“Woodstock”: Getting Back to the Garden

The New Beverly Cinema, on Beverly Blvd. in midtown L.A., dates back to 1929, but it was not always a movie theatre. It has housed vaudeville performances, specialized in foreign films, and (when re-named The Eros) devoted itself to porn. My most memorable visit came during my grad school years when—as a fledgling film reviewer for the campus paper—I was invited to come view Japanese auteur Hiroshi Teshigahara’s somber and claustrophobic Woman in the Dunes, all by myself, in an auditorium that normally seats 300. A brilliant film, but hardly my happiest experience at the movies.

Today things are looking up for the New Beverly, which was purchased by Quentin Tarantino in 2010 in order to show old films (always in 35mm prints) that he particularly admires. Last Sunday, I was privileged to see a screening of the Oscar-winning 1970 documentary, Woodstock. Of course it commemorates the famous 1969 festival that attracted some 500,000 young people to what was billed as “3 Days of Peace & Music.”

I’d seen Woodstock when it was released in 1970, a quick nine months after the 1969 summer festival that marked a joyous farewell to the tumultuous Sixties.  Now that fifty years have passed, I found myself struck once again by those youthful concert-goers who were so deeply in love with rock music, weed, sex, and their own bodies. The performance footage is memorable, including Sly Stone trying to take his listeners higher, Jimi Hendrix sneaking a mournful Taps into his apocalyptic version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and Crosby, Stills & Nash admitting (after a masterful “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”) that this was only their second performance as a group. Dale Bell, one of the film’s producers, has explained to me how a ring of expert photographers stationed themselves around the stage and in the light towers to capture the performers from every angle, in all their glory.

 But what I’ll remember best is the documentary footage that seems to cover EVERYTHING about Woodstock: the grouchy locals, the happy hippies, a free-wheeling chat with a cheerful Port-o-San man who admits he has one kid attending the festival, and another in Vietnam. Among the many memorable moments: an attendee insisting that U.S. government forces have deliberately seeded the clouds overhead to try to rain out this parade. What’s lovely is the apparent spontaneity captured on film: young people unselfconsciously grooving to the music, slipsliding down patches of mud after that rainstorm, stripping down to bathe in local streams, tenderly making love. The sound team captures a marriage proposal over the P.A. system, and announces the birth of a baby. (No telling how many babies were conceived at Yasgur’s farm over three days and nights.)

 Dale Bell has authored or edited several related books, including Woodstock: An Inside Look at the Movie that Shook Up the World and Defined a Generation. He readily cites moments from the film, and is happy to quote co-founder Michael Lang on why the festival still resonates in the collective consciousness: “It’s the music. It’s the lyric. It’s the being together.” After a long career that spans public television and documentary film, Bell is returning to his first love with a podcast he plans to call “Woodstock Matters.” Fifty-four years after the crowds dispersed, he wants to probe the festival’s (and the film’s) longterm impact: “I want to sprinkle water on it again, and see what grows.” His first guest? Musician and photographer Henry Diltz, recently honored at the Grammy Awards for his portraits of rock royalty.

 

 

“Anna Christie”: Back When Actors Had Faces

As awards season heats up, with this year’s Oscars slated to be handed out on March 12, it’s hard to believe that Academy Awards were first presented in 1929, when most movies had not yet learned to speak. The November 1930 ceremony, a swanky shindig held at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, gave its biggest prize to the Hollywood adaptation of an anti-war classic, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Amazingly, one of ten films in the running for Best Picture of 2022 is the first-ever German language version of this same “war is hell” novel.   

At the 1930 ceremony in which All Quiet on the Western Front won its laurels, Greta Garbo’s name was very much in evidence: she competed against herself in Anna Christie and something called Romance. (Norma Shearer took home the statuette.) Anna Christie was also singled out for its direction (by Clarence Brown) and its cinematography (by William H. Daniels, an ace who was still earning nominations in 1964). Daniels’ intimate black-&-white camerawork is one of the glories of Anna Christie, in which the screen is filled with enormous close-ups of some of Hollywood’s most expressive actors. Daniels, of course, had learned his craft in the silent era, and he thoroughly understood Norma Desmond’s rueful remark in Sunset Boulevard: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.”

 In Anna Christie there are both faces AND dialogue.  The most dramatic face, of course, belongs to that scintillating Swede, Greta Garbo, who can be mesmerizing whether she’s projecting world-weariness or joy. Then there’s the beautifully ugly Marie Dressler, as well as George F. Marion as Garbo’s long-estranged father, a frequently tipsy sailor who speaks ominously (and with a colorful Swedish accent) about the allure of “dat Old Debbil Sea.” Both the gritty oceanfront environment and the generally foreboding atmosphere mark this as a play by Eugene O’Neill, who won his second Pulitzer for this early work back in 1922. It's a simple story, but a poignant one. In a rundown wharf-side tavern, Old Chris (Marion) gets word that his twenty-year-old daughter is leaving Minnesota to come stay with him. He fantasizes that she’s a healthy, hearty farm gal, but when she arrives it’s clear that life has been hard on her. Because this was Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie was marketed with the slogan “Garbo Talks!” So I’m sure there was some suspense as to what her voice would sound like and what she would say. Spoiler alert: her very first line, after she slumps into the bar-room with a suitcase in tow, is this: “Gimme a whisky, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby!"

 Though Old Chris remains blind to his daughter’s travails back home, it’s quickly clear to the audience that Anna has faced her own rough seas. She hints at abuse by a family member, and it’s obvious that her “job” in the Twin Cities involved prostitution. Still, she forges a relationship with Old Chris, and they manage to live with some contentment on the coal barge of which he’s now captain and crew. But when they rescue some sailors adrift on the open sea, love comes into the picture., and Anna is challenged to open her heart to the possibility of happily-ever-after. Far be it from me to give away O’Neill’s ending.

 Trivia time: There’s a second Garbo version of Anna Christie, shot in German with a largely different cast for the European audience. (“Garbo spricht Deutsch!”) A 2018 opera exists too. And, remarkably, in 1957 the play was turned into a Broadway musical, innocuously called  New Girl in Town.  

 

Navigating “Triangle of Sadness”

I’m told that among fashion-forward folk, the “triangle of sadness” is the area between one’s eyebrows and the top of one’s nose bridge, the space in which wrinkles related to ageing and unhappiness tend to congregate. (Purveyors of Botox, of course, are delighted to help you rejuvenate yourself by plumping out this region.) I had never encountered the term “triangle of sadness” before watching a darkly comedic English-language film that carried off the Palme d’Or  at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Because the film opens with a line-up of buff male models all vying for a lucrative gig, it makes sense that the ominous “triangle of sadness” gets a quick mention. I should add that there are other possible meanings for the phrase as well. Since the main action unfolds on a luxury cruise ship whose voyage goes awry, it’s fair to think of the infamous, mysterious Bermuda Triangle, the graveyard of many a sea-going vessel. And the film contains, if you look at it geometrically, a perverse sort of love-triangle as well.

 I had vaguely heard of Triangle of Sadness when it was first released, but last week’s 2023 Oscar nominations made me sit up and pay attention. Not only is this small film in the running for Best Picture (along with Avatar 2, The Fabelmans, and Everything Everywhere All at Once) but its Swedish director, Ruben Östlund, is one of only 6 candidates for Best Director, in the august company of Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans), Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin), Todd Field (Tár), and the two Daniels whose teeming brains concocted Everything Everywhere. Östlund is also up against the same men (yes, they’re all men) in the tough original-screenplay category. Clearly, some Academy members were extremely impressed.

 I’m not sure whether it’s just coincidental, but the shipwreck aspect of Triangle of Sadness  reminds me a lot of a popular 1902 stage play by none other than J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. It’s been a long while since I read The Admirable Crichton, but the gist of Barrie’s comedy is that is that when some very upper-crust Britishers are stranded on a tropical island, the one traveler with some practical skills upends the traditional social hierarchy and becomes the man in charge. There’s a mild social message here, and a considerably tougher one in Triangle of Sadness, in which an American ship’s captain with Marxist leanings (Woody Harrelson, as you’ve never before seen him) debates political theory with a wealthy Russian oligarch while a storm rages outside. It’s all meant to seem absurdist in the extreme: while the hard-working crew members desperately strive to keep the posh passengers happy and safe, Harrelson’s captain remains focused on his political rejection of the opulent lifestyles all around him.  

 I don’t think it’s accidental: “Screw the rich” seems to have become a major theme in recent years. In addition to Triangle of Sadness, see also Knives Out, Glass Onion, and elements of Elvis, Blonde, and She Said.. Then there are, of course, both seasons of TV’s White Lotus, in which the wealthy and entitled show up at a super-exclusive resort, and bad behavior ensues. Truth be told, we like to be persuaded, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would have it, that the rich are very different from you and me. But—as someone close to me has pointed out—without the ultra- rich you can’t make movies. For the deep-pockets financiers behind these projects, in which the very wealthy are confirmed to be selfish and cruel, is this a matter of self-flagellation? Somehow I think not.