God and Gold: “Aguirre, The Wrath of God”

Circa 1982, my once and future boss Roger Corman signed on to help distribute Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a bizarre adventure set in the jungles of the Amazon. This was during a ten-year period, starting with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, when Roger went all in on the American distribution of outstanding European art films.

 Ten years earlier, Herzog had made another challenging film set in the rainforests of Peru. It was this earlier film that helped give him an international reputation, and it starred the same actor—the manically intense Klaus Kinski—who was later to be at the center of Fitzcarraldo, the story of a 20^th century man obsessed with the bizarre idea of building an opera house in the jungle. Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a period piece, vaguely linked to historic fact, in which a troop of Spanish conquistadores and their local minions hack and raft their way through Amazon rain forests in a bid to find the fabled lost city of El Dorado.

 Aguirre, a mere 94 minutes long, begins with a slow stretch in which a long line of Pizarro’s Spanish soldiers (as well as slaves, indigenous conscripts, Catholic priests, and—to our surprise—a few elegant ladies in sedan chairs) inch their way through a challenging landscape, from lofty mountaintops down to the Amazon River. So slow-moving is this opening section that I suspect the always impatient Roger Corman would have been itching to trim it, if he had any say in the matter. I got a bit restless too, but my hunch is that Herzog was here sending us a message—that this film would require us to step outside of time and give in to the plodding nature of the actual and the symbolic journey.

 And what a journey! Early on, Pizarro recognizes that it might be pure folly to send the entire regiment in search of an enigmatic city of gold. That’s why he creates a small squadron of maybe forty people and sends them off on rafts, giving them two weeks to return with some usable intel. Things go badly from the start: there are perilous rip currents that trap some of the travelers, as well as concealed but deadly Indian tribes who oppose incursions into their territory. In the face of these challenges, genteel and steady commander Don Pedro de Ursúa is overthrown in a mutiny led by the brooding Don Lope de Aguirre.

 From the moment we first spot him, it’s clear that Aguirre (played, of course by Klaus Kinski) is dangerous. You have only to look into his pale blue eyes to see the madness blazing within. He’s a man caught in the grip of an obsession: to find El Dorado and seize its golden treasures, thus ensuring himself fame as well as fortune. Though others on the trek focus on spreading the glory of God, he himself is fixated on the gold he believes awaits those bold enough to find and claim it.

 The last section of the film concentrates on the way the trip implodes, with those still alive (though starving and debilitated) seeming to lose all touch with reality. Aguirre, who likes calling himself “the wrath of God,” is predictably the last man standing. But his vision of the future contains ominous (and sexually perverse) elements I would rather not discuss. And then there are those visitations from what seems to be another world, but perhaps is just the natural order striking back at man’s hubris. I know one thing: I don’t want to see Klaus Kinski in my dreams. 

 

Where the Boys Are: Remembering Connie Francis

`The passing of plaintive songstress Connie Francis brought me back to my teen years. Francis—whose early pop hits included “Stupid Cupid,” “Lipstick on Your Collar,” and a swoony rendition of the old “Who’s Sorry Now?—played featured roles in movies and then segued into belting out standards for adult audiences. Hers was an eventful life: her father chased away an early suitor, the pre-fame Bobby Darin, and none of her four subsequent marriages ended well. In 1974, while staying post-concert at a Howard Johnson’s motel in upstate New York, she was raped at knifepoint, left naked and tied to a chair by an assailant who was never found. Other family tragedies and health challenges followed, but she eventually resumed her singing career, became a victims’ rights advocate, and survived until the ripe old age of 87.

 I will always associate Connie Francis with Where the Boys Are, a 1960 film seen (sometimes more than once) by every junior high school girl I knew. The film was in many ways a template for the beach party movies that followed (as well as for aspects of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures nurse flicks). We girls appreciated Where the Boys Are for zeroing in on the hopes and fears with which we regarded our own futures. Our impending college years—still far off but looming large in our imaginations—seemed to promise so much in the way of freedom, self-fulfillment, romantic love. Still, we could sense that there were dangers to be skirted, and the film makes these quite clear.

 It starts with a group of diverse (but, of course, all white) college co-eds heading down from the snowy Midwest to enjoy spring break in Fort Lauderdale, where vacationing collegians abound. Boys, of course, are very much on the minds of the four. The sensible Merritt (Dolores Hart) is quickly attracted to Ivy Leaguer Ryder (George Hamilton). Madcap Tuggle (Paula Prentiss) is delighted to find that TV Thompson (Jim Hutton) is even taller than she is, and shares her wry sense of humor. Pretty blonde Melanie (Yvette Mimieux) falls hard for a Yalie named Franklin. Angie (Connie Francis) has a few laughs with the goofy Basil (Frank Gorshin), but is mostly alone, wistfully warbling, “Where the boys are . . .  someone waits for me.”  

 All these plotlines play out in ways we can predict. The fun and games that are part of this giant courtship dance give way to a more somber tone when Melanie, who has naively agreed to meet Franklin at a local motel, finds herself a rape victim. Dazed and disheveled, she wanders down the highway and is sideswiped by a passing car. Her hospitalization quickly leads her friends to step back from their own romantic adventures. Maturity, they realize, is something to be prized. At the film’s end they’re returning to college, sadder but wiser.

 As they recuperate from their spring fling, lessons have been learned. (I’m sure our parents appreciated the film sending a cautionary message regarding pre-marital sex.) The light-hearted romance of Tuggle and her guy is quickly over (though Prentiss—making her first film—and Hutton had such strong on-screen chemistry that MGM quickly starred them in three romantic comedies). It’s only Hart and Hamilton’s characters who seem to have a solid connection that can make for future happiness.

 The irony, of course, is that Dolores Hart was not destined for marriage. In 1963 she ended her engagement to an L.A. architect to enter a Connecticut convent as a Benedictine nun. Clearly, she was not heading where the boys are. 

 

The Serpent in the Garden: “Picnic at Hanging Rock”

Many scholars agree that the Australian film industry came of age in 1975, when native Aussie Peter Weir directed Picnic at Hanging Rock. This complex psychological thriller—filmed in South Australia with state funds and an Australian cast—became an international success story, though its ambiguity was not to every taste. On the strength of this film and such other Australian projects as Gallipoli (1981), Weir carved out a major career in Hollywood, starting with Witness and including such distinctive features as Dead Poets Society (1989), and The Truman Show (1998)

 From the film’s first few moments, it’s clear that Weir is brilliant at giving a visual flair to his stories. This one, based on a popular Australian novel that hints that the story it tells is true, begins on the morning of Valentine’s Day in the year 1900. We’re in the countryside, at a school for well-bred young ladies, most of whom are thrilled to be going on a rare outing to a natural landmark a few hours away. For the occasion, all are decked out in pristine white dresses (it’s summer in Australia) along with black stockings and shoes. They’ve let down their hair, and for once have been allowed to remove their little white gloves once they near their destination.

 It's a prim group, apparently, though there are hints from the start that some of them are chafing a bit at all the restrictions placed on them by their strict headmistress and her faculty. They may be tightly corseted beneath their summer frocks but their emotions are running wild and free, as we see when they exchange surprisingly passionate Valentine messages. Once they arrive at the distinctive volcanic outcropping known as Hanging Rock, they seem to let down their guard, as do their official chaperones. They’ve been warned not to try to climb the jagged rock formation because of the many dangers it presents, including insects and poisonous snakes. And yet a few of them do set off to explore their surroundings . . . and several are never heard from again. These include Miranda—blonde and pretty—who has been singled out early on as someone sure of her powers and perhaps eager to go her own way. (I kept wondering if her name was chosen in reference to the heroine of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, someone excited to discover for herself a “brave new world.”)  

 The mystery of the girls’ disappearance is never solved by the filmmakers, leaving some critics and audiences aghast. Instead the focus is on the reactions of those left behind, survivors who feel pain for a whole host of reasons. There are the missing girls’ classmates, of course, but also the school’s imperious headmistress and her staff, as well as the local policemen who’ve helped with the search and a visiting English gentleman who’d eyed the pretty young ladies before they went missing and becomes almost unhinged after their disappearance. The camera picks up the anguish of all of these folk, but also lingers enticingly on the natural world that stands in such marked contrast to the “civilized” strictures of the upper-class Aussies of that era. We see those snakes, those insects, those dangerous critters that the girls had been warned to avoid. But we see beautiful creatures too, like a majestic swan who glides through the film from time to time, seeming to suggest both purity and proud independence.  

 Picnic at Hanging Rock is a frustrating film for those who like their mysteries solved, but it will haunt me for a long time.

 

 

Looking Back at “Rear Window”

When I was much younger, I always had trouble with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 thriller, Rear Window.  Set in New York’s Greenwich Village, it’s the story of Jeff, a globe-trotting photojournalist (James Stewart), who has broken his leg in the line of duty. Stuck in his tiny upstairs flat, with much too much time on his hands, Jeff has nothing to do but spy on his neighbors, through binoculars, in the apartment building across the way. Critics discuss this film as an exploration of voyeurism, with audience members essentially joining Stewart as Peeping Toms. Some recent feminist scholars have gone further, seeing Rear Window in terms of the notorious “male gaze,” the way movies are designed to reinforce men’s stereotypes about the women they can’t stop watching.  

 My problem with the film was this: I too had endured a broken tibia. In fact, I’d endured two, from ski accidents a year and a half apart. (Yes, I quit skiing thereafter.) So I was sensitive indeed to any inaccuracies about life in a plaster cast. I could well understand Jeff’s restlessness, and appreciated the detail of him desperately trying relieve the itchy skin inside the cast by cautiously inserting a long-handled backscratcher. But! Why was he stuck in a wheelchair throughout the film? Why wasn’t there a pair of crutches around?  Yes, a few weeks in a thigh-to-toe plaster cast can indeed seem like an eternity, but why was Jeff so helpless, and so miserable, when his cast was apparently due to come off a mere seven weeks after the accident, thus implying that the break wasn’t all that drastic? (Try wearing a cast for six months sometime!)  

 Fortunately, my legs are both whole these days (knock wood!), which frees me to appreciate Hitchcock’s work on this clever and  original film. I was not surprised to learn that it was made entirely on the Paramount Studios back lot, with Jeff’s fixed point  of view focused almost entirely on a multi-story apartment building that spreads before him like a stage set. It’s a  midsummer heatwave, which means (in an era before the widespread advent of air conditioning) that life plays out through wide-open windows and on fire escapes. He’s spent so much time observing the building’s inhabitants that he’s given some of them nicknames, like Miss Torso (a curvaceous dancer who seems to have few clothes and a lot of company) and Miss Lonelyhearts (who only pretends to have visitors, and appears on the brink of being  suicidal).

 One neighbor (played by the hulking Raymond Burr) apparently likes growing plants in the building’s small flowerbed, but has no use for his neighbor’s little dog. He also doesn’t seem, from Jeff’s wheelchair-bound perspective, to have the best relationship with his invalid wife. He’s a traveling salesman, so perhaps it’s not odd that he comes and goes at odd hours, carrying a suitcase. But Jeff is quick to cast him as the bad guy in a murder mystery. Is he?

 Jeff’s accomplices in trying to solve this mystery that may or may not exist include a peppery visiting nurse (the always delightful Thelma Ritter) and a gorgeous socialite (Grace Kelly) who’s deeply in love with him. Kelly’s Lisa Fremont makes old-time viewers like me recall what was so great about 1950s fashion.  Lisa claims she’s ready to give up her lavish lifestyle to join Jeff in holy matrimony; he’s skeptical, and perhaps he has reason to be. In the course of this film she shows her underlying pluck, but are they ready for happily ever after? That’s one mystery that Rear Window never solves.

 

Bob Mackie, Naked?

I met Bob Mackie circa 1981, on the fabled MGM studio lot. We were on the set for Herbert Ross’s ambitious musical, Pennies from Heaven, starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. They played dreamers who (almost) survive the Great Depression by fantasizing about living lives filled with music, dance, and luxuries like spectacular clothing. Needless to say, this was a dream assignment for Mackie, whose chief claim to fame at the time was his flamboyant duds for TV divas like Carol Burnett and Cher.

 As a big fan of the Carol Burnett Show, I asked the amiable blond Mackie (wearing a polo shirt and looking like a kid) whether he was responsible solely for the lavish gowns in which Burnett greeted her weekly studio audiences. In fact, he explained, he did everything related to costuming for the long-running weekly variety show. This meant bunny suits for the dancers, when needed, and goofy garb for Burnett in her various skits. It turns out—as Burnett herself is quick to admit—that it was Mackie who came up with the crowning sight-gag in a movie parody of Gone With the Wind that got one of the show’s all-time biggest laughs. Burnett plays Scarlett O’Hara, forced to greet a post-war Rhett Butler in a dress hastily crafted from her plantation’s green velvet curtains. When she wafts down Tara’s majestic staircase, viewers can’t help guffawing: her home-made gown still retains its original curtain rod.

 Burnett is one of many celebs interviewed by Matthew Miele for his lively 2024 documentary, Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion. Its title refers to the tantalizingly sheer sheath gowns designed by Mackie first for Mitzi Gaynor and eventually for Cher, who—with her scintillatingly slender figure—has been perhaps his ultimate muse. His glittery gowns hint at nudity but leave the wearer’s private areas discreetly covered, though oh so sexy. For Mackie, all this now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t glitz is fun to design, and has led him to costume everyone from Vegas show girls to Barbie. Another of his more unusual clients in Elton John, who encouraged Mackie’s outrageous side, allowing him to come up with a Donald Duck ensemble and an Amadeus-style frock coat, as well as a sequined baseball uniform for a sold-out concert at Dodger Stadium.

 It's clear that Mackie adores pretty women (and pretty men like RuPaul), but in fact he seems to like pretty much everyone. The documentary carefully hints at his sexual orientation, but also shows homey scenes of the now-eighty-plus-year-old Mackie (grey-haired but still boyish) cozily hanging out with his recently-discovered granddaughter and her children on a sunny patio. (His son Robin, a Hollywood make-up artist, died in 1993 at age 33 after an apparently turbulent life.) Though he dresses top stars, Mackie seems wholly comfortable—even overjoyed—to be dressing conservatively and blending into family surroundings.

 Mackie’s talent for glamour has earned him fame and fortune, as well as many accolades from his peers. (The film opens with him modestly accepting myriad awards from fellow designers and critics.) But the top Hollywood honors have eluded him. He has three long-ago Oscar nominations—for Lady Sings the Blues, Funny Lady, and Pennies from Heaven. In the documentary, Carol Burnett expresses outrage that the 1982 Oscar for costume design went not to Pennies from Heaven but to the year’s big film, Chariots of Fire. In this well-crafted period Olympic Games drama, veteran designer Milena Canonero’s cast mostly wear track suits that look like long underwear. Ah well! I guess no one can win them all. 

 

Hail and farewell to Mitzi Gaynor, an early Bob Mackie muse, who has just died at age 93

Not So Superman

I admit it: there are times I feel pop culture has left me in the dust. Am I just too old to have fun? I had heard many good things about the latest Superman film, written and directed by James Gunn, whose Guardians of the Galaxy had amused me a great deal. My tastes tend to run toward the intellectual, but—for a complete change of pace—I do enjoy extravaganzas with a side order of goofiness.

And everything I read about this particular Clark Kent/Superman combo seemed hugely appealing. I liked the fact that Gunn had apparently chosen to sidestep the angst-ridden, cynical Superman of several recent iterations and made HIS superhero a bit of a dork, or at least a gentle, upstanding guy with slightly old-fashioned tastes.

 It sounded interesting, in this day and age, that as a result of Lex Luthor’s machinations this Superman would come to be reviled by the public as an alien, a dangerous representative of another culture who has illegally invaded Earth. (The complaints in some quarters that this Superman is too “woke” don’t make much sense, in that Gunn’s superhero is far more connected with his folksy midwestern adoptive parents than with the pair who sent him to Earth as their own planet faced annihilation.) 

 I also heard many plaudits for Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane, as a worthy successor to the smart, spunky Margot Kidder back in the Christopher Reeve days. I too was impressed by Brosnahan (who, with her throaty voice, SOUNDS like Kidder, but has a contemporary sassiness all her own). The surprise in this version is that she knows full well about Clark Kent’s secret identity, and is not above questioning his values and his methods—in the name of journalistic integrity, you understand. Spoiler alert: she concludes that she’s really into him, despite it all.

 But I can’t agree with the critics and fans who have oohed and aahed over the presence of the wonder-dog Krypto. Gunn apparently got the idea for inserting Krypto into the story after he himself adopted a pandemic rescue dog with a great talent for screwing things up. Gunn’s tales about the exploits of his own computer-eating Ozu are hilarious, but I felt no particular affection for the clearly animatronic wonder-pup who nearly kills Superman while trying to come to his rescue. (Yes, this Superman needs rescuing more than once: we first see him immediately after his first-ever defeat by a superhuman bad guy, and he seems to get knocked around a lot.)

 So what’s the gist of this particular Superman film? I’ve heard critics say joyfully that this is the Superman of their comic-book-centric childhoods. For me, alas, it’s a loud, long, noisy bounce from midwestern corn (in all senses) to eerie Arctic wasteland to ravaged metropolis to a futuristic “pocket universe” gulag entered through a desert campsite where all of Lex Luthor’s minions wear cheery Aloha shirts. I couldn’t always follow it. Nor, honestly, did I want to.

 The comic-book world of superheroes has been with us since the 1930s. For young boys, in particular, characters like Superman, Batman, and Captain America have promised vicarious adventures and a well-developed sense of right vs. wrong. Hollywood in recent years has benefitted hugely from its superhero connections, and—with movie attendance now flagging—

this year’s Superman and Fantastic Four flicks are much needed. But why does it all have to seem so silly? (I’ve just learned that James Gunn began his career with Lloyd Kaufman’s Tromeo and Juliet, full of severed limbs and possibly the stupidest film I’ve ever walked out on.)  

Girls Gone Wild: Appreciating “Dance, Girl, Dance”

Until recently, I had never heard of Dance, Girl, Dance. This 1940 dramedy about two New York chorines who are roommates and (sometimes) close friends, is hardly Hollywood’s finest hour. It was produced by RKO, one of the less prestigious studios of the industry’s Golden Era, though a place where a number of major talents—think Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn,  and the Astaire-Rogers duo—got their start. Its two female leads were also on their way up: Maureen O’Hara plays the sweet, sensible Judy (though she’s eventually to unfurl a wild Irish temper): all she really wants to do is to burnish her skills as a classical dancer. Her counterpart is Bubbles, played by a blonde and brassy Lucille Ball as a gal who’ll say or do anything to make her way in the world. Of course they both fall for the same guy, though for very different reasons . . . and he turns out to be not worth having. Hijinks (including what we in the Corman world would call a rip-roaring catfight) ensue.

 So why was Dance, Girl Dance inducted in 2007 into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress? Clearly this has to do with the rising reputation of its director, Dorothy Arzner.  Arzner, who from 1927 to 1943 was the only female director in Hollywood, got her start back in the silent era. She entered the industry as a typist, thereby getting a close look into how scripts are constructed, then moved into the editing suite. As director she was responsible for about twenty movies, some of which have been lost. The first woman to helm a sound film, she invented the boom mike (at first a microphone attached to a fishing rod) as a way to improve the sound quality of Clara Bow’s first talkie, 1929’s The Wild Party. She was ultimately the first female member of the Directors Guild of America.

 The Criterion DVD on which I’ve just watched Dance, Girl, Dance pays tribute to Arzner via two fascinating extras. Film scholar B. Ruby Rich (whom I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing about women and sex in the films of the 1960s) hails Arzner as a competent and confident talent who was particularly smart on the subject of gender politics. Apparently skeptical about conventional marriages (the one in Dance, Girl, Dance is a doozy), Arzner seems happiest when focusing on the supportive relationship between women. In this film she also powerfully takes on the ”male gaze” in a scene wherein O’Hara’s character, accustomed to being ogled and laughed at by the lascivious men in her nightclub audiences, turns the tables. Never one to hide her own lesbianism, Arzner—who had cropped her hair short and wore man-tailored suits—made sure we sympathize with her female characters, no matter what they wear and what they do for a living.

 The second featurette on the DVD stars director Francis Ford Coppola, who was one of Arzner’s students after she retired from filmmaking and joined the graduate faculty at UCLA. Coppola  remembers “Miss Arzner” as both smart and gracious: she had a habit of bringing to class cookies that were much appreciated by impoverished film students, and she even once treated him to a simple lunch that felt like a life-saver. This was not the only nourishment she provided. Disheartened and broke, he at one point considered giving up his filmmaking dreams and returning to New York. In the nick of time she persuaded him not to lose heart, that he was going to make it as a film director. And, of course, he did.