The extant material was, it may be presumed, all
the studio could fit in its advertising department as the love of the ages.
Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca are the plain ideal of the
feckless playboy, a supremely tasteful man, and the unconfident botanist whose
specialty is ferns.
Enough has been excised to recall the depredations
of RKO, what remains is too much for Canby (“a charming, slightly nutty
film with some awkward moments”), who admired it.
The Heartbreak
Kid
Neil Simon’s An American Comedy. A notable dryness is applied to The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols), from Il Boom (dir. Vittorio
De Sica) for example, with echoes in The
Last Tycoon (dir. Elia Kazan) and Lost
In America (dir. Albert Brooks), mutually. Simon
wins the bet on sheer exactitude.
“I’ve learned that decency doesn’t
always pay off.”
Mikey and Nicky
The absolute structure is a gangland contract.
Whatever is revealed or thought to be revealed under the stress and strain of
it constitutes the film (perceptibly a variant of Pinter’s The Dumb
Waiter, among other things).
This is probably the closest thing to seeing Peter
Falk on stage, in a commanding, detached performance (you can also see him
demonstrating his two-shot technique, “I look at the other actor’s
face, maybe there’s a drop of sweat on the tip of his nose, I look at
that”).
Criticism has been entirely inadequate. “That
mishigas I leave to the Catholics,” says Mikey.
Canby thought he was knocking the film by comparing
it to Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Variety
scented a drama of reversals.
Ishtar
The legendary
disaster, yet another, that brought down Hollywood and ended a great
directorial career, is nothing but amusing (cf.
Rydell’s Harry and Walter Go to New
York).
The point of
departure might be Gene Kelly’s The Cheyenne Social Club joke that
Henry Fonda is a Democrat and James Stewart is a Republican. But audiences that
balked at Mikey and Nicky could not be expected to appreciate this, to
say nothing of the critics.
Vittorio
Storaro’s pictures are worth whatever it cost.
Because it is
written that two messengers of God shall come to Ishtar and remedy the
oppression of the people, Rogers & Clarke do just that by converting a
Commie Pocahontas from the party line and fending off the CIA, which is
supporting the Emir against a coup.
That’s half
the film, the rest in an epilogue describes their fame, Simon & Garfunkel
of a latter day, Rogers & Clarke, the worst songwriters in Tin Pan Alley.
A mysterious
allegory of the Cold War, to be sure, and one that particularly left blank
stares on folks who live by song albums and political causes of one sort or
another, it would seem.
This arrangement
exists, be it known, so that the prophecy is not made public for fear of
“a Shiite rebellion”, or sold to the KGB.
An obscure allegory,
to be sure, but there at the end is Rogers & Clarke’s first album,
recorded by the U.S. Army live at Chez Casablanca, produced by the CIA,
distributed and promoted under Government auspices.