Imploding in Atlantic City

Moral ambiguity is a quality that director Louis Malle knows very well. Maybe this has something to do with his awareness, as a part-Jewish child at a Catholic boarding school, of a 1943 Nazi raid that sent a close friend and a teacher to Auschwitz. (The memory ultimately led to Malle’s monumental 1987 film, Au Revoir, les Enfants.) Though most of his movies were made in France, he tried his hand at America-set dramas too, including 1981’s My Dinner with Andre. Malle’s most notorious American movie is surely Pretty Baby (1978), in which a eleven-year-old Brooke Shields plays a child prostitute in 1917 New Orleans whose virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder. But he received major awards nominations for his next film, 1980’s Atlantic City, which became perhaps star Burt Lancaster’s last major film role.

 The snowy-haired Lancaster plays Lou, a small-time crook hunkered down in a rapidly decaying resort town where classic hotels are being imploded to make room for modern gambling casinos. Though Lou likes to boast about when he and Bugsy Siegel were prison cellmates, he makes a living—such as it is—as a numbers runner in a poor part of town, while also serving as full-time valet and part-time bedwarmer to a neighbor, a bedraggled former beauty queen who’s the widow of a mobster type. His only true pleasure, it seems, is spying on another neighbor, the luscious Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works at an oyster bar by day and sponges off her body with a freshly cut lemon come evening time.

 Pretty soon, Sally’s world will be rocked by the reappearance of a Canadian ex-husband, Dave, who shows up with her hugely pregnant sister and a whole cache of stolen cocaine. Before long, Dave will be pulling Lancaster’s amiable Lou into his orbit while he tries to make a lucrative drug sale. But of course some really bad guys are soon after Dave: there’s a marvelous chase scene, followed by a murder.

 From there, things get truly complicated. Sally and Lou draw closer together, while he enjoys spending on her the drug money the mobsters didn’t manage to collect from Dave. But ultimately, the thugs are still out there, looking for a big payday.  I won’t go into what happens, other than to say that Lou—a fascinating mix of generosity and self-preservation—ultimately makes a heroic gesture, while at the same time reveling in an unfamiliar sense of his own powers   as a tough guy. It’s a marvelously nuanced Lancaster performance, delivered when he was almost 70 and well past the athletic vigor of earlier star turns like his Oscar-winning role in Elmer Gantry. And Sarandon (only five years after her ingenue role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) matches him with a portrayal that is fierce,  poignant, and sensuous.  At the close of the film we wish them both well, but aren’t quite clear about where either one of them will land. Both were Oscar-nominated for their portrayals, as was Malle as director, but this was the year of Chariots of Fire and On Golden Pond.

 Curiously, despite Atlantic City’s very American setting, it was not technically a U.S. film, but rather a French and Canadian co-production. (Outside of the leads, most of the performers hailed from Canada, like Kate Reid as the blowsy onetime beauty queen and a mesmerizing Robert Joy as the manic ex-husband.) Still, the film has enjoyed a rare All-American accolade. In 2003 it was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, so I guess it belongs to all of us now.

 

 

The play’s NOT the thing in “Clash by Night”

It was while exploring the mid-century American films of Fritz Lang that I recently saw Clash by Night. I had previously watched two RKO films directed by Lang and starring the great Edward G. Robinson. The Woman in the Window (1944) turned out to be an influential early noir, with the kind of “surprise” ending that in retrospect seems more than a bit cheap. I enjoyed it, despite its predictability, much more than I liked Scarlet Street (1945), which supposedly is the first Hollywood movie in which the creep who fries in the electric chair is NOT in fact the killer. The third Lang film I watched starred the always interesting Barbara Stanwyck along with burly Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan, of whom critic Manohla Dargis has written, “[he was] born to play beautifully tortured, angry souls.”  During the opening credits I was surprised to find this film was adapted from a Broadway play by Clifford Odets.

 The Odets connection made me turn once again to my personal Odets expert, Beth Phillips. Beth, who is finally close to finishing a monumental biography of Odets, reminded me that, though Odets wrote some marvelous original screenplays (like Sweet Smell of Success), none of the Hollywood films adapted from his groundbreaking plays had the benefit of Odets’ input. When approached by studios, “he just took the money and ran.” So it’s no surprise that the screen version of Clash by Night differs hugely from the stage version: the location is switched from Staten Island to Monterey, California; a key ethnicity shifts from Polish to Italian, so that Lang can shoot a big fat Italian wedding scene. More importantly, as was typical in this era, the stage play’s brutal ending is considerably brightened in the film, with Stanwyck’s character finally embracing domesticity and the husband who loves her beyond reason.

 Beth is hardly a fan of the original Clash by Night, which she calls “probably Odets’ worst play, a blatant melodrama” without much in the way of social ideas behind it. Not knowing any of this, I found the film interesting to watch, mostly because the central characters were well realized. I liked the film’s opening, with ocean waves dramatically crashing on the shore, and I suspect Lang enjoyed filming some of the gritty on-location introductory scenes, full of fishing boats and women earning their pay in a sardine cannery. (Yes, that ‘s Marilyn Monroe, in dungarees, toiling over a trough full of wriggly fish.)  

 Within the central love triangle, I was most impressed by Paul Douglas as the good-hearted but not too bright Jerry D’Amato, who certainly deserves better than he gets from Stanwyck’s Mae.  Stanwyck herself is notable as always, playing a dame (that’s got to be the right word for her!) who can never be satisfied by the life she leads. Robert Ryan, the third side of this triangle,  effectively conveys his general bitterness toward the world in which he finds himself. Still, I had some gripes. Monroe’s character, the soon-to-be fiancée of Stanwyck’s fisherman brother, doesn’t make a lot of sense in her continued admiration for Stanwyck, despite it all. And I have a special grudge against “Where’s the baby?” movies. Supposedly, both Douglas’s and Stanwyck’s characters are deeply affected by the love they feel for their infant daughter, Gloria. So—while Douglas is at sea, how can Stanwyck and Ryan sneak off to spend hours enjoying themselves at a local carnival, apparently leaving poor Gloria all alone in her cradle? The carelessness suggested by this kind of plotting speaks to me of a film that was hustled to completion.

 

 

Getting to Know “The Worst Person in the World”

My lukewarm feelings for Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which has just been nominated for nine Oscars, has made me wonder: in watching the film on my big-screen TV, was I missing something? Or was I just not in the right mood to appreciate a low-key domestic drama about a Norwegian absentee father and his grown daughters? Particularly in regard to the film’s leading lady, the Oscar-nominated Renate Reinsve, I read several times the comment that she’d been even more memorable in Trier’s previous film, 2021’s The Worst Person in the World. Great title, that! I decided to see for myself what the critics had found so mesmerizing.

 So now I know: Reinsve is indeed mesmerizing, in a film apparently built around her charmingly contradictory personality. (The role won her a Best Actress award at Cannes, and shot her to international fame.) In The Worst Person in the World, she plays Julie, a very bright but quite mixed-up young woman who can’t decide on a direction for her adult life. En route to becoming a surgeon, she suddenly decides to chuck the scrubs and study psychotherapy. That doesn’t work either, when she concludes that “I don’t want to become a spectator in my own life.” So she tries photography, but basically works in a bookstore while trying to solve the riddle of her impending future.

 That riddle comes to revolve more and more around her love life. There’s a semi-famous underground cartoonist (Aksel), who adores her, but also—at age 45—is starting to crave a family. There’s also a barista (Elvind) with whom she shares some naughty fun while on the lam from a dull reception, though he has romantic commitments elsewhere. The single most special part of the movie occurs about midway through, when Julie realizes (for the moment, at least) that she wants to leave Aksel for Elvind. This is the section of the film that cast and crew refer to as “Frozen.” A casually-dressed Julie leaves Aksel’s flat and runs down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. There she starts to jog and then run . . . passing multitudes of Oslo residents, all of them frozen in place as they swing their briefcases, wheel their bikes, check their cellphones, smooch their girlfriends. Throughout Norway’s busy capital city, she seems to be the only person who’s truly alive as she races to the coffee bar to claim her new love. In a DVD featurette, director Trier explains both how the footage was shot and what it means: when you realize you’re in love, “you’re in your own time zone.”

 After this bravura midpoint, far be it from me to reveal where we find Julie at film’s end, though it lines up with Trier’s own passion for the cinematic arts. The conclusion meshes nicely with several other kinds of endings we see (or intuit) among this film’s characters, but there’s also a hint that perhaps Julie has finally arrived at an unexpected sort of peace. Which, of course, is not quite the same thing as happiness. On the strength of the two films I’ve seen, Trier (who’s both a writer and a director) has a special gift for bringing his films to a conclusion, one that both wraps up the current story and suggests where we go from here.

 Perhaps the secret ingredient of Trier’s cinematic tales is time. Like Julie coursing through the busy streets of Oslo, time doesn’t stand still. It brings changes—both good ones and bad ones—and it’s the role of human beings like Julie to go along for the ride.

 

 

 

Getting to Know “What Maisie Knew”

Several of the great novels of Henry James (1843-1916) have been made into films of the Merchant-Ivory variety. Such James works as Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, all of them marked by psychological insight and a fascination with upper-crust life, have successfully been brought to the big screen, filling the eye with bustles and parasols and cravats. (There’s also a terrifically spooky period film, The Innocents, that came out in 1961, based on James’ The Turn of the Screw. I saw it in its first release, and have never quite gotten over it.)

 James’ plots don’t usually translate well to the present day. Certainly, his characters don’t talk in the way we do now, for better or for worse. But in 2012 a cluster of producers brought forth a film that had been languishing in development hell since 1995. It’s a modern adaptation of a slim James novel in which the author chronicled the impact of a divorce upon a six-year-old girl. Although the novel, What Maisie Knew, was published back in 1897, its story of warring parents, their new mates, and an emotionally challenged child seems astonishingly contemporary.

 The film shifts its action from Victorian London to modern New York City, where Susanna and Beale have acrimoniously parted. Susanna, a successful singer/songwriter with a big tour coming up, is highly volatile. (She’s played by the always impressive Julianne Moore, whose participation helped get this project off the ground.) Beale, played by Steve Coogan, is an art dealer with an international clientele: he’s jolly indeed when he’s in a good mood, but spends most of his life jetting to foreign climes. Six-year-old Maisie (the truly adorable Onata Aprile) rotates between their condos, cheerfully adapting to wherever she happens to be. Her poise when a pizza deliveryman shows up at her dad’s place—as the grown-ups fight, she calmly gathers enough dough for an appropriate tip—tells us that in many ways she’s old before her time.

 Beale, it seems, is now shacking up with Maisie’s former nanny, Margo, whom he soon marries. On the rebound, we gather, Susanna ties the knot with a virile young bartender, Lincoln. Maisie, always open to sudden changes in her chaotic family life, quickly comes to adore Lincoln. That’s a good thing, because her mother is soon off in a big tour bus and her father departs yet again for Europe, leaving Margo and Lincoln to manage the child’s daily life.  Everyone loves Maisie, and she loves all of them, but her daily needs are not being considered. At one point she’s stranded at Lincoln’s bar, not sure where she’s going to sleep that night. (A moment in her first-grade classroom tells us that she’s not the only child of her generation and affluent circumstances dealing with a fractured family life.)  

 I’m not always a fan of tykes on the screen: too often they seem mannered and excessively “cute.” But this project, built on Maisie’s reactions to the world going on around her, is lucky to have found a child who genuinely seems both innocent and wise beyond her years. We sense her craving for love, and feel like cheering when she finally takes a stand on her own behalf. The ending is not quite that of Henry James, but it will do nicely. (The young actress, now 20, is still around, but without any recent credits I know of. The implications in her bio is that her own parents have separated too. Perhaps that’s why this performance seems so close to the bone.)

 

 

 

The Big Chill: Snow Days, Frozen Yogurt, and the National Film Registry

While much of the U.S. has been shivering through snowstorms, I’m almost embarrassed to say that we in SoCal are enjoying glorious weather: the kind that encourages you to be outdoors taking a walk, not inside watching a movie. Frozen yogurt sounds great to me right about now, and there’s a popular little shop nearby called “The Big Chill.” Which just happens to be named after a 1983 film that recently made it onto the National Film Registry administered through the Library of Congress.

 In 1983, The Big Chill was a hugely popular film peopled by some of Hollywood’s brightest new talents, including such stars-in-the-making as William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close. They play former college pals gathering in a comfy home in South Carolina to memorialize one of their number who has died, a suicide. It’s a film whose central subject is nostalgia: they’re all remembering back to the Sixties, to their college days at the University of Michigan, when they were young, optimistic, and full of ideas about how the world should be run.

 Looking over the whole list of new inductees to the National  Film Registry, I’ve concluded that nostalgia is a central concept in many of them. Sometimes the movies themselves are thematically looking back on an earlier (and maybe better) era; sometimes it’s the modern viewer who’s transported by a classic film to a time when life seemed to hold much more promise than what we know today.

  What do I mean? Well, let’s start with two musicals from the 1950s that both made this year’s list. They were released by different studios (Paramount and MGM), but both, curiously, have the same top-billed star, Bing Crosby. Both are set in what was then the present-day, but the reality they portray is definitely candy-coated. White Christmas (1954) unfolds largely in and around an old country inn where two WWII army buddies who now have a nightclub act woo two talented singing sisters, while also trying to help the inn’s owner, their former commanding officer. Of course the plot climaxes with the singing of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” a song originally written for a 1942 Hollywood film with a very similar premise, Holiday Inn. Listen to its hyper-nostalgic lyric: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” And 1956’s High Society is a musical throwback to 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, portraying a ritzy but placid social environment that all of us would just love to experience.

 There are some serious dramas on the list too. Glory (1989) is a powerful historical drama portraying the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an African American unit that fought (under white commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw) for the Union during the Civil War. I suspect most of us are hardly nostalgic for the racism and blood of the War Between the States, but we can look back with admiration on the raw courage of Shaw and his men. Similarly, 1993’s Philadelphia graphically portrays the depths of the AIDS crisis. It’s not a time to which we’d want to return, but the story unfolds in a way that makes heroes out of its central characters. And Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of a dying gay man includes a heartbreakingly nostalgic scene in which he relives an operatic performance by Maria Callas.

 We can feel a much happier kind of nostalgia in recalling how we (or our children) loved The Incredibles (2004) or how Wes Anderson helped us look cheerfully back to a time that never quite was in 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

Peering at “The Woman in the Window”

It’s  sometimes comforting, at a time of extreme tension, to return to the past. Maybe that’s why I decided to turn off the news reports coming out of Minneapolis and watch a movie from 1944, The Woman in the Window. This Edward G. Robinson starrer, which I’ve heard described as helping to launch the “film noir” genre, is a taut little thriller also starring Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, and Dan Duryea. The director is the great Austria-born Expressionist Fritz Lang, whose credits include Metropolis and M, along with (after he came to America) such noir classics as Scarlet Street and Clash by Night.

 One thing that’s refreshing about watching old movies is that we all know the tropes. If a mild-mannered college professor is first seen lecturing his students about the ambiguity of the Biblical injunction “Thou shalt not kill,” we know for certain that someone’s going to die. If a husband stays behind in the city when his wife and kiddies leave for a family vacation, it’s a good bet that he’ll soon have unexpected company. And if he admires a woman’s sultry portrait in a shop window, there’s an excellent chance that said woman will come into his life in a major way. Moreover, those of us with any knowledge about the studios’ adherence to the so-called Hayes Code in this era are quite clear on the fact that any on-screen moral transgression is eventually going to be punished.

 The marvelously versatile Robinson, who had over a hundred acting credits in roles ranging from good guy to bad guy, from leading man to supporting player, has been called the best actor who was never nominated for an Academy Award. (The Academy belatedly granted him an honorary Oscar in 1973, just after his death at age 79). In “The Woman in the Window,” he’s not without complexity. Though a committed family man, he proclaims to his cronies, over drinks at the local club, that life shouldn’t end at forty. He speaks out for the male need to assert oneself, though he ruefully admits that  too often “the flesh is strong but the spirit is weak.” In other words, in the absence of his (rather bland) wife and kids, he’s ripe for an adventure. When the mysterious artist’s model (a stylish Bennett) invites him first to a cocktail lounge and then to her apartment, he’s ready for anything. (Her come-on is that she wants to show him the artist’s sketches that preceded the painting of the portrait he so admires.)

 We don’t know quite what to make of Bennett’s character, nor of the intruder who changes everything. But an escalating series of events leaves Robinson’s Professor Richard Wanley taking charge of hiding a body. This is made even trickier because one of his close pals,  played by the imposing Raymond Massey, is a district attorney who loves talking about the details of his latest big case, and even invites Wanley along to see where the body was found by law enforcement. Uh oh!

  Suspense definitely mounts. But perhaps we have a hunch where all this is going. The film’s trailer, very much in the style of that hyperbolic era, breathlessly promises “the most startling ending ever filmed.” True, the conclusion is well handled by all involved, but I must admit that I wasn’t truly surprised. I had guessed the secret outcome of this film just ten minutes in. Sometimes, though, it’s fun to go on a journey even when you anticipate its outcome. Better by far than being hit by terrible surprises every time we turn on the news. 

 

On the Couch with "Sentimental Value"

For months I wanted to watch Sentimental Value, the Norwegian family drama (by auteur Joachim Trier) that won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has just been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Though recently more and more foreign-language films have been nominated for top Oscar honors, this film’s haul has been particularly impressive, including Best Original Screenplay and four acting noms (for Renate Reinsve as Best Actress, for both Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas as Best Supporting Actress, and for screen veteran Stellan Skarsgård as Best Supporting Actor). Among the kudos already won by Sentimental Value is recognition from AARP’s annual Movies for Grownups, which has its own unique categories for films of special interest to older folk. AARP named Sentimental Value the year’s “Best Intergenerational  Film.”

It’s easy to see why Seniors who appreciate art-films might go for this one. No guns, no spilled guts, no things that go bump in the night, unless you’re talking about painful memories. Just a quiet family drama, involving two grown daughters, their estranged father, and several others caught in the orbit of a Norwegian household whose members are prominent in the European arts community. I have loved many Scandinavian films over the years, starting with the masterpieces of Ingmar Bergman, and I suspected Sentimental Value would be a pleasant change from recent highly lauded but deliberately over-the-top American flicks like Sinners and One Battle After Another.

Here’s what surprised me: when I watched on the big-screen TV in my living room, Sentimental Value seemed almost too low-key. Its characters’ struggles to bind old wounds struck me as  convincing, but not always interesting. I wanted something exciting to happen, beyond talky scenes in various quiet locales—a bedroom, a café, a beach. The low-key conversations did contrast in an interesting way with the theatricality built into the subject matter. The father is a world-famous director; his #1 daughter Nora is an acclaimed stage actress. At the start of the film, it’s opening night at a huge and prestigious theatre, and Nora (dressed in a period gown that suggests she’s playing an Ibsen heroine) is in a state of total panic. She’s absolutely convinced that she can’t possibly play her role, and she does everything she can think of—to the consternation of cast and crew—to avoid going on stage. Then, finally, she does make her entrance . . . and the performance is a triumph.

So we know Nora is a self-centered neurotic, but it remains to meet the rest of the family, This occurs after the funeral of Nora’s mother, when friends and relatives gather at the historic family homestead. An unexpected arrival is Nora and her sister’s estranged father, who long ago left the family behind to pursue his directing ambitions. Now he’s back, at least partly to further the new project with which he hopes to revitalize his career. The script he’s written focuses on the final days of his own mother, who had been an heroic anti-Nazi partisan in World War II. He wans to film in the family home, and he wants Nora to step into his mother’s role. By the film’s end, we understand everyone’s emotional connections, and see the possibility of reconciliation. But it takes a long time to get there, and I confess I was a bit confused by the off-screen characters (a mother, a grandmother) who are so much responsible for these family members’ deeply-felt emotions.

I wonder: would I have liked this film better in the cineplex? Do certain quiet, serious movies just not work as couch-films?