Murmurs from the Heart: Agnès Varda in California

I fell hard for the late French filmmaker Agnès Varda when I saw her onscreen in her Oscar-nominated Faces Places (originally Visages Villages). In this late-in-life documentary, a big hit at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, the then-88-year-old Varda travels throughout the small towns of France with a decades-younger artist known as JR, snapping photos and posting giant murals of the citizenry. On screen, she’s a charming gamine: with her tiny frame, huge eyes, and mop of auburn hair, she looks like someone’s most amusing elderly aunt, still spry after all these years. (The tall, thin, bearded JR provides a wonderful counterpoint.)

 Varda was married for almost three decades to the equally creative Jacques Demy, best known for his all-musical 1964 hit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Both gained fame as filmmakers during the rise of the French New Wave. (You can see them both represented in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s 2025 salute to the making of a seminal New Wave classic, Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1960.) It’s been a very long while since I watched Varda’s much-admired 1962 movie of the Paris streets, Cléo from 5 to 7, though I remember it being very much in the seemingly impromptu New Wave style. I was not a big fan of her equally-honored 1985 drama, Vagabond. But I suspect that Varda’s real talent lies in documentary filmmaking, in finding the pulse of a place, a time, and a people.

 Always a wanderer, Varda spent part of the 1960s in California, where she reunited with an elderly relative, captured the dynamism of the Black Panthers on film, and goggled at the L.A. mural scene. For her, as the film’s off-camera narrator, L.A.’s street murals are “living, breathing, seething walls.” She considers them “as beautiful as paintings,” revealing “everybody dreaming together,” even though some of them are crude, amateurish, and marred by graffiti.

 The 1981 film she made to celebrate L.A.’s murals is called Mur Murs . Clearly fond of word play and multilingual jokes, she has adapted the French word mur (for “wall”) into a variation on the English word “murmur.” (Around the same time, she also shot a modest dramatic film that used L.A.’s murals as an occasional backdrop. That 1982 piece, Documenteur, is wittily subtitled “an emotion picture.” I watched it too, but couldn’t find much interest in observing the low-key characters go about their business. It’s as a documentarian that Varda shines the brightest.)

 In Mur Murs she introduces the viewer to some of L.A.’s major mural artists , like Kent Twitchell. It’s poignant to see Twichell’s iconic L.A. Freeway Lady captured on film, since this monumental portrait of his grandmother and a world-spanning knitted afghan no longer gazes down on the Hollywood Freeway, having been painted over in 1987. I also enjoyed the glimpses provided by Varda of several of Santa Monica’s liveliest wall paintings. And it’s lovely to see the giant blue whales someone painted on a large wall in Venice dwarfing a solemn row of live tai chi practitioners.

 But though she has an eye for aesthetic appeal, Varda also seems fascinated by the cruder murals of East L.A. She views these as continuing the tradition of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, who for a time lived and worked in SoCal. These dramatic works, often painted by collectives of amateur artists, are marked by deep emotion and a strong community spirit, because they tend to commemorate homeboys who have lost their lives to street violence.   

 Varda loves it all—the refined and the raw—and I love her celebration of these loud, bright murmurs. 

 

Harold and Bud: The Pre-Graduate

It’s hard for me to think of Bud Cort as old. When playing a title character in 1971’s Harold and Maude, he was in his early twenties, but (with his small frame,  big blue eyes, and early Beatles haircut) he looked to be maybe seventeen. And, of course, acted on screen like a spoiled teenager, one who hates his life and everyone in it. But now, more than fifty years later, Bud Cort is dead of pneumonia, at the not-so-young age of 77.

 When I was a recent college graduate, Harold and Maude was considered a major film for my generation. Not that the off-beat story of the pairing of youth and age was a commercial hit at the start, The film, written by UCLA film student Colin Higgins and directed by relative newbie Hal Ashby, was almost universally panned by critics and ignored by potential audiences. Gradually, though, it was discovered by young people in rebellion against their elders. Famously it became a cult hit, playing for three straight years in a Minneapolis art-house with a youthful clientele.   

 Why did Harold and Maude prove so attractive to young Americans? I realized, when watching it again after fifty-odd years, that this film has a great deal in common with the hit movie on which I wrote my last book, 1967’s The Graduate. In some ways they’re similar: a youthful leading man, a mistrust of parents; a restless rebellion against what seems like a bleak future. On the other hand, there are ways in which the two films couldn’t be more opposite. As my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson points out, recent Ivy League graduate Benjamin Braddock is a star student, a star athlete, and a Big Man on  Campus. Back home in Beverly Hills,  he’s his parents’ trophy son. Bursting with pride about his achievements, they give him expensive presents (a sportscar, a diving suit) and don’t intrude when he chooses to spend his summer lounging in the swimming pool (and in Mrs. Robinson’s bed).

 Harold, by contrast, has done nothing for his mother to brag about. (His father seems to be totally missing in action.) His very wealthy mom, played by a screen veteran with the wonderful name of Vivian Pickles, seems bent on ignoring him, so caught up is she with her salon appointments and social events. When she decides that an early marriage might cure what ails him, she insists on filling out the dating survey herself, in his name. Maybe that’s why Harold keeps coming up with increasingly gruesome ways of feigning suicide. He also attends many a stranger’s funeral . . . and that’s where he finds someone with similar tastes, almost-eighty-year-old Maude (the great Ruth Gordon).

 Despite her appreciation for a good funeral, Maude is hardly as gloomy as Harold. Instead she’s a true life force, someone who poses in the nude for artists and steals cars for fun. In her presence, Harold discovers joy, though his “Elaine” is a great deal older than Benjamin Braddock’s. All of which leads to an ending that seems surprising, but (given a few hints of Maude’s backstory) perhaps not entirely illogical. No, Harold and Maude don’t end up together on a bus, à la Ben and his beloved, but—for the young people who made this film and the young people who watched it—it still seems an ending filled with optimism and love. (And, of course, a rejection of anything to do with President Nixon and the U.S. military establishment, representing a world that the youth of my generation hardly wanted to celebrate.)

 

 

After Hours in Nighttown

Circa 1988, when I came to work at Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, a strange new script crossed my desk. Called Daddy’s Boys, it was an outrageous dark comedy about a family of Depression-era bank robbers. If it read like something that had been cranked out in a hurry, this was because it had. It seems that Roger, looking at the rather effective period sets that had been built for Big Bad Mama II, became nostalgic for those early days when he’d shoot an outlandish movie (like Little Shop of Horrors) over a weekend, on sets left over from someone else’s project. My soon-to-be buddy, Daryl Haney, wrote the weird and wacky screenplay, while also playing the film’s hillbilly lead.. And its director, making his very first feature, was Joseph Minion.

 I doubt it was accidental that Roger knew Joe Minion’s work, because Joe had written the screenplay for one of Martin Scorsese’s most unique small films, 1985’s After Hours. Scorsese, of course, was one of Roger’s outstanding protégés, having made Boxcar Bertha for Corman’s New World Pictures in 1972. But after such major artistic and commercial successes as Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), Scorsese had hit the skids. His 1982 The King of Comedy was not well received, and a major studio had backed out of funding his passion project, based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial novel, The Last Temptation of Christ. At a creative impasse, Scorsese decided to take a chance on Minion’s eccentric little script, teaming with Griffin Dunne, who also played the hapless lead.

 After Hours is not the obvious Scorsese film: no gangsters, no major production values. It’s a simple but riveting story, set on the streets and in the seedy byways of Lower Manhattan, over the course of one very long evening. Dunne plays Paul, an uptown Manhattan office worker, now heading down to artsy, scruffy SoHo at the invitation of a quirky young blonde (Rosanna Arquette) who appreciates his taste in Henry Miller novels. He finds her in an artist’s loft, where her mostly undraped roommate (Linda Fiorentino) proves challenging company. I won’t go into too many details: suffice it to say that Paul is thwarted at every turn: his last $20 bill flies out the window of a cab; a new acquaintance abruptly commits suicide; he’s drenched by a sudden rainstorm; every woman he meets quickly turns against him, to the point where he’s racing through back alleys because someone suspects he’s the burglar who’s been preying on the neighborhood. All he wants is to go back home, but somehow that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.  

 After Hours presents am increasingly phantasmagoric view of the world as the night plays out south of Houston Street. (One detail I’ll long remember: Paul fleeing through the mean streets of Lower Manhattan, chased by a Mister Softee ice-cream truck driven by none other than the late Catherine O’Hara. And then there are those strange moments involving hippie comics Cheech & Chong, as well as the papier-mâché bagel-and-lox paperweights that keep showing up when least expected.) Film scholars have some fascinating things to say about Scorsese’s borrowing of stylistic elements from surrealists like Hitchcock and Kafka, I’d add that there’s something here reminiscent of the “Circe” section of James Joyce’s greatest novel, the part that became an unlikely 1958 Broadway hit titled Ulysses in Nighttown.    

 Which hardly means this film is for intellectuals only. It should appeal to anyone who looks for a way out of a humdrum existence but finds the adventure ultimately too much to bear.  I’ve been there; have YOU?   

 

 

 

Los Angeles Plays Itself

I’ve long been convinced that Hollywood writers of romantic comedy secretly pine for their own early years in New York, when they had no money but a great capacity for love. Just look at When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and of course Annie Hall. On film, Manhattan often seems like a playground for lovers, who stroll through Central Park, nuzzle one another on subways, and find inspiration at the top of the Empire State Building. But if cinematic New York is for lovers, my L.A. hometown sometimes seems reserved for disasters: like earthquakes, fires, and terrorist attacks upon skyscrapers on Christmas Eve.

 The Los Angeles Times, obviously determined to show that there’s more to L.A. than Die Hard, recently published an Entertainment section devoted to the topic of “101 Best L.A. Movies.” Their sleuthing (and the follow-up section that features angry readers’ own suggestions) has served to remind me that L.A. is many sorts of places in one. It’s, of course, where movies are (or used to be) made: its agreeable weather and its amorphous nature have allowed it to pose as many other cities and countries. (Did you know that Martin Scorsese’s quintessentially New York-based Mean Streets was mostly shot in L.A.?) But a true movie fan knows that a Los Angeles location can imply many different aspects of life in the SoCal megalopolis. First place on the Times list went to Chinatown, showcasing crime, corruption, and a certain exotic flavor (“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”) Near the top of the Times 101 there’s also the weird fantasy world of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and, of course, the faded movie-star glamour of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The Times’ top five also include the ersatz flair of the Beverly Hills nouveau riche (Clueless) and the futuristic nightmare of Blade Runner.

 But not every film on the Times list showcases the rich and famous. I was pleased to see the inclusion of Tangerine, Jackie Brown, and particularly Boyz N The Hood, all of which pay attention to the down-and-out, as well as to the pervasive racial tension affecting L.A.’s misfits. There’s also suburbia (Valley Girl, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and the ethnic pockets where English is not really the lingua franca (Real Women Have Curves, Mi Vida Loca). L.A. as a place of aspirations is showcased beautifully in everything from The Karate Kid to Bowwfinger, while LA. as the land of dashed dreams shows up in movies as different as Barton Fink and Slums of Beverly Hills. And the list also covers films that dive deeply into local occupations we Angelenos would rather ignore, like the San Fernando Valley pornography biz in Boogie Nights.

 When I first beheld the Times list, I anxiously scanned it to make sure it included The Graduate. (It’s #37, capturing the soignée lives of the swimming-pool set.) But some Times readers expressed dismay at the non-appearance of such films as the Oscar-winning Crash (a slightly overwrought movie definitely attuned to L.A.’s  car culture)), the screen adaptation of Nathanael West’s classic Day of the Locust (for me it misses its mark) and the hilarious Get Shorty. My own biggest complaint is the absence on the main list of 2009’s poignant romantic comedy, (500) Days of Summer.

This film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, is a 2009 charmer in which an young  couple fall in and out of love while living and working in Downtown L.A. Local landmarks (the Bradbury Building!) and hidden corners are given their due. Hey, this is a “New York is for Lovers” movie set in my own hometown! 

 

 

 

 

Confronting “The Beast in Me”

Since around the time that my Roger Corman biography came out, I’ve been part of a lively group called Biographers International Organization. This group, officially founded in 2010 by the indefatigable James McGrath Morris and some of his biographer peers, is devoted to the art and craft of biography. BIO’s advisory council has included a who’s who of famous biographers (including Pulitzer Prize winners like Debby Applegate, Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, and Stacy Schiff), but anyone who finds biography of interest is welcome to join for a nominal fee. Perks include an annual conference, an informative monthly newsletter, and Zoom gatherings galore. And, of course, a Facebook group in which biographers from around the globe trade info, cheer one another on, and generally stay in touch.   

 I bring this up here because of a hot recent topic on the BIO Facebook page: the limited Netflix series called The Beast in Me. The dauntless biographer Carl Rollyson (who’s credited with almost as many books as Heinz has varieties) was, I believe, the first to encourage his fellow members to check out the eight-part series. It’s a cracking good thriller, featuring two of filmdom’s finest, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a best-selling author grieving the loss of her young son in an accident involving a drunk driver. Rhys (a Welsh actor who speaks flawless American English in this series) plays Nile Jarvis, a wealthy entrepreneur notorious in the press because of the mysterious disappearance of his wife.

 One reason Rollyson and other serious biographers are keen on The Beast in Me is because Aggie’s fame comes from her publication of a non-fiction book about her late father. When the series opens, she’s struggling to move ahead on a joint biography of two recent Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who were both courtroom adversaries and personal friends. A fertile topic for a book, perhaps, but maybe not one that Aggie’s equipped to handle. So when her new neighbor, the cheerfully sinister Nile Jarvis, proposes himself as her new biographical subject, she pays attention. Next thing you know, they’re having long tête-à-têtes in which, while proclaiming himself innocent of serious crimes, Nile Continues to find ways to get under Aggie’s skin.

 The series is riveting, though maybe its wrap-up is not quite as effective as it might be. It’s exciting to see Danes (who surpasses even Keri Russell of The Diplomat in looking worried and disheveled) struggling to know how to handle the disarmingly chummy new next-door pal she’s pledged to present to the world on the page. As Carl Rollyson has pointed out to his fellow authors, biography can also be seen as autobiography. The way a biographer approaches his or her subject is very much a secret glimpse into that biographer’s own psyche. Aggie, for instance, must ultimately admit to seeing in herself something resembling Nile’s cold-blooded approach to the world.

 I agree completely. I’d even say that my three books reveal to the reader three very different aspects of my own path through life. Writing about my longtime boss, filmmaker Roger Corman, I was something of a cynic: sassy and even snarky. My Ron Howard bio brought out the optimist in me. Suddenly I was hopeful about the human capacity for goodness. My 2017 study of The Graduate, officially titled Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, saw me as a member of a youthful generation  hugely influenced by this smart little comedy, but also—fifty years later—as someone who had learned a great deal about life as the decades wore on.

 

 

 

In Jeopardy

As the 2026 Winter Olympics played out, I was an up-close-and-personal observer of a competition of another kind. While figure-skaters Ilia Malinin and Amber Glenn graphically showed us what performance anxiety is all about, I was watching perfectly nice mental athletes trying to best the reigning champ on that old TV standby, Jeopardy! The show, around since 1964, rewards arcane knowledge that contestants must offer by way of a question. Categories are obscure; clues are designed to be tricky. If you do well, you can win major money and pride yourself on being a designated brainiac. But, even though host and staff go out of their way to be welcoming to all participants, the assumption is that two out of the three contestants will eventually go home with empty pockets and dashed dreams of glory. For some of the losers it’s fun, despite it all. Others will take longer to get past the disappointment they feel about their less-than-stellar performance.

 What is it about quiz shows that we Americans love? I’m old enough to remember early game shows like The $64,000 Question, in which questions were more factual than tricky, and we in the home audience found ourselves rooting for contestants with particularly moving backstories. Our enthusiasm for these shows was of course tempered by the eventual disclosure of massive behind-the-scenes cheating, contrived by the networks to increase fan excitement. The secret coaching of contestant Charles Van Doren on the show called Twenty-One led eventually to a fascinating 1994 film, Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford. (Ralph Fiennes played Van Doren, and John Turturro starred as Herb Stempel, a less aristocratic contestant who was forced to lose to Van Doren, scion of an impressive literary family.)

 There’s been no cheating scandal connected with Jeopardy!  One thing is clear: people really want to be in the studio audience. Jeopardy! is taped at Sony Studios, which of course used to be the fabled MGM lot. So just getting past the guard gate is a bit of a thrill, and the parking structure décor—with its towering photos of host Ken Jennings right next to the metal detector—is designed to make you feel part of something special. After some waiting around, and receiving the all-important wrist band, you are escorted . . .  not to the soundstage but to a gift shop where all manner of branded game-show merch (T-shirts, pajamas, water bottles) is on sale. After making your purchases you assemble in a large hallway where videos of excited contestants play in a constant loop.

 Finally you are escorted to Jeopardy! central, where a veteran greeter explains the code of conduct. Yes, laugh and cheer, especially when the applause sign is lit, but don’t mutter the correct answer, even under your breath, because a sensitive microphone might pick it up. The crew on hand all seem part of a very large family: the greeter makes sure to let us know how many decades he’s been with the show, how much he adored late host Alex Trebek, and how Ken Jennings (a 74-game Jeopardy! winner before snagging the host’s job) is perfect as Trebek’s amiable successor.   

 The Jeopardy! set is a marvel of exotic swirls and dramatic lighting. But perhaps even more exciting is the lobby, which guests can visit between taping sessions. There’s a huge case filled with Emmy statuettes won by the show. And you can pose for photos behind a mock-up of a real contestant’s desk. Alex Trebek’s very own desk is posed in a niche like a treasured relic, complete with futuristic lighting. I’ll take nostalgia for $800.

 

 

 

Meeting Two Strangers on a Train

A cab pulls up to a big urban train station. A man gets out, but all we see are his snazzy two-toned spectator brogues. Another cab arrives; another man emerges. We spot some his luggage, including a pair of tennis racquets, but also his sensible dark dress shoes. Both pairs of feet stride through the station.. We next discover them beneath the table of a club car, where one man’s foot accidentally nudges the other’s shoe.

 This, of course, is the very enticing opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological thriller, Strangers on a Train. This film, made midway through a directing career that began in the 1920s and ended with Family Plot in 1976, is considered one of Hitchcock’s most effective in ramping up suspense by way of skillful screen artistry. The original plot, involving two young men who seek to evade the long arm of the law by committing murders on one another’s behalf (“cross-cross”) was concocted by Patricia Highsmith, for whom this was a first novel, five years before she gave the world the talented but lethal Mr. Ripley. Still, Hitchcock and company made some key changes to Highsmith’s story. For one thing, the Guy Haines character is far more culpable in the novel than he is in Hitchcock’s version, wherein (possibly to get past the censors) he can’t ultimately be tempted to follow the murderous path of Bruno (an eerie Robert Walker).  Hitchcock also deleted a key detective character, and added a famous merry-go-round scene that is one of his all-time most climactic. 

 Critics often discuss Hitchcock’s use of symbolic doubling in this film.  It focuses on the similarities (as well as differences) between two young men who accidentally meet in a train car: each of them is burdened by a relative who would perhaps be better off dead. We can’t miss the fact that Walker’s character—wealthy and superficially charming but deeply dissatisfied with his lot in life—responds to Granger’s attractiveness and is determined to bind the two of them together via the committing of two perfect crimes. There’s also the key parallel between two young women who wear thick spectacles: one is violently assaulted and the other soon finds herself in deeply symbolic danger.

 Barbara, the second of these bespectacled young women, is played by Patricia Hitchcock, the Master’s only child. She’s a distinctive character, much  different from her elegant sister (Ruth Roman) who is Guy Haines’ beloved.  Small and definitely rather Hitchcock-like in her appearance, Barbara is introduced as someone who is much fascinated by criminal behavior. The implication is that she shares Hitchcock’s own obvious delight in the macabre . . . until dangerous doings seem to be heading her way.

 Though Pat Hitchcock is fascinating (and Ruth Roman is, frankly, not), the crux of the film involves the interaction of the two male leads. As the preppy tennis player, Farley Granger is appealingly handsome and gentlemanly, which makes him slow to recognize the evil lurking in his fellow passenger. But it is Robert Walker who is unforgettable. We see his Bruno Anthony first as a fancy dresser and a glib talker, someone who can get under the skin of a complete stranger and bend him to his will. With an enigmatic smile on his face, he can pursue a young woman through an amusement park tunnel of love, and then commit a murder that is reflected in her glasses. This moment is perhaps the film’s grim high point: there are other shocks and scares to be had, but somehow the ending just doesn’t live up to what has come before.