Feeling “A Real Pain” on Holocaust Remembrance Day

April 23, which falls just after the joyous Passover season, is the date of this year’s Yom HaShoah, also known Holocaust Remembrance Day. It commemorates, especially in Israel, the approximately six million Jews senselessly slaughtered by the Nazi regime before and during  World War II.  Among local U.S. commemorations, I’ve just read about one planned for the very Catholic Loyola-Marymount University. But I was particularly struck by the upcoming event at UCLA Hillel, which plans to feature the screening of Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-honored 2024 film, A Real Pain.

What makes this choice so interesting is the fact that A Real Pain is not your average Holocaust movie. It’s not set during or immediately after what’s known as the Shoah. No one is in hiding, and we see no atrocities. (See, by contrast, such fine international films as Schindler’s List;, Au revoir les enfants; Europa Europa; Life is Beautiful; The Pianist; and Ida.)  A Real Pain, set in the present day, focuses on two American cousins whose distant Holocaust connection is their recently deceased Grandma Dori. In her will, she left the two young men the money for a brief heritage trip to Poland, where they could visit her former home and soak up the culture that made her the lifeforce she was. (No, she was not herself a Holocaust survivor, but any trip to Poland cries out for an acknowledgment of what happened on its soil.) 

In the course of their brief trip, we get to know their small group of fellow travelers: a mature married couple, an anxious divorcee, a deeply spiritual convert to Judaism who is a survivor of genocide in his native Rwanda. But the focus is on the two cousins: the tense, deeply-focused David (played by Eisenberg) and the free-spirited Benjy (Kieran Culkin), who mails a stash of weed to their first hotel and insists that David share it with him on the off-limits hotel roof. Part of the pleasure of the early going is seeing Benjy interact with his tightly-wound cousin, charming the other travelers with his ready sense of fun. Benjy also shows himself to be sensitive to their personal anxieties, but his manic insistence—as a Jew in Poland—on refusing to accept comfy first-class train accommodations leads to a worrisome outcome for all concerned. Gradually Benjy’s deeply troubled psyche comes into focus, along with David’s personal difficulty in accepting his cousin’s underlying sadness.

That’s when the little group pays a visit to the Nazi concentration camp known as Majdanek. (The film was shot almost entirely in Poland, with the full cooperation of the Polish government, which eventually made Eisenberg—a descendant of Polish Jews—an honorary citizen.) It’s a quiet and eerie segment, capturing the reverent silence with which the travelers absorb what little was left behind by their slain Jewish ancestors. No jokes here; Benjy is, for once, in full control of his behavior.

What follows, for the cousins is the long-awaited brief stop at the apartment complex where their grandmother once lived. It’s somewhat gratifying, somewhat not, to find themselves walking in her footsteps. In any case, the film ends as it ought to, with some smiles, some hugs, and some big questions. Benjy’s and David’s complicated inner worlds can’t be entirely blamed on the Holocaust, from which they are two generations removed and a continent away. But, over the years, I’ve known the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. They’ve been spared the agonies we know about, but their lives are still stamped with the aftereffects of what happened back then . . . what shouldn’t happen to anyone.

 

Leaps of Faith: “Lady Bird”

Wasting time on the Internet, I spotted a recent run-down of the 25 all-time best religious movies. I expected the list would contain a lot of Bible epics as well as faith-based old clunkers like The Nun’s Story and Going My Way. (Yes, both have their charm, but they seem awfully far away from life as we know it in the 21st century.) Instead, what I saw was an intelligent cluster of films in which religious faith and religious affiliations of multiple sorts take center stage, even if the central characters are grappling with religion rather than simply believing.  

The list contains some oldies, like Black Narcissus (1947) as well as Ingmar Bergman’s astonishing duo from 1957, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. Some of the choices reflect religious traditions other than our familiar ones: see Atanarjuat The Fast Runner, a 2001 prize-winner from Canada that meticulously reflects Inuit culture and language. The luminous Ida, a 2013 Polish film about a nun-to-be who uncovers her Nazi-era past, is a natural for this list, but I hadn’t expected to find Minari or 12 Years a Slave or There Will Be Blood, all of which do in fact have something to say about faith. Of course I was gratified to see the great Schindler’s List in a place of honor. But the inclusion that surprised and pleased me most was that of a film I recently watched for the second time, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017).

Lady Bird, which apparently hews closely to writer/director Gerwig’s own early life, is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl finishing up high school in Sacramento, California. (She’s played with conviction by Saiorse Ronan, who was 23 at the time.)  Lady Bird is a proudly independent thinker who has given herself a new jazzy name in place of the much more predictable one with which her parents gifted her at birth. But despite the fact that she yearns to boldly enter the adult world, she’s got to finish out her classes at a benign but deeply conventional Catholic high school, where her teachers are priests and nuns. She auditions for the school play, struggles with math, and occasionally butts heads with visiting anti-abortion speakers, while also hanging out with her best pal, falling in and out of love, (with both Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet) and pretending that she lives in a mansion-like local residence instead of a slightly shabby tract home.

As Lady Bird sees it, the biggest cross she has to bear is her mother, a kind-hearted but outspoken nurse who struggles to do what’s best for her headstrong daughter. Mom (Laurie Metcalf) is the practical member of the family, unlike Dad (Tracy Letts), an out-of-work dreamer who would deny his child nothing. Lady Bird has her heart set on an east-coast college (in “a city with culture”) and Dad somehow scrapes together the financials. But it’s only when she’s far from home, and dealing with an acute physical and emotional crisis of her own making, that Lady Bird comes to recognize how much she relies on both an actual home and a spiritual one. For the first time, she reverts to her birth name (Christine) and enters a church of her own volition.

It’s a simple but wholly convincing story, anchored by strong performances and Gerwig’s sure hand on the helm. Ultimately it was nominated for 5 Oscars, two for Ronan’s and Metcalf’s work and three for Gerwig in her various functions. Alas, it won none of them. Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, and the ill-faced La La Land were the big winners. 

 

Cinema and the City: New York, New York

I’m newly back from New York City, a place where you’d think the locals would look down on Hollywood. New Yorkers, after all, have Broadway, as well as some of the world’s best museums and attractions. Yet Hollywood loves making movies about New York City, even giving them evocative titles like Manhattan and New York, New York. In films, New York City seems made for romance—see everything from Splash (where a mermaid comes ashore in front of the Statue of Liberty) to Moonstruck to You’ve Got Mail. And of course there are celebrated TV series like Sex and  the City, in which every central character is hot, funny, and out looking for Mr. (or Ms.) Right. 

What I learned on my most recent trip to the Big Apple is that New Yorkers too are secretly infatuated by the lure of Hollywood. They support funky little neighborhood cinemas, and gather in local eateries for Oscar watch parties. They’re proud of landmark locations like the exterior of Carrie Bradshaw’s Sex and the City apartment on Perry Street in the West Village. If you visit the museum near the top of the Empire State Building, you’ll find yourself surrounded by reminders of how many films include the famous skyscraper in pivotal moments. There are tearjerkers like An Affair to Remember, in which an attempted meeting at the top of the building leads to near tragedy. (The famous Cary Grant/ Deborah Kerr scene was to be mirrored, decades later, by the romantic climax of Sleepless in Seattle.) There’s also a joyous dance number in the World War II classic, On the Town, that takes place on a soundstage re-creation of the building’s observation deck.

But of course the most famous use of the Empire State Building (or a Hollywood facsimile thereof) occurred back in 1933 when a giant ape climbed the skyscraper with Fay Wray in its arms, only to be shot down by a passel of buzzing biplanes. Today the building’s museum can’t get enough of King Kong: there are posters and models, and you can pose looking horrified while in the grip of the ape’s enormous fist. (I admit that I couldn’t resist trying it out.)  

Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where generations of immigrants have crowded into tenements while trying to pursue their own American dreams, also has movie and showbiz connections that go back generations. This slightly squalid but picturesque area is home to a cramped little shop called Orchard Corset. It’s been around since 1949, and in the same family since 1968, but these days it doesn’t cater solely to buxom mamas from the neighborhood. This is the place from which none other than Madonna orders her sexy custom bustiers. And Orchard Corset is also beloved by theatrical costume designers, who count on the shop to supply period-appropriate undergarments. Remember the 1950s-era torpedo bosoms featured in the TV series, Mad Men? Where do you think those imposing bras were found? (Improbably, Orchard Corset also does a lively mail-order business from a site in Wenatchee, Washington.)   

Visitors to the Lower East Side would be well advised to check out the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where you can book tours of what once were the cramped little quarters of Jewish and Italian immigrants. What’s special is that these tiny apartments reflect the actual daily lives of specific well-researched families. In one flat, circa 1935, the children’s bedroom reflects a fascination with Hollywood glamour. On the wall over a young girl’s bed you can see vintage images of her movieland favorites: a very young Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford.  

                                                                                    

Get Him To the Greek: Harry Belafonte and Other Al Fresco Stars

Last weekend I toured Griffith Park’s venerable Greek Theatre, courtesy of the good folks at the L.A. Conservancy. Opened in 1931, with a mandate to bring culture to Angelenos, this outdoor venue now boasts 5780 seats. This makes it a small cousin to the colossal Hollywood Bowl, which seats some 17,500 music-lovers. We toured the stage, much changed from its early days, as well as the hallways where some famous acts of recent years have left their mark. And, in the distance, we spotted the hills where so-called “tree people” used to enjoy free access to the entertainment.  

These days, the Greek is primarily a pop music venue. It has also been featured in movies, like 2010’s Get Him to the Greek, a goofy Judd Apatow-produced comedy featuring Russell Brand as a free-spirited rock star and Jonah Hill as the recorder exec pressed into service as his chaperone. For the 2018 version of A Star is Born, the Greek was the stage on which Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper performed the Oscar-winning “Shallow.”   

But I remember the Greek in a different mood. No, I don’t date back to the time when troops of ersatz classical nymphs frolicked on stage for the delight of theatregoers. But in the era (1952-1975) when impresario James A. Doolittle booked acts, I was taken by my parents to see some very classy entertainments from far-flung places. Here’s what I remember: Britain’s venerable D’Oyly Carte company performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. The Grand Kabuki from Japan. The National Theatre of Britain staging an Elizabethan-style all-male production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The Comédie Française presenting Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in French, which was a very nice pay-off for my years of high school français. (My mother pointed out Maurice Chevalier in the audience.)

But I mainly associate the Greek Theater with the bi-annual summer visits by Harry Belafonte in his prime. His show, featuring singers, dancers, and a small group of musicians, was always a fabulous spectacle. He even followed up his best-selling Belafonte at Carnegie Hall live album with Belafonte at the Greek. My mother was such a fan that she saw each of his shows twice, once with my father and once with my younger sister and me. One year, when we arrived early, she’d scouted out the underground lot where headliners parked their cars. She stationed us near the exit, just in time to see the great man himself emerge. We chatted briefly, and he complimented me on the party dress I was wearing. Proudly I told him, “My mother bought it on sale.” (Behind me, Mom turned beet red.) 

Belafonte, as I was to learn over the years, had many talents. In early films like Carmen Jones, which didn’t always require him to sing, he was a handsome leading man, engaged in thwarted romances and dangerous doings. Later, teaming with longtime pal Sidney Poitier who also directed, he did a nifty Brando-as-the-Godfather imitation in a ghetto crime comedy called Uptown Saturday Night (1974). In his last film, 2018’s Blackkklansman, he performed for Spike Lee as an ageing activist, a role that meshed nicely with the passions that animated his private life. To my surprise, he gets little recognition at Washington’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Though, in the section of the museum dedicated to entertainers, the cover of his Calypso album can be found, there’s no display case dedicated to his career. But a  fiery Belafonte quote is on display at the museum connected with the Statue of Liberty: “Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.” 

 

When We Were Young: “Baby, It’s You” and “The Big Chill”

A funny thing about the year 1983: filmmakers who were not so young as they used to be were now looking back on their coming-of-age years, the tender and turbulent Sixties. John Sayles,  recently graduated from making horror flicks for Roger Corman, shot in 1983 his first studio movie, a coming-of-age romantic comedy called Baby, It’s You. Based on a memoir of sorts by Hollywood honcho Amy Robinson, it begins in 1966 in true Sayles territory: Trenton, New Jersey. Jill Rosen (an adorable Rosanna Arquette) is a smart and sassy high school senior who gets good grades and nabs the lead in the school play. Into her life comes Sheik (Vincent Spano), an Italian kid from the other side of the tracks who can’t exactly be called a greaser because he idolizes Frank Sinatra and dresses like a suave man about town. Opposites attract, but though Jill tempts fate by secretly dating this high school drop-out, she manages to move on when she gains admission to her dream school, the tony Sarah Lawrence.

Cut to the following year: Jill has traded in her short skirts and knee socks for hippie garb, discovered pot and the pill, and otherwise explored life beyond the purview of her solidly upper-middle-class parents. On a spring-break trip to Miami she rediscovers Sheik, now dreaming of a showbiz future but basically washing dishes in a hotel kitchen. The attraction is still there, though in other ways she’s evolved. We suspect there’s no future for their relationship, but a sweet ending (one that makes use of Sheik’s favorite song, “Strangers in the Night”) shows how much they continue to mean to one another, come what may.

It's an appealing film, though hardly a deep one, with its nostalgia element heightened by a soundtrack crammed with oldies like “Wooly Bully.” (I can’t resist mentioning that it was The Graduate that in 1967  began the trend of using pop music to establish the mood of an era.) 

After he left the Roger Corman fold, Sayles’ very first film was Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), a small but influential indie about a reunion of Sixties activists, all just turning thirty, a decade or so after their graduation from college. This low-budget gem (which Sayles himself described to me as using the low-budget Corman trick of making do with what you have on hand) was critically acclaimed for capturing the spirit of an era. It seemed to kick off a host of reunion movies, the most potent of which was Lawrence Kasdan’s hugely popular The Big Chill. Like Baby, It’s You, this film looks back on the politics and culture of the Sixties, but from the perspective of campus friends who are now older, but not necessarily wiser, than they were when they linked up at the University of Michigan. Within the framework of a weekend spent in a large house following the suicide of a close friend, The Big Chill examines successes, dreams, and particularly regrets, in a way that is sometimes poignant and sometimes funny. 

The cast of The Big Chill is part of its strength. Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, coming off the huge success of his 1981 thriller Body Heat, had access to some of Hollywood’s brightest young talents. Among the film’s stars are William Hurt (who’d scored in Body Heat), Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close, in only her second film. The DVD version I watched includes a years-later interview with cast and crew, highlighting how the ensemble cast, isolated in a South Carolina town, found ways to strengthen their sense of longstanding camaraderie.  

 

Spheroids and Triangles: "Challengers"

 

When the big new releases of 2024 came out, one that slipped past me was Luca Guadagnino’s tennis film, Challengers. This erotic triangle featuring a sexy young female tennis whiz and the two former best friends who lust after her seemed like an interesting departure from Guadagnino’s 2017 hit, Call Me By Your Name. Not that I was entirely entranced by the coming-of-age same-sex romance that gave us an eyeful of Timothée Chalamet—playing a sensitive young man awakening to his own budding sexual urges—clambering all over the golden-hued torso of Armie Hammer. It all seemed, frankly, a bit lugubrious, but critics and audiences clearly were swooning. 

I was curious to see Challengers because the dynamic among the three leads promised to be intriguing and because I wanted to see how Guadagnino handled female sexuality at his film’s center. Certainly he has put together an attractive cast, with the gorgeous  Zendaya rotating between a charmingly boyish Mike Faist (he was Riff in Spielberg’s take on West Side Story) and an appealingly scruffy Josh O’Connor (with an American accent that far removes him from his role as Prince Charles in The Crown).  The idea is that they all meet on the junior tennis circuit where the two very young men have just won a championship as doubles partners and Tashi  is an extraordinary young player with a scholarship to Stanford.

Then time passes, and Guadagnino gets fancy, jumping between various eras we can distinguish mostly because Tashi’s hair gets shorter and Art’s blond curls disappear. The jumps back and forth in chronology are so abrupt that for me it was never clear when several key plot points occurred. Does, for instance, a key tryst between Tashi and Patrick occur before or after she marries Art and bears his child?  I honestly don’t know. 

I can only tell you that Tashi’s behavior in the film is to me maddeningly unappealing. From the first, she’s using herself as a lure, promising her body to whichever of the two men wins an upcoming tournament. We’re supposed to see her as smart and scrappy, using tennis (as well as tennis players) to get what she wants out of life. Personally, although I couldn’t overlook Zendaya’s definite it-girl quality, I  could find nothing very attractive in her machinations. Does she ever feel a genuine emotional connection with either of the two men she keeps in thrall throughout the film? I suspect not . . . so who are we rooting for?

The film ends, predictably, with Tashi’s two lovers battling it out on center court in the finals of a tennis tournament that will determine their careers but also their romantic lives. I won’t tell you who wins, partly because the filmmaker chooses to go for ambiguity, in the service of a finale that is more symbolic than particularly meaningful. It made me think back to a much early moment in Challengers, wherein a teenage Tashi pays a visit to the room shared by the two brand-new junior champions. Both clearly have the hots for her; both badly want to get physical with this tantalizing young woman. First she makes out with Art, and then with Patrick. Suddenly they’re all three wildly kissing. Then she silently backs out of the tryst, leaving two fellows smooching one another. Which, I suspect, is Guadagnino’s real focus in this film: the mutual attraction/repulsion of two male contenders. I don’t think Guadagnino likes women very much. And this film is his way of using a woman as a catalyst to show us his fascination with male-on-male carnal desire. 

The Play’s the Thing: "Arsenic and Old Lace"

Once upon a time, hit movies got their start as Broadway plays. This was long true of blockbuster musicals, of course: think of the stage-to-screen metamorphosis of (for example) Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Fiddler on the Roof. (Today, though musical theatre is a much harder sell than it once was, the current box-office success of the screen’s Wicked reminds us how a beloved stage play can translate into a motion picture bonanza.)  But stage comedies without musical underpinnings have also been the source of screen success. Think back to 1936, and the Kaufman and Hart screwball stage hit, You Can’t Take It With You, about a family of lovable eccentrics whose daughter falls in love with the son of a stodgy banker.  Two years later, the play was filmed with an all-star cast led by Jean Arthur, James Stewart, and Lionel Barrymore, winning Oscars for Best Picture and for Frank Capra’s direction.  

The awards racked up by You Can’t Take It With You may have been somewhat unique (it’s rare for light comedies to take home top prizes), but there was a time when many a Broadway comedy enjoyed additional kudos for its screen iteration. Clearly loads of people who lived far from Broadway were eager to see shows they’d only heard about, especially if their favorite Hollywood stars appeared in the movie version. Here’s one example: a little farce called The Solid Gold Cadillac, a big Broadway hit of the 1954-55 season, was filmed in 1956. The little old lady of the stage version—someone who upends the business world with her unexpected financial savvy—became in the film the much-younger, much-cuter Judy Holliday, who won critical praise and a Golden Globe nomination. 

Which leads me to mention that the little-old-lady star of the original stage version of The Solid Gold Cadillac was Josephine Hull, who was almost 80 when she created the role. Though she lost that part to the thirty-something Holliday, she did appear on screen in several classic stage-to-screen transfers, including Harvey (that’s the one with the invisible rabbit) and Arsenic and Old Lace. For the latter, released on screen in 1944, Frank Capra was again involved. This time the laughs came from a macabre set-up involving a Brooklyn theatre critic whose two sweet elderly aunts have a surprising habit of bumping off lonely old men with glasses of elderberry wine, delicately laced with arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide.

 In the film version, Mortimer Brewster (a newlywed after a lifetime of disparaging marriage) is played by none other than Cary Grant. I’ve enjoyed Grant’s appearances in many film comedies (from Bringing Up Baby to Charade), but this may be his most physical role of all. His job is chiefly to react with astonishment to all the zany, grisly doings occurring around him, and Grant is definitely up to the challenge: watching him drop his jaw, bug out his eyes, and do elaborate double-takes is a masterclass in comedic acting. But there are lots of other talented farceurs involved. Chief among them are Jack Carson as a cop with dramatic ambitions, Edward Everett Horton as the proprietor of a lunatic asylum, Jean Adair as Josephine Hull’s lovably addled sister, and the inimitable Peter Lorre as a surgeon with a serious drinking problem. The stage version had featured Boris Karloff as Mortimer’s disfigured (and very scary) brother. As the biggest name in the cast (as well as the play’s chief investor), Karloff couldn’t leave the play to perform in the film version, so Raymond Massey (in Frankenstein-adjacent Karloff makeup) does the honors. 

 

Recalling Stardust Memories

The recent passing of Marshall Brickman made me curious about his collaborations with Woody Allen.  The two shared writing credit on such Allen hits as Sleeper, Manhattan, and particularly Annie Hall, which earned the duo an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1977. At my local library I checked out a volume of Woody Allen screenplays from perhaps his most fertile period, the late 1970s.. Two of them—Annie Hall and Manhattan—were written with Brickman’s participation. The other two—Interiors and Stardust Memories—were solo outings by Allen. My not-very-scientific conclusion: when collaborating with Brickman, Woody Allen was more grounded in the here-and-now. I think Brickman brought the hypertalented Allen down to earth,  negotiating with him an effective balance of comedy and genuine emotion.

Of the two screenplays Woody Allen wrote solo, Interiors is considered by most critics and audiences a flop, a lugubrious story of failed romances, lacking the impish humor that has always been Allen’s trademark. Then there’s Stardust Memories (1980), something of a hodgepodge, but a fascinating one. This is Allen (or at least an Allen-like character) confronting his own celebrity as both director and performer, dealing with the fact that both studio execs and film fans strongly prefer his “early funny ones” to his own ambitious goal of capturing human suffering through cinema. 

In Stardust Memories, Allen is Sandy Bates, a well-known comic filmmaker who apparently aspires to be the next Fellini. He’s got a new movie in the can, but the studio honchos are not thrilled by an ending involving two old-fashioned passenger trains. One train car contains Sandy’s character and a clutch of riders who are clearly living lives of quiet desperation. The other, which Sandy stares at longingly through the train window, transports jolly revelers wearing furs and holding up awards statuettes for all to see. They’re having a great time . . . . but suddenly this lively crowd is off the train and picking its way through a garbage heap. Talk about blatant symbolism!

At a Florida hotel where Sandy’s the honored guest for a tribute weekend, he’s constantly surrounded by a swarm of fans, most of them slightly grotesque. Some want to kiss him; some want to kill him. Everyone wants something: a souvenir photo; an opportunity; a contribution to a worthy cause; a roll in the hay. As he struggles to avoid their clutches, as well as the pedantic clichés of some film-scholar types in attendance, he’s simultaneously wrestling (as Woody Allen heroes generally are) with romantic angst. There’s the gorgeous but emotionally fragile Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), as well as the pretty mother of two cute French-speaking tykes (Marie-Christine Barrault) and a young violinist who considers herself bad news (Jessica Harper). Then Sandy is confronted by a clutch of visitors from Outer Space (they too prefer “the early funny ones”) and is faced with an unexpected life-or-death moment (don’t ask). 

In watching Stardust Memories (which, by the way, is scored with some wonderful Dixieland tunes, including a Louis Armstrong rendition of “Stardust”), I couldn’t help thinking about a movie classic, Sullivan’s Travels  This 1941 film, written and directed by Preston Sturges, concerns a successful director of Hollywood comedies who yearns to work on a serious project about the plight of the downtrodden. Having gone on the road to soak up true Americana, he ultimately comes to realize the value of comedy in soothing people’s harsh daily lives. Ia this what Woody Allen is trying to convey to us in Stardust Memories? Honestly, it’s hard to say. But he’s certainly given us a lot to chew on.  

 

Art, Angst, and Almodóvar

I’ve long been fascinated by the brilliant Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar. And I’m hardly alone. The new Academy Museum has, until recently, devoted one large gallery to provocative (and hardly child-friendly) clips from Almodóvar’s best work. And on April 28, he’ll be honored by Film at Lincoln Center with its 50th Chaplin Award. But I can’t pretend I know all there is to know about the man behind such international hits as Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, and Talk to Her. That’s why I dove into a slim but tightly packed new book from Columbia University Press, titled The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films.

Author James Miller is not your usual film scholar. A professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, he has turned a COVID-era movie-watching project into a serious exploration of Almodóvar’s entire life and career. Clearly a methodical thinker, he lays out at the beginning of his book his conviction—following a close viewing of every Almodóvar film—that his subject “was essentially a man of the sixties, forged in Spain’s belated version of that decade’s global counterculture and seriously pursuing his own quest for philosophical insight and personal liberation.” He sees in Almodóvar’s films a passion for self-examination, one deeply rooted in European philosophical tradition. Miller’s preface ends with the assertion that “Almodóvar has long been fascinated by the blurry line between fiction and reality, between cultural memory and personal memory, between autofiction and autobiography.” The author  announces here his plan to analyze the master’s creative process “in a way that allows Almodóvar to emerge both as a real person as well as a fictional character represented in multiple alter egos in various films.”

To this end, Miller selects seven of Almodóvar’s films to discuss in depth. Each reflects, though hardly in a conventional way, some aspect of Almodóvar’s private life. Instead of arranging the movies chronologically in terms of their release dates, Miller chooses to match them with key periods of Almodóvar’s own personal chronology. That’s why he begins, following a biographical sketch of the artist’s life trajectory, with the 2006 release Volver, viewing it as Almodóvar’s return to the rural La Mancha of his boyhood and to the hard-scrabble working class section of Madrid in which he spent his youth. 

The next film he discusses is 2004’s Bad Education (its original Spanish title,  La mala educación can also mean “bad manners”). This often startling work contains a cinematic version of a key moment in Almodóvar’s own childhood. As a boy with a keen mind and an angelic singing voice, he was a prized pupil at a boarding school run by Catholic priests. He suffered sexual abuse at the hands of one of them. Bad Education contains this horrendous moment, but also jumps ahead in time to a film being made about the incident and its aftermath, with the victim himself apparently playing one of the lead characters. In the unique way with which, in Miller’s terms, Almodóvar “nests” various story elements inside one another, Bad Education then turns into a kind of film noir, with eerie mistaken identities pointing toward a latter-day crime that becomes downright Ripley-esque. 

The later films on Miller’s list explore the period of Almodóvar’s young manhood in the gaudy so-called La Movida movement of the 1960s as well as (in 2019’s Pain and Glory) the mature filmmaker’s acknowledgment of his own homosexuality. As always, the latter film’s director character is and is not the master himself. But he’s certainly worth our attention. 

 

Achieving the Best of Everything: The Katharine Gibbs School

It’s a long-time movie staple: an attractive young lady comes to the big city (generally Manhattan) with stars in her eyes. She gets a low-level job and struggles to move forward, while at the same time fending off the advances of cads and hoping to find True Love. It’s a plotline exemplified by the all-star 1959 film, The Best of Everything (based on a steamy Rona Jaffe best-seller). But the same basic story thread shows up elsewhere too, as in 2006’s well-loved The Devil Wears Prada, in which—for a change—the all-controlling boss is a woman. In most films of this sort, the ending for the central character is basically (despite some missteps along the way) happily ever after. 

The notion of smart, well-trained young women finding their place in the world of work was central to a once-powerful American institution, the Katharine Gibbs School.  Far more than a secretarial college, Gibbs (which in its heyday had several east coast campuses) was a place where bright young women could pave their way to future success. While working hard to master demanding courses in typing and shorthand, Gibbs students also were schooled in literature, psychology, finance, and other fields, all the better to  make them ideal employees. Some laughed at the dress code: when in public, Gibbs “girls” were required to be elegantly turned out, in neat suits, face-framing hats, and white gloves. But Gibbs alumna were models of professionalism, with the skills and the confidence to move beyond entry-level positions and attain the highest ranks in fields like government, banking, publishing, and even aviation. Several, in fact, made their mark in the entertainment industry, not only as actors (Loretta Swit of M*A*S*H fame was a graduate) but also as behind-the-scenes executives, writers, and publicists  

I know all of this because of a fascinating new book by a colleague, Vanda Krefft. Her Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women traces the institution from its founding through the war years, exploring the lives of highly-successful Gibbs graduates, many of whom managed to combine career success with happy family lives. She parses the triumphs of the Fifties, then reveals how, in the turbulent late Sixties, the whole Gibbs philosophy fell by the wayside as second-wave feminism and the general iconoclasm of the era made the old rules seem out-moded. 

Though I was captivated by many of women featured in Krefft’s well-researched and nicely written pages, what sticks in my mind is the story of the school’s founder. She was born in 1863 in Galena, Illinois, one of eight children of a businessman who, despite immigrant roots, worked his way into a position of wealth and power in his local community. In an age when upper-class women were meant to be merely decorative, Katharine lived comfortably,  but never went beyond a high school education. Her father’s sudden death changed everything; since he left no will, her older brothers took charge, and managed to squander the estate.. Ultimately she married and had two children, but, when she was forty-six, her well-meaning husband died in a freak boating accident. Again there was no will, and she had to fight even to be the decision-maker for her own sons. Left with nothing but mouths to feed, she decided to start a school teaching other woman how to think for themselves, and how—in times of crisis—not to be beholden to men for their livelihood. Somehow it worked. I can well imagine Gibbs’ story on the big screen, maybe with a plucky Claudette Colbert or Joan Crawford in the leading role. 

Searching for . . . (“The Searchers”)

I admit it: westerns aren’t my favorite genre. And it’s taken me quite a while to like one of John Ford’s most admired westerns, The Searchers. But I could always see why the film was popular. Shot in 1956, it takes full advantage of color cinematography in showing off Ford’s all-time favorite locale, Monument Valley, with its stark red buttes pointing toward the bright blue sky. 

Anyone wanting to know more about The Searchers should seek out my colleague Glenn Frankel’s 2014 book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. Suffice it to say here that this film has had a huge influence on other major filmmakers, including David Lean, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, and George Lucas, who applied some of Ford’s shooting techniques to his Star Wars films. As for me, I returned to The Searchers after many years because it was referenced in a new biography of the actress Vera Miles. Who knew she was credited as the film’s third lead, after John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter?  All I remembered was Natalie Wood as Debbie, the young white woman who’d spent nine long years as a Comanche captive: after all, she was what the search of the title was all about.

Vera Miles, I should explain, plays a major role in what Roger Ebert once called the film’s “silly romantic subplot.” The feisty daughter of settlers, Miles’ Laurie Jorgensen is in love with Martin Pawley, the earnest young man whom Wayne’s Ethan Edwards reluctantly allows to accompany him on his quest for the missing girl. What stands out about Wayne’s character is how thoroughly he detests anything to do with Native American life. His intrinsic racism extends particularly to captive women whom he views as defiled by Indian “bucks.” Given that Wayne is generally seen on film –by Ford and others—in a heroic light, it’s uncomfortable accepting him as a bigot who goes out of his way to be cruel. But there’s a tiny moment at film’s end that shows us a sliver of good will in his character, before he leaves the reunited family to enjoy some happy domesticity and heads out solo into the unknown.

Watching The Searchers again reminded me of how many films are structured around a quest for a missing person, usually a family member. Some examples include Missing (1982), Searching (2018) and what seem like a raft of Liam Neeson flicks, including Taken (2008). But  I was reminded of a very different search in an extremely arty 1999 movie called Three Seasons, the first film shot in Vietnam after President Clinton lifted a longtime embargo. Set in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), it contains several plot lines that explore the changes in Vietnam since the infamous war of the Sixties and Seventies. In one  key subplot, Harvey Keitel plays a former American G.I.  who has returned to the country to find a daughter he’s never seen. 

I saw this film for a funny reason. At a favorite L.A. restaurant I got to know a waitress who was friendly and capable, with a faintly exotic look. It turns out she was Amerasian, and had just been cast as Keitel’s elusive daughter. I watched the film with excitement, waiting for Lola to come on screen. And at long last she did. At the very end of the film, we saw—through a window—the two sitting in a cafe, deep in conversation. What did father and daughter talk about? I have no idea. The movie ended there, leaving the viewer outside looking in. 

David Lynch Sings the Blues

I’d never say that the films of David Lynch are favorites of mine. They’re rather too puzzling and too macabre to make me want to watch them more than once. Still, Lynch’s recent death seent me back to the film that cemented his reputation in the film world. So I sat down and watched Blue Velvet, which I hadn’t seen since its release in 1986. 

Lynch shot Blue Velvet after he’d already made a truly bizarre body horror indie (Eraserhead), a screen adaptation of a Broadway costume-drama (The Elephant Man), and a big-budget space opera (Dune). Following the latter serious but doomed effort to crank out a film version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, Lynch leapt at the chance to do something more intimate. As his acclaimed TV series, Twin Peaks, would later show, Lynch was fascinated by the hidden corners of small-town America, the dark secrets behind the sunny facades. Blue Velvet begins (to the syrupy tune of the Bobby Vinton pop hit) with glimpses of happy Americana: cheery flowers blooming, an off-duty fireman waving at the locals from his truck, a neat row of clean-cut school kids crossing a street, a middle-aged man watering his lawn. Then suddenly the man collapses to the ground, and we realize that Middle America isn’t all sunbeams and rosebuds. (Ironically, at this early point we’ve already caught a glimpse of the fallen man’s wife, curled up on a comfy couch to watch a TV episode in which somebody is pointing a gun.) 

The hero of the story turns out to be Jeffrey, the son of the injured man. As played by Kyle MacLaughlin (who’d starred as Paul Atreides in Lynch’s version of Dune), Jeffrey’s a handsome and well-meaning fellow, home from college because of his father’s accident. Taking a walk in his neighborhood, he comes across a startling sight: a severed human ear. That’s when he can’t resist doing some sleuthing of his own. It quickly includes his neighbor, a pretty blonde high schooler named Sandy (Laura Dern), who jumps at the chance of playing Nancy Drew. 

What they discover is a side of Lumberton, their cozy home town, that they hadn’t anticipated. There’s a lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini) with a masochistic streak, a psychopathic drug dealer (Dennis Hopper) with rape on his mind, and a weirdly effeminate creep (Dean Stockwell) who’s into karaoke. And, of course, a guy with a missing ear. The clean-cut Jeffrey can’t resist getting mixed up in all of this, acknowledging with fascination that “I’m seeing something that was always hidden.”

The curious thing about Blue Velvet is that, despite a good deal of grotesque violence, the movie ends on an upbeat note. Jeffrey and Sandy are a happy couple, Dad is well again, flowers are blooming against a bright blue sky. It’s as though none of the ugliness we’ve just seen has ever happened. Still: those flowers look suspiciously phony, as does the chirping bird (a callback to Sandy’s earlier romantic dream of happiness) that perches outside the window of the family kitchen. And look! Isn’t that a worm in its beak? 

Blue Velvet will never be in my personal pantheon of truly great movies. I’ve liked other Lynch films better because I’ve found their characters more appealing: see, particularly, Wild at Heart (which stars Dern again, with Nicolas Cage). And the conundrums in later Lynch films like Mulholland Drive seem more worth figuring out. Still, Blue Velvet paved the way for the rest of Lynch’s important career. And it’s fun to see Isabella Rossellini wearing something other than a nun’s habit. 

 

Good and Evil in the Films of Gene Hackman

Once upon a time, I felt the big mystery involving Gene Hackman was exactly why he got fired in 1967 from the plum role of Mr. Robinson, spouse of the notorious middle-aged housewife who beds young Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. When I  researched the film for my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, I put this question to producer Larry Turman. He had no good answer for me, saying only that this was a choice made by director Mike Nichols. The firing hardly hurt the finished film: Murray Hamilton was unforgettable in the role. And Hackman recouped by playing Buck Barrow in the same year’s Bonnie and Clyde, landing himself an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

Today, of course, there’s a much sadder mystery to ponder:  what killed the 96-year-old retired actor, his decades-younger wife, and one of their three dogs inside their Santa Fe home? A report last Friday concludes Hackman died from a combination of Alzheimer’s and heart disease, following his wife’s very sudden death from Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome. (No word yet about what killed the dog.) All we fans can do now is remember Hackman in his prime, as an actor’s actor. Though he was never a handsome leading-man type, he carried his films with an artistry and power few can match.  

I’ve hardly watched all of Hackman’s 70-plus screen roles, but I’ve deeply admired his performances in films like The French Connection (for which he won his first Oscar) and The Conversation. Though he was most recognized for his work in dramas, I enjoyed seeing his comedic side emerge in projects like The Birdcage (in which he played a conservative U.S. Senator who discovers his daughter’s about to marry the son of a flamboyant gay couple). The sight of the straitlaced Senator Keeley dodging the press by dressing in drag and dancing to “We are Family” is matched in hilarity only by Hackman’s goofy scene as the cheery blind man in Young Frankenstein. 

Still, it was in serious dramas that Hackman found his permanent niche.  In his memory, I’ve just (re)watched two of them, 1988’s Mississippi Burning and 1992’s Unforgiven, the Oscar Best Picture recipient that won Hackman his second Oscar. Seeing them back to back, and remembering Hackman’s other celebrated roles, I came to an interesting conclusion. In Mississippi Burning, which chronicles the 1964 search for three missing civil rights activists in the American South, Hackman is on the side of the good guys. Though a former Mississippi sheriff, he now works for the FBI, assisting the by-the-book agent played by Willem Dafoe in tracking down the killers of the three young men. Certainly we can admire his values (as well as his gentleness toward the young woman married to a local deputy with clear Klan connections), but he can also be infuriating. He’s first seen cheerfully belting out a KKK theme song, and he’s prone to telling jokes that might certainly be offensive in this context. Moreover, his strategies for catching the perps are not entirely ethical (though they do work). In other words, he’s a good guy we’re not sure we like very much.

In Unforgiven, he’s again a lawman, this time in a small Texas town, circa 1880. He claims to have banned firearms, but Big Whiskey is rife with crime and violence, and he’s ultimately taken down (by star Clint Eastwood) late in the game. Still, he’s a fascinatingly genial guy, and we almost agree with his final insistence that he doesn’t deserve what he gets. Gene Hackman’s good bad-guys and bad good-guys will long stay with me. Hail and farewell. 

 

Losing It At the Movies: Memories of Local Movie Houses

Sean Baker, the newly minted king of the movie world, has publicly pleaded with studios and moviegoers to support local cinemas. This is a subject about which I too feel passionate. And so does my new friend Kendra Nordin Beato, a staff writer at the venerable Christian Science Monitor. Here’s a link to her recent—and fascinating—CSM article, titled ‘I didn’t know I needed it.’ Why neighborhoods rally to save movie houses.’ And here’s a companion link to a CSM audio featurette, A documentarian’s take on the magic of moviegoing, about a filmmaker currently chronicling the movement to preserve neighborhood theatres. 

Growing up in L.A., I was surrounded by a wealth of movie houses. Beyond exotic palaces like Grauman’s Chinese and the Egyptian, both glamorous venues on Hollywood Blvd., there were friendly local spots like the Picwood (where Pico met Westwood Blvd.) and the Picfair (yup, at Pico and Fairfax). Also the Stadium (now a synagogue), where generations of kids hung out at Saturday matinees. And Santa Monica’s own Aero, which during World War II played movies ‘round the clock, to accommodate shift workers at nearby aircraft plants. All of these were stand-alone theatres, usually featuring double-bills along with the occasional newsreel and a batch of cartoons.  (Joe Dante’s great little 1993 film, Matinee, captures what it was like for young movie-goers in 1962, though he also interpolates the Cuban Missile Crisis.) 

But the times they were a-changin’, and the stand-alones were either leveled or replaced by multiplexes. You picked one film from a menu of several of the latest releases . . .  and when it was over, you couldn’t hang around to watch it again. And forget about having a choice of seating in advance. 

Here are a few of my most vivid movie house memories: 

(1) The Graduate (1967) – Part of the thrill of this legendary romantic comedy was rooting for Benjamin and Elaine in their flight from the domination of their parents. Closely studying this film years later for my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, I realized that the charm of the ending came from seeing young people openly defying the will of the previous generation. Movie theatres rocked with the cheers of young cinephiles. It wasn’t until years later, watching on our couches at home, that we all started to wonder: where will this newly-minted couple go from here? 

 (2) A Clockwork Orange (1971) – I remember seeing this bold Stanley Kubrick translation of the Anthony Burgess novel at the storied Grauman’s Chinese. The house was packed. When the cruel, sadistic rape scene (performed to the tune of “Singin’ in the Rain”) came on screen, all the men in the theatre seemed to erupt with gleeful laughter. Never have I ever felt so female . . . or so vulnerable. 

(3) Rocky (1978) – I’m hardly a fan of prizefighting. Still, I was all in for Rocky Balboa in his climactic fight against the champ, Apollo Creed. Watching this is a medium-sized house in the San Fernando Valley, I truly felt I was ringside for the fight of the century. Everyone in every seat felt the same way: we were all wonderfully united in cheering on the underdog in his bout against the pro. 

Then, as a young film critic, I watched Teshigahara’s 1964 Japanese masterpiece, Woman in the Dunes, completely alone in a large revival house. It’s a film about isolation—and I felt it in every fiber of my being. 

Kudos to Hollywood’s Quentin Tarantino, Jason Reitman, and others who’ve taken on the mission to preserve some legendary local theatres, like the UCLA-adjacent Village.  

 

And the Oscar Goes To . . .

The Oscar awards broadcast last Sunday night was fascinating, infuriating, and a bit dull—in other words, it was not much different from the shows of the recent past. New host Conan O’Brien added a bit of impish charm to the event: blessedly, he had a few effective political zingers, like the one praising ultimate top winner Anora for taking down powerful Russian oligarchs in a way that our political leaders recently failed to do. There were also splashy musical numbers, some of which were relevant (Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande encoring the big song from Wicked) and some which were decidedly not. Why the show felt the need for a musical salute to the James Bond franchise, featuring Margaret Qualley in a sexy dance number and then three (count ‘em) pop singers belting out Bond theme songs, I can’t begin to guess.

Mostly, the results of the Oscar balloting left me happy. It was great to hear Anora’s Sean Baker (who won a record-breaking 4 Oscars—for writing, editing, directing, and producing a single film) champion independent filmmaking as well as the importance of supporting neighborhood movie houses. 

Speaking of which, I’m newly back from New York City, where I visited the kind of local movie house that would warm Baker’s heart. Nitehawk Cinema, a stone’s throw from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, specializes in indies, oldies, and oddities. A pre-show curtain-raiser is a fascinating compilation of old movie trailers and offbeat interviews, and you can order a nosh or a cocktail at your seat. My evening at the Nitehawk allowed me to watch the entire list of Oscar-nominated live action shorts. 

As always, in the short-film categories, most of the 2025 nominees were from faraway places. All of them under 30 minutes in length, they came from such faraway places as India, Croatia, and South Africa. My companion and I wholly agreed on the likely winner, but it turned out we were far off-base. Here’s the rundown:

“The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent,” from Croatia, is a very brief (13 minutes) and disturbing tale of a man removed from a train, at a time of political repression apparently connected to the Chechen War early in this century. The L.A. Times reviewer deeply admired this film, but we felt it was too cryptic to sustain our interest.

“Anuja,” officially American but shot in India (Mindy Kaling was a producer), deals with a smart-as-a-whip street child who must make a difficult choice about her future. Definitely likable, but (to my mind) clearly in need of more time and more money in order to carry the story to its logical conclusion. I’d love to see this as a feature-length film. One fascinating note: the child who starred in the movie is an actual street kid reliving a version of her own life story. 

“I Am Not a Robot”—from Holland, a highly original concept, and one that—at least at the start—allows for some welcome humor. Alas, toward the end it bogs down in sentimentality. 

“A Lien” (U.S.) – the title is weird, but this story of a husband and father unexpectedly being picked up at a citizenship hearing and targeted for deportation struck me as powerful and extremely pertinent. I had this pegged as a winner.

“The Last Ranger” (South Africa) – a deftly told tale of rhino poachers, and my second favorite.

The winner? “I Am Not a Robot.” The question is—did voters genuinely like this best, or did they go for a great title, without really assessing the quality of the film? Did they actually  watch these films at all? 

 

No Small Parts: J. K. Simmons in “Break Point”

Though I’m hardly a tennis player, I’ve been wanting to see the much-applauded tennis movie, Challengers. The world in which it’s set reminds me of how many great movies of the past have included tennis in at last one key scene. Just think of the mesmerizing tennis tournament scene in Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train. (The action is on the court, but the audience should be paying attention to a spectator sitting quietly in the stands.) Tennis shows up in movies as different as Annie Hall (Alvy and Annie first meet on a tennis court) and Gigi (Leslie Caron’s girlish character, who cavorts all over the court, stands in joyous contrast to the stiff demoiselles who can’t be bothered to move at all). In Pat and Mike, Katharine Hepburn’s character famously melts down while playing against real-life tennis celebrity Gussie Moran. The recent King Richard is, of course, all about the father who raised tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.

The 2014 film Break Point (not to be confused with the 2015 surfing flick Point Break) is an amiable comedy in which tennis takes center stage. It’s written by and stars Jeremy Sisto as a slovenly tennis pro who’s forced to team up with his estranged brother, a wholesome substitute teacher, in order to win a berth in a major tournament. There’s lots of tennis action, but this is more of a human-interest story in which two siblings accept each other’s different choices and a lonely kid finds a substitute family. 

Part of why Break Point is worth watching is the presence of J.K. Simmons, who plays the gruff but loving father of the two tennis-playing brothers. He’s his sons’ biggest fan, always front-row center at their matches. To be honest, I’d never heard of Simmons until 2014. He started making movies back in 1994, and I’m sure I spotted his bald head and his low-register voice in big films like Juno, Up in the Air, and Burn After Reading. He’s pretty well disguised with hair and mustache as J. Jonah Jameson in several Spiderman flicks, which gives me an excuse not to have recognized him there. But in any case he didn’t come into focus for me until the year that Point Break was made. That’s became 2014 was also when Damien Chazelle released Whiplash, in which—playing the leader of a college jazz ensemble—Simmons demands perfection to the point where he’s downright maniacal. The role of Terence Fletcher was Simmon’s first big chance for a truly bravura performance, and he hardly wastes it. The role landed him major critical acclaim, and other more showy roles, like that of William Frawley (the original Fred Mertz) in Being the Ricardos. Still, a guy’s got to eat, and Simmons’ filmography is filled with roles in forgettable films like The Tomorrow War and Ride the Eagle It’s not unusual for him to release six films in a single year. And he also keeps busy using that wonderful basso voice of his in videogames and animated features. He also sings, and has appeared on Broadway as Benny Southstreet in Guys and Dolls

Like J.K. Simmons, there are hundreds of characters actors who’ve long been the backbone of the movie industry. Their names aren’t always familiar to us, but we know their faces and appreciate their reliable professionalism. I interviewed Robert Forster when Whiplash won Simmons an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Forster, an Oscar nominee himself for Jackie Brown, was thrilled for his colleague, a real pro who had truly paid his dues in the motion picture industry.  

 

The Winterly Beauty of “Small Things Like These”

So this year’s Oscar ceremony is almost here. Meanwhile I want to write about  a movie totally absent from the list of nominees, though its star—who’s also one of its producers—won last year’s Best Actor Oscar for playing the title role in Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy, born and raised in Ireland, had fallen in love with Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a tiny but powerful 2021 Irish novella known as the shortest work to ever become a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize. It was he who assembled a production team that includes Matt Damon. 

The resulting film, now on Prime, is acutely sensitive to Keegan’s themes as well as her taut use of language. It’s a small story, as befits a book barely100 pages long. But its concerns are large, because it takes on the horrors of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, in which—until as recently as 1996—Catholic nuns welcomed unwed mothers into their convents, only to exploit their labor and steal their babies. (Contraception was then illegal in Ireland, and the power of the Church was such that no one spoke out for decades about the abuses occurring in their towns.)  

The horrors of the system have been covered in other dramatic films and documentaries. Part of what makes Keegan’s work, and the film it inspired, unique is that the focus is on a man—a middle-aged dealer in gas and coal, circa 1985—whose working-class life is upended when he comes in contact with a victim of the nuns’ double-edged hospitality. Bill Furlong (played, of course by Murphy) has made a comfortable if not a posh, living for himself and his family, which includes a hard-working wife and five school-age daughters. His girls, all of them promising and well-loved, attend St. Margaret’s, “the only good school for girls” in the vicinity, and so it’s vital that he remain on excellent terms with the Mother Superior (a frosty Emily Watson) of the convent next door. All the locals have a sense of what’s going on behind the convent walls, but (as Bill’s wife Eileen tartly reminds him), “If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore.”

But Bill, a man prone to introspection, sees in the plight of pregnant young women’s the situation of his own mother. Pregnant with Bill at 16, she was graciously accepted by the local wealthy Protestant widow as domestic help, rather than being treated as a “fallen woman” and sent to labor for the nuns.  And though his mother suddenly died young, the kindly and childless Mrs. Wilson raised Bill in comfortable surroundings, then helped him to find education, a wife, and a business of his own. Now he relishes his role as pater familias, but there comes a time when he finds himself forced to make a difficult but thrilling choice. 

The story takes place at Christmastime, and the cold, damp weather seeps into the film. This makes it all the more stunning when the Mother Superior invites Bill into her cozy study with its blazing fire. The imagery of the novel—its use of crows, for instance, as an ominous symbol of the nuns’ power—is faithfully preserved on screen, and of course the soundtrack is filled with Christmas carols that ironically remind us of comfort and joy. I’m  only sorry that the mystery of Bill’s paternity, sustained throughout the novel, is pretty well answered in the film version, in a way that invites its own questions. 

Not everyone will like this film, but its harsh beauty shines bright in the winterly darkness. 

 

Color Me Movies (The Academy Museum Dazzles in Living Color)

The always interesting Academy Museum is hosting a big new exhibit until July of this year. Called “Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema,” it is part of the Getty organization’s latest ambitious region-wide arts festival. The festival, which used to be known by the umbrella term Pacific Standard Time, is now simply called PST Art, and the theme for the current iteration is Art & Science Collide. (Learn more at www.pst.art)   

Though I admit that “Chromatic Explorations of Cinema” sounds a bit dry, there’s plenty on the fourth floor of the Academy Museum to delight both adults and children. We start with a history lesson, about how color came to be added to the familiar black & white tones of early cinematography, often with the help of female employees who painstakingly tinted reels of filmstock by hand. (Walt Disney gets credit for figuring out how to colorize animated movies. His “Flowers and Trees” was the first commercially released film to be produced in the full-color three-strip Technicolor process,, while Snow White became America’s first feature-length cel-animated film.) But the exhibit also boasts huge introductory pops of living color, featuring clips from movies both American and foreign. Indian and Chinese filmmakers, it seems, have long been masters at using intense color to brighten romantic stories. Naturally we also get that most colorful of American stars, Marilyn Monroe—all red lips, yellow hair, and fabulous fuchsia gown—in a splashy number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Not to mention Judy Garland’s Dorothy emerging from her drab Kansas home into the Technicolor dazzle of Oz  And the brilliantly clashing colors of Jets and Sharks in West Side Story.

One room, labeled “Color as Character,” features a rainbow display from the museum’s extensive costume collection, showing us how Jay Gatsby’s powder-pink suit, the baby-pink ensemble worn by Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, and Cruella de Vil’s outrageous black-and-red get-up from One Hundred and One Dalmatians shed light on the characters who wear them. Dorothy’s ruby-red slippers, we learn, were described as silver in L. Frank Baum’s original novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was the geniuses at MGM who changed silver to scarlet the better to take advantage of color cinematography.  (And, of course, we get to see an exceedingly rare pair of the slippers, one of the museum’s treasures, displayed in a plexiglass case.) 

But from this point onward, the exhibit gets sublimely experimental. It seems that some avant-garde animators, sensing the power of color in the abstract, began shooting short films to show off the new artistic possibilities of the motion picture medium. The Academy exhibit displays samples of the work of Oskar Fischinger, a German-American artist who profoundly influenced the opening sections of Disney’s 1940 masterwork, Fantasia. Remember how the start of that animated film, in which Mastro Leopold Stokowski leads his orchestra through Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, is a vivid visual collage of intertwining shapes? Though Fischinger remains uncredited because of a falling-out with the Disney brass, his work was the starting point for this brilliant segment. But I found myself particularly entranced by a film credited to Mary Ellen Bute, whose visual artistry brings a whole new dimension to Franz Liszt’s entrancing Hungarian Rhapsody. She reportedly specialized in “visual music,” and her short films often played as curtain-raisers at prestige movie palaces like Radio City Music Hall.   

Of course, everyone loves do-it-yourself exhibits, and this one ends with opportunities for the spectator to play with color on a huge screen, to a musical accompaniment. A good time is definitely had by all. 

 

Liza Minnelli: A Star Was Born

The new documentary,  Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, made me curious about the movie career of one of Broadway’s favorite song-and-dance divas, Liza Minnelli. After all, Liza (still alive and kicking at age 78) is the daughter of two charter members of the Hollywood pantheon, director Vincente Minnelli and the incomparable Judy Garland. 

Liza made her first screen appearance as a babe in arms at the end of one of her mother’s musical films, The Good Old Summertime (1949). Her first credited role came in 1967’s Charlie Bubbles, as an ingenue opposite Albert Finney, who both starred and directed. But it was in 1969 when she truly made a splash: her role as a needy college co-ed in something called The Sterile Cuckoo led to her nomination for a Best Actress Oscar, along with such dramatic icons as Genevieve Bujold (Anne of the Thousand Days), Jane Fonda (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?), Jean Simmons (The Happy Ending) and ultimate winner Maggie Smith (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). The following year she was featured as a disfigured young woman in another highly emotional dramedy, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. The death by overdose of forty-seven-year-old Judy Garland on June 22, 1969 had left Liza bereft just as she was entering young womanhood. Judy’s own youthful screen career had seen her frequently cast as a girl-next-door type, even though her huge singing voice contained paradoxical notes of what one critic has called “fragility and resilience.” For Liza, I would choose the word “waif.” Directors seemed to see in her someone who was hurting, but knew how to cover her grief with sheer pizzazz.

It all came together for Minnelli in 1972, when she snagged the female lead in the film version of Cabaret. Director/choreographer Bob Fosse knew how to capitalize on her combination of little-girl-lost pathos and brassy insouciance (as well as her musical skills and her long, long legs) to fill out the character of Sally Bowles. Sally, who first appeared in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, was portrayed as the top chanteuse at the city’s seedy Kit Kat Klub, at a time when Hitler and his thugs were taking over German life. It was the perfect melding of performer and role, and it won her the Best Actress Oscar in 1973.. (Also in 1972, Minnelli scored another triumph with her televised concert film, Liza with a Z.)  

Though after 1972, Minnelli’s continuing screen success would have seemed assured, she ran into a series of roadblocks. Projects that looked good on paper—like 1975’s Lucky Lady and 1977’s New York, New York—turned out to be expensive flops. Liza herself faced health crises (exacerbated by recreational drug use) and went through a pack of mostly unsuitable husbands and lovers. She craved motherhood, but it was not to be. 

It wasn’t until 1981 that she had another bona fide hit movie, 1981’s Arthur, in which she plays a scrappy waitress who unexpectedly becomes the love interest of a childish (and generally drunk) millionaire, portrayed with gusto by Dudley Moore. To be honest, I watched Arthur again recently, and found  much of it rather repugnant. To me there’s nothing particularly hilarious about a falling-down drunk, even if he generally means well. But the film won an Oscar for John Gielgud’s portrayal of a cranky but endearing butler. And Minnelli and Moore have some charming moments—notably when, upon first meeting, they instantly launch into spritely husband-and-wife banter to conceal the fact that she’s just been apprehended for shoplifting an expensive tie. The waif, it seems, also rises.