Bloodfist: Remembering “Body and Soul”

It’s hard to believe how many Hollywood films (and international films, for that matter) have focused on prizefighting. Such ring-set films seem to have a built-in audience: Wikipedia lists 50 boxing movies that over the years have grossed between $3 million and $300 million at the worldwide box office. At the very top of the list are five Rocky movies, as well as three Creed films that can be considered Rocky spinoffs with an African-American twist. A number of highly successful boxing movies are biopics: see Ali (2001), with “The Greatest” played by Will Smith; The Hurricane (1999), about the ringside and legal woes of Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter; The Great White Hope (1970), the slightly fictionalizing story of early Black prizefighter Jack Johnson; and of course Martin Scorsese’s great Raging Bull (1980) in which Robert De Niro plays the deeply troubled Jake La Motta. (I could name a good many more boxing biopics, but enough is enough.)

 Then there are boxing-related films that qualify as comedies. See for instance, Danny Kaye in a musical called The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), about a neighborhood milkman who accidentally becomes a boxing sensation. The high-grossing Any Which Way But Loose (1978) and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can (1980), both star no less than Clint Eastwood as a trucker who’s also a bare-knuckles brawler, and who roams the American West along with an orangutan named Clyde. In a more sentimental vein, a desperate Charlie Chaplin tries boxing in City Lights (1931), a film that many consider his masterpiece. Even more sentimental is another 1931 flick, The Champ, starring Wallace Beery as an over-the-hill prizefighter desperately trying to care for his young son. And let’s not forget Hilary Swank as a female boxer whose dreams are shattered, along with her body, in Clint Eastwood’s poignant Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (2004)

 My parents, who loathed John Wayne westerns as well as anything to do with boxing, made room in their hearts for John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). It’s the rollicking story of a former pro boxer with a guilty conscience who must reluctantly fight on behalf of the lass he loves. It’s a carefree Gaelic romp just right for St. Patrick’s Day.

 On the other hand, there’s 1947’s Body and Soul, which is a great deal more somber, but is often considered one of the best boxing films of all time. This designation is partly because it was shot by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, who later won Oscars for both The Rose Tattoo and Hud. If part of the attraction of boxing on film is that it allows for intense close-ups of two human bodies in motion, Howe’s in-tight camerawork beautifully conveys the sport’s intensity. Meanwhile director Robert Rossen’s strong cast, led by John Garfield, punches home a powerful story about a young would-be boxer, his girl, his worried mother, and the dangerous men who control him. The film was a critical and commercial hit, accruing three Oscar nominations (it won a statuette for its editing). But its cast and crew paid a high price. The story, which specifically pointed to Jews and African Americans as victimized by powerful WASP interests, was not a safe one to be telling in an era when the House Un-American Activities Committee was on the rise. Star Garfield, screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, and director Robert Rossen all found themselves called to testify before HUAC, and only Rossen (who eventually agreed to name names) emerged unscathed. Garfield continued to make films, but was deeply scarred by the HUAC experience. He died in 1952 at age 39. 

 

Bloody Good Show: The Godfather, Part II

It’s been a long time—easily 50 years, in fact—since I saw the second Godfather film. I know that, snob that I was, I didn’t see the first Godfather when it debuted, because I was too arty back then to be interested in crime dramas. It wasn’t until a friend with impeccable intellectual credentials told me that The Godfather was essential Americana that I discovered for myself the brilliant picture that Francis Ford Coppola had given us of the underside of the American dream. As it turned out, Godfather II would be a feather in the cap of my former boss, Roger Corman. It won six Oscars, including several for Corman alumni. Francis Ford Coppola , who got his start fresh out of film school as Roger’s assistant, took home statuettes for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, while Robert De Niro (who’d been featured in Corman’s Bloody Mama) was honored with the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the youthful Vito Corleone. Moreover, Corman graduate Talia Shire became a Best Supporting Actress nominee for her role as the godfather’s sister. 

 I returned to The Godfather Part II in part to savor the work of the late Robert Duvall, who plays it close to the vest as Tom Hagen, the godfather’s indefatigable fixer and adopted son. But I was also curious to see how a film could be both sequel and prequel to what had gone before. Honestly, I don’t think Godfather II (the first sequel ever to win a Best Picture Oscar) is quite as strong as its predecessor; by cutting between two stories set in two very different eras Coppola sometimes weakens the film’s throughline, and the ultimate conclusion doesn’t pack the wallop of the earlier film. Still, there’s much to admire. I was strongly impressed by De Niro’s work in the Sicily scenes, and the Lower East Side sections of the film allowed us to see his evolution from eager immigrant to godfather-in-the-making. And Coppola clearly had a marvelous time filming massive period crowd scenes, letting us in on the local color of New York’s Little Italy in all its tawdry splendor.

 By contrast, there’s the rustic but tony compound of Michael Corleone and family at Nevada’s Lake Tahoe, where they hole up while he’s busy deal-making with Las Vegas honchos. And we also get glimpses of both Miami and pre-Castro Havana. It is striking watching Al Pacino’s Michael becoming, in this film, more and more his father’s imperious son, the master of all he surveys. Pacino never won an Oscar for playing Michael in three Godfather films Though he earned Oscar nominations for the first two, it took him until 1993 (and the semi-interesting Scent of a Woman) to take home the golden statuette. But when I checked out the dates, I was struck by the fact that less than a year after Godfather II hit the screen, Pacino gave another masterful Oscar-worthy performance in a favorite film of mine, Dog Day Afternoon. That heist film, based on a true story, had Pacino as Sonny, a hapless young man determined to knock over a Brooklyn bank to finance his lover’s sex-change operation. If you see Dog Day Afternoon not long after Godfather II, I suspect you’ll be surprised that Pacino suddenly seems much younger, much shorter, and much more inept than in the previous film. That, of course, is what acting is all about.

 I should also mention that both Godfather II and Dog Day Afternoon also feature the gifted John Cazale, an ominous-lookng character actor who died much too young. 

 

Crowning the King of Comedy

We’re all aware, at least if we watch American television, that right now talk-show hosts are something of an endangered species. Gone are the days when a man like Johnny Carson (or Jay Leno) was a friendly face in our living rooms, poking impish fun at celebrities and politicians without fear of retribution. Now Stephen Colbert’s months at CBS are numbered. And Jimmy Kimmel seemed to have gotten the axe when the powers-that-be disapproved of one of his jokes. (Surprisingly, the backlash was such that he was quickly reinstated.)

 But itl makes you wonder why anyone would risk it all to tell jokes on late-night television.  What exactly is the attraction? The money? The laughs? The opportunity to take on the status quo? The need, pure and simple, to connect with an audience?

 These thoughts flitted through my mind as I sat down to watch an unlikely 1982 film by Martin Scorsese, one that contains no gangsters and no boxers. (Yes, there’s a taxi-driver or two, but not in a role of any significance.) You could say, though, that this—like so many other Scorsese projects—is a film about an obsession. Robert De Niro, starring in his fifth film for Scorsese, plays Rupert Pupkin, an intense young man determined to make it as a stand-up comedian. None other than Jerry Lewis, then in his fifties, plays Jerry Langford, a comedian of the Carson ilk with a wide base of adoring fans. By happenstance, Pupkin protects Langford from a frenzied mob, then tries to worm his way into the great man’s home and heart as a way of launching his own career as a comedian. What does he want? To commence his own climb to fame and fortune via the opening spot on Langford’s nightly broadcast. How does he go about achieving this? With the manic determination that marks so many Scorsese protagonists. And, of course, a little touch of mayhem.

 It's fun to see De Niro, hyper-familiar in brutal parts, desperately playing at being ingratiating. And Lewis, eschewing his usual comic shtik, is convincing as a very private man forced to make nice, much against his nature, to someone who has obviously gone off the rails. For me the big surprise is comedian Sandra Bernhard, who essentially plays De Niro’s partner in crime, working her own surprisingly sexual obsession with Langford while helping clear the way for Pupkin’s leap into the big time.

 This is not, despite its title, a movie that is full of chuckles. But it does use very black humor to probe the excesses of fandom, something which continues—thanks to the Internet—to be more and more a part of our everyday world.  The King of Comedy builds to a climax and then a coda that have aroused much discussion: the movie doesn’t end in the likeliest of ways. Some moviegoers (like me) have appreciated its heavy-duty irony; others are not so sure.

 Admirers of Scorsese are apparently divided on the merits of this film. Some critics of the day embraced De Niro’s character as the flip side of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle; others (including the influential Pauline Kael) were convinced Scorsese had lost his way. If Wikipedia is to be believed, such cinema wonderworkers as Akira Kurosawa and Wim Wenders have ranked The King of Comedy among their very favorite films. Fans in today’s Hollywood include Steve Carell and Jack Black, who would like to star in a remake. I don’t suspect that this will happen anytime soon, if ever. But the nature of comedy, as a subject, never truly grows old. 

 

Robert Towne and Old Hollywood’s Best Alumni Association

The death of screenwriter Robert Towne on Monday made me lament the passage of time. Towne’s great era was the Seventies, when he wrote such gritty films as The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo, while also making vital (though uncredited) contributions to The Godfather and other hits. Though these were all major studio pictures, I will long associate Towne with his Roger Corman days, when he played the male lead in Corman’s 1960 cheapie, The Last Woman on Earth, while simultaneously pounding out the script on the set. This was filmmaking, Corman style: assemble some ambitious pals and get them to take on as many jobs as possible (for as little money as possible). Eventually, the idea was that they’d find out what they were really good at, and maybe move on to the big bucks. For many would-be Hollywoodites, it worked.

 Here's the opening of Chapter 8 of my independent biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers:  Roger Corman and the Academy Awards are not usually mentioned in the same breath. But on April 8, 1975, many of the big winners had a Corman connection. Best Film and Best Director Oscars went to Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather Part II. Best Supporting Actor was Robert De Niro, for his performance in the same gangster epic. Ellen Burstyn was named Best Actress for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, directed by Corman alumnus Martin Scorsese. Other nominees that year: Talia Shire and Diane Ladd, both up for Best Supporting Actress; cinematographer John Alonzo, whose very first film was Bloody Mama; and Jack Nicholson, favored to win Best Actor for his starring role in Chinatown. (The award went instead to Art Carney, for Harry and Tonto, leading Corman to joke that Nicholson’s loss had spoiled his personal sweep.) Robert Towne, who won the year’s Best Original Screenplay honors for his Chinatown script, surveyed the glittering multitudes and said, in the presence of reporter Bill Davidson from the New York Times Magazine, “This joint looks like a meeting of the Roger Corman Alumni Association.”

 For those who aren’t up on Corman’s long career, here’s the lowdown.  Coppola, straight out of UCLA’s film school, went to work as a Corman production assistant, then made his directorial debut, 1963’s Dementia 13, with money left over from Corman’s The Young Racers. In 1970, De Niro had a major role in Corman’s Bloody Mama. Corman produced Scorsese’s second film as a director, 1972’s Boxcar Bertha. Talia Shire and Diane Ladd both acted in early Corman movies, as did Jack Nicholson, who first met Roger (and Robert Towne) in a Jeff Corey acting class, then went on to play in multiple Corman movies including The Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven, The Terror, and his 1958 film debut, The Cry-Baby Killer. Nicholson, who remains deeply appreciative of Corman’s role in his career, recalled for Roger’s own memoir working on films whose budgets were so low that the actors all had to share the same script.

 Not everyone who worked for Roger in the early days became famous. But take the case of Dick Miller, who started out as a would-be screenwriter. Roger saw potential in the short, pugnacious Miller, and cast him in leading roles of films like 1959’s A Bucket of Blood. Eventually he became a featured actor (and good-luck charm) in all the films of a later Corman alumnus, Joe Dante. Eventually he starred in That Guy Dick Miller, a 2014 documentary made by one of his fans. I remember Dick well, and I hope the world will remember Robert Towne too.

 

 

Shine On, Flower Moon: Scorsese on the Prairie

Recently I’ve heard from several admirers of David Grann’s 2017 bestseller, Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. These readers—including Jack El-Hai, a colleague known for his work as a biographer—are disappointed by Martin Scorsese’s new film adaptation of Grann’s book. They find the film, among other things, too long, too lacking in sympathetic characters, and too focused on one family’s egregious behavior to capture the magnitude of the problem the book confronts.

 I can’t agree with them, partly because I’ve never read Grann’s book. So I don’t exactly know what was lost in the transfer from page to screen. I do know that the filmmakers, deeply aware of the strong emotions invested in this project by indigenous groups, worked hard to avoid any accusation that this was a “white savior” project. They didn’t want this, in other words, to be one of those movies in which white-skinned men of good conscience rescue suffering Native Americans from their oppressors. Scorsese even goes so far as to make an appearance at the beginning of the film, spelling out his intentions. And I’ve heard that star Leonardo DiCaprio, a longtime Scorsese collaborator, made the gutsy decision not to star as an heroic FBI agent but rather to play a not-too-bright World War I veteran whose credulous nature contributes to the disastrous love story at the center of the film version.

 Taking the film as a film—and not as an adaptation of an important book—I have to say that I found it enthralling. Though well over three hours long, it caught me in its grip and wouldn’t let go. Partly this is a matter of a brilliant production design, best appreciated on an IMAX screen. I will long be haunted by the memory of Osage men, having sadly concluded that their traditional way of life is dead and buried, suddenly reveling in a spurting plume of crude oil on their land. And there’s a stunning moment much later in the film when firefighters battling an arson blaze seem like inhabitants of Dante’s Inferno.

 Moviegoers who have watched loads of classic westerns will be enthralled by this apparently authentic look at the Osage people, circa 1920, following the discovery of oil. These Native Americans do not live in wigwams or hogans, nor do they dress in buckskin and wear feathers in their hair. Now wealthy because of their land rights, they speak good English, attend the local Catholic church, and glide into their squalid Oklahoma town in taxis driven by white men. Young women like Mollie may proudly wrap themselves in tribal blankets, but also cover their heads in stylish chapeaux. Played by rising star Lily Gladstone, Mollie is hardly the pathetic little squaw of many a western. Strong and spirited, she has no problem in choosing DiCaprio’s Ernest as her husband, and sharing with him (at least at first) an intense connubial life.

 If Ernest doesn’t seem worthy of his bride, it’s at least partly because of his allegiance to his uncle, played by Scorsese regular Robert De Niro as William King Hale. In his illustrious career, De Niro has played many bad hombres. But there must be a special circle of hell for the man he portrays here. King Hale speaks the Osage language and loudly touts his friendship with the Osage people. But ultimately his eye is on those lucrative Osage land rights, and the devil take the consequences.

 A clever (though controversial) device at the film’s end invites us to put this tragic story into perspective. Bravo, Mr. Scorsese.

 

Third Time’s Not the Charm: The Godfather, Part III

In 1972, everyone was talking about the screen version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Who could forget the pageantry, the brutality, Marlon Brando stroking that cat? When awards season rolled around, The Godfather was nominated for eleven Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay. (It was a great year for movies. In the Best Director category, Francis Ford Coppola was beaten out by Bob Fosse and Cabaret.)

 A mere two years later, a second Godfather film showed up on movie screens.  With Brando’s Vita Corleone dead and gone, Godfather II focused on son and heir Michael (Al Pacino), now a reluctant crime boss trying to reconcile himself to his new power. Michael’s story in the present day is interwoven with that of Vito as a young man (Robert De Niro) leaving Sicily in response to the massacre of his family. Unusually for a sequel, Godfather II was perhaps even more admired by critics and audiences than the initial film. It was nominated for nine Oscars, and won an impressive six, becoming the first sequel ever to be named Best Picture, even though it was up against such masterworks as Chinatown.

 You can’t blame Paramount Pictures, which had optioned Puzo’s 1969 novel, for wanting to take full advantage of its golden goose, even though, after the release of Godfather II,  Coppola considered the Corleone saga complete. That’s why Paramount hired a string of established writers and directors to come up with Part III. Some versions had the Corleones working with the CIA in Latin America. One involved a turf war with the Irish Mafia in Atlantic City. In another, Michael Corleone is killed early on, and the entire focus is on his surviving children.

 Some twenty years later, Puzo and Coppola were finally persuaded to return to the project, and much of the original cast signed on. The focus is now entirely on an ageing Michael, still trying to balance his criminal activities with a desire to lead a worthy life. It’s striking to see what time has done to the familiar Corleone family members. Michael is greying and fighting health problems. His estranged wife Kay (Diane Keaton) has a rather silly new hairdo, and her sadness over the hand she’s been dealt is a bit hard to buy. (Since we’ve all seen Keaton be adorably addled in Annie Hall, it’s easy to think she’d face tragedy with a blithe and dithering la-di-da.) Michael’s sister Connie (Talia Shire), whom we first met as a jubilant bride in Part One, has been turned by circumstance into a black-clad angel of death. New characters include Michael and Kay’s grown children. Son Anthony, who has turned his back on his father’s murderous ways, aspires to be an opera singer, and his stage debut in Palermo (in an opera that features Godfather-style violence) provides a nice excuse for the entire family to end up in Sicily. Daughter Mary (played by Coppola’s own daughter, future director Sofia) is her dad’s loyal sidekick. Her performance was much derided back in the day, but the truth is that it’s a thanklessly unconvincing role. And of course there are lots of thugs, connivers, and assassins-in-waiting. (Watch out if you see a cop or a priest on the streets; he’s probably a killer in disguise.)

 What makes Godfather III worth watching? Coppola is still brilliant at staging public spectacle:  a street fair, a night at the opera, an innocent-seeming place where danger lurks. Palermo and Manhattan both look gorgeous. And the music—that plaintive trumpet theme—lures us into a story that might not be quite worth telling.