Paris (Texas) When It Sizzles

 I’ve discovered that there really is a place called Paris, Texas. It’s in the northeast east of the state, just spitting distance from the Oklahoma border, and in 2020 its population was 24,000 souls. But in Wim Wenders’1984  film—financed and shot by an international consortium—Paris, Texas is more of a state of mind. It’s one of the first phrases uttered (well, sort of) by a down-and-out drifter to the brother who’s come to rescue him after a four-year absence. And it’s a closely-guarded snapshot of a patch of desert scrub that looks to be in the middle of nowhere. Paris, Texas, eventually, takes on the aura of a dream-state in which nostalgia fuses with a joyous sense of love and connection and future promise, at least for some.

 Wenders’ movie never literally takes the viewer to Paris, Texas. But his European camera-eye (highlighting the work of the brilliant Dutch cinematographer Robby Mūller) deeply loves the state’s wide-open spaces, using natural light to capture them in all their glory. The road-trip aspect of the narrative allows Wenders and Mūller to explore tumble-down towns, seedy motels, and the desert itself. But big cities are part of their vision too. Los Angeles, the end of the road for some aspects of the story, has never looked so beautiful, with its hillside suburban homes basking in the hazy west coast sunlight. And the skyscrapers of Downtown Houston glow in the urban dusk.

 Because Wenders’ canon was largely unknown to me, I expected Paris, Texas to be arty, mostly a feat of cinematography, with human relationships getting short shrift. How wrong I was! The raggedy man painfully inching his way across the desert in the opening frames turns out to have a complex and deeply moving backstory. Some two hours later, we finally find out what’s troubling him, and all the pieces of an emotional storyline click into place. The drifter, a native Texan named Travis, is played by classic Hollywood character actor Harry Dean Stanton in a bravura performance that allows him to register all the emotions: pain, anger, whimsy, gratitude, regret. Others in the international cast include Dean Stockwell as Travis’s good-hearted brother, Aurore Clêment as that brother’s deeply maternal wife, and eight-year-old Hunter Carson (son of actress Karen Black and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson) in a movingly natural portrayal of a boy abandoned by his birth parents years before. Late in the film there’s an important appearance by Nastassja Kinski as a fragile-looking blonde in a peepshow booth. For a while her Texas drawl, belying her German roots, had me completely fooled. But the key scenes in which Travis shares his story  with her from the far side of the glass have a visual and emotional power I will not soon forget.

 The filmmakers involved with this project are an impressive bunch. Second unit was shot by France’s Claire Denis, who went on to become a film director of note. Allison Anders, another significant director in the making (see Gas Food Lodging), served as a production assistant. The original screenplay is by Sam Shepard, the Oscar-nominated actor who as a playwright can be considered a poet of wide open spaces. (L.M. Kit Carson is credited with the adaptation.)

 All in all, this is a motion picture worth seeing and savoring, for its sensitive performances as well as its visual beauty. I’ll give the last word to a fan who posted on IMDB: “Perhaps each person has a film -- usually a masterpiece -- which affects him or her so strongly that it is beyond description. This is mine.”   

 

 

Who’s Really Got The Right Stuff?

The death of aviator Chuck Yeager last week at age 97 took me by surprise. Frankly, I thought he had died long ago. After all, Yeager’s great era was the 1940s, when the World War II flying ace-turned-test-pilot entered the annals of aviation history by breaking the sound barrier. He continued to fly well into the 1960s, setting records while testing out new designs for the U.S. military and for NASA. Though his lack of a college degree (as well as a strong independent streak) prevented him from entering the astronaut corps, he managed to outlive all seven of the Mercury astronauts who were the first Americans to be sent into space. (The last of them, John Glenn, passed on in 2016 at age 95.)

 I learned about Yeager’s contributions while reading The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s 1979 non-fiction account of the Mercury program. Wolfe, a pioneer of so-called New Journalism, dug deep to get at the minute details of the first astronauts’ experiences. But, being a natural-born cynic, Wolfe saw far beyond the heroics, taking a jaded view of seven red-blooded American guys who were being held up to the world as role models. For Wolfe, the true hero was Yeager, whose stoic independence of spirit and complete disregard for celebrity lifted him far beyond the achievements of the astronaut corps, whose chief obligation was to be shot into space as what he called “spam in a can.”

 Following on the heels of Wolfe’s book was Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film version of The Right Stuff, which vividly sets up the contrast between Yeager and the Mercury Seven. Yeager, played in an Oscar-nominated performance by playwright-turned-actor Sam Shepard, is tough, taciturn, and ready for anything. Posted out among the Joshua trees of California’s high desert, he rides horses, drinks deep at the local watering hole, and vies playfully with his earthy, beautiful wife (Barbara Hershey). When the call comes to take a newly designed aircraft through the legendary sound barrier, he doesn’t hesitate, even though he’s secretly coping with broken ribs. Nerves of steel . . . he’s got them.

 The Mercury guys are brave too, though in many cases far less disciplined. The film follows them through a selection and training process that often seems arbitrary and rather silly. And their own quirks don’t improve our view of them.  Alan Shepard (that’s Scott Glenn playing the man who would become the first American in space) has a maddening habit of dropping into Jose Jimenez routines, parroting comedian Bill Dana’s pseudo-Mexican character who was widely popular at the time. (In the film, a Latino medical staffer working with NASA is definitely not amused.) Buddies Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) and Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid), both theoretically family men,are all too ready to violate their marriage vows with Cocoa Beach lovelies. Meanwhile, the long-suffering Mercury wives are angling for White House tête-à-têtes with Jackie Kennedy.

 The one true Boy Scout in the Mercury ranks is John Glenn, winningly played by Ed Harris. He’s depicted as highly protective of his own wife, who suffers from a debilitating stutter. And he’s not above lecturing the others on how their misbehavior sheds a bad light on the program. But he’s also quick to act as a spokesman when the group feels itself exploited by NASA. No wonder he’s the one Mercury astronaut who ended up in politics.   

 Kaufman’s film is not without its flaws, like an ending that never seems to end.  What I’ll remember is Ed Harris’s smile and Sam Shepard’s ritual request for a stick of Beeman’s gum before each bold flight.

 

 

 

Sam Shepard: A Blue-Collar Renaissance Man

“It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.”

This is a quote from Sam Shepard—the late playwright, actor, and all-around cultural icon—who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 2017, at the age of 73. I respond to this particular quotation because I’ve just seen a strong stage production of Buried Child, for which Shepard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979. Like many of Shepard’s writings for the stage, Buried Child is a raw, tough-minded look at a family in crisis, set in a run-down house somewhere in rural America. It has its darkly comic moments, but its basic mood is grimly ironic. It’s not the kind of play one easily forgets.

I suspect most people who know the Hollywood side of Sam Shepard (including his 26-year relationship with actress Jessica Lange) don’t realize he was the author of 44 plays, many of them award-winners. The grotesque but largely realistic family dramas that mark the highpoint of his career include (along with Buried Child) Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind. Some of Broadway’s and London’s best actors have taken on roles he has written. He always resisted performing in his own work, but was persuaded by Robert Altman to play a leading part in a 1985 film production of Fool for Love, one that also featured Kim Basinger, Harry Dean Stanton, and Randy Quaid.

Though Shepard thought of himself primarily as a playwright, Hollywood loved his acting chops as well as his craggy Middle-America look. The son of a former military man who took up farming in his later years, Shepard seemed right at home in dramas set amidst cornfields or battlefields. His first big movie role came in 1978, when he played the key role of a lovelorn farmer in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Five years later, his portrayal of legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff nabbed him an Oscar nomination. His later roles ranged from Steel Magnolias to Black Hawk Down, from Hamlet (he played the ghostly father of Ethan Hawke’s title character) to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. One of his last big roles was as the family patriarch in the all-star film production of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County (2013).

My first brush with a Sam Shepard work came back in the Seventies, when I saw a local production of Shepard’s 1972 play, The Tooth of the Crime. A musical drama set in a vaguely sci-fi future, it involves a lethal battle of weapons and words between an ageing rocker and a dangerous young upstart who seeks to dethrone him. I was never entirely sure what the play was about, but remained mesmerized by its manic energy. What I’m just now learning is that the highly versatile Shepard was also a rock drummer back in the day, a musician who toured sporadically with a psychedelic folk band, The Holy Modal Rounders. He also accompanied Bob Dylan on his Rolling Thunder Revue, charged with coming up with a screenplay for Dylan’s 1978 attempt at filmmaking, Renaldo and Clara. With Dylan he later co-wrote  the song “Brownsville Girl,” and he also collaborated both professionally and personally with Patti Smith.

Truly, Shepard’s was a life well lived. I hope that, despite the bleak vision conveyed in his dramas, he had some fun, and smelled a lot of roses.

Memories of Jeanne Moreau (and Sam Shepard)

It’s not true, as some Hollywood onlookers claim, that Jeanne Moreau was once cast as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Yes, her name came up as producer Larry Turman and director Mike Nichol contemplated having Benjamin Braddock lured into bed by a genuine Française. This would have been nicely in keeping with the French cinematic tradition of sophisticated older women initiating naïve young men into sexu­ality.  But Turman and Nichols decided between themselves that the story of The Graduate needed to be an all-American one, and so Moreau was never offered the role.

It’s no surprise, though, that they considered Moreau for the role that eventually went to Anne Bancroft. Born in 1928, she would have been just the right age in 1967 to play a still-sexy woman with a daughter in college. And Turman and Nichols, both fans of the innovative new European cinematic movement known as the Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave), surely had seen Moreau in some of her most iconic roles. In 1958, she was directed by Louis Malle in Les Amants (The Lovers), playing a bored wife and mother who upends her comfortable marriage in the arms of a much younger archaeologist she’s just met. By the film’s end she has turned her back on her previous life, abandoning husband and daughter for an uncertain existence with her new flame.

 In the U.S. The Lovers was particularly known for its role in a landmark obscenity case A screening of the film in Cleveland Heights, Ohio led to a criminal conviction of the theatre manager for public display of obscene material. He appealed to a deeply-split U.S. Supreme Court, where Justice Potter Stewart (not known as a flaming liberal) wrote a soon-to-be-famous commentary on Jacobellis v. Ohio.  Stewart refused to label The Lovers pornographic, saying that, while he could not narrowly define pornography, “I know it when I see it.” (Happily, while few of the justices could agree on their own definition of what makes something obscene, Jacobellis won his case.)

The other film for which Moreau will never be forgotten is François Truffaut’s provocative Jules and Jim, which startled moviegoers in 1962 via its depiction of a lethal love triangle, with Moreau’s Catherine at its apex. (The two young men involved were Henri Serre and Austria’s Oskar Werner, who would later make a big impression in Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools.)  The film’s inventive stylistics, coupled with its insights into the extremes of human behavior, assured it of serious attention from every film-lover out there.

As Moreau grew older, she won the respect and the friendship of such leading writers as Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, and Marguerite Duras. She acted for Orson Welles, once vocalized with Frank Sinatra at Carnegie Hall, and was briefly married to William Friedkin of The Exorcist fame. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, she had affairs with everyone from Pierre Cardin to Miles Davis. As recently as 2012 she was still making movies. When she died yesterday at the ripe old age of 89, no one could say that she hadn’t lived a full life.

Rest in peace, as well, to Sam Shepard, a talented actor (a Best Supporting Actor nominee for The Right Stuff) who was also one of our best contemporary playwrights. His tough, spare dramas of hard-scrabble family life were performed by major actors and won major awards (like the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child). Shepard’s personal life included a two-decade relationship with Jessica Lange that produced two children. How sad that he succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease at the not-so-advanced age of 73.