Flying Down to Rio for the Olympic Games

Today marks the kick-off of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Not that the path to these Olympics has been a smooth one. What with political turmoil, economic meltdown, crime in the streets, and garbage in the bay, the 31^st Olympiad may not exactly be a triumph. (Then there’s the Zika virus, and the Russian doping scandal, and the threat of terrorism: I could go on and on.) But why not think positive? Rio is known to be a beautiful city, despite it all, and who can resist the meeting of the world’s greatest athletes? And, come what may, I’ll always have the Rio of the movies.

The first movie I know that features at least a fantasy version of Brazil’s many charms is a 1933 pre-code musical from RKO, Flying Down to Rio. It stars (yup!) Dolores del Rio as part of a romantic triangle, but is more famous for introducing the great duo of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. When Astaire and Rogers slither through the Carioca, their foreheads touching, screen history is made. If Rio seems the home of romance in this film, it looks even sexier in a full-color romp called That Man from Rio, a lively French spy spoof featuring authentic Brazilian locations and the delightfully rumpled Jean-Paul Belmondo. Twenty years later, the city of Rio was featured in a mild American sex comedy, Blame it on Rio. (Though Michael Caine, director Stanley Donen, and writer Larry Gelbart were all involved, it didn’t make many waves.)

Brazil of course has its own active film industry. Most of the titles are unfamiliar, but some have definitely made their presence felt on the international circuit. One is a sexy comedy from 1976: Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. This story of a woman torn between a proper gentleman and a sexy layabout (who returns to her as a ghost) made a star of Sonia Braga.

                                  

Several of the most highly regarded Brazilian films tackle life in the country’s picturesque but toxic slum neighborhoods. One is Pixote (1981), which focuses on a ten-year-old runaway struggling to survive on the streets of São Paulo. Its director, Hector Babenco, would later go on to direct Sonia Braga, Raul Julia, and the Oscar-winning William Hurt in an inventive prison drama, 1986’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. In 2002, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund directed an even more brutal story, one that features Rio’s rival street gangs, Called City of God, it captures the toll taken on the lives of young people who grow up in a violent culture.    

But I want to end on gentler note, with an Oscar-winning film that has always symbolized Brazil for me. Black Orpheus (originally Orfeu Negro) dates all the way back to 1959. Its director, Marcel Camus, was French, but in staging the ancient Greek love story of Orpheus and Eurydice (and setting it against the phantasmagoric excitement of Carnaval), he went to the streets of Rio in search of potential actors. Interestingly, several he found were athletes. Breno Mello, who played Orpheus, was a soccer player. And Adhemar da Silva, in the key role of Death, had won Olympic gold medals in the triple jump in 1952 and 1956.

Orpheus in the Greek original was a musician, and it is the film’s music that most sticks with me now. Antônio Carlos Jobim was involved, and guitarists the world over now make Theme from Black Orpheus part of their repertoire.

Black Orpheus was the very favorite film of Barack Obama’s mother. Who knows how it helped change history?

Anyway, let the games begin!

Light My (Funeral) Pyre: Ray Manzarek’s Long, Strange Movie Trip

Some people are meant to die young. Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, entered into myth when he died in Paris at age 27, having overdosed on drugs and fame. But I thought Ray Manzarek was capable of living forever. Ray, whose keyboard artistry dominated the great Doors hit, “Light My Fire,” seemed well and fit when we spoke at length in 2008. He was then living in Napa Valley with his wife of forty years, growing vegetables and regularly working out. He spoke candidly and with roaring enthusiasm about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, of how LSD had opened the doors of perception and helped him find his way. It was totally clear to me that his was a life well lived. Now, alas, he’s dead of cancer at the age of 74.

Though Manzarek made his mark in the world of music, I discovered that he’d been a movie buff all along. In fact, he first met Jim Morrison when both were students in UCLA’s graduate film program, which they favored because of its “European sensibilities,” at a time when Hollywood had dedicated itself to Rock Hudson’s on-screen flirtations with Doris Day. Actually, Ray rather liked Pillow Talk, which he described to me as a guilty pleasure. But by the time he entered film school, he had discovered The Virgin Spring and The Four Hundred Blows. For him, “Black Orpheus just totally sealed the deal. . . . You can have samba and an adaptation of a classical Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice and Death and the underworld, and it all takes place at Carnaval in Brazil. And I said, fuck it, that’s it, that’s what I want to do.”

At UCLA, where instructor Josef von Sternberg of The Blue Angel fame praised his student film, Manzarek had no clear-cut career plan: “You know, I was a pothead. I was trying to do as little as possible.” He toyed with making documentaries, then joined with Morrison, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore to form a rock group that hit it big in 1967. But always he remained fascinated by the contrast between music and movies. For him, “Music is close-your-eyes-and-have-an-orgasm. . . . Cinema, on the other hand, is our contemporary church. You walk into the darkened auditorium, and there on a large screen the gods dance for you, tell a story.” Referring to the Javanese tradition of using shadow puppets to convey religious teachings, he noted that today’s moviegoers “are not watching the gods, but we make those people on the screen our gods. Those are our contemporary gods and goddesses.”   

Ray passionately described for me his favorite Sixties films, including Bonnie and Clyde, Blow-Up, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The Doors first watched 2001 while stoned, sitting in the very first row, mesmerized by Kubrick’s long, strange trip.) To him such films, edited like rock videos, struck a chord with America’s youth because they were “just going at the intensity that WE were going at. Everybody in America or all the young people in America, all the stoners in America, were operating at a high level of INTENSITY. And those movies were made at that level of intensity. And it was like TOO MUCH TOO MUCH TOO FAST TOO HARD TOO BRIGHT TOO COLORFUL. TOO LOUD, MAN, TOO LOUD. TOO VIOLENT. And that’s what we said – Yeahhhhh! That’s the way movies are supposed to be.”

Well, Ray, you’ve just swung open the doors of perception for the last time. I do hope you’re enjoying this chance to break on through to the other side.