Thank you so much, Criterion!
So many movies to choose from – which is, of course, a great thing.
Check out my picks — of course two star Ralph Meeker. That wasn’t a plan or anything but it always seems to go that way with me.
And Udo Kier forever.
Re-posting my piece on Jacques Demy‘s Model Shop
“He rushed out and rented a white convertible, and he’d drive around L.A. He’d call and say, ‘It’s a dream here!’” – Agnès Varda on her husband Jacques Demy in Los Angeles
In Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, George Matthews (Gary Lockwood), a 26-year-old unemployed architect, drives. It’s 1968 in Los Angeles (1969 when the movie was released), and he drives and drives and drives – the movie loves to watch him drive (and some of us love to watch him drive) – he drives all through the city – at day, at night. He listens to classical music, rock, and the news on his car radio, mostly about the Vietnam War. Sometimes he drives silent, only the traffic sounds and the wind in his ears. Sitting at the wheel of his vintage M.G. convertible (on the verge of being repossessed) he’s both running away from and towards … something. Some injurious future – he would like to avoid what he views as possible soul-crushing employment or even death (the draft is hanging over him) – and he would like to experience something fulfilling and new, exciting – love? Creation? Keep driving.
The driving matches his mental state, which is not aimless exactly (though his live-in aspiring actress girlfriend played by Alexandra Hay would probably disagree – she is not happy with him at the beginning of the film and their relationship, understandably, is falling apart). But all of this driving is maybe more like searching, wondering what the hell is going to happen, and at the end, as he says himself, trying. And so, he drives. And within this movie that occurs in 24 hours of this young man’s life – he seems to be driving through half of it. This driving is his mental state, and this is Los Angeles. He is full of undefined longing. As Joan Didion wrote, “A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.”
You get the feeling George is filled with both – exhilaration in bursts (when the geography of the place inspires him) and an amorphous unease – there are young men and women and bright lights and music and sun all around him, but there’s darkness clinging to every inch of it all. Attraction – a beautiful, dream-like woman in white driving a long white convertible – lulls him out of his torpor. She stands stark and elegant and somewhat a bit out of time and place, but there’s something sad about her – you feel it instantly. Does George as well? You get a sense he does, which makes him more intrigued, more magnetized. George, then, reflects more how Didion continued on her thought: “There is about these hours spent in transit a seductive unconnectedness.”
Yes, there is that. The seductive. The unconnected. But one reason these hours at the wheel of the automobile are so seductive is the yearning to connect the unconnected. There is something about driving in Los Angeles, driving anywhere in the city, that is formless, yet full of stories – stories within nooks and crannies of shuttered movie theaters or old restaurants or old Hollywood haunts and houses and apartments and hopping club venues. Ghosts haunt the city. That can be unsettling and wonderful and sometimes both at the same time.
But also – the others – the passengers and drivers in the other cars: their stories, their stares, and their own loneliness. Some days it seems it’s a city of, mostly, single passenger cars. It’s often a gorgeous, fascinating city. But there are days where it feels – taking in the sunshine and breathing in the air – chemically off – as in your brain chemicals. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is exactly – those certain days that feel strange yet beautiful, light and dark, but listening to L.A.-made music by the band Love (especially 1967’s “Forever Changes”) or the Beach Boys’ 1966’s “Pet Sounds,” sweeps me into that state of haunted beauty, darkness within sunshine, the enigmatic nature of it, the complexity.
And so, the woman in white, almost spectral at first, carries a lot more with her than he (he being George) or the viewer might have anticipated – she has a past. And for anyone familiar with Demy, her presence is deepened by her backstory – here in the movie and here in Demy’s work – which seem to swirl together in a personal, tender reverie. With much of Demy, we feel a bittersweet heartache, connections made by chance and often, love that was not returned and, of course, waiting. Driving is a lot of waiting. Making movies is a lot of waiting too.
And sometimes – making movies – you don’t get the person you yearned for – in this case, it was Harrison Ford instead of Gary Lockwood (I think Lockwood is really good here). Columbia didn’t see it and felt Lockwood (after his role in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001), was more suitable. The movie didn’t do well regardless – and has become either a curio or something of a cult film for either Demy-philes, or those simply intrigued by taking in late 1960s Los Angeles – because you see so much of it, you feel its vibe, and you wish a lot of it was still around. But how different this movie might have been received or regarded with Ford? And what to think of Demy’s possible career in Hollywood? Or Ford’s alternate one? One might assume it would have been different. And would Demy have made his superb Donkey Skin? We’ll never know. And, so, Harrison Ford is even imprinted on the movie, if you know the backstory to it. As Ford tells it in Agnès Varda’s documentary The World of Jacques Demy, he spent time location scouting with Demy, and he and the director did indeed go to a model shop (on Santa Monica Blvd – the exterior painted DayGlo). According to Ford, Demy recreated the interior quite accurately, as you saw it (but, I’m going to assume, with Demy’s visual flair and added color), and he talked about the long narrow corridor they walked down to meet their model – it was painted black. And that they were both shy.
So, here’s Lola (Anouk Aimée) working at such a place. A French woman in Los Angeles, she doesn’t have her work visa, and can only find employment at one of those model shops – a place where men pay by the quarter half hour or half-hour to take pictures of women scantily clad or, obviously, nude (or maybe more if the price is right). So close and yet, so far-distanced by a machine-possessed only in image, a lens and, in a way, defining the only way Demy could capture and enshrine a mysterious and perhaps confusing kind of love at first sight – via his own camera.
Lola carries a whole past with her, of course, everyone does, but she also carries an entire Demy movie. Two movies, in fact (three if you want to count where her brooding paramour of 1961 ends up – Cherbourg). The foundational movie is, quite appropriately, Lola, Demy’s sublime first picture released in 1961, starring Aimée as Lola, in which Lola worked singing and dancing at a cabaret in Nantes, France, hoping for her great love (and father to her seven-year-old son) to return.
It’s richly rewarding to find all of the inter-connectivity in Demy’s work, so much that you dig for it throughout his movies, afraid you might have missed one reference, one recurring character (and indeed, I may have). It puts you, the viewer, right in his mindset, wondering and longing to assemble what is an intimate fresco of memories or dreams. In Lola, Aimée is much cheerier and more smiling and girlish, while harboring the sadness of waiting for Michel (Jacques Harden). There are imprints of both Michel and young Lola in Aimée’s Lola of Model Shop – she wears a similar white sheath dress, out with a man smitten, here it’s George (in Lola, it’s Roland, played by Marc Michel, who will then fall for Deneuve’s heartbroken and waiting-for-another, Geneviève in Umbrellas of Cherbourg). And then there’s the white convertible she drives. Her beloved Michel opens Lola looking very American in all white clothing including a white Stetson hat and driving a long white convertible Cadillac through Nantes while Lola is not yet aware, he has returned. At the end of Lola, the two reunite and drive off together in that long white Cadillac as lovelorn Roland, sadly walks to a different future.
But as we’ll learn near the end of Model Shop, Lola and Michel will not make it. They will divorce. He’ll fall for another – a gambler in Las Vegas named Jackie Demaistre – from Demy’s second film, Bay of Angels, in which Jackie is played by a tough, but sad-eyed, vulnerable bottled blonde Jeanne Moreau. She, too, is a mother (divorced), going through life at a roulette wheel. Jackie plays with chance, perhaps as a way to control it. In Demy’s universe, chance influences so much of our lives.
In something like chance, George spies Lola at, of all perfect places within this movie, a parking lot. He’s managed to drive off the repo man for the time being – but only if he can secure 100 dollars to pay off his car loan. He asks a friend who works as a parking attendant for some dough – the friend declines, nicely, since George already owes him money. But there he sees Lola, and follows her (some might view this as creepy), and driving on Sunset he turns to drive up a hill, and finds Lola driving to one of those swanky residences up in the hills – Lola is off to a mysterious meeting or appointment of some kind. She knocks and enters this house. We never know who it is or why or what is happening inside. George sits in his car and then gets out, taking in the view, the sprawling geography of Los Angeles looking beautiful and lonely but full of possibility. He drives away. He picks up a hitchhiker (she rolls a joint – rather expertly as the grass impossibly doesn’t fly out all over the place – and hands it to George for the ride). He deposits her down on Sunset. She walks away – and this being a Demy movie, we almost wonder if she’ll return in some way – she doesn’t. He drives to another friend’s place – the house where the band Spirit practice and live (another imprint of the real invading movie life – this is the actual band who also provide the atmospheric soundtrack for the movie – the gorgeous, melancholic opening tune “Fog” will really stick with you).
These guys are excited about their new record – they have a purpose George doesn’t seem to have, not immediately anyway – and so, here, we see, not burned-out hippies, but men actually creating and achieving. (We wonder what might be in a few more years – the 1970s are upon all of these characters) George sits with Spirit’s lead singer, Jay Ferguson, as he plays a new song on the piano. There’s something really lovely about this moment – watching George listen, and the look on Lockwood’s face is unsmiling but thoughtful – if you really look at him during this scene, you really feel for him. Jay says, “I haven’t got the words down yet. But I know what I want them to do. I’d like them to be sort of a personal testimony: the insanity of this world. I don’t know. It’s really far out. But, if I could just get it down, like it is in my head.” (A relatable creative desire if there ever was one). Jay asks George what he’s up to; if he’s still at his old job. George says he couldn’t take it anymore; it was wasting him and he tells him he’s broke. He asks (he says he feels weird about it) for 100 bucks. Jay generously gives it to him, smiling and telling him not to worry about it because everything is “going great for us” – his band. Jay is really sweet. It’s touching. Jay asks what he’s up to, what’s next for him:
“I don’t know. I’m not gonna give up architecture really want to create something. I just can’t seem to wait out the 15 or 20 years it takes to establish your reputation and then for what? To design service stations and luxury motels? (laughs) I keep going around in circles I guess, trying to find out what the choices are, wasting a lot of time. Like this morning (laughs) – I did an incredible thing. I was in my car and I started to follow this … uh nothing. It’s not very interesting.”
Jay presses that it is interesting and to tell him. George says:
“I was driving down Sunset, and I turned on one of those roads that leads up into the hills – and I stopped at this place that overlooks the whole city it was fantastic. I suddenly felt exhilarated. I was really moved by the geometry of the place; it’s conception, its baroque harmony. It’s a fabulous city. And to think some people claim it’s an ugly city when it’s really pure poetry, it just kills me. I wanted to build something right then, create something. You know what I mean?”
There is the exhilaration Didion spoke of – and George, rather poignantly, opening up to his friend about it. He really loves the city – he’s not cynical or hardened or beaten down by it yet. He’s not felt the deep darkness via the terrors of 1969 Los Angeles yet (chiefly, Manson), but there’s a lingering dread nonetheless. I suppose some found this scene (as well as others), corny or earnest, or “too European,” but I find it moving, particularly in that George (via Demy) is sticking up for Los Angeles. Already at this point, Los Angeles was a city people professed to hate, smudged with smog and a hollow Hollywood dream (of course there is so much more to Los Angeles than Hollywood – if people and certainly cynical visitors would actually drive around more, and take in neighborhoods – they might understand the city’s history and multi-cultural population). This persists – this tired Alvy Singer thought, that Los Angeles’s only “cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red light…” Not true – about the cultural advantage, the right on red is valid and damn crucial if you’ve ever spent time driving in this place.
In the excellent, essential essay-film Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen discusses Model Shop and says he took issue with it when he was younger, not for its love of Los Angeles, but for its limited terrain. But, apparently, with time, he came to find the film moving. As he stated, “Jacques Demy loved Los Angeles as only a tourist can, or maybe I should say, as only a French tourist can. I resented Model Shop when it came out because it was a West Side movie. Its vision of the city didn’t extend east of Vine Street. But now I can appreciate an early poignant Los Angeles, a city. It’s totally incoherent, but if you live here, you have to be moved.” As I’ve said, it is moving. And if you don’t live here, you can be moved as well.
Demy relocated to Los Angeles in the late 1960s for a time – and he really got into the place. With the success of his third movie, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (also nominated for four other Oscars – Best Song, Best Original Score, Best Scoring – Adaptation or Treatment and Best Screenplay), Columbia Pictures called, and Demy took it. (Before Model Shop, he had also directed another sublime musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort, released in 1967 – nominated for an Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture) And so, he, with his wife, the brilliant filmmaker Agnès Varda (Model Shop should also be viewed with Varda’s impressive work made in Los Angeles – among them, 1967’s Uncle Yanco, 1968’s Black Panthers, 1969’s LIONS LOVE (…AND LIES), 1981’s Mur Murs), they found inspiration all over the place – fell hard for it. And like Lockwood’s George, they would drive.
As Varda said, “We had a convertible car. We were playing the game. Then I would drive. I would take Pico and go from the ocean to downtown. I would do Sunset Boulevard that turns a lot. I would do all the streets – Venice Boulevard, etc. I was impressed, absolutely impressed.” Demy spoke of driving as well, and how driving in Los Angeles was in and of itself cinematic: “I learned the city by driving – from one end of Sunset to the other, down Western all the way to Long Beach. L.A. has the perfect proportions for film. It fits the frame perfectly.”
You see this in Model Shop’s opening shot – set next to George’s Venice Beach home (with an oil rig out front) – Demy films a majestic crane pull back on a camera car as Spirit’s “Fog” plays, and we take in the location and atmosphere of Venice, riding along smoothly with the camera. It’s already automobilized, and it serves a vehicular connection to the opening shots of Lola and Bay of Angels. With Bay of Angels (one can’t help but think, now, as we watch Model Shop, of the City of Angels) the camera executes a vertiginous, virtuoso pull back from Jeanne Moreau walking the boardwalk in Nice, Michel Legrand’s music soaring until we no longer see her, and the city flies by. In Lola, a white Cadillac drives into the frame, a man in white gets out of the car and looks at the sea. He jumps back in, and the camera does a similar crane pullback (albeit much shorter) as Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony plays. With Lola, we see the man in white actually driving the car, and the camera is then mounted on the back, we follow the Stetson-hatted man, eyeing his view. All three movies seem to be taking in surroundings via car (in Lola, most directly), and with music, and it’s so beautiful; so, stirring. Demy’s oblique visual rhyming between the three movies deepens the poignancy. He loved camera movement and music and Max Ophuls (Lola is dedicated to the great Ophuls), and he used all of this love in such a personal way. There is such coveting and longing and missing in the cinema of Demy, making vehicles a perfect encapsulation of this notion – cars and people are in some ways, to use the time-worn Longfellow phrase, ships that pass in the night, only there’s much more connection than we may have thought.
George drives back up to that swanky house in the hills and, this time boldly rings the doorbell. He asks about the woman who was there earlier, this morning, and the response from inside is – there was no woman here: “nobody came.” As if George saw a ghost. He leaves. He drives again, this time stopping to get a hamburger. By coincidence, he sees the woman in white walking down the street – he leaves his hamburger behind and follows her. She walks into the model shop, and he follows. Inside it’s all red velvet wallpaper with pink curtains and violet paint, black and white photos of models on the wall. A blonde woman in a mini skirt and black boots sits on the couch, watching the T.V., barely noticing him. She nicely hands him a photo album – he can pick his girl – and he comes across Lola. He picks her. It’s a bit creepy and sad and all too easy – you feel for Lola and how vulnerable she is. You wonder if he thinks the same, but he’s stone-faced, probably out of nerves, like young Harrison Ford and Jacques Demy before him. He gets the lowdown – you rent the girl 20 dollars for a half hour, 12 dollars for 15 minutes, six exposures of film, camera and film included. He picks 12 dollars (he just borrowed 100 bucks; you are very aware of George’s relationship with dough right now). A guy older than George in a suit and loose tie comes out with his camera, turning it in after his session. He looks more like the type you’d imagine would haunt this kind of place in 1968 – a guy more of the 1950s, an Irving Klaw enthusiast. The place is never presented as sordid, but certainly detached, and not exactly George’s scene. Demy neither romanticizes the place nor insults it or the women there – it’s just work. And when George is alone in the room with Lola, the exchange is realistically awkward, even a bit lifeless.
He doesn’t really attempt to talk to her, he doesn’t really act like a man who is smitten, he seems sour, disappointed even, but he takes all six photos, Lola posing however she likes because he doesn’t care what she does. It’s all very chaste, Lola mostly wrapping herself in her fluffy robe. It feels off seeing either of them in this place – George is more at home in his car and Lola seems like she should be anywhere else, dancing, smiling, not just posing – if we’ve already seen Demy’s Lola, we are wondering about where she lives, where her son is, if she’s happy. What happened to Michel? If we haven’t seen Lola we just find it even more mysterious. When George is down to his last shot, the conversation goes:
Lola: You have only one left. If you want me to do anything…
George: I like what I’ve got.
Lola: You don’t seem particularly interested in photography.
George: I’m not. I’m more interested in you. Besides, I don’t think the guys who come here give a damn for the art of photography, do they?
Lola: I don’t judge the customers. It’s not my concern.
George: It’s kind of degrading work, isn’t it? Why do you do it?
Lola: To make my living… But I don’t like this word, “degrading.” After all, I don’t know what YOU do, to make your living.
George: Me? Nothing, right now.
Lola: Then you don’t run the risk of degrading yourself by working.
George: You’re French.
Lola: As you can hear.
George: I followed you this morning.
Lola: Yes, I know… Good-bye.
George: Good-bye.
Good-bye. And that is that. He doesn’t reach out to her, doesn’t ask for her number, more about her life, nothing. Part of this seems like a good idea – he shouldn’t bother this woman – he shouldn’t walk in and ask aloud if what she does is degrading. But he’ll learn and he’ll think more. George seems slightly surprised by his actions, albeit in a low key way. Demy shows George leave, driving again, taking the film to the designated place on Selma Ave. He drives to extend his car payments (he needs to pay by that night, or his car will be taken away the next morning). He drives more and then winds up at his friend’s alternative newspaper, where they offer him some work. (His friends are so damn nice) “I got the draft hanging over my head, makes it kind of tough to plan anything,” George says. The men discuss the draft, their status within it, and the Vietnam War, and you think anything “heavy” that is said in this picture, well, it’s understandable with this kind of worry darkening these young men, who are trying to smile and laugh it off as much as they can. But not all of them can. And then George calls home, borrows money from his mother (whom he clearly loves) and learns from his dad (whom he clearly does not relate to) what has been hanging over him – that his draft notice has come.
Will George see Lola again? Indeed, he will, as he ventures back to the model shop and finally asks her out. One of the reasons? One he says, anyway? They both share a love for Los Angeles. Lola says she is leaving, anxious to return to France, but admits she will miss the city, that she loves Los Angeles. George says, “Well, that’s surprising, you know, most people hate it. Well, now, there’s two of us that like it. And that’s a good enough reason to get on out and have a drink, isn’t it? When the two meet in the parking lot, their cars vertical to one another, they share some of their life story. How old they are (or around how old they are), what they’re up to, what they came from, and what they are, or are not looking forward to. George, the dismal draft, and Lola (stage name – her real name is Cecile, she tells him), she yearns to see her son whom she’s not seen in two years. He’s about 14 now. It’s a beautiful scene, all the more affecting that that they open up via car – it jives beautifully with Demy’s vehicular lyricism, and we wonder if they would have only opened up while sitting behind the wheels of their convertibles. It shows how cars are not necessarily disconnecting; there’s a feeling of protection that makes one feel safe to utter things they may not have said. So much so that George tells Lola that he loves her.
“You’re very nice. And what you say is very moving. But you don’t know me at all,” a very sweet but tentative Lola says. She wisely understands that he just needs someone – perhaps it’s not just her. He becomes defensive, particularly about the kind of life she lives (she sees this as insulting – it is), but boy, does he not get how much more Lola knows about life and love than he does. But by the time the movie closes, I think he will get it. And he’ll, actually, truly, love her as a person, not as something he needs.
George and Lola will go to Lola’s place and talk more. Here, Aimée is absolutely lovely and heart-rending, showing George pictures of her past (pictures straight out of the movie Lola) – of her ex-husband, Michel, of her former lover, a sailor (also from Lola) whom she intended to catch up with in Chicago, but found out he died in Vietnam. You spy Roland in a photo, but she says nothing of him, but you also see a French magazine with Catherine Deneuve on the cover – Roland’s future. She talks about Michel leaving her for Bay of Angels’ Jackie and how depressed she was. How she has given up on love. It’s such a beautiful performance, and with the imprints of Demy, his movies and Aimee’s Lola (“Lola in L.A.” Varda called in in The World of Jacques Demy) deepening this woman who works at something so simply called a “model shop.” You never know who you might drive up next to in a parking lot in Los Angeles, and George has just found a woman of multitudes. They spend the night together, and George gives her his last bit of dough to help pay for her trip to France. When he returns home, his girlfriend is leaving him (all for the best – even if she is supposedly going to sell out, you don’t not feel for her either) and he’s hoping to see Lola one more time. He calls up her place but her roommate informs him she’s already left. George (and Lockwood especially) is really poignant at this moment. Lola may have given up on love, but she does not believe in giving up on trying, and that really sticks with George. He says to her roommate:
“I just wanted to tell her that I loved her. I just wanted her to know that I wanted to try to begin again. You know what I mean? That I was, I just wanted her to know that I was going to try. Yeah, it sounds stupid, doesn’t it. But, I can, you know. I mean, I personally can. Always try, you know. Yeah, always try. Yeah, always try.”
Much of Demy’s work is concerned with similar thematic elements: the near misses of love, the aching, longing nature of our solitude and the casual destruction of our destiny by the arbitrary intervention of a superstructure: morals, conventions or the military draft to fight a war that feels alien or downright wrong to us. He seems to really believe in love, or the hope of love or the transforming, musical exaltations of love (and pain), and he believes in trying. Driving forward? Perhaps, within the steel and glass, rolling alongside us in a busy, deceitfully sunny freeway is the very soul that could redeem us from this world and ourselves.
At the end of Model Shop, you see outside of George’s house – his car is, finally, being towed away. And we wonder what George will do now – regarding the draft, regarding his wheels. He takes his freedom very seriously and he loves to drive… What now? We’re not sure. But we do hope he will drive, again, with his own car, wherever he wants to go. And that he will, indeed, try …. “Yeah, always try.”
From my New Beverly piece.
“The character I played in the picture, Rocky Sullivan, was in part modeled on a fella I used to see when I was a kid. He was a hophead and a pimp, with four girls in his string. He worked out of a Hungarian rathskeller on First Avenue between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth streets—a tall dude with an expensive straw hat and an electric-blue suit. All day long he would stand on that corner, hitch up his trousers, twist his neck and move his necktie, lift his shoulders, snap his fingers, then bring his hands together in a soft smack. His invariable greeting was “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?” — James Cagney from “Cagney By Cagney”
“You’ll slap me? You slap me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize.” – Rocky Sullivan
We love Rocky Sullivan.
And not just love him because we’re Spit/Spike/Bim/Slip/ Muggs or whomever else Leo Gorcey embodied as his days as a Dead End Kid/East Side Kid/Bowery Boy — but we love him as an audience watching Angels with Dirty Faces, delighting in the pugnacious charm of James Cagney.
We love him just as much, even more, perhaps, when he’s fried at the end of the picture. He turns, or, rather, pretends to be (we don’t know which one for sure) yellow. He howls for mercy as the jailers drag him to the electric chair in that gorgeous, horrifying, shadowed death chamber sequence:
“No! I don’t want to die! Oh, please! I don’t want to die! Oh, please! Don’t make me burn in hell. Oh, please let go of me! Please don’t kill me! Oh, don’t kill me, please!”
Rocky is either really scared or a really good actor or both – we feel like crying whichever way it goes. Some of us do cry when Rocky gets it. The guard sounds almost Shakespearean once they finish him off:
“The yellow rat was gonna spit in my eye” (“Why dost thou spit at me?”).
Pat O’ Brien’s priest Jerry Connolly, while so visibly moved at Rocky’s cowardice or courage, practically sees the skies opening, angels singing, readying for Rocky’s hoofing to heaven. Rocky cannot be burning in hell. No. There’s no way God is going to allow Satan a Rocky, and not after Rocky granted Jerry that kind of courage, a courage “born in heaven,” getting straight with God. Unless God is a double crosser– lost a bet with Satan. We hope not. If we believe. Do we believe?
We believe in Rocky.
A tear drops from gentle Jerry’s eye and we, somehow, hold nothing against him for asking Rocky to ham it up before death – a pretty unreasonable request if you ask me – and Rocky says so too: “You ask a nice little favor, Jerry. Asking me to crawl on my belly the last thing I do.” Indeed.
And indeed, when we think about the Hollywood production code, led by Catholic censor Joseph Breen, meddling with movie morality, passing on his suggestions/demands especially here — as this is, a movie in 1938, following the friendship between a priest and a gangster — was of keen interest to him. Breen was concerned earlier gangsters were shown in too glamorous and sympathetic light – he worried those rebels, like a pre-code Tom Powers (Cagney, in The Public Enemy) or Tony Camonte (Paul Muni, in Scarface) were leading the public astray. They were just too damn sexy and exciting for the depression-era audiences and he feared they sided with their rejection of what would be deemed a square society. A society of suckers because, look how bad things are anyway? Why go straight?
But Breen’s not really getting his wish granted with Michael Curtiz’s entertaining, moving, at times masterful Angels with Dirty Faces (gorgeously shot by cinematographer Sol Polito), even if he thought he may have. Sure, we have a priest “winning” in the end – if you call that winning. And, yes, we’ve got a melodrama about good and evil and those society are most worried about – impressionable children. The young ones who hero worship gangsters, the kids who, quite understandably, wonder why in hell they should work as hard, and for peanuts, like their parents do. Or, maybe, their parents aren’t working at all (here, the Dead End Kids – Billy Halop as Soapy, Bobby Jordan as Swing, Leo Gorcey as Bim, Gabriel Dell as Pasty, Huntz Hall as Crab, Bernard Puntzley as Hunky – I think I got them all). But nothing can erase the unescapable magnetism of Cagney’s Rocky Sullivan, no matter what the headline hollers after his death: “Rocky Dies Yellow: Killer Coward at End!”
Those kids, led by Soapy, are introduced to Rocky’s swagger the moment they steal his wallet. Rocky’s out of prison and back to his criminal ways and, not knowing that this is THE Rocky Sullivan, the little toughies rob him. He figures it out quickly, and heads down to their hide-out, a place that used to be his old hide-out with his pal, Jerry, who was once a hooligan like him, and is now a priest. We’ve learned that Rocky was chucked in juvenile detention when he couldn’t outrun the cops like Jerry could (you’ll be reminded of this in the film’s final heavenly line). And, so, Rocky turned deeper into crime. Jerry turned to God. Endearingly, they remain friends.
The scene where the kids figure it out is so seductive and charming, that, if you haven’t fallen in love with Cagney already, you will right then and there. “Next time you roll a guy for his poke, make sure he don’t know your hideout,” Rocky says to them, not even angry, just kicking them in the pants for being so stupid, laughing along because he used to be like them. He puckishly winks as confirmation of being Rocky, rather than announcing himself, he doesn’t need to. Swing exclaims: “It’s Rocky Sullivan! We tried to hook you! What a boner!”
Well, now the kids idolize him. What is Father Jerry going to do? He tries to get Rocky involved as some kind of good influence – but Rocky is already back to his criminal ways, getting in even deeper with his crooked, and it turns out, quite quickly, murderous, double-crossing lawyer, Jim Frazier (Humphrey Bogart, terrific here), who is the picture’s real villain. Frazier tries to get Rocky killed, who strikes back (which isn’t so surprising). The corrupt lawyer will later even put a hit on Jerry, a damn priest – we already know that Rocky can’t go that far. (Can you imagine how less sympathetic Rocky would have been had he agreed to that plan? Where was Breen on all this? Probably secretly seduced by Rocky too…).
Rocky’s also got a likable love interest in beautiful, spirited Ann Sheridan who runs the boarding house Rocky initially rents once out of stir. These are good people around him – and he riffs and physicalizes with the kids with such ease and, at times, brilliant hoofer that Cagney was, a plug ugly grace. There’s famous lines here, and then there’s just wonderful, rapid-fire little toss-offs too, like when Rocky asks the kids to sit down to lunch. He instructs, “Chuck your chest up to the wood.” It seems to mean a few things by the very way Cagney utters it – sit down, listen to me, deal with life, grow the fuck up. Oh, and eat your lunch.
So, when it’s all over, well, I just don’t believe that these kids have really lost respect for Rocky, even if they appear so. O’Brien, with his lovely eyes and genuine humanity is still likable, we don’t want him to fail the kids, but we also don’t think his plan will work. After all, this is Cagney as Rocky. This is “Whadda ya hear! Whadda ya say!”
They’ll get over the coward bit. They may even begin to disbelieve it. And they may not turn to crime, and that’s good, but they may have learned some more know-how about life. They may now really- and not just to eat their lunch- chuck their chests up to the wood.
There’s Mr. Sawyer. He’s contemptible, dishonest, selfish, deceitful, vicious … Yet he’s out there and I’m in here. He’s called normal and I’m not. Well, if that’s normal, I don’t want it.” – Kris Kringle
Is Santa Claus insane? That’s what Miracle on 34th Street asks and never really answers. Not really. Santa is cleared in court and certainly not dangerously delusional and there’s a strong suggestion that he might really be Santa, though I never bought it. No way. I don’t care what people who love this movie say (and I love this movie). Kris Kringle, who lives in an Old Folk’s Home where no elves are to be seen, with no Mrs. Claus nearby (as far as we can see), a guy who takes the subway into the city, is wonderfully, sweetly …a little off… that’s my take, and that’s what makes me like the movie even more.
The beloved George Seaton classic gives you room to ponder Santa’s mental stability and think further about the white-bearded fellow – the figure of myth, of commercialism, of the shrewd business and competition of department stores (in this case, Macy’s and Gimbels), courts, greedy kids and nice kids and awful parents and frazzled parents and then, the common-sense parents. Almost progressive common sense – like Doris Walker, the mother Maureen O’Hara plays – a movie-mother I always liked, even if the film wishes she would stop being so sensible. But who can blame her pragmatism? It’s 1947, she’s divorced, living in New York City, working hard at Macy’s as an event director and raising her kid alone. She certainly doesn’t believe in Prince Charming or Santa Claus and probably not God either, and she doesn’t want her child to buy into mythology or malarkey that will only let her down. I always loved her character and I loved her daughter Suzie, played by the natural, intelligent Natalie Wood. I understood Suzie’s initial side-eye of the man who keeps saying he’s the real deal Santa Claus, softened by her sweet notice of what a good job he’s doing. When he tells the little girl he’s actually Santa Claus, she knows the score: “My mother’s Mrs. Walker, the lady who hired you,” she says. And then, nicely, she adds, “But I must say, you’re the best one I’ve seen.”
Already, she likes the myth of Santa, and she likes Gwenn’s real beard, his gentle, though different demeanor. What is so different about him? You see young Natalie Wood wondering this so convincingly. Well, for one, that he seems so real. Is she starting to believe? And, again, she likes this man. After all, he’s Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle, a gentleman so charming and sparkly-eyed and lovely and interestingly real (he opens the film walking the streets of New York City in an impressively long location shot, giving the picture an almost gritty feel), that he’s impossible not to love, even if he’s a bit pushy in the matchmaking department.
And he’s not a drunk (poor guy – he’s cold – “A man’s got to do something to keep warm.”) like the other Santa Suzie’s mom had to fire from the Macy’s Day Parade. That sad drunk we actually feel sorry for is played by the great Percy Helton – Percy Helton! The lech who leads to Beverly Michaels’ downfall in Wicked Woman, that worm! Edmund Gwenn is on to him right away, and any kid would be too. I mean, did we really believe in Santa? Deep down? What if you caught mommy kissing Percy Helton underneath the mistletoe? Or rather, Percy Helton kissing mommy? Shove him off of her! Call the cops! That’s not Santa.
I was six when I learned there was no Santa Claus. Six is too old. And of course I had my suspicions earlier — I was a somewhat sensible child (I mean, come on did I really believe?) — I was a wary child — but I wanted to believe in that man and just held firm even if I was lying to myself and I damn well knew it. I liked the idea of Santa, but I was growing up, and six is not five, that’s a big step, and these figures of folklore took on an absurd, sometimes sinister edge, which made them both not believable and intriguing; weird, or wonderful. I loved fairy tales for that reason, and devoured all of the real Brothers Grimm, intertwining those stories with the holiday creatures, wondering if they might have darker sides as well. The Easter Bunny then became something like the Big Bad Wolf. That once delightful bunny became a chilling monster for an evening after my sister woke me up in the middle of the night when I was five, informing me that an enraged rabbit was trying to break into the house because my mom locked all the doors. She said he was loitering outside and would probably bust through the door with an ax. Would he eat us? I didn’t want him to come in. The next morning, finally understanding she was joking (I love my sister), I was resolute to not believe in that enormous rabbit anymore because essentially, this big bunny was a home invader, and while my sister was messing with my belief in a tough love, darkly humorous Night of the Lepus kind of way (wise up, kid, a rabbit jumping into your house could KILL YOU) I understood he’s better considered as a mythic creature. That one I stopped believing.
And so, I had to come to terms with Santa. He, too, sneaks (breaks) into your house in the middle of the night. He gives you the cold shoulder if you’ve been “naughty” (or puts coal in your stocking – or worse, in other cultures). So, the truth. I learned when an older neighbor kid told me there was no such thing as Santa Claus. “You’re being really dumb,” he said. He was right, and I was standing there simmering – all seething six-year-old rage. And yet, inside I thought, The Easter Bunny, he’s not real, that silly Tooth Fairy (what the hell does he do with kid’s teeth anyway?), Oh, god, I am dumb! He’s right. How could I believe this? Well, of course I didn’t. I was just holding on to it. My parents were divorced when I was five — maybe I liked holding on to some childhood fantasy for that reason. Maybe I needed the crazy. Crazy made sense to me at this time.I don’t know. We get mad at ourselves because we’ve known we’ve been right for a long time.
So you move on. Big deal. I thought, if a guy is pretending to be Santa, like Gwenn in Miracle, he’s either really sweet, or really creepy – which isn’t fair to all those guys who just want to work for a holiday season – and I don’t blame them for drinking – but I’m talking about being a six-year-old here. And, I thought, if you think you are Santa, like Gwenn, you’re probably nuts. But I was fine with nuts – create your own world, be whoever you want to be. It’s better than exhausted, fake Santa at the mall or drunk Percy Helton and his lap I will not sit on (I don’t think I ever did when I was a kid), even if exhausted, fake Santa became a source of amusement later in life. All forms of exhausted, drunk or deranged Santas became amusing and/or disturbing with an entire sub-genre of films to dig into what lies beneath that red suit. But before all of those Silent Night, Deadly Night movies or Santa-suited Christopher Plummer vs. Elliott Gould in Silent Partner, or Billy Bob Thornton being “Bad,” or Johnny Craig creating “…And All Through the House…” for EC Comics’ The Vault of Horror in 1954, people were aware of the delightful strangeness of Santa via Miracle on 34th Street. Like when young Alfred (Alvin Greenman) tells Gwenn’s Kris that the uptight pseudo-psychologist, Granville Sawyer (Porter Hall), has been assessing him as a special case, that he finds it odd for a 17-year-old wanting to play/be employed as Santa – which isn’t too outlandish to wonder about. But this supposed doctor is a spiteful know-it-all and even cruel. Kris thinks the man’s psychoanalyzing is scaring the kid. Underscoring how some are suspicious of a certain kind of fake Santa, even finding them creepy, but through a sweeping generalization, Alfred relays what Sawyer told him:
“He says guys who dress like Santa Claus, see, and give presents away, do it because when they was young they must have did something bad and they feel guilty about it. So now they do something they think is good to make up for it. It’s what he calls a guilt complex.”
Alfred goes on with what Sawyer is assessing deep inside this young man’s psyche. And it enrages Kris – which is curious. He’s really mad. Kris, not anti-psychiatry (a nice touch in the movie – he’s not against heads being examined, even when his will thoroughly be searched), demandingly asks Sawyer if he’s a licensed psychiatrist. Sawyer says it’s none of Kris’s business, but Kris presses on: “I have great respect for psychiatry, and great contempt for amateurs who go around practicing it.” And then it leads to Kris … knocking Sawyer on the head, infuriating the man (“When a delusion is challenged, the deluded is apt to become violent!”) – and this propels the courtroom drama of the film. Kris is freaking everyone out – he’s not fit to sit at Macy’s – even if the most perfect Santa on earth is pulling in good business. He didn’t really hurt Sawyer so much as hurt his pride (Kris is clearly more intelligent than Sawyer) and Sawyer is milking it, but what if he hits a customer? What if he hits a kid? It’s a valid concern (though more interested with business than anything else), but what’s so beautiful about Gwenn’s performance is that we never ever think he would do such a thing – we are on his side right away. We believe he believes he’s Santa and we believe in this actor. So when Santa is chucked in a car to be carted off to an insane asylum, it’s genuinely distressing (though I wish the picture had went even darker here – I was always hoping for one scene like The Snake Pit or Suddenly, Last Summer – Suddenly, Last Santa).
But Miracle on 34th Street is a family film, a picture that’s viewed by many as a lot of corn-pone Christmas cheer. I disagree – I always felt it expressed darker, more cynical tones (“All right, you go back and tell them that the New York State Supreme Court rules there’s no Santa Claus. It’s all over the papers. The kids read it and they don’t hang up their stockings. Now what happens to all the toys that are supposed to be in those stockings? Nobody buys them…”). The darkness/light balance is not quite at the level of Frank Capra, but the picture asks interesting questions and is genuinely different. A Christmas story to be sure, but also a down and almost dirty New York story (the cinematography by Lloyd Ahern and Charles Clarke is often very stark, sometimes noirish dark, and the Macy’s Day Parade sequence is beautiful). The sappy stuff never really soaked into me because it’s not really that sappy – Gwenn’s Santa isn’t just making people think of the true meaning of Christmas, but making people ponder just who should be deemed insane? Why can’t this old guy just believe what he believes? Be an eccentric? And then it also uses this old guy’s need to believe for manipulation – for business, for publicity, and for a lawyer (chiefly, Fred Gailey, played by John Payne) who is romantically interested in Doris Walker. He really does come to adore Kris, but he’s in love with Doris, and he’s not above using Kris and the ensuing drama to extra woo her. He’s sincere, but all of this Santa business is making him seem much more romantic. As he says: “Look Doris, someday you’re going to find that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn’t work. And when you do, don’t overlook those lovely intangibles. You’ll discover those are the only things that are worthwhile.”
Whenever Fred says this to her, I want to jump in and say, back off, buddy, allow Doris her “way of facing things.” Doris deserves some leeway given how many more challenges she’s surely had to face, certainly more than Fred. And she’s not wrong in wondering what is going on with this Kris Kringle – she’s got to think of safety – can’t have a psycho on her watch. But, thankfully, the movie never turns Doris into a shrew or a woman who must be tamed by the right man – even if Fred and Kris can get a little pushy. And she’s never cruel to Kris – she really becomes fond of him. Loves him, even. Doris is a smart, warm woman and she loves her kid – she rightfully doesn’t want Suzie to be hurt by fairy tales or some guy pretending to be Santa. But Suzie, sensible, cute Suzie – Suzie needs, well, a little crazy in her life. Fairy tales. For Doris, this is a sense of faith – not just in Kris or Fred but perhaps in men – and she likely needs that faith. And though faith could be interpreted as Doris finding a slight religious voice, she means faith in people, and so, not God or the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus (that’s how I choose to take this), but people. As she finally says near the end of the movie: “Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.” That’s very sweet, but I like Kris’ take on imagination, which may even be an admission of himself. When little Suzie answers that imagination means seeing things that aren’t really there, he answers:
“No, to me the imagination is a place all by itself. A separate country … the first thing you’ve got to learn is how to pretend.”
Edited from a piece originally published at The New Beverly
I published this in 2014 after working with Udo in 2010 and 2012. Eleven years later, the legend, the unforgettble actor, the sui generis Udo Kier has passed away. Film and, really, the world, will never be the same without him. There will never be another. I will miss you so much, my friend. And deepest condolences to wonderful Delbert.
We’re driving around Palm Springs and Udo Kier is asking me to check on his ball. Has it arrived? I’m not certain what he’s talking about. A ball has not been mentioned yet today, but as we slowly creep past his block, I check for a ball as if this is the most normal thing to do. “It’s enormous, you can’t miss it,” Udo tells me in his distinct German accent of Udo-ness; only Udo sounds like Udo — and no one sounds like Udo. I don’t see the ball. “No. No ball. OK. It’s not here yet, let’s drive some more,” he says with a curious mixture of stern cheeriness. We do just that, eyeing houses, discussing the architecture of Palm Springs, how our mornings went. We discuss his life living in both Palm Springs and out further, far into the high desert. He stops by his other house to show a couch he wants to give me. It’s lovely from what I can see, but dusty and crammed in the back of his garage. It’s massive. How will I ever move this thing? He seems incredulous: “Well, don’t you have any strong friends?”
Yesterday Udo and I drove around Morongo Valley shopping in thrift stores. Udo doesn’t care for the antique marts where everything is curated and nicely arranged and usually overpriced. He prefers the hunt, to search through the junk and treasures, to stumble on something remarkable and unexpected. And he always manages to do so. We come across a big white desk with pink and gold details – faux neoclassical with those delicate legs. Probably from the 1960s, but very Louis XVI. It’s a little ridiculous but sturdily made and beautiful, bordering on tacky and we both love it.
He says that I must have this desk. He urges me to buy it. I’m waffling but Udo persists. He tells me this is where Marie Antoinette would sit and write letters. He shows me how. He tells me it would look good with my hair. He’s ever convincing, but I need to think about it (“strong friends”). We continue to browse and almost immediately see two men, maybe antique dealers, spying the desk, inching closer, checking the price. We return to the desk. Udo says “She is going to buy it.” I am? We place it on hold. Oh dear. More things to move. More strong friends.
Everyone in these dusty little shops know him. Some know he’s an actor, a movie star, some probably aren’t so sure. They can tell he’s something famous. He talks nicely and with jovial familiarity to everyone working. When we drive further on to a thrift store in Yucca Valley, an older female employee wearing her Angel Thrift smock stands out front on her smoke break. She greets him with a scratchy, gin-soaked voice, “Hey, Udo. We got some clay pots.” Udo is pleased. She takes a drag from her cigarette and says, “Yeah. But you got too many clay pots.” She cackles and goes back inside. The clerk says an immediate hello — there are items in the back. Everyone’s happy to see him. Walking through the store, someone asks Udo if I’m his daughter. He says, “Don’t insult her! She’s my granddaughter.”
Driving through the desert, we talk about his life, art, his work (and all the work he’s currently doing — it’s a lot), people he’s met, working with Fassbinder, von Trier, Morrissey, von Sant, Argento, Herzog, Maddin and more and, then, movies he’s loved as a kid. He loved watching Errol Flynn pirate movies. He didn’t have much money growing up, but he’d rush to see Flynn on screen. He discusses one of the three pictures he almost made with Alejandro Jodorowsky. It later became Santé Sangre. Before it was to star Udo and Bette Davis. Wait. What? Bette Davis?
Udo says he cried that they couldn’t raise the money back then; that he couldn’t work with Bette Davis. “Originally Bette Davis played my mother. It was a circus family and my father cut off the arms of my mother and I swear to her that as long as she lives, I will be her arms! Imagine! Imagine! Bette Davis and me! And I would have trained how to do it.” Udo adds: “I don’t want to spill a cup of coffee on Bette Davis.”
I mention Davis’ eyes. Udo and Bette, in a staring match! Udo laughs. Bette’s eyes lead to another favorite actress and her famous eyes, Elizabeth Taylor. “I was in love with Elizabeth Taylor when I saw Suddenly, Last Summer. Oh, my god! She should have got an Oscar for that.” He brings up numerous Taylor performances that stayed with him including Reflections In a Golden Eye (“With Marlon Brando when she hits him!” he says), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Butterfield 8 and X, Y & Z. And then he tells me he kissed her, in real life.
“It was at a dinner in Miami … the guest speakers were Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn. And I was sitting at one table, with a very famous artist and I was bored. Because the wine, they give it to you and you drink it. But the food takes forever. So I said, I’m going to take a rose from the table and give it to Elizabeth Taylor. She’s at the table with Valentino. The painter I’m sitting with said, ‘You are not brave enough to do that.’ So I poured one more glass of wine, took the rose, walked over to where she was sitting, kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘You are so beautiful’ and gave her the rose. She said, ‘Thank you.’”
“My dream as a young actor was playing Elizabeth Taylor’s son because we had the same eyes. My idea, was, I would be her son, who she doesn’t know about in Rome. And he comes into her life and she’s flirting with him, and then they have an affair and she finds out it’s her son.” I’m taken aback by this. What a wonderfully sexy and kinky idea. (Udo has a lot of intriguing ideas.) I exclaim, “Why didn’t you write and direct this movie?” He agrees he probably should have.
I bring up Udo’s beauty. He’s shy about this for a moment. I tell him he’s still gorgeous now, because he really is. He’s lucky in that, as he gets older, he never loses his Udo-ness, it just seems to increase. He’s too interesting a person, too unique, too vital, too great an actor, too smart for anything like beauty to fade. I’m not flattering him. It’s just too obvious. Every place I’ve been with him, Paris or Winnipeg or Los Angeles or in the middle of a dirty thrift store in Morongo Valley, people look at him, things shift, the room temperature changes. Charisma. When he was young, he had to know he was one of the most beautiful men on the planet, I say. He’s very gracious about this. Not boastful. It must have been crazy, at times. He is again, humble and discreet but he knows what I am getting at or pondering.
We stop off at his halfway finished property in Joshua Tree. A simple, but semi large green structure, set in the vast expanse of desert. His survivalist-looking neighbors, seemingly the only ones, check in and offer a beer from their truck. They invite us to see their pet donkeys. They love Udo. The man hands him a bag full of thrift store neckties. We’ll see the donkeys later.
Inside the house, he’s still putting in the kitchen and the bathroom. The inside is like a barn with exposed beams that he’ll keep that way. It’s gorgeous. It’s filled with all kinds of pretty, strange things, all eclectic and fitting of Udo’s taste. Udo loves the Palm Spring mid century modern aesthetic, and he has an impressive, enormous art collection (and furniture and just about everything), but he’s not boring and strict about it like too many people. An instinctively creative person, he mixes it up with all eras and expression and his own art projects.
Udo makes fantastic chairs out of neckties. (Now I understand the neckties.) There’s a box of doll heads and I reach in to grab one. All of the dolls have holes in the back of their heads. He says he’ll put feathers in the holes. He shows me a lovely antique dining room set that he hates to part with but doesn’t have room for. He says I can have it if I can move it. More strong men. He tells me, once it’s all moved and set up in my dining room, he’ll come visit me and the dining room set. He’ll make a movie about it. Elegant and absurd: About a man who comes over to visit because he wants to sit at the table and chairs he gave to his friend. But then he just keeps coming over, repeatedly, over and over, to sit there. He sits in different chairs. He likes to put his hands on the table. He misses the table. He misses the chairs And sometimes he’ll come into her house and just sit there alone. This movie is told off-the-cuff, poetic. Like when he instructed me to get air conditioning: “You don’t want to be a dried flower, Kim.”
We drive back to Palm Springs, talking about the desert, why it’s preferable to spread oneself across this hot, high lonesome instead of settling in Beverly Hills or somewhere like that. Udo, who does not have a normal life, but remains down to earth and sensitive, talks about having a normal life. “I don’t want to lose reality. The more normal you feel, the more you have a fantasy of being someone you loved. And that was always my goal, to talk to people, finding out people’s stories… I will look at a man walking in a strange way and I think, that’s great. Maybe one day I will play a role and I will walk like that man or that woman who walks very strange…”
“The problem is that people think that actors live in this mundane world. That they’re driven in a Rolls Royce and all that. And those that do, they lose reality. If you live like a millionaire, and then you play a millionaire, what is there to do? I fantasize of a combination of [things] of what I’ve read in books or magazines or Dostoyevsky or see in real life. If you have lost the reality, you lose the fantasy. You need to have the need for fantasy. The happiest of all the places where I could be is here, in the high desert. There is something magical about it.”
We return to Palm Spring and I stay the night. We wake up, drink coffee and check on his other house. He waters a tree. And, then, back to that ball. We drive down his street. I finally see the ball. He wasn’t kidding about this thing. You couldn’t miss it. An enormous orb taller than his fence, made of steel and iron or something ridiculously heavy has arrived on a truck, a massive sculpture to set in his expansive backyard by the pool. The artist unloads it himself in the blazing sun. Udo is grateful and kind to the artist, a friend, accomplishing something that appears incredibly dangerous. How heavy is that ball? The artist doesn’t need any help, and seems to want to be left alone focusing on this task, so we go back into the house. Udo makes lunch and we talk about work. But we can’t stop eying that ball. Udo decides he likes the ball slightly off center and we interrupt our conversation to peek on the thing’s progress. Udo is correct. The ball is somehow more impressive and interesting when pushed a bit to the left. It takes three hours to unload the ball.
We move outside by the pool and gaze at it. I am oddly moved by the ball, the way it’s just sitting there, tall and round and set against the blue sky. It’s strangely beautiful. You can stand inside the ball and Udo says I can dance in it at night. Udo is thrilled by his newest work of art. He points out that it looks like a giant eyeball. Udo names it, half jokingly, half serious, “The Eye of the Universe.”
I drive back to Los Angeles that night and fall asleep early. I wake up around 6 AM to an earthquake. The bed is shaking, the walls are shaking and I’m confused. I remember I’m in Los Angeles, and not in Palm Springs. I suddenly worry about that enormous ball. I sincerely hope that ball hasn’t rolled into Udo Kier’s house. I reassure myself. It’s an eye. It’s Udo. And Udo is resilient. As large as it is, it won’t win. And if that eye tried, it would make a great movie with Bette and Liz and dear Udo. The Eye of the Universe.
Love you, Udo. Udo Forever.
Excited to announce our Nightmare Alley, directed by Guillermo del Toro — which I co-wrote with him — is getting the Criterion treatment this year. Release date – October 28!
Here are the details:
-4K digital master of Nightmare Alley: Vision in Darkness and Light, a new black-and-white extended director’s cut, supervised by director Guillermo del Toro, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
-4K digital master of the theatrical version of the film, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
Two 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the films and special features
-New audio commentary on the extended director’s cut featuring del Toro
-New documentary on the film’s performances, visual language, costume and production design, and score
-New conversation between del Toro and actor and producer Bradley Cooper
-New conversation between del Toro and co-screenwriter Kim Morgan
-Trailers
-English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio
-PLUS: An essay by crime-fiction and true-crime expert Sarah Weinman
New cover by Thomas Ott
“When I accepted the assignment to take over Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel Comics’ four-color 007 facsimile, the series was shambling through creative purgatory, charted by a knot of writers and artists who (with the exception of Jack Kirby) apparently didn’t know or didn’t care about its direction—or, more appropriately, its lack of direction… I might have used Charles Bronson, Kirk Douglas, James Coburn, or other cinematic tough-guys upon which to build my matrix, but instead opted for one of my favorite character actors: Charles McGraw. Whether playing heroes or villains, he was always as hard-boiled as they came, always just as ready to shut anyone up with a backhand slap as with a warning. His vocal delivery neatly summed up everything he brought to the screen: a predatory growl as harrowing as that of a cornered tiger’s, bristling with menace, and suggesting a penchant for violence beyond that of his blunt, granite features. Sometimes there was even a harsh, metallic quality in his timbre, like that of a Sonovox voice amplifier. Something beyond human. Perhaps something even less than human. The voice of Charles McGraw personified what I felt Fury was all about. His was the voice I heard as I wrote him into the S.H.I.E.L.D. saga. His voice was the core of the character, the point at which every adventure began and ended..” – Jim Steranko, from his intro to Alan K. Rode’s “Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy”
In Felix Feist’s The Threat, Charles McGraw’s Red sits in a chair in California desert shack – he’s leaning back. His feet are propped up on another chair – indifferent to the cast of characters freaking out around him – hot-placid amidst chaos. His sweaty partners in crime (Anthony Caruso’s Nick and Frank Richards’ Lefty) are pacing uncomfortably, wishing the beer wasn’t so warm (“Hot or cold it’s still beer!” Nick snarls to Lefty’s whining). They keep on the lookout. The tied-up men in the back – police detective Ray Williams (Michael O’Shea) and district attorney, Barker MacDonald (Frank Conroy) responsible for Red’s prior incarceration (Red busted out) – are strategizing and scared – and they look completely useless. What on earth are these straight-arrow fellas gonna do? What are they capable of – up against Red? Let’s see them try. Will they try?
The traumatized ex-girlfriend, Carol, who was forced along this dire road trip (Virginia Grey), the one who never ratted Red out and keeps telling him so – she is trying to keep her shit together and we feel for this poor soul. Red doesn’t believe her or the cops, and this slip of a woman (she is pretty, very distinct looking, but so thin she looks almost like she’s going to pass out), endures, vulnerable as all hell, but somehow stronger than the authority figures wiggling in the further room. She has a past with this man – you’d have to be vulnerable and strong to have a past with Red. And we’ll see more of that later.
The force of Red is so intense, so nearly unmoving, that everyone around him look like mice, circling an enormous cat – one who will casually swipe his paw and lay any one of them flat, maybe even dead. He’s ready to strike and yet totally relaxed – if that’s possible in a human. With McGraw it is. He doesn’t look comfortable necessarily, that’s not the right word, he doesn’t look like he’s enjoying himself either – he looks angry, but not out of control (just born pissed, something) – but he looks in his element, as if this was just what he was naturally meant to be and do and live in. Like he almost can’t help himself.
At this point, no one seems like they could take him (no one ever does, not really, until the end … keep your eye on skinny Carol), and all he really has against him is that old standby – time. So, when one of his partners claims that Red said they’d be out of there by daylight (it’s past daylight – and they’re worried and itching to exit this hell hole), the other asks for the time. Red rasps, “Give me your watch.” The guy (that’s Nick) takes his off watch and hands it to Red. Red puts the watch on the table, grabs a beer bottle, and smashes it. He chucks it back to Nick and says with his distinct growl, simply: “Now you don’t have to worry about the time.”
Well, indeed no.
This is a perfect Charles McGraw moment and one where you think – no other actor in the world would deliver that line the way he does. Even that simple of a line. None. Not even Lawrence Tierney, who never seemed like he was acting either. There is just something about this man’s voice and demeanor that is unmatched and reverberates through a room. Alan K. Rode, who wrote the ultimate biography on McGraw, summed it up beautifully in his book:
"His guttural rasp of a voice, reminiscent of broken china plates grating around in a burlap sack, was complemented by an intimidating, laser-like glare and a taciturn demeanor that verged on being closed captioned for the hearing impaired. McGraw’s brusque noir characterizations are comparable in technique to Thelonious Monk’s splayed fingers beating his unique jazz stylings into submission on the piano ivories. The title of Monk’s identifying theme ‘Straight, No Chaser’ exemplified McGraw’s artistic and personal bent for over half a century.”
In The Threat (1949) – Feist’s lean and mean story is told without an ounce of flab – filled out by the presence of the electrifying McGraw. The story is simple: Red busts out of Folsom Prison – we see this briefly at the very beginning – guys running, guns firing, sirens blaring, but we don’t need to see much else. The movie gets right to it. He’s on the run, and hell bent to get the guys who put him behind bars — that’s the District Attorney and the police detective who wind up in the aforementioned shack (one will get such bad treatment off screen, we hear his torment and truly wonder what on earth is being done to the guy – it’s more terrifying that we only hear his pained moans). They nab these two, nab sad Carol, nab a poor guy who has nothing to do with any of this, a guy named Joe (Don McGuire), and head out to the California desert hide-out, waiting for Red’s old partner to smuggle him into Mexico.
So, what’s going to happen? I’m not going to say because the joy in this movie is wondering how on earth anyone is going to get out of this place alive. And how are they going to take on McGraw? You wonder about the body count. You worry about Carol and you are riveted by Red. You can’t take your eyes off of him.
And so we watch – we watch the room rumble with McGraw's blood, his pumping black heart bouncing off those hate-shack walls. He’s casually savage, and for a moment, we might think he’s got something going on inside there – so if he briefly stares forlornly into the void, we look for some kind of feeling – and then wonder if he’s merely staring into a sociopathic abyss. McGraw’s Red, a furnace of vengeance, is boiling his captive's lives away by simply breathing near them. But, really, he’s boiling his own life away too – absolutely self-destructing. But he’s doing it his way. We guess. We wonder if this guy ever feels joy. He doesn’t seem too sad.
Everyone’s good to great here (Gray is a standout as are McGraw’s sleazy cronies), but it’s McGraw’s gruesome party all the way – from his silent menace to his terrifying bursts of violence (like pinning a man's wrists with his feet and crushing his head with a chair – one of the greatest scenes in the movie – emotionally and technically— and it was probably that same chair Red was so easily reclining) he is like nothing you’ve ever seen, and probably never will.
This is the movie that made McGraw something of a star – thought not a usual leading man – notably in Richard Fleischer’s Armored Car Robbery (1950), and The Narrow Margin (1952). And he did sometimes play a good guy – a tough guy but a good guy. He’s also terrific in Harold D. Schuster’s Loophole, Howard Daniels’ Roadblock, John Farrow and Richard Fleischer’s His Kind of Woman and of course, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus.
Feist (who directed two other hellraisers, on and off screen – Lawrence Tierney in the tough, excellent The Devil Thumbs a Ride, and Steve Cochran in the rough and romantic Tomorrow is Another Day) working with cinematographer Harry J. Wild, knows how to showcase McGraw in such doomed digs. Tension builds so much that you can practically smell the sweat – and everyone’s sweat is a little different – you can smell that too. These characters perspire and dread and plan and panic and grow crazier and crazier while their big bad captor sits and waits, radiating wrath.
And all in just 66 minutes. That is six minutes over an hour for those who are bad at math. And during that time, this hysterical entrapment does not waste one minute of intensity, style, intelligence and Charlie-McGraw-magnitude. Feist knew what he was doing and who he was dealing with here. He knew who was the star (even though McGraw is third billed!)
And the movie needn't be shorter or longer. As if you were concerned about the time. Were you concerned about the time? Smash! “Now you don’t have to worry about the time.”
Happy Birthday Marilyn Monroe!
For beloved MM’s birthday, here’s a small excerpt from my Criterion piece, “Marilyn’s Method,” published in 2023. It covers, among other things, her performances in The Misfits, Niagara & Bus Stop, specifically, and her journey and power as an actress and an artist. Here’s a portion:
“Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and Guido (Eli Wallach) have captured—beautiful horses who will be turned to dog food—is so extraordinarily moving in its quietly weighed delivery that it’s breathtaking. It’s moving because it’s Montgomery Clift asking the question, and because of the power of Marilyn Monroe’s Roslyn and her chemistry with Clift. But it’s sublimely moving because of Roslyn’s preceding scene instigating the request—her scream in the desolate landscape, her testimony:
Killers! Murderers! You’re liars! All of you liars! You’re only happy when you can see something die! Why don’t you kill yourself to be happy? You and your God’s country! Freedom! I pity you! You’re three dear, sweet, dead men!
That big, blistering moment is filmed in a gorgeous and almost unmerciful long shot, with a distant Monroe, her blond hair and denim in the desert; viewers fix their eyes to see her better as she rages—a brilliant choice by Huston. By forgoing a close-up, he makes Monroe’s speech feel almost unexpected and shocking, and, oddly, more powerful. There are three men who, throughout the movie, have observed this woman with bewilderment, lust, love, and anger. She’s represented multiple ideas, dreams, or wishes for them (the script was written by her soon-to-be ex-husband, playwright Arthur Miller), but she’s now screaming and nearly tearing her hair out—almost as if to make herself flesh and blood.
Marilyn as Roslyn espouses part of the movie’s thesis—a potential sledgehammer—without the directness feeling unnatural, underscoring the end-of-the-line lives these men lead and the simultaneous empathy and anger she feels toward them. Clift’s Perce, who is already feeling lousy about capturing the mustangs, so much so that he doesn’t even want to be paid for it, gazes with sadness and, perhaps, shame; Gable’s Gay looks on concerned, disquieted, and Wallach’s Guido, at that moment, is all annoyance and anger: “She’s crazy,” he says. “They’re all crazy. You try not to believe it because you need them.”
Read it all here.
Happy Birthday Marilyn!
“Little Murders was conceived as an essay on what I perceived to be going on in America in the mid-1960s…’inspired,’ if you will, by the assassination of JFK and the shooting of Oswald a week later. The post-assassination climate of urban violence made me realize this country was in the process of having an unstated and unacknowledged nervous breakdown. All forms of authority which had been previously honored and respected, on every level of society, were slowly losing their validity.” – Jules Feiffer
In Little Murders Elliott Gould is an American under attack. An exaggerated, satiric American under attack, but as this movie ever so slyly shows, perhaps for some, not so exaggerated. The city and everyone in it has gone mad and fear — so much fear — is making citizens turn on each other. Even the cops are freaking out. Gould, numbed by those little and big things that beat us down by life — those soul-crushing day-to-day existential agonies — also endures genuinely violent threats: a push in the park, a punch in the gut, a full-on beating. He’s not paranoid about those waiting in the alleys anymore because, why? Why be paranoid if you’re beat up nearly every day? Gould is so directly in touch with these perils that he’s adopted a nihilistic nonchalance of protection and simply shrugs off the offenses. He doesn’t find the need to fight back, not because he’s a pacifist, but because he’s an “apathist.” As he explains to his soon-to-be-wife’s parents in perfect Elliott Gould deadpan: “Well, there's a lot of little people who like to start fights with big people. They hit me… And they see I'm not gonna fall down. They get tired and they go away. It's hardly worth talking about.”
It’s both a strangely reasonable rationale (people will stop, you might wind up dead but they will eventually stop hitting you) and an absurdly funny display of dispassionate blunting: he says he hums through the pain and thinks of something else, like taking pictures (he’s a photographer). Makes sense — if the world feels insane — and it often does, especially now. Cartoonist, playwright and screenwriter Jules Feiffer wrote this in response to what he deemed America suffering from: an “unacknowledged nervous breakdown.” That was 1967. And here we are (as I wrote this — 2017) — now, it's 2025.
Little Murders is a satire, but never beyond reality – it’s so brilliantly observed, so smart, so hilarious, and so disturbing, that watching now, the picture moves beyond a time capsule of New York City circa late 60s early 70s and into the dark heart of American madness. And in the grand American literary tradition — Hawthorne, Melville, Poe — we are all a little crazy: Said Poe, “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
I’m not sure if anyone displays simple sanity (whatever that means) in Little Murders — maybe (OK, not really) Patsy Newquist (played by Marcia Rodd) who is trying her hardest to at least be optimistic in a city full of muggers, shootings and heavy-breather obscene phone calls that follow her from apartment, to parent’s place to even a payphone at her wedding. But trying is indeed a “horrible sanity” in this movie’s unsparing universe, so when she meets Alfred (Gould) as he’s getting attacked outside her flat, she does the most insane thing imaginable, she falls in love. Her version of love is to “mold” Alfred, a photographer who takes pictures of dog shit (a jab at the art world? Or he’s a really talented photographer of dog shit? I say both), and she urges him to listen to her schizoid entreaties: “I want to be married to a big, virile, vital, self assured-man that I can protect and take care of! You've got to let me mold you. Please! Let me mold you!” Gould’s not so sure about this whole love thing but he proclaims a more powerful declaration: “I trust you! I very nearly trust you!” For a guy like him, that’s saying a lot. Hell, that’s saying a lot of anyone.
Directed by Alan Arkin and shot by Gordon Willis, this 1971 adaptation of Feiffer’s genius, pitch-black comedic play still feels like nothing you’ve ever seen before. The beats of the movie, from hilariously nutzo family dinners to genuinely reflective moments of horror (like a blood splattered Gould on the subway), remain potently uneasy. This is not a comfortable movie, nor should it be. For that reason, one can understand its fascinating backstory as a play. First running in 1967 and starring the great Gould, it only played seven nights and then closed. People weren’t ready for it, perhaps; something didn’t click, or something clicked too much. Two years later, after America had been batted around enough (and would even more in the ensuring years), it played off Broadway, this time to great success. As for the film? In 1971 so much had hardened in this country.
In Feiffer’s vision no one is spared. He’s not being conservative at all — this is not a decrying of city violence or a return to values. I believe Feiffer is instead a shrewd, frustrated observer, while giving what we hold “sacred” a raspberry. Patsy yells at Arthur to fight back, she can’t stand his apathy. She’s right, but then she’s not right. She ceaselessly questions his masculinity as Gould in all of his tall, dark, offbeat Belmondo prime, wanders around in a bemused daze — he's a guy who could likely land a punch but doesn’t want to. Maybe that’s just as masculine, not giving a fuck. Everything is questioned here. Patsy’s family, the conservative father (Vincent Gardenia) who thinks everyone’s a “swish” and is so fearful of appearing weak that he hollers at anyone who states his first name (“Carol”); her “come and get it!” mother (Elizabeth Wilson) who sits Arthur down to show him pictures of their dead son because she figures Arthur likes photography; her bizarre little brother (a hilarious Jon Korkes) who moves around in constant comic motion, lurching and smiling and making noises to be humorous (we think), and he is funny, albeit with a kind of sinister brotherly love (he and Patsy have some underlying incestuous dynamics).
Their apartment feels like a bunker as shots are fired outside and the “typical” American family is holed up, a group of loons, no crazier than Arthur and, yet, strangely recognizable if you’ve ever felt unsure meeting a partner’s family. Arthur’s intellectual parents are a different kind of nuts — they only speak through books — and so when he drops in on them (he clearly hasn’t seen them in forever) and questions his childhood — they can only answer through literary, philosophical and even cinematic reference. It’s funny, but it’s a bit heartbreaking as Arthur returns to Patsy, defeated, and, then defeated to become what she wants. He discusses his past college days when he was an activist and the FBI was on his tail. He says, "It was after this that I began to wonder…. why bother to fight back? It's very dangerous. It's dangerous to challenge a system unless you're completely at peace with the thought that you're not going to miss it when it collapses."
Feiffer, who also wrote Carnal Knowledge, released the same year as Little Murders (what a year) is relentlessly, hilariously toxic and yet, one never feels pushed away from the movie. The characters become weirdly likable; we start caring about them, we understand their anxiety while questioning those sacred institutions right along with Feiffer and Arthur: There’s a fantastic wedding scene with Donald Sutherland as a hippie reverend, announcing vows that are hysterically sensible:
“So what I implore you both, Patricia, and Alfred, to dwell on, while I ask you these questions required by the state of New York to ‘legally bind you’ — sinister phrase, that — is that not only are the legal questions I ask you, meaningless, but so too are the inner questions that you ask yourselves, meaningless. Failing one's partner does not matter. Sexual disappointment does not matter. Nothing can hurt, if you do not see it as being hurtful. Nothing can destroy, if you do not see it as destructive. It is all part of life, part of what we are.”
Another powerful, eerily prescient moment comes after Arkin’s paranoid cop flees the Newquist’s apartment, summoned when Patsy’s been killed (yes, this happens — she’s randomly shot). Mr. Newquist loses it and delivers a speech with crazed, paranoid satirical pronouncements that now, don’t seem so satirical anymore:
“What’s left? What’s there left? I’m a reasonable man. Just explain to me, what have I left to believe in? Oh, I swear to God, the tide is rising… We need honest cops! People just aren’t being protected anymore! We need a revival of honor and trust! We need the army! We need a giant fence around every block in the city—an electronically-charged fence! And anyone who wants to leave the block has to get a pass and a haircut and can’t talk with a filthy mouth. We need RESPECT for a man’s reputation! TV cameras, that’s what we need, TV cameras in every building, lobby, in every elevator, in every apartment, in every room. Public servants who ARE public servants! And if they catch you doing anything funny, to yourself or anyone, they BREAK the door down and beat the SHIT out of you! A RETURN to common sense! We have to have lobotomies for anyone who earns less than 10,000 a year. I don’t like it, but it’s an emergency. Our side needs weapons, too! Is it FAIR that THEIR side has all the weapons? We have to PROTECT ourselves and STEEL ourselves. It’s FREEDOM I’m talking about, goddamn it. FREEDOM!”
By the end, Arthur finally breaks down after snapping pictures of people in the park, and it’s important we see he’s shooting people, not shit, which may seem like a bright new beginning. Really, it’s an on-the-nose (but perfectly on-the-nose) symbol of what’s to come. He brings home a rifle and the family embraces violence. They smile and laugh and celebrate crazily, but there’s no catharsis. They sit down to dinner and it’s all so terribly sad. It’s also terribly funny. And terribly timely.
My piece was originally published in 2017 for Ed Brubaker's Kill or Be Killed
Little Murders is playing tonight, June 1, at 7 PM at Egyptian Theatre | Q&A with actor Elliott Gould. Moderated by Larry Karaszewski.
From Ray Carney’s “Cassavetes on Cassavetes”: “I loved Frank Capra when I was a kid. I saw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and I believed in it. I believed in the people in our country and our society. I believed that the rich were not that bad and that the poor had a gripe, but that people could come together and that made America a better place for me to live in and be proud of. And every Capra film I’ve ever seen showed the gentleness of people. There were corrupt people within that framework, sure. The poor people were always oppressed, but they were oppressed with such dignity and loveliness that they were really stronger than the rich; the rich had to be educated. I grew up with that idea. I grew up on guys that were bigger than life. Greenstreet, Bogart, Cagney, Wallace Beery. Those were my favorite guys. I’d think, God, what a wonderful life they had – to have an opportunity to stand up there in front of people, in front of a camera, to express yourself and be paid for it, and say things and have it mean something to the audience.”
“I am trying to show the inability of people to recognize that society is ridiculous. Hardly anyone obeys the mores, but they respect them. If they are exposed breaking the mores their lives can collapse. Our hero is not a coward, but in covering up this failure he destroys everything else that is important to him. A silly search for mores reduces the great, wonderful hero of the story into a cheap individual with no morals and ethics and no place to go.” – John Cassavetes on Too Late Blues
Everyone in Too Late Blues is miserable. And I mean miserable. That is in no way a condemnation of the picture, not at all, as this is a beautifully realized collection of melancholic musicians (also an agent, B-girls, a couple of bartenders and a touchy tough guy) who are depicted as humanely, compellingly and explicably miserable in a way that only John Cassavetes (who co-wrote, with Richard Carr, and produced and directed the picture) grooves on with his particular kind of dignity for the defeated. Some don’t know how miserable they are, they’re even laughing and exuberant at times, but we can feel it throughout the picture – it just hangs over these characters with their respected musical purity and perilous futures in a world that manages to grind down your purity and grind down your debasement (and yes, the world can grind down your sullying even more than you thought). Though none of these individuals are really trying to maintain a bright outlook since they know how life goes, they’ve been around. They’re also not ready to chuck away their dreams even when they go “commercial” (for a time). That should be a positive. It is. In an easier world. And so they walk from room to room, bar to bar, gig to gig, haunted. It’s no wonder the lead character’s name is jazz cat Ghost (Bobby Darin) – his ego might ruin him to that fate – a potential phantom, a guy people talk about from the past, leaving stale smoke and circles on bars behind him while maybe, just maybe his real music will be playing somewhere, a memory. Or maybe he’ll make it his way. Cassavetes did (but by 1961, while he was directing this picture, he hadn’t yet), and one can’t help but see the anxious, questioning parallels between Ghost and Cassavetes.
Darin’s Ghost Wakefield yearns to keep his artistic integrity, no matter if his band complains about playing in parks to birds and trees, living off nothing, is portrayed with the drive of a guy with lots of talent, lots of charm, but a hell of a lot more insecurity than he’s letting on. Darin in real life was a singer with loads of talent and though he was popular, he always seemed a bit off-center, not quite as cool as he would have liked, but not as square either. In Too Late Blues Darin entirely gets the anger and ego of a guy with talent to burn playing dumps, fighting during recording sessions and dealing with scummy agents while trying to do what he loves. He’s seen this world before. You can tell. And he’s both poignant and completely unlikable all at once.
You can also tell that Stella Stevens (who plays Jess) the beleaguered B-girl and singer, has seen some sleazy situations in her time. She floats into the picture a petrified beautiful bird, nervously scatting with a seasoned jazz pro and ends it a suicidal wet-haired feral cat, once again singing in her wordless, almost disturbing near incantations. She’s heartbreaking – a broken young woman who has been so used, she can slip from quiet, contemplative junkie (without ever shooting up – her character just oozes opiate addiction and trauma) to drunk and boisterous to runny-eye-makeup, furious good time girl. She’s acting a part when she’s out hooking sliding right into the role men want her to be, but when she’s faced with actually loving someone (in this case, Ghost) she’s an emotional wreck. She’s also so vulnerable that one contemptuous moment from Ghost and she’s gone. She sleeps with his musician friend who is, as she says, bigger than him. She repeats this with emphasis so you get that she doesn’t just mean taller.
And yet, the film never judges her. Cassavetes is so understanding of this kind of woman that the picture feels downright radical in that regard. She’s not just a whore – she’s not even sure what she is – and that’s sad, not ugly. And Ghost (who will become kept himself by a rich woman playing music just for the scratch) well, what right does he have to judge? Ghost may represent the movie’s mixed idealism and egoism of holding onto your vision, but Stevens is its vulnerable center. She’s spinning from one place to another, even a baseball field, with all of these men swirling around her either telling her she’s worth something or distracting her from the purity of not just music (for she can sing) but of her own self. She is so down and depressed that her later, very physical meltdown in a bathroom is so shattering it almost takes you by surprise. We knew she was despondent and yet, she’s so brilliant in this moment, we are genuinely taken aback by just how despondent she really is. As Cassavetes reflected: “I see women in bars, crazy girls who don’t want to be themselves and who don’t want to admit what they are. They’re difficult people. They’re hard to talk to. But to me they’re like a mother; awkward, pretty young girls.” He’d known these women. And, again, Stevens must have, too. She’d likely known these men.
And Cassavetes knew about the struggle of working for dough. This was Cassavetes’ second picture after directing his groundbreaking, independent Shadows and starring in his “commercial” TV show, Johnny Staccato, and his first time directing under a studio (Paramount). He was allowed neither his casting choices with the leads (he wanted Montgomery Clift and his wife, Gena Rowlands) nor his preferred location (he wanted New York City, the film was shot and set in Los Angeles), but, according to Ray Carney’s ‘Cassavetes on Cassavetes,’ he felt some optimism bringing most of his trusted friends and crew along: Shadows cast members Seymour Cassel, Cliff Carnell, Rupert Crosse and Marilyn Clark; Johnny Staccato actors Val Avery and Everett Chambers; American Academy of Dramatic Arts alums like Bill Stafford, James Joyce and Vince Edwards. Both his co-scripter and his cameraman (Lionel Lindon, a veteran who also shot for John Frankenheimer, including The Young Savages, All Fall Down and The Manchurian Candidate) worked on Johnny Staccato. He was given freedom in spite of some stipulations, and he worked beautifully with his cast and musicians (Shelly Manne, Red Mitchell, Jimmy Rowles, Benny Carter, Uan Rasey, Milt Bernhart a score by David Raskin, and Slim Gaillard shows up in the film as well).
The picture is also gorgeously shot, the black and white cinematography giving us a life where men and women live, play, fight and drink by night, only to look strangely awkward in the daylight (Ghost remarks how beautiful Jess looks in the sunlight partly because she’s never in the sunlight). Though it has less the ragged experimentalism of Shadows, the composition and interiors and the lack of an actual street life (it’s just a lot of darkness out there, or a depressing pool lighting up the outside of Jess’ pad) powerfully conveys the claustrophobia of club life. One second it’s fun and dancing, the next it’s Vince Edwards punching and screaming about needles in pockets, hollering about dope fiends. Everything feels entombed and perilous all at once. Never mind how anyone breaks through this life, how does anyone break through this room? The picture is something near a masterpiece.
But, never mind all that. Like Ghost compromising his 100 percent artistic vision, Cassavetes wasn’t happy with the end result. He didn’t get the edit he wanted (and that edit would have been interesting, likely greater than this one). The movie didn’t do well and some of those ready to attack him for going commercial jumped on him. He wound up making another picture for Paramount that proved even more upsetting (A Child Is Waiting) and would eventually make one of his finest films, Faces.
As Cassavetes said about working with the studio: “All I care about is making a movie I believe in. Everyone else in the room with me, they’re concerned with figures rather than people and emotions. They only care about money. There are no artists in the room with me, only bankers. I’m all alone.”
Making art just for money? Compromise? Thankfully, Cassavetes created his own kind of career so he wouldn’t have to. But, Too Late Blues’ Ghost? He might get the group back together and go places. Other than that, he’s miserable. Miserable in a magnificent movie.
Previously published at The New Beverly
Sunset Gun 
