Jerry with his high class friends who come calling. And when he tries to quit drinking the cowboys are singing outside and suddenly you tap into RIO BRAVO's scene where Dean Martin almost takes a shot of whiskey while the Mariachi death song plays down the street from the jail. Moran is a little firecracker but her pal is no Joan Blondell, and when we see Gilbert ponder whether or not to keep her after their marriage's been annulled you may tap into that ambivalence Frank Sinatra had with Shirley MacLaine in SOME CAME RUNNING. But Gilbert, he was almost all the way tapped out, and it shows. Those shakes are something else.

HEADLINE SHOOTER (1933)
dir. Otto Brauer - ***
Frances Dee is a swell little half-pint, nearly a decade away from becoming the girl we all fell in love with in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1942). How can any girl ever make sobriety sexy? Dee can. She exhibits some serious chemistry with the main, taller star of this 1933 'press corp.' action-comedy, a briefly beloved Will Gargan as a newsreel cameraman. Lee Tracy is relegated to wingman and wryly notes: "They want you to chase 'em, and once you catch 'em they hang on ya like a ton of bricks." Then he gets crushed by a ton of actual bricks while filming on location at a warehouse fire. Ralph Bellamy is again the jilted fiancee who's really a swell guy out at the old homestead.

This is an early kind of tough-ass Warner Brothers action, with the obligatory final shoot-out with gangsters and some great scenes around real-time floods, fires, and even some 'found' shots during the Santa Monica earthquake. It's startling how at ease the actors are around these real-time calamities, with reporter Dee offering comfort to shaken witnesses as she makes sure to get the signature on the statement, and the victim's addresses, showing that solid mix of sexy warmth and maternal compassion that would make zombies in a decade clear her path in admiration.

THE CROWD ROARS (1932)
dir. Howard Hawks - ***
The cars are game and Cagney's explosive, but it's kind of tough to care because he's also such a shit to his women. I know how it is from being in a band: the self-disgust side effect of  being adored by people who don't know you; you come to hate them the way Dean Martin hates his girl in SOME CAME RUNNING; or Clark Gable hates Jean Harlow in RED DUST; or Cagney hates Mae Clarke in PUBLIC ENEMY. Eventually Cagney breaks down, describing the smell of his burning friend after the big race centerpiece, when Frank McHugh wipes out, catches on fire, and the cars keep driving around, breathing him in as they pass, until Cagney freaks out and disappears.

Ann Dvorak chases him down to the Indy 500, and we get some great scenes of Cagney asking for jobs and being turned down by various outfits, because he's lost his nerve. Lost his nerve? Cagney? A laconic, very interesting parade of Hawks-types has to say no to him, and it's here more than anywhere else you can feel the Hawksian touch in its infancy, and when Cagney finally tells Ann about the crash and the smell of McHugh's burning corpse, he cracks up in her arms, from then on it's racing with style and you know it's not just Cagney's macho racer that has to learn women are ten times wiser than men, it's Hawks too. And he does, and maybe Dvorak and Blondell are the ones that taught him, like they teach Cagney. Maybe? Maybe nothin'!

TOP SPEED (1930)
dir. Mervyn Leroy - **1/2
An early sound comedy-musical (with most of the music numbers cut) starring the rubber-mouthed comedian willing to 'adopt some' with Jack Lemmon, SPEED is a daring chronicle of the years before the Depression; a last gasp of college letters and class resentment. It's all waiting to be unpacked in repressed lines like: "I'm so modest I won't allow lamb chops on the table, unless they have those paper pants on." Both suggestively lewd and comically moralist, the film sums up the only sane response to the draconian, near fundamentalist level of sexual repression endured under the watchful eye of hotel detectives, chaperones, and social reform-minded wives that were all the rage at the time. Herein we also learn the origins of now forgotten phrases like "over a barrel" (it's a protean kind of CPR) and "counting sheep" (apparently it was a big fad like Atkins is today, and Brown explains it complete with hand gestures). And since 1930 was such a ' scandalous' time, well, it was very easy to be scandalous. Just being caught in a hotel room with a woman not your wife could earn you a public flogging, and from thence we get those boudoir comedies of sneaking around fire escapes in one's underwear, hiding under beds while the hotel flatfoot looks around, and so forth. It's hard to get that kind of naughty steam going in our more permissive age. But in 1930 people are so repressed even the men can't show their torsos on the beach and have to wear full body swim suits (arms are allowed to be bare via a t-top.) It explains a lot. 

Joe E Brown comes off pretty well, like a primordial Jim Carey, and when he pretends to be a  millionaire he sounds just like Walter Matthau, or did Matthau emulate Brown as a kid, catching films like TOP SPEED on matinees while anti-Semite bullies skulked the streets? Regardless his character is basically a prick. Footage of the final race is ridiculously mismatched between Brown's rear projection drunkenness and random boat race footage. Impossible to tell where anything is as Edward Arnold disparages the news his future son-in-law took a bribe, but in true financial savvy the pal just takes the money and screws his briber over, bets it on himself via his stooge buddy Joe E. Brown, and then pockets the profit. Oh to be alive in an age where millionaires were made so effortlessly. Oh, but then we'd have to get married first.

Bride of Bogartstein: IN A LONELY PLACE

Spousal abuse is so demonized these days that not a single redeeming characteristic is allowed to remain in our violent men of drama. Gone are the magnetic brutes like Stanley Kowalski, gone any concept of an abusive artis like Dix Steele in IN A LONELY PLACE. It's not surprising then that we're unprepared for how hard it is to adapt to these characters and their sudden brutal displays. 

But Bogart is Bogart, and since he's playing a famous Hollywood screenwriter, his tantrums and white hot rage black-outs go unchecked, save for police intervention which his studio then works to keep out of the papers. This is the kind of guy you should just get away from stat, but can't, since he's famous and witty and charming in a bleak sort of way. Thus a brute is allowed to stay brutish: "I've had hundreds of fights," he says to Gloria Grahame's neighbor love, as if that's some sort of mark of the martyr, instead of the bully.  Most men go through their whole adult life without getting into a fight, especially these days, but certain kinds of men make up the difference, they attract one another like magnets, yet they never start it, they just feel obliged to continue it.

While Bogart looms like an electric golem, gone to gray suits, Grahame flexes her beautiful face into a Hollywood glamor death mask as she tosses and turns in bed, worrying that she's sleeping with a potential murderer, a raging egotist who could snap at any moment, over the slightest thing she does wrong; this keeps her awake and she starts taking pills to sleep. He might not like that, so she worries more: "This one's not going to let you go that easy," snaps her masseuse, who it is implied has given her more than one happy ending over their tenure together. Grahame's sad eyes show this the last non-loser she's likely to run into before her happiness clock expires, but he's worse than a loser.

But Bogart doesn't pull back on being Bogart, even as he lets himself get creepy, and his dark self-effacing wit seems strained; the Bogie we know is too sharp not to know when those around him are turned off, but Dix has no clue. Bogart is brave enough to show the angles by which his actorly charisma is exposed as vain antipathy. Dix's "A simple yes or no will do very well" proposal of marriage comes off like a threat. He sees marriage as providing any lady her luckiest break (or fracture) like signing a deal with a confused white tiger, or an arm-rending chimp. His abusive Stockholm-Syndrome-afflicted agent exclaims in the least coded of gay double entendres: "He's Dix Steel, and if you want him you've got to take it all" This kind of lackey is dangerous for a guy this fucked: "People like him can afford to be temperamental" is just the agent's way of saying "you should see how tender he is when it's just us!"

PS - any respecting woman would have left Dix the moment he snapped on the beach, just as Krasner should have left Pollock when he made his first embarrassing scene at the dinner table. But such are those few unlucky moths blind enough that they can only see the most brilliant light, the light of charismatic madness, that they wind up stuck on the bulb of an ego that has swollen mercilessly with the pumping eternal handshake current of exploding pockets and the bloody war-like business of making pictures.

I'll admit the first few times watching IN A LONELY PLACE I got a headache, partially from the unpleasant frisson of seeing Bogart so messed up, but mainly from all those ringing phones! The road to Hollywood heaven must be paved with nonstop telephone calls. I guess in L.A. they are like music.  The best phone calls I ever had were from a girl in L.A. They went on for hours, for days! It's the very breathing of the biz, and you can tell Dix's never stops ringing. Ding Dong, indeed, the dead witches are in the making.

Electric Bogartstein, bra, the only way to see this film is on a triple bill with THE RETURN OF DR. X and BIGGER THAN LIFE, and to realize Bogart and Nicholas Ray both were making horror movies the whole time, even when they were making mysteries or romantic dramas.

Ray loved his insane abusive geniuses, and the link between Dixon and James Mason's tyrannical father is clear: Hollywood is (or was) the place where white rage fights, shooting, drugs and casual sex are wantonly indulged in, thought about, and depicted for the enjoyment of the world. Certainly Ray indulged in these things, but his love makes him different than the poseurs of violence and despair. His forgiveness of his fucked up protags is his way, perhaps, of trying to forgive his own trespasses. Like Sal Mineo's tortured puppy killer in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, or Mason's most unsexy madness in BIGGER THAN LIFE, Bogart's illness has a groovy poetry. Both BIGGER and IN A LONELY PLACE show a man who thinks you are watching a different movie, and that you are swooning at his brilliance and fearless spending, and if you remind him what movie he's really in, you better do it from outside swinging distance or you'll get a black eye at best.

Perhaps only natural bullies can make it in Hollywood's chain of intimidation. (think of the "This is the girl" harassment from the mob in MULHOLLAND DR.). Or maybe all these are just excuses, and I've got Stockholm syndrome too. Of course it would be damn nerve-wracking living with someone so violent, but we love him because Bogart was always a little menacing anyway, that's what gave his heroes their flavor, the sudden eruptions, the "that means one of you is gonna get a beating for nothing!" climax of TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, or that cruel mirth in his eyes when he knocks out Joel Cairo in MALTESE FALCON. His sadistic relish enables him to do his job more efficiently.

I just gave some strange writerly advice to someone: "never give it your all unless your paid less than it's worth." Was that my dyslexia, or was this apparent paradox part of the sick queasy feeling created by seeing what financial overcompensation can does to Dix Steele? When MALTESE FALCON followed PLACE on TCM (for Bogart Day), it seemed like a twisted freakshow out of Todd Browning. I've seen FALCON a trillion times, but this time the camera angles seemed beyond bizarre. Long takes of nothing: a phone gradually reached for and talked into offscreen; a phone on the night table, the cigarette. I finally realized I should be wondering if Bogie's in bed with Mrs. Archer, or alone reading a racing form. When we finally see him again it's from low angles, looming around big hotel lobbies or taking his maternal support on the sly from Effie.

Bogart seen after IN A LONELY PLACE is a monster. He's a Universal horror monster figure who escaped to Warner's to be a gangster and then fought his way up to stardom and romantic protagonists. He and his first wife were known as "The Battling Bogarts", this was never a man to fuck with. So we worshipped him, and still do, Stockholm-style, but also as the pinnacle of righteous intensity. But Ray is able to locate the monster underneath all that 'good' anger and violence. Once the war is over and there's no one left to legally kill, the monster in the Bogart persona starts to crack through the detective/war hero/romantic lead mask, right along the crow's feet, and the Frankenstein monster starts trying to reach out to crush someone.

The fourth time through PLACE, gone was my headache over the phones, and to the floor was my jaw as the sheer intense brilliance of Bogart's slow burns and sudden lashings. When something doesn't go his way, the anger begins, and then every attempt to quiet him is regarded through progressively more paranoid eyes. This man should clearly be medicated, but he's allowed to roam free. In the end the murder mystery is solved and yet Dix has almost started a whole new one. Dix's ego is such that he shouldn't be allowed to be in a movie. Thank God Nicholas Ray gave him one anyway. Ray never gives up on any character, even when they're so foul we recoil in shock that we're seeing them at all, let alone played by leading men, as protagonists..His love for dangerous maniacs is contagious; their lives are his downfall, and our redemption.

One Pill Makes You Corporate: LIMITLESS (2011)

LIMITLESS, AKA AMERICAN PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGICAL, is kind of a fable about that drug so popular amongst investment bankers, Adderall, or failing that any amphetamine-based stimulant. The idea is that we only use 10% of our brain, what if we could use all of it? And have total recall of even the most mundane moments in memory. Such is the gift of the magic pill, which then he needs more of, and so do a lot of other people. The chase is on, paranoia steps up, all is well, but then loose ends are tied behind people's backs, and sheer stupidity rears its head.

The problem here is that Bradley Cooper and the filmmakers are afraid to go AMERICAN PSYCHO, so a hinted at black-out murder is just a plotline dropped in time for the big climax of battling Russian thug cliches. And instead of some bitter downward spiral, where our Cooper -- who plays a self-absorbed science fiction writer too stupid to take an offered pill from his ex-brother-in-law -- goes mad or turns evil once initiated into the realms of heavy power, we have him become a Tom Cruise-style action star. Once he does make the grade, so far so good, but then, on his big day presenting his portfolio to Robert De Niro's power-talking tycoon, he decides not to take a pill, so he's sick from withdrawal, and almost throws up on De Niro's thousand dollar loafers. Turns out he has a stash of pills at his girlfriend's house, but of course never dreams of getting it, because that would be too easy. Instead she (Abbie Cornish) has to get it, on her lunch hour, while he shivers like a crackhead in her office.

Don't doubt that I personally am similar and as we say in AA, had a lot of identification. I was a horribly blocked writer, tortured with longing, until my shrink put me on Effexor, and now I'm super-human on the keypad, writing so damn much my fingers fall off, smoking and staying otherwise sober, for the kids, but always riding that low throbbing train of motivation and focus. Drugs have been overcoming writer's block since the dawn of pencils, but that's not Bradley's problem, it's having his girlfriend be so dismayed that his newfound confidence wasn't real, since it was boosted by a substance. Listen lady, substances are the core of existence. We wouldn't even have civilization if not for coffee. We'd still be asleep, and cranky, in our thatched huts, hoping and dreaming that someone else will bring us some breakfast. But Cooper's refusal to remember he has pills around until it's time to try to take them to fight Russians is just not believable.

Imagine Popeye spending hours trying to open a can of spinach, his hands shaking, finally needing Olive to do it while he stammers through his teeth, an empty pipe in the corner of his clenched mouth. Not good. Popeye needs an open can ever at the ready, and so he has it. Has Bradley ever tried spinach? From a can? No, too cool for that; his spinach is fresh from Balducci's - all he needs is a little pill, and he's such a genius he can't even remember he's dead in the water without one.

 

I won't give away the ending, but I will tell you its needlessly happy, a validation of Hollywood's fetish for solipsism's comely victims. What the story cries out for is a finale reflecting the terrifying loss of control and sanity that comes from tampering too long with your brain chem--as in the endings of, say, AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000, top, bottom), where the feeling is one of both return/victory and of a trap snapping shut all around you that you are powerless to prevent. In the vapid clutches of Reese Weatherspoon's debutante, our strange protagonist Christian Bale comes to the realization that he has absolutely no idea if he's been dreaming or actually living all his murders. Instead, LIMITLESS bears out the feeling one gets amongst financial market people that they're doing their country a service by making themselves hugely rich. Why doesn't our super-enlightened Bradley figure out a cure for AIDS, or how to levitate, or remote view alien worlds, or make some draconian decision to wipe out half the population in a plague he's designed, carefully by hand, in order to make the world less crowded, ala LATHE OF HEAVEN? No, he goes for politics, and the position of state senator. What a tool.

In the end, this drug just kind of turns you into Tom Cruise, and for the Los Angeles power worshippers, that's everything: assertive narcissism and total fearless confidence. We love that trait like we love gangster movies, or mad scientists, or Hannibal Lecter, but you can't have your face and eat it too, you can't expect that Bradley alone is rising in the ranks. What of all the others struggling for their angry fix? In reality pills like this come along all the time, but trouble is, everyone finds out about them and within a year taking it doesn't give you a leg up on the competition so much as barely keep you in it.  

Cooper's character seemed pretty stupid to begin with, but he loves his drugs and we're supposed to be in awe of him irregardless of Abbie Cornish's disappointment. In the end we come away angry at our own trapped potential, but there's a reason we shuttered up the upper rooms of our brain mansion: there be monsters locked away up thar. Tread lightly, and bring a good therapist, and a sword, or suffer the consequences, unless you're Bradley Cooper, for not even the darkest demon can compete with the gravitic drag of such black hole vanity.

Abilene Point is Anywhere: How Texas Conquered Death - SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)

As part of the Richard Kelly blogathon on Exodus 8.2 I'm revising and re-posting my initial fractured skewed take on SOUTHLAND TALES which is heavily influenced by Steven Shaviro's highly recommended book, Post Cinematic Affect

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous." 

----Alfred N. Whitehead (1925)

"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more 

futuristic than they originally predicted."

--- Krista Now (Sara Michell Gellar), Southland Tales

"Pull ze string!" 

-- Bela Lugosi (Glen or Glenda)

After the cult explosion around Kelly's big debut, DONNIE DARKO, it was inevitable his next film would be too 'difficult' for the masses, but with a bit of post-modern affect discussion under your belt, or on a double feature with BOARDING GATE (also covered in Shaviro's book), it might make more sense. There is an annoying buzz of self-indulgent confidence at work in the film, with its ceaseless frisson and funky breaks that are meant to dazzle fans of a certain age, but might not because there's so little else at work - it's a film made up of dead hypertext links and little text.

Kelly's presumption is seemingly that we're going to watch SOUTHLAND over and over and compare obscure references and symbolic meaning on the internet with each other, and the meaning will arise from there, but that seems unwise in an age where an infinite amount of films and TV are available at every moment and we can barely sit still for a film once, let alone again and again. Do you want to know why DONNIE DARKO was such a hit, and screened at midnight showings for years in my old East Village neighborhood? Because chicks loved the doomed, moody romance and Jake G's stoner stare; his battles with schizophrenia mirrored their own issues with existential expressions like cutting, anorexia, drugs, grudge sex, and the like (at least based on the girls I knew, at the time). It was a hand into their darkness, a friend who knew the score. And it was lyrical and poetic without being close to corny, you could go to the midnight show in your pajamas and no one would bat an eye, or a ball, very far.

SOUTHLAND has nothing much for the midnight lonesome girls to hold onto, except maybe the Darko-ish sex appeal of Justin Timberlake as Boxer, the lone gunner at the pier at the end of time, but he's just one (or rather two) of a big cast, and while I admire the abstract crossword puzzle association to films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Boxer passes and pockets a blinking plastic orange while Ludwig Van's 9th plays in the background), MADAME SATAN (crazy Zeppelin party), THE BIG LIEBOWSKI (dancers in the skee-ball lanes) and MULHOLLAND DR. (Rebekah "Llorando" Del Rio, singing the Star Spangled Banner, clashing against droning John Cale strings), and I love that Moby does the rest of the music and it's a perfect fit for Kelly's mood, and I love that it's the end of the world and everybody's fine with that, working to stop the apocalypse in only in the most perfunctory of ways, I'm a dude, who's seen a lot of dude films, over and over that girls may not like since they ain't got no romance, or angst - and girls are generally a bit wiser when it comes to picking obsessions. My girl can't look at SOUTHLAND for more than a handful of minutes without getting restless. If you're a Lou Reed fan, for example, you have to have Metal Machine Music, even if you'll never listen to it for more than a few minutes. It's the collector mentality... run amok, and out, until nothing's left but the fact that you're in your room, alone, trying to hear some pattern in Lou Reed's amphetamine 70s angst.

"Quantum teleportation, teen horniness, and war."

DARKO was about the apocalypse of self-immolation, the sacrifice of the individual, while SOUTHLAND presumes there is no individual. It becomes the world's sacrifice, so that media itself may live. I'd contend here that boys--so disenfranchised and glum---may be more pro-apocalypse than girls. The nonstop parade of documentaries about 2012, Nostradamus, and the Ice Age on Discovery and the History Channel proves what Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES hints at: some of us, self included, are excited for the apocalypse. It's a chance to stop receiving paper bank statements in a whole new way. I'd even argue our whole culture is apocalypse-dependent. Without the fantasy of a global reset button, we'd be stuck with the guilt, hangover, and debt of seven generations. Aren't you always tempted to just blow up the house rather than have to clean up your messes?

But what I can't understand is why Nostradamus and--apparently--every ancient civilization with star savvy was so anxious to encode everything on earth with the date that is now rapidly approaching - 2012. In the new century, if we heard the world was gonna end 'exactly' five hundred years from now, would we care? Seven generations is a crap in the bucket when you're thinking about Egyptians and Mayans... who themselves were wiped out long before getting close to within seven generations of 2012. So why did they inscribe our date with destiny in secret code all around their architecture? Why did they care about us more than we care about ourselves?!!! What about the fast food and the banks and power plants that might fall a mere 7,000 years from now!? What about all those innocent lives Hank Quinlan put in the death house? Save your tears for them!

Even the bad guys who monitor everything from afar in SOUTHLAND are secretly enthralled by the notion of the end, and are all rebelling from one program or another to ensure that end arrives. Good guys and bad all want the same thing in an age when amnesia is inducible via an easily acquired drug. Anyone can be abducted and turned loose without being able to identify one's abductees. The Rock (Boxer Santeros), starts the film with amnesia and the first thing his wife (Mandy Moore) notes when seeing him--with some disgust--is that he has amnesia. He's worthless to her now. She notes it with the repulsion one might notice the reek of stale booze and cigarettes or stale perfume on his collar. He denies his amnesia on instinct as if its something to be ashamed of. The game of it all becomes what the Buddha calls "joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. When the world finally adapts that marvelous strategy, owning up to amnesia is the same as pressing the button because even Def-Con 5 needs love.

What Kelly also understands is the nature of drugs and the weird habit alcoholics and drug addicts have of watching the same movie over and over again because... I forget why. They're too wasted to change the channel? Or dredge up another DVD? Or for that matter endless repeat seasons of reality TV shows, where our knowledge of what is going to happen, who will win, who will die, is granted us like benign rulers, or our own inner Pilot Abilenes. Revelation 6.8 and behold a pale horse and the name that sat on it was repeat business; if you've ever edited footage on Final Cut until it loses all meaning... or if you've ever conducted experiments on soldiers, or called him Ronald Taverner, or sniffed paint fumes from a spray can, or had amnesia, forgetting you're Ronald Taverner...then you know what I mean, and if you're happy and you know it, hit the squib, and act shocked when you die, act scared nigh to death, so the Dead End Kids won't want to start no trouble in the rubble that your sorry ass generation left them to build on. Just leave them a DVD of SOUTHLAND TALES, and they'll think you were one muthufuggin' lost-ass generation.

The Balloon that is Welles

 "I've spent years inflating the balloon that is Welles. Please do not puncture it."
- Orson Welles (to Mary Livingston on The Jack Benny Show)

Orson Welles has his hair and beard like a rolling Van Gogh storm cloud for MR ARKADIN (1955), recently screened on TCM and at least trippy enough with its mismatched sound rhythms that you can feel Orson Welles playing around all through post-production, having a high old time. It's too bad it's couched in a luxuriant 3-DVD + novel set on Criterion and not floating in on the late late night UHF movie after PLAN NINE or THE CREEPING TERROR, because its Brecht/Godardian deconstruction is  all in your face from the get go, it begs to be reconsidered as a Monogram horror film that's gone off the rails and run off to Europe, rather than 'Art.'

The cheap budget means most of the action is just discussed rather than seen, in rooms where people lurch about as if in the stateroom of a heaving yacht, or drink champagne or method act in waves and the plot also circles around like a bizarre combination of two old radio shows playing at once in perfect synchronicity and the connections with narcotics, Nazi money laundering, captain of industry psychedelia, and the feeling that maybe poor Orson's just been masking his lonesome all along, as the past comes catching up with him; you can smell the wine and cigar smoke and gentle Ibiza perfume and suntan lotion and ghost laughter of passing mistresses; whiskey spills along the strips of celluloid; snatches of great dialogue that seems to be a kind of journal of witty things Welles has said and heard in his European exile.

 Pretty Woman: 

Do you remember me?

Mischa Auer: 

No. I can never remember a pretty woman, it's so expensive!

Like internet dating, this film is the story of trying to unmask someone while keeping your own mask on, trying to open up a dangerous candy egg as it in turn is trying opening you, for you are also a candy egg. Inside the normal, competent, witty candy shell could be anything, from a saintly cream to the bitter pills of maniac psycho yawning void with sharp can opener fingers or more of the same candy shell, waiting to leak out into your mouth, venomously or no. The girl who came off so polished and nice becomes bossy and mirthless as the night moves on and you struggle to make sobriety appear effortless while a churlish demon sulks within your egg, scratching at your insides like they were his dream journal until your tongue slips and reveals a screaming multitude of convicted hellions writhing (and writing) below your smooth surface.

It takes a great director to tap into that hellish core energy but an even greater to tap in a whole layer further to find the black comic heart of that inner core, for evil too has an inner yolk, a deep, well-earned sense of wit and good humor. Such a yolk is Welles, who rules in the Hell of his own continental editing suite rather than serve in Hollywood's jazz heaven.

To get back to the internet date analogy, consider the date is a success and they are married and even then, for a few months, the candy shells are undamaged by the demon yolks within. But now the stress of daily grind, of each others' messes have made hairline fractures and the yolk demons have figured out how to short wave radio to each other with special code words that crack shells like high pitched arias. This fighting is the great expression of love between demons. It is something foreign, alas, to someone like Welles, a towering genius who preferred women at a distance, to be loomed over as they cringe with their jigsaw puzzles, or lurch drunkenly around tilting pleasure yachts (MR ARKADIN); or to be seen only in passing, in the shadows of sharks ala LADY FROM SHANGHAI. But this evasion tactic will not stall them forever. Rather than show his true core demon to his daughter (played by his much younger fiancee at the time) Arkadin, so it turns out, would prefer to just disappear into the ether.

So a 'towering' genius like Welles must inevitable embrace loneliness like he embraces alcohol, tobacco, and hashish, and all other eggshell removers, until the last vestige of phony candy shell is gone, and the whole social sphere wherein friends bring friends over who bring people who amused them on the boat now seem dull and inane... but hey, maybe Orson will put you in his film. He's been working on it for years! He'd rather be alone with that film than and an editing scissors and dubbing mic than at a party or in bed with a gorgeous blonde. In proto-nouvelle vague fashion there's the sense that while you're watching an ARKADIN scene, Welles is giving you his notes on it, fusing his commentary track half a century early into the essence of the dialogue, overdubbed by himself for nearly every male character. You get the sense meanwhile that the female actresses could be dubbed by whomever wakes up first in Welles' chateau, before whiskey and sycophants render her incoherent and him indulged and besmitten by self adoration's shiny but worthless baubles.

Note that Welles has never made a movie about an actor or artist struggling with their art, tending rather towards murderers, rogues, and captains of industry (Arkadin is all three). Not for him the sanctimonious glum piety of something like QUILLS, which mistakes the addiction of writing flagellant smut for a holy purpose; or the classical polish of actors like Laurence Olivier and Patrick Stewart, who mistake Shakespeare for great art as opposed to merely the pinnacle of charlatanism. Welles made a career laughing at his own absurdity, especially as a guest on radio shows like Jack Benny and Fred Allen, but he always preferred to play the devil rather than the angel, and the one time he wasn't the heavy--in LADY FROM SHANGHAI--he showed why he wasn't much good at it. He couldn't even make eye contact with his own ex-wife, turning away to pontificate in his high whispered Irish brogue while Mr. Bernstein ran away with the best role, the one clearly meant for Welles to play, the loathsome ogre lawyer showman.

To Welles, and to Don Birnim, and to Ben in LEAVING LAS VEGAS, and to myself of course, whiskey is a far more noble addiction than writing. We'd rather be remembered as being able to hold our liquor rather than holding a Pulitzer. Drinking leaves only empty bottles, and maybe broken glass, while writing leaves ugly thoughts that can gestate for centuries until your original meaning has been torn out and the zombie husk of your words used to champion any old egg-crushing cause.

Or worse, it can forgotten altogether.

I know from my own work that how seductive it is when you're the star and love to edit and look at yourself on screen. There's something quite magical about it, the chance to study how you look to other people, frame by frame. Welles never lived long enough to see the age of affordable digital video, and I wish he'd made a dozen Arkadin sequels instead of making just one three times. Such is the life of a vagabond obsessive. Indecisive reigns, but at least glum sanctimony has been kicked out the window. He makes any other egotistical tyrant genius look shabby by comparison, and he makes himself perhaps shabbiest and most tyrannical of all.That is why we love him: he's cinema's one true prodigal, and his own best company.

PLUNGE! Dr. Mabuse vs. Ameritrade

 

If you're adverse to silent films, maybe you're like me and really just adverse to their usually trite orchestral or piano scores. The trick to enjoying DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (1922 - avail. on DVD and Netflix Streaming) is to turn down the sound (no comment on the included score, which I've not heard) and connect your ipod on shuffle. Surrender to the possibly synchronistic juxtapositions rather endure the banal orchestral or piano score that tends to underlines even the smallest of gestures without a whit of counterpoint or ironic distance, to the point that even John Williams might say, too much.

Fritz Lang films can move like molasses at times, but this silent two-part event is never dull for a second, especially with the random counterpoint of your ipod. If you trust in it, you're bound to get at least a few songs worth of real, eerie synchro-connect through this random collage process. I had the theme from John Carpenter's Escape from New York: Main Theme start right as the action shifted to a big night club where a crazy woman was dancing on top of two giant wooden noses. It became Lynchian, this Lang-Carpenter synthesis, like two rights canceling each other out and leaving only 'Silencio'. Meanwhile hypnosis and staring eyes and disguises pervade the film - paranoia and shiftiness, the mad rush to get rich obscuring all judgment for self-preservation. You know how those Germans were, and how we are... driving over a cliff as we argue over whether or not seat belts are important.

The big day trader moment comes early: Mabuse's agent looming like a spectre over the Berlin stock exchange, kidnapping briefcases to drive stocks down and then releasing them to drive them back up. The timeliness is never far off, but now, more than ever, it's hauntingly relevant. America's credit rating has plummeted! Mein Gott! We're not far off from that Expressionist moment of post-WW1 Weimar Berlin, where the mark was devalued and everything and everyone was for sale, and Americans went over to celebrate how far their dollar could get them. Don't forget that the Great Depression was far away yet, in 1922, Berlin was the epitome of decadence and world-weary despair.

The recent bouncing of our national worth along the stock exchanges of the world has a lot to do, in my opinion, with the day traders, guys who think they're actually doing something important with their lives by their slot machine-like hunkering over the E*Trade accounts... Mabuse Lites, (with a crisp bold taste). The type of guys who wear khakis and high five a lot, so their beer ads claim. They must still be out there, but they're not the true Mabuses anymore. They got took by the master behind the scenes, the sneaky pete conservatives who deliberately shorted the market for their own sinister agenda. They sold out their own country in a lemming stampede. The less self awareness they have, the easier they are fleeced, according to Mabuse's supernatural theology. It's in clinging to the illusion that you are normal, a 'regular guy' that you befoul the world by funneling the treasure you never knew you had into the pockets of criminal cartels.

Mabuse would return under Lang in 1932 with TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, confined to a mental ward and using his will alone to control sabotage. It was as if Mabuse could only thrive without sound, that the arrival of dialogue and sound effects reduce him to an empty shell, but somehow enable him to merge with the very fabric of German society itself. 

Lang hated the common man as much as anyone and you can see him siding with the sinister cash-hungry Mabuse during this stock sequence. You could probably stop watching, for awhile, right after the poker game that follows (scored by my ipod to Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg's La Chanson de Prevert) as I did, and then watch again later, in 20 minute chapters of your ipod's choosing, but even as strictly a random collage of great expressionist images Mabuse is awesome. Weimar evil had seldom looked so inviting, so artsy, so terrifyingly expressionist, and Lang never seemed to be having as much fun as here, venting cobra venom with the mechanical cool of a cuckoo stock ticker.

Thanks to Lolita Kane's awesome blog post.