By D.K. Holm
March 4, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on, and perhaps you should stop reading the Internet.]
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
The Quality of Authorship is Not Strained
Shakespeare is so wondrously versatile that his plays reward constant re-reading, constant reinterpretation. To immerse yourself in Shakespeare requires learning a new language, not just the vocabulary of Elizabethan England, but also a way of looking at the world that is at once both angry and wise, comic and tragic. There are few writers as effortlessly generous as Shakespeare.
Or do we mean "Shakespeare"? The quote marks around the name seem obligatory in the early 21st century at a time when, nearly 500 years after Shakespeare's registered death, questions about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays are taken much more seriously than when the subject was first quietly introduced in the 1780s by the Reverend Dr. James Wilmot. Could the 36 plays attributed to Shakespeare, with their evidence of wide travel, of familiarity with the doings of courts both legal and royal, and written in a vocabulary deemed to be the largest of any writer in history, really be the work of a villager who couldn't even spell his name the same way in six different known attempts? Isn't it more likely that the plays issued under the umbrella moniker "Shakespeare" were really written by a host of Elizabethan scribes? Or by a man more likely to have traveled to Italy, participated in lawsuits and been received at court? Someone, to be exact, like Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford?
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This is not a classist argument suggesting that such plays could "only" have been written by an aristocrat (numerous Elizabeth writers such as Marlowe have "low" origins which detracts not from their achievement or status). Rather it is a solution to the host of vexing Shakespearean cruxes that have confounded scholars, actors, and readers for centuries. More and more scholars, actors, and critics are coming around to the idea that "Shakespeare" was someone else, as evidenced by the annual De Vere Studies Conference held annually at Concordia College in Portland, Oregon.
Shakespeare traditionalists feel the threat. In the last few years there has been an onslaught of prestige publications dedicated implicitly to the notion that Shakespeare was the Stratford man. These books, by Stanley Wells, Michael Wood, and most recently by Stephen Greenblatt (WILL IN THE WORLD) make little if any mention of De Vereans or other Shakespeare skeptics. But despite the death grip of received wisdom that the Shakespeare industry has on the traditional idea that a simple villager fled to London and became the world's most famous playwright, dissenters are finally gaining some ground, to such an extent that there may someday soon be an "Oxfordian" Collected Plays of "Shakespeare."
Actor Jeremy Irons is also a Shakespeare skeptic to make his views known, which brings us to THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Irons revealed on the CHARLIE ROSE SHOW that he had concluded that Edward De Vere indeed wrote the plays attributed to the Stratford man. Would that this had been in some twisted way the theme of the new MERCHANT in which he stars. It would have made for a delightfully exotic interpretation.
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THE MERCHANT OF VENICE is a play seemingly divided against itself. On the one hand it is a drama about a speculator who overextends himself and falls subject to his usurious creditor. Alternating with that lead story is a pastoral comedy about a princess-like young woman weathering suitors required to win her via the test of selecting from one of three proffered urns. In the Arden edition of the play, John Russell Brown makes some very clever arguments that show an intentional linkage between the two threads of the play but to my mind that doesn't make the script any funnier or more dramatically compelling. The comedy isn't funny (most Shakespeare comedy isn't) and the drama isn't necessarily harrowing, and in Shylock, the usurer, Shakespeare offers up a golden opportunity to scenery chewers everywhere.
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Al Pacino as Shylock can't resist the bait. Never known for the subtlety of his portrayals (Michael Corleone is an anomaly in his career; AND JUSTICE FOR ALL is the typical style), Pacino here takes his shredded voice and amps it up to heights not seen since his own Richard the III. And like Harvey Keitel in Scorsese's LAST TEMPTATION, Pacino is too august a personage to modify his persona in the interests of the larger concerns of the play. People want to see Pacino as Shylock and, goddamit, they are going to see Pacino! Thus Shylock speaks with a New York City street accent.
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Directed by Michael Radford (Il POSTINO), MERCHANT begins by portraying a Venice of abject hedonism. Shot after shot unspools of tipsy revelers in colorful dress dallying with topless wenches in a generally carnivalesque atmosphere, as if Fat Tuesday were Grasso Martedi. I assume that all this frivolity is meant to contrast with what Shylock calls his "sober" house, which is so sober his only daughter Jessica flees it to run off with a gentile.
Anyway, out of this carnival emerges Antonio (Jeremy Irons) to immediately spit on Shylock, who at first hails him as a friend. Meanwhile Shylock's daughter is dallying with Gratiano (Kris Marshall), a friend of a friend of Antonio's. This goes on for another five minutes, and then the play MERCHANT OF VENICE proper begins, about 15 minutes after the opening credits. As is generally the case, Shakespeare himself is rather irrelevant to this as well as other modern adaptations.
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If actors face off like basketball players than Irons wipes the screen with Pacino. Irons is delicate, nuanced, and realistic to Pacino's bombast and vulgarity, qualities which Pacino must think are inscribed into the part. Radford's interpretation also "gayifies" the text by hinting, via an onscreen kiss, that the Merchant and his pal Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes, looking a lot like Prince) are more than just pals. Here I suspect that Radford is taking too literally aspects of Renaissance male bonding that Shakespeare is drawing upon. Bassanio needs some quick cash to woo the princess Portia (Lynn Collins), and thus the tumbler of the plot are unlocked.
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In any case, the film, like the play, flips between the debtor's story and the suitors' romance, until its inevitable and oft-told conclusion, in which Portia unites the two by substituting for her summoned uncle to adjudicate between Shylock and Antonio in court. Radford stages the courtroom scene like a hog auction, with the spectators in a tight scrum around the litigants, the light from the side a nicotine stained beam that makes everyone look dirty and sullen. That Portia uses a literalist's trick to foil Shylock and the law shouldn't offend nitpickers. After all, Shakespeare did have a character say once, "Kill the lawyers."
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THE MERCHANT OF VENICE figures in a new book on the authorship issue, PLAYERS: THE MYSTERIOUS IDENTITY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (Regan
Books/HarperCollins, 308 pages, $26.95, ISBN 0 06 077559 9) by Bertram Fields, an entertainment lawyer who has previously applied himself to other cruxes in British history. MERCHANT is of interest to those weighing authorship because of the familiarity with Italian life and settings, its legalese, the subject of Judaism, and the playwright's knowledge of then yet untranslated lines from Ovid (see pages 82 - 83).
Taking a basically neutral position, Fields separates the Stratford man from the Playwright in order to evaluate the possibility of commerce between these two entities. Fields, in his own words, provides an "overview of the brilliant monarchical setting that was the background to the events in question and that provided the model for some of Shakespeare's most memorable characters. Then we will explore the facts that we really know about the Stratford man and compare them with what we know of the great poet and playwright. Next, we will examine and weigh the evidence for and against the proposition that the two were the same. Having considered that overriding issue, we will evaluate the case for each of the principal alternative candidates, assessing the likelihood that one of them, rather than the Stratford man, was the true Shakespeare. Then, finally, we consider what might have happened."
Noting that there is very little evidence to verify the existence of the Stratford man in the first place, what little there is portrays a "litigious, small-town land and grain speculator, striving to be deemed a 'gentleman'" which is at odds with a great playwright of "soaring humanity, extraordinary sensitivity, and revulsion at hypocrisy and pretense [page 280]."
After contrasting the inferable lives of the Stratford Man and the Playwright, and walking the reader, in clear, calm prose, through the issues or what the Stratford's education might have been, the puzzle of the sonnets, the sexual orientation of the Playwright, political and religious and social views, the controversy of the Stratford man's will and the monument build in his honor, and the background of the first folio, Fields also examines notable candidates for real authorship (De Vere, Marlowe, Bacon, even Queen Elizabeth), and comes to the cautious — and admittedly as yet unprovable — determination that the Playwright was De Vere using the Stratford man as a front, but who also collaborated with other writers and relatives, men who may have contributed content to the plays even after the Playwright's death (as may well have the Stratford man, whose savvy sense of theater and knowledge of low characters may have informed certain passages and deviations from the Playwright's more consistent world view). It's a good book and thus far the best introduction to the authorship controversy.
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No Shakespeare enactment is truly satisfactory. That is the conclusion many fans come to after immersion in the Bard's work. The plays are just too complex to enjoy complete translation to the stage or screen. But still some adaptations are better than others. This MERCHANT OF VENICE is fine as far as it goes, hobbled only by uneven casting, staging and sets that too often interfere with the words and action, and a broad failure to unite the two disparate plot layers along the lines that Brown suggests.
But the "state" of contemporary Shakespeare adaptations is further illustrated by a sudden rash of DVDs, starting with TWELFTH NIGHT/ MACBETH (HVE, 2003/1998, two discs, $29.95, Tuesday, December 14), which brings together two recent versions of two of the Bard's most frequently adapted plays.
TWELFTH NIGHT is one of those colorblind productions, like Kenneth Branagh's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Directed by Tim Supple in what is so far his only credit, the color blindness doesn't affect the play one way or another, and the strong cast enunciates Shakespeare's dialogue in a winning, convincing, and realistic manner, following the model that Branagh himself established with HENRY V. Michael Maloney, who played the smarmy Dauphin in Branagh's film, appears here as Malvolio, and he is excellent, but the standout is Chiwetel Ejiofor as Orsino, who speaks Shakespeare's lines as if he had just thought them up.
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The version of MACBETH that comes on the second disc, on the other hand, is one of those strained affairs that attempts to "update" the play with a contemporary setting. This TV production, from 1998, appears to take place in the Balkans, but the text of the play as presented here — in an incredibly truncated form — seems to have little relevance to the internecine warfare of Eastern Europe after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
This version's Lady Macbeth is the voluptuous Greta Scacchi, and Michael Maloney is on hand again as Banquo, but their Thespian skills are defeated by the distracting setting, a series of dirty, dusty, abandoned factories. The whole project comes across like that disastrous version of RICHARD III with Ian McKellen set in a modern war-torn England, but without being as entertainingly extreme or creative as TITUS, or other films by Julie Taymor.
Neither of these two films comes with any extras, beyond scene selection.
Probably one of the oddest Shakespeare adaptations, though highly unofficial, is Gus Van Sant's MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (The Criterion Collection, No. 277, 1991, two discs, $39.95, Tuesday, March 1), now finally out on DVD. Not that IDAHO is viewed as a Shakespeare film. It is too much of an art project. Its quotations from Shakespeare's HENRY plays are viewed as the kind of playful inspiration that any great artist can demand. That the Shakespeare elements of the film are wholly at odds with the basic text and subject matter only seems to irritate purists.
When he is not importing incomprehensible iambic pentameter "humor" into his settings, Van Sant's IDAHO is an interesting piece, although I wouldn't go so far as to call it entertaining. It is the product of obsession and in turn has become the subject of obsession. Van Sant, who is not shy about his concern over boys who live on the streets, had been trying to formulate that obsession into some kind of story for years, under numerous different titles. IDAHO appears to be an amalgam of two or three scripts, later spiced up with the Shakespeare stuff.
Apparently Van Sant saw a screening of Welles's CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, and came out of the theater in a state of satori, now knowing how to solve his script problems. Most directors don't watch all that many movies, but when they do there is trouble. When he later saw some films by Bela Tarr in the same auditorium as he watched CHIMES, he came out shooting, making first GERRY on Tarrian principals and then ELEPHANT (for which he also stole elements from Alan Clarke). With CHIMES, it's not clear if he understood what he was viewing, however, beyond the broad outlines of a plot, just as it is not clear if Welles knew what he was doing in his film. Both appear to be happy accidents, the films, in a sense, taking control of themselves against the directors' wishes.
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Meanwhile, thanks to the film's relatively lively style, its portrayal of wildly independent characters, its male sentimentality, and the death of its lead, a cult has formed around IDAHO for teens spread across the nation who need help in reconciling themselves with their real identities. Ample evidence of IDAHO's importance in this regard is given in the supplementary material on the Criterion disc, in which Todd Haynes, Jonathan Caouette (TARNATION), and the mysterious and mysteriously revered J. T. Leroy, all gather to pay homage to the film and to its role in their own lives.
With its "director-approved" transfer (1.77:1, enhanced), this Criterion transfer is superb, and comes in both the original Dolby 2.0 stereo or in new Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, worked up for this release. The first disc also contains the film's trailer.
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Disc Two extras festival begins with an audio only interview between Van Sant and director Hayne, basically an audio commentary track but without the visual. Haynes is very "starry eyed" in the presence of Van Sant. He says "wow" a lot, often at the most banal statements. Meanwhile, Van Sant is addicted to the formulation "like sorta," as if nothing is what it is but a pale reflection of something else (although Van Sant comes across here as much more articulate than in most other interviews I've heard him in). Haynes went to Brown and his approach to films is brainy, but in the course of the interview he sounds surprisingly ignorant: he hasn't read SILAS MARNER or CITY OF NIGHT, and is continually taken by surprise by some of Van Sant's information. It's a very technical and informative interview, and some curious tidbits do arise, such as that singer Tom Waits almost played the Keanu Reeves character (this was probably before the infusion of the HENRY elements, and some of the Waits character is probably in the Bob Pigeon character). I especially enjoyed learning some secrets about the underground world of Portland, Oregon, where the film was shot and where I live, such as that there was a place called Camp located on Third and Southwest Taylor in downtown Portland where male prostitutes would gather to meet clients. This was located right near the dirty bookstore I used to go to (this was a good bookstore to go to because the magazines were not wrapped in plastic so you could flip through them). In fact, the film, which sets a scene there, now serves as a peculiar memorial to this particular bookstore, now long since laid waste thanks to urban renewal.
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Next up is a "making-of" featurette (43:00) in which co-cinematographers Eric Edwards and John Campbell, editor Curtiss Clayton, and production designer David Brisbin talk about numerous aspects of the film. It is equally as informative as the audio chat, but also has that air of hagiography that infuses the disc. Brisbin talks at one point that as he was reading the script that he "couldn't believe" that so much "intelligence" was permitted in a Hollywood script. This is a ludicrous statement regarding a script with a Yahtzee cup of a plot suffering, in addition, the imposition of a half-assed Shakespeare text unwillingly upon it.
Which brings us to the next supplement, a video interview with FILM COMMENT and VILLAGE VOICE film reviewer Paul Arthur. Focusing on the influence of Welles's CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT and Shakespeare's HENRY IV plays to the script and other matters, Arthur almost makes you think that Van Sant really came to this script thinking about such things as identity and paternity. Then you watch the film again and it is clearly just the director's personal fantasies finding expression in a crazy quilt of incidents.
The supplements devolve from there. Next is a lightweight, girlish conversation (20:00) between producer Laurie Parker and River Phoenix's sister Rain about the film, six deleted scenes, and an audio conversation with Jonathan Caouette calling J. T. LeRoy (the new Truman Capote) and Van Sant popping in at the mid point.
Finally there is a 68-page booklet featuring an essay by Any Taubin, on set reportage by Lance Loud, a "conversation" between acolyte J. T. LeRoy and Van Sant, and reprinted interviews with Van Sant and Phoenix, along with color photos, cast and crew, transfer info, and chapter titles. The fold out dual disc digipak comes all enclosed in a paperboard slipcase.
Everything that is subtly wrong with IDAHO is made manifest with EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES (New Line, 1993, $19.97, Tuesday, November 2, 2004), Van Sant's disastrous adaptation of the Tom Robbins, from which Van Sant's career might never have recovered had he not sold out and done a straight Oscar-whoring Hollywood tale like GOOD WILL HUNTING.
Now one can enjoy COWGIRLS as a delightful mess, a train wreck of a film that must surely rank as one of the worst films of all time as it gayifies hippie culture to tell of a young woman (Uma Thurman) whose deformed thumb renders her hippiedom's most successful hitchhiker. Her Candide adventures take her from New York's social elites and to a lesbian run ranch in siege mode as it tries to protect the last of a rare bird species.
Van Sant manages to merge the cloying post-Vonnegut archness of Robbins's book with the Warholian sensibility of the post 1960s Factory. It is an uneasy blend. In fact, it is enough to make your skin crawl. But precisely because it is so terrible, because it is so misguided, uncomprehending, so inward and private and selfish, it makes for fascinating if discomforting viewing.
Apparently, though, COWGIRLS is not yet ready for its dual disc set. New Line issued it last fall with an excellent transfer but with no supplements to speak of. Surely a work of this abnormality must someday merit a two, nay a three or four disc set!
Oscar Populations
Like everyone else in the world I was lying back and watching the Oscar ceremony last Sunday, having all the thoughts that everyone else in the world had (the oddity of giving the lesser awards from floor, the studied) quality of the acceptance speeches).
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But was I among the rest of the world? Daniel Radosh in the February 28th NEW YORKER raises some questions that had inchoately bothered me for years about the Oscar claim that one billion people watched the broadcast. Like Carl Sagan disproving that Santa Claus exists (OK, you got one guy in a red suit and a sleigh, and over 150 million households, divided by eight hours of flying time), or Noam Chomsky questioning the death totals in Cambodia, Radosh wonders aloud about just where the Academy gets its figures on viewership. The Academy, we now learn, disavows that figure ("Our best estimate is several hundred million"). It turns out that UPI writer Vernon Scott was the Jean Lacouture of this figure, brandishing it and even further exaggerations in his various Hollywood columns. It's rather comforting to know that not everyone in the world watches the Oscars.
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Naturally, I lost the Oscar pool I entered, getting only seven of the 24 categories correct. On the other hand, I did learn a thing or two. First, the winner of this pool got 12 answers correct, or just half. Thus I think in order to win a pool one needs to work hard and really figure out what is most likely to win so that a safe margin of 14 to 15 categories can go your way.
I'm sure there are tricks to winning an Oscar pool, but one of them is not subscribing to the WALL STREET JOURNAL. On Friday the 25th it ran a piece in which the paper enlisted the aid of an economics professor to come up with a formula for predicting the Oscar. Had I followed this formula, I would have lost worse than I did. However, if I had simple read the big yellow chart to the right on the page and followed the predictions of John Lippman, of the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, I would have won. He got the top six categories all correctly.
If only Bill James were interested in movies rather than baseball.
Passholes
Thanks to Movie City News I came upon a story by Tom McNamee about "pass whores" in Chicago who are disrupting advance screenings and even going to the degree of suing a marketing firm, HNOW, for discrimination when they tried to break the back of the screening rats. "We call them 'pass whores' or 'screening whores,' " McNamee quotes one film marketing specialist as calling them. " We're not exactly talking Ebert & Roeper."
I feel for him. I really do. I have been dealing with these jerks since 1979. They are like a swarm of locusts who descend on a screening and essentially take it over. They sit together, bring their own mountains of food in crinkly sacks, slaver after free t-shirts as if they were manna from heaven, and scoff at the publicists and ridicule the movies they are seeing for free. They walk around gladhanding each other, as if they sponsored the screening, and they frequently cause trouble for the critics, talking through the movie to each other, or even attacking the reviewers personally in some physical manner. Worse of all as far as the publicists are concerned is the fact that the passholes' presence defeats the very purpose of these screenings, which is to generate word of mouth. Since they only talk to each other, word doesn't get out (which could be a good thing on occasion).
The publicists seem to be powerless. I don't think they are, but that is the stance they take. Over the years these morons have told all their friends, until the rats have ballooned up to a force of about 75 or more. They claim that they enjoy all the free screenings in town (there are at least three a week here in Portland, Oregon) for free, but the amount of money they spend on gas to drive out to various small business giving out tickets, and then to the theaters showing the screening, certainly nullifies their "bargain." And the fact that these homunculi arrive for the screenings two to three hours before show time suggests that even all these free screenings fail to fill up empty lives.
In any case, I thought that Portland was nationally unique for its passhole problems. It's bleakly gratifying to learn that other cities have these woes too.
Media Notes From All Over
Does Dairy Queen really believe that it is successfully selling popcorn shrimp via the vehicle of a humorous skit based on family cannibalism? Is there some obscured advertising principle at work here that insists that using alienating plot elements creates lasting "impressions"? That might explain why so many current commercials contain outrageous material, like the ad set during a video will reading, or the similar ad in which an escaped lion eats a emu. Death predominates in ads these days. Even the ad for the Universal theme park begins by reminding the American public that it is working itself to death.
If not death obsessed current ads at least highlight domestic disharmony, as with the various characters in the Dodge ads who one-up their spouse (the stranded motorcycle; the wife who almost says "asshole"). For the most part though commercials show the users of their products as losers. By virtue of using a product or service, we learn, the consumer is humiliated, caught out, trumped by a spouse, or destroyed. Maybe there is some kind of reverse psychology at work but failure, cannibalism, and death strike me as hardly healthy selling points for mass marketed merchandise.
About seven years ago Jonathan Rosenbaum, in one of his reviews in the CHICAGO READER (not on line for free) resurrected the career of one Cy Endfield, most famous for ZULU and MYSTERIOUS ISLAND. He sounds British, but was born in Scranton. As I recall it, Rosenbaum made a fascinating and compelling case for Endfield as a great auteur. It was one of those articles that makes you want to rush out and find all the director's films on tape or DVD (if such a store even exists somewhere in this world).
As my eyes glided ravenously down the column inches, I also began to wonder, Who might my Cy Endfield be? Would I stumble upon that lone figure simply awaiting my investigatory skills to render him famous for all time? After all, that is the "big game" that movie writers look for, a previously underrated, unheralded, or unrecognized director to champion. My problem was that I knew too much about film directors (though obviously not as much as numerous colleagues and friends, people who often finish your sentences with proper nouns if you take too long to proffer a director or star's name).
But even for brainiacs, finding unsung heroes is not as easy as it used to be. Andrew Sarris did so much spadework in the field that almost always when you turn up an old hack from the '40s or '50s, Sarris had been there first. When Tarantino enthusiastically offered up William Witney a few years ago I'm sure that certain halls of academe and bullpen corridors rang with squeals of exasperation and jealousy.
Well, I think that I've finally found my "Cy Endfield" and it's all thanks to the dynamic dais of DVD.
I'm thinking of Richard Quine (rhymes with "wine) the erstwhile collaborator of Jack Lemmon, three of whose films are out just now from Columbia Tristar. I don't know if CTHV intended to do a mini Quine retrospective but that is the result of a trio of films starring Lemmon, Doris Day, Kim Novak, and / or Kirk Douglas.
The first Quine film I was aware of watching was a Jack Lemmon comedy called OPERATION MAD BALL, a program filler if ever there was one. It's one of those military comedies that flooded the market in the wake of SEE HERE PRIVATE HARGROVE and MR. ROBERTS, in which medic Jack Lemmon, in rapscallion Phil Silvers mode, is trying to set up an off-base party for his compadres in the army. The stand out for me was TV comedian Ernie Kovacs, whom I'd never seen in anything else except TV appearances. He was absolutely brilliant in the thankless part of the humorless superior officer whom Lemmon ran rings around. There is one moment when, while on the 'phone getting more bad news, Kovacs shows a fantastic blend of rage, frustration, and defeat in the flash of one second, a moment not unlike the relief Gunnar B&#j246;rnstrand shows after not killing himself in Russian roulette in SMILES OF THE SUMMER NIGHT. But bear in mind that I only saw the film once, and it was a long time ago.
Quine was one of those children of the arts, appearing in a lot of musicals in the 1930s and movies as a child star, later playing a part in the musical MY SISTER EILEEN, which he recreated in the first movie version and then remade with Bob Fosse in the role that he had played.
Quine teamed up with actor turning emerging writer Blake Edwards in the early 1950s (they had met in the coast guard during the war), and they collaborated on numerous comedies. I get the impression that they cross-fertilized, Quine influencing Edwards's later casting choices, and Edwards "maturing" Quine's subject matter. It's remarkable, for example, how similar their dramas from the 1960s resemble each other. DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES is very much in the spirit and tone of STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET.
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CTHE's three Quine offerings span his career. First up is MY SISTER EILEEN (Columbia Tristar, 1955, $19.95, Tuesday, February 22). Surely one of the most musically boring musicals ever committed to stage and screen, SIS is derived from a series of short pieces by Ruth McKenney that appeared in the NEW YORKER in the 1930s. Compiled into a book, they went to the stage then to musical, before reaching the screen twice, once, as mentioned, with Quine, then again in a film by him. The material was also adapted into the play and musical WONDERFUL TOWN.
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Aspiring writer Ruth (Berry Garrett, of ON THE TOWN) and the "prettier" Eileen of Thespian inclinations, hit Greenwich Village from Ohio and end up on Barrow Street in a basement apartment resting over a subway tunnel under construction. The vaguely naive Eileen, a descendent of Miss Torso from REAR WINDOW, ends up contested over by two men, a nice guy soda jerk and a rapine journalist, while Ruth peddles her wares to a stand-in for the NEW YORKER, edited by Jack Lemmon's Bob Baker. Bob likes Ruth's stories but in an aching contrivance Ruth has to pretend that there is no sister and that all Eileen's adventures really happened to her. The unproductiveness of this contrivance of a plot enrichment is apparent from the fact that nothing memorable happens in the film after it is introduced. Nor are the songs memorable. This may have been the first popular musical in which no hit songs emerged. They are so bland you can't even hear them as melodies, and they dissolve unto themselves, like a virus consuming its host. As a film, SIS is significant because it introduced Lemmon and Quine to each other, the duo going on to a fruitful working relationship that culminated in six collaborations. By the way, a lot of people like EILEEN, and one critic calls it the best non-MGM musical of the period.
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Much more conventional is the Capraesque IT HAPPENED TO JANE (Columbia Tristar, 1959, $19.95, Tuesday, February 22) about a single mother (Doris Day) running a Main lobstery whose business is threatened by the penurious policies of a bloated railroad executive (Ernie Kovacs). With the help of ha besotted hometown lawyer (Lemmon) and her own plucky ingenuity, she defeats the evil corporation.
In this film we begin to see some of the bedrock qualities of Quine's direction, his effortless use of the widescreen frame, his integration of characters into their surroundings, his comic timing, his use of realism as a comic background, and his generosity toward actors. In her Universal sex comedies (or rather anti-sex comedies), Day was meant to be a feminine ideal. Here, she is a tomboy, and though there is a strain of the anti-sex Day (she starts off the film by making sure that a male lobster is segregated from the girl lobsters), the focus is much more on her integrity, as a little man standing up to big business.
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Representing business is Kovacs (apparently doing a Harry Cohn impersonation). His balding, flatulent vulgarian is a stand in no doubt for the many studio executives and producers Quine and Kovacs had to deal with, but it is also interesting to see such an anit-business film come out of the Hollywood factory at the tail end of the pro-business '50s. As a comedy, JANE ends up as a blend of Keaton's THE GENERAL and the domestic comedies of the time, which mocked the post-war male's futility by feminizing them, throwing Lemmon into an apron and giving him "woman's work."
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Kovacs, who died early in a tragic car accident, is for me the great unheralded comedian of the 1950s. The mirror image of Russ Meyer, he was a brilliant and subtle actor who toiled in modest comedies and westerns usually as the villain. In STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET (Columbia Tristar, 1960, $19.95, Tuesday, February 22), Quine gives Kovacs a meatier role, as a hack novelist obsessed with critics. His bestsellers give him enough cash to build a dream house, and to that end he has hired Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) to build it for him.
Probably one of the most underrated movies of its time, STRANGERS is a delightful film to sink into, a good, solid, traditional tale with a lush score. Which isn't to say that Quine doesn't do marvelous things with the camera and the widescreen frame. Based on a novel by Evan Hunter, the story follows Coe as he builds the house for the irascible Kovacs while at the same time falling into an affair with a neighbor, played by Kim Novak. As the house progresses, so does the affair, and when the house is done, so is the romance. This is Cheever and Updike country, a world of large lawns and quiet desperation behind the kids toys and martinis. What's curious is that Coe appears to be perfectly happy. The film asks the weird, difficult question of if it is possible to love two people equally, and critiques modern society for its bizarre limitations on human freedom.
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All three discs enjoy terrific transfers, but none of them offer much in the way of extras, beyond the typical chapter selection, trailers, and varied language options.
Another offbeat "woman's picture" is the Icelandic THE SEAGULL'S LAUGHTER (HVE, 2001, $29.95, Tuesday, March 1). It comes across as a blend of Bergman and Altman as it tells the story of Freyja (Margrét Vilhjálmsdóttir), a liberated woman returning to Iceland in the 1950s after several years of marriage to an American. Once back, she begins to search for a new lover or husband, infuriates the more conventional women around her, and becomes first a gorgon and then the idol of a younger sister. Domestic crime also figures in the complex plot.
Iceland isn't known for its film production but I realize that I have seen something like 10 Icelandic films in the last few years. They have the tenor of Japanese films, minds divided over the issues of privacy and freedom within a small community. SEAGULL also has the quality of a funny dogme film, though that sounds like a contradictory label.
This delightful black comedy comes via HVE with a fine widescreen transfer, enhanced, a brief making of featurette, a few deleted scenes, some television ads, the original trailer, and, in a four page insert, an essay by director Agúst Gudmundsson.
A little tardy as far as tying in with MOULIN ROUGE comes TOULOUSE-LAUTREC AND MONTMARTRE (HVE, 2004, $19.95, Tuesday, March 1), a 30 minute documentary by Carroll Moore keyed to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the National Gallery and then the Chicago Art Institute.
It's rather a breath of fresh air. Unlike most documentaries about famous people, it is frank about the life of its subject who consorted with prostitutes and drank himself to death. Narrated by Ted van Griethuysen, it gives a thumbnail sketch of the painter's life, offers sound bites from about five T-L experts, and an abundance of imagery from T-L's work, as well as photos of his real life inspirations. To me, it was a fine antidote to the Nicole Kidman movie, which ignorantly assumed that "Toulouse" was the painter's first name.
Finally! A DVD that actually uses Easter Eggs that make sense! INCIDENT AT LOCH NESS (Fox, 2004, $27.95, Tuesday, March 1) is such an elaborate prank that to spoil it offends even the filmmakers, who put the real story on numerous Easter eggs hidden on the disc (they are accessed through the form of Nessie in silhouette popping up on the menus).
What that means is that there are two audio commentary tracks on this disc, one in which director Zak Penn continues the hoax with co-producer Werner Herzog (who "walks off" in a huff) and a succession of others who play along, including an assistant director, a guy who claims to be the producer of DVD supplements for Fox, a film buff pulled off the street, and Penn's own wife, from whom he is getting a "divorce."
In this mockumentary about the death aquatic there is a film within the film within the film, as Penn and Herzog go off in search of the Loch Ness monster for a "film" that is never completed. It's like a parody of a film about the making of a failed Terry Gilliam movie.
The film comes in a fine widescreen (1.78:1, enhanced) with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and a wealth of extras. Besides the two commentary tracks on side A, side B has 24 deleted scenes, including six with the fake scientist Michael Karnow, four deleted scenes with Penn, and two with Herzog. Another Easter egg is a 22-minute real "making-of" that tells the story behind the story of the film within the film.
I have already dilated on the merits of FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX as a movie. Now comes FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (Fox, 2004, $27.95, Tuesday, March 1) on disc, and, as usual when one gets deeper into something, I find I like it better.
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If desert wars are much like sea wars (movements by increments, vast expanses, works gummed up by the elements) than desert filmmaking must be like shooting a film at sea. On the audio commentary track, director John Moore, producer John Davis along with Wyck Godfrey and production designer Patrick Lamb go into harrowing and amusing detail about the difficulties of desert shooting: the camaraderie, the lack of privacy, the isolation, the frustrating weather. It is one of the best commentaries I've heard in a long time and one of the most surprising because it heightens interest in a movie (nine years in the making, we learn) that doesn't on the surface seem so interesting. There is very little glad-handing as the filmmakers stick to the fundamentals of working on location.
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Released with a good widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced) and demonstration copy level Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, the disc also features a 42 minute making of that is a story on its own, along with four extended scenes, and two deleted scenes, with optional commentary.
The cult of Jesse Franco continues to puzzle me but I dutifully watch as many of his films as come my way — which may be a neverending journey, given that he is associated with over 200 titles. From his middle period comes 99 WOMEN (Blue Underground, 1968, $19.95, Tuesday, February 22), about what happens to a woman sentenced to prison on an isolated island. Made while Franco was associated with the Canadian exploitation producer Harry Alan Towers (who also wrote the script under a pseudonym), this is a typical Franco production: it comes in numerous versions, and has a complex or nil life on VHS tape (I couldn't find either title in the VIDEO WATCHDOG index).
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Scrape away the surface exploitation qualities and the distracting attempted escape sequences, 99 WOMEN is in fact a very bleak film, ending on a note of futility and with the only good person, Maria Schell's do-gooder prison official, driven from the institution in tears. But I guess my problem with Franco is that his films, serious though they sometimes may be in intent, never transcend their exploitation roots.
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99 WOMEN comes in an excellent widescreen transfer (1.66:1, enhanced) with a fine Dolby Digital mono audio track. Extras consist of a video interview with Franco, who discusses his relationship with Towers and the cast and how he got them (including a long story about how Mercedes McCambridge gave Franco advice on how to handle her and Schell). There are also three deleted scenes: two different versions of long sequences, and the alternate ending used in Spain. Finally, there is the trailer, a poster and still gallery, and a PDF of a bio of Franco by Tim Lucas derived from the book OBSESSION.
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VENUS IN FURS (Blue Underground, 1969, $19.95, Tuesday, February 22) is like a bizarre version of BLOW UP, but for a sexploitation film it is more onieric than onanistic. It begins (as does 99 WOMEN) with a figure on a beach. In this case it is James Darren, a wandering musician, who finds a corpse washed up on shore. In his mind he retraces his steps, and the viewer follows him as he shown at various parties, at nightclubs, and elsewhere, where he is haunted by the very blonde on the sand before him. In a classic film school resolution, Darren learns that the "corpse" on the beach is really himself, that he is the innocent foil to all the degenerates encountered in the narrative.
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The movie, by the way, has nothing to do with the novel VENUS IN FURS. The title was exploitatively tacked on (Franco called it BLACK ANGEL). It comes in a good transfer (1.85:1, enhanced), with good DD mono. The extras resemble those for 99 WOMEN, with Franco interview, the trailer, the Franco bio, and stills gallery, the difference being an audio interview with Maria Rohm about this film and her career in general.
NEXT TIME: BE COOL, THE INCREDIBLES, THE SPECIALS, more Asian action films, movies on music, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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