The Sound of Jazz
The Seven Lively Arts
CBS Studio 58 for
an hour of live jazz, three cameras say, tight views of the soloists, the various
bands at work (Count Basie, Red Allen, Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Rushing, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Giuffre).
The Lonely
The Twilight Zone
Through a piece
of fantastically intricate imagination, Serling establishes injustice as a
feminine machine only a victim could love and only a hero destroy.
Smight, filming
in Death Valley’s Desolation Canyon, emphasizes the superfices
that are derived from radio drama in a characteristic manipulation of what
magicians call “misdirection,” setting up the prison asteroid nine
million miles from Earth with its solitary inhabitant, and saves his nuance for
Jean Marsh’s performance as the robot, remarkably lifelike and yet not
quite human.
Jack Warden is
the frenetically lonely prisoner, and John Dehner is the captain who supplies
the robot (his name is Allenby, which curiously
anticipates Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia).
The Lateness of the Hour
The Twilight Zone
The title
signifies a state of affairs in which the desire for comfort has led to dependence
on servants. These are revealed to be robots invented by the master, whose
inquiring daughter is another creature, reprogrammed in the end to supplant the
crowd of maids and footmen.
This is the acrid stuff of an Albee play, taped live in front of several
cameras and displaying not only Smight’s skill in this thrilling genre,
as well as John Hoyt’s positive genius for it and superb performances by Inger Stevens and Irene Tedrow,
but also a stunning coup de télévision, a maid
thrown down the stairs who lands in front of a camera at the foot and smiles.
It’s the
other way of saying that children used to have chores now done by machines (the
opposite of, for instance, “A Hundred Yards Over
the Rim”).
And then there is
Lumet’s curious story about Midnight
Cowboy, so many answer prints were needed to get the color right,
Schlesinger told him, whereas with digital movies there’s no problem,
says Lumet.
The Night of the Meek
The Twilight Zone
In his second
turn at a live taping for The Twilight Zone, Smight has mustered the
unit to its full capabilities, as required by a script that calls for evident
magic and a sleigh drawn by reindeer.
Serling’s
analysis makes clear the influence of Pichel’s The Great Rupert on
De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano. The meaning of Christmas is revealed, and Santa
Claus is a saintly man who finds an elf waiting for him on that sleigh, after
giving himself out to be “an aging, purposeless relic of another
time”.
Art Carney leads
the cast in quite a stunning display of live television that partly depends on
meticulous preparation of its effects, and partly on the medium shot (beloved
of Schlesinger in Billy Liar) which brings things into view out of a
continuum unseen beyond the camera.
Twenty Two
The Twilight Zone
The stripper who
calls herself an “exotic dancer” collapses with nervous exhaustion
and dreams every night in the hospital of going down to the morgue where a
nurse says, “room for one more, honey.” Without entering this room
called Two-Two, the patient runs back upstairs, night after night.
The doctor calms
her, she is released. About to board a plane at the same gate number, she is
met by the same nurse wearing a stewardess’s uniform and saying the same
thing. The passenger runs back into the terminal, the plane takes off and phallically explodes without her.
Smight has this
to film with his live unit on videotape, which adds to the marvel. Barbara
Nichols is the ecdysiast, Jonathan Harris her physician, Fredd
Wayne the dapper, snappy agent.
What Really Happened
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
The structure
presents this as incident and trial with contradictory evidence given as
flashbacks from two viewpoints.
A woman is
married and widowed at 17, left with child, studies fashion modeling, puts the
boy in care of a friend and widow, is married again, this time to her former
husband’s employer, takes the friend with her as housekeeper and mother
of the boy.
The husband is
wealthy but the wife is extravagant. The boy is something of a nuisance to him.
The housekeeper is fired, and poisons the husband’s nightly glass of warm
milk. The wife is tried for murder.
The mother-in-law
testifies against her as frivolous and adulterous, but the general tenor of
Smight’s direction supports the defense. Two scenes are played twice, the
wife confronted with bills she either scoffs at or modestly acknowledges, and
an old romantic interest (who has made a fortune mining South American tin)
whom she either encourages in his lecherous advances or whose kindness she
relies on for a loan.
The dramatic
conclusion leads to a wry and fleeting consideration of justice in its course.
The housekeeper, Hitchcock explains, was arrested and tried for murder.
“She hoped for a suspended sentence,” but what really happened was,
“they suspended her.”
The Paragon
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
The lady in the
title is a meddlesome busybody who makes it her business to run
everybody’s lives for them, the least she does is make them feel
inferior, at her best she kills “what allows them to survive”,
she’s the Ibsenite do-gooder by way of
O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, really a sadist and a
sociopath, whose response to criticism is to say that she is not loved.
Her husband
finally does her in with an overdose of sleep medication, reluctantly and after
a warning she’s too blind to heed. The burden of this creature is
sustained by Joan Fontaine in upswept hair and smiling contempt, a fountain of
malice who “does things for people”. Her
very patient dutiful husband (Gary Merrill) bids her hold her tongue in vain,
and retails to her face the list of crimes and follies she’s engaged
upon, the cruelties and agonies she’s inflicted. “You are
deadly,” he concludes. Friendless, his business failing, everyone afraid
of her, he offers one last chance, sell the house, go to Europe together. She
wouldn’t dream of it.
The preparation,
researched out of Principles of Medical Jurisprudence, causes her a
dream of darkness visible before curtains.
The Lonely Hours
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
The women and children
of this episode enact the judgment of Solomon for the benefit of the audience.
There are no men at all, Mr. Henderson is away at a military base developing
rockets, Lt. Novotny of the police waits downstairs
while a policewoman does the basic sorting.
This is the tale
of a lodger, Mrs. Williams, who takes a room at the Hendersons’
and cheerfully baby-sits their infant son, whom she takes for her own after the
hospital deliberately, as she believes, swapped him for the premature baby who
died at birth, her husband having left her some time before. The Hendersons also have three young girls, who first think
Mrs. Williams is an “atomic spy”, and refine their theory into her
spying on their father’s work.
Smight’s
direction must certainly have been helped by the presence on the set of Nancy
Kelly, Gena Rowlands, Joyce Van Patten, Juanita Moore, and so on, the children
are about ideal. He has only one fancy shot, a slight up-angle on Rowlands as
Mrs. Henderson traipsing off to the kitchen for more coffee while Kelly as Mrs.
Williams slips a mickey into her cup. He cranes up
for a normal perspective on the return, concluding the shot.
The Dark Pool
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour
The situation is
prefaced by an exterior sunnily set beside the pool. Baby’s in his crib, watched over by mother’s own
Scottish nanny, with Pedro the houseboy also in attendance. Mother comes home,
a Yankee just learning to ride, orders a quick drink, dark looks all around, oh
well, make it a light one. She goes inside to talk to her husband on the
telephone, in a few seconds the baby climbs out of his crib for the first time
and drowns.
The nanny takes
the blame because of the mother’s reputation for drinking, and is
banished from the house by the husband after the coroner’s inquest (which
attaches no blame to her). And now comes the main action, a woman pretending to
be the baby’s real mother (he was adopted) has come into knowledge of the
accident through Pedro, and wants the house, the husband, everything.
The hell of this
is finally dispelled when the truth is made known all around.
Hitchcock as host
spends the episode dealing with a giant firecracker, almost like an unexploded
bomb.
I’d Rather Be Rich
The story goes
back into the realm of Lubitsch with the original scenarist, Hanns Kräly. Polished and repolished, it attains the perfection seen in the title
number right at the start, behind the credits.
The romance of a
highly-successful singer and a corporate heiress, interrupted by a poor chemist
with a “viscous ceramic” for the space program, proves that
chemistry, not æsthetics, drives love.
Howard Thompson
of the New York Times did not perceive a jot of it, not a tittle.
Halliwell follows him in honoring Chevalier only.
The Third Day
A succession of
nightmare episodes pellucidly filmed with an
exacerbating deadpan. Herbert Marshall as the paterfamilias moves one finger
only, the company makes fine pottery and is named Parsons, the district
attorney collects medieval weapons, the jazz singer is a slut, her husband is
Arte Johnson, Mona Washbourne works for the CIA
“overthrowing...” (her joke), and so on, a Socratic amnesia case,
one’s ass in a tub of butter slowly bared like Alec Guinness in
Hamer’s The Scapegoat, tranquilly recollected emotion, from the
author of The Desperate Hours
(dir. William Wyler).
“Twaddle”,
said Bosley Crowther (New York Times).
“Interminable chat”, says Halliwell’s Film Guide.
Harper
Boleslawski’s dreaming policeman (eyes open, alarm clock, eyes
closed), athletic. Daylight, a sink full of ice cubes. Leftover
coffee, bitter, the wife. Pistol in shoulder holster,
swatting flies. The perfect gumshoe.
Samson
and the temple of the Philistines (“well, the happiness market’s
crashed, baby”).
“You know, L.A. is the big league for religious nuts.”
“That’s
‘cause there’s nothin’
to do at night.” One of the
detective’s several personæ, a jocular lowbrow.
The deep
aquamarine of the Sampson swimming pool is very characteristic, like the deep
haunches of Sampson fille,
who nevertheless doesn’t swim but dances on the diving board, and the
deep ensconcing in the traditions of the detective film before Polanski’s
Chinatown (as Harper drives up to the Sampson manse for the first time,
Felix the chauffeur is puttering in a basin like Mulwray’s
gardener), “no wonder your old man took to the sauce, I would too if I hadda sleep in here.”
“You’re
not very hip, but I believe you. Except you’ve got
cop’s eyes.” Smight’s night work in the Palisades is
especially dreamlike, and that’s where you get the pilot’s James
Cagney. “You sure the handwriting is his?”
“That
moronic scrawl is unforgettable,” Bette Davis for Mrs. Sampson.
“Your
husband keeps lousy company, Mrs. Sampson, as bad as there is in L.A., and
that’s as bad as there is.”
“Miranda? Hello Miranda! Miranda’s coming.
How are you?”
“Suicidal.
I’ve just had the nicest chat with Stepmommy.”
Edward Everett Horton for the lawyer, “poor nice Albert.”
“I am nice.”
“The bottom
is loaded with nice people, Albert, only cream and bastards rise.”
“Well,
what’s your big
deficiency?”
“I have
none, I’m a bloody saint.”
“You
probably still think a woman’s place is in the heaume.”
“Not in my heaume.” Sissy Goforth’s
villa in Boom (dir. Joseph Losey) two
years later, from Tennessee Williams’ The
Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, a topnotch analysis.
“Can I just look around?”
“He’ll
be risking the wrath of the sun god.”
“So
I’m lionhearted.”
“I only
laugh when it’s funny, my own stupidity maybe.” There is a touching
strobe effect as Harper drives up with the girl to the Sampson gate under a
tilt-and-pan, on a much smaller scale than the one at the end of Losey’s The
Sleeping Tiger. “Ah, it’s a kidnapping, I got the note...
Austin Schwartz-Marmaduke of the Schwartz-Marmaduke Foundation for Ballroom Education... I’m in
a bar at Castle Beach but I’m hiding from an idiot cop in the men’s
room, now that is funny.” The
complicated fight sequence in the temple also perhaps has flickers of this, under
the sign of Figueroa. “Is there no end to your sacrilege?” All of
which is mentioned exclusively for the benefit of those who attribute to the
director technical competence beyond the demands of art, in the very strictest
sense. “Disgustin’ly lucrative, but, as
you suggest, hardly enrichin’ to the
soul.”
The
“fish-eyed faggot” dies on the docks, the bloody saint goes home to
his wife (Losey remembers the serpentine, two serpentine columns). “At
least you’re honest.” Mrs. Harper is certainly by way of Fellini.
“I’m gonna crack this thing, Albert, I swear to ya, it’s gonna be laid out.” The
pilot’s death, at the hands of Albert. The
“gorgeously unendurable” end of the Philistine, at the hands of
Harper. Death of Sampson. Flight
of the happiness-seeker.
The view from
Harper’s wrecked car is repeated a year later in Penn’s Bonnie
and Clyde.
Samson as a type
of Christ yields the final image of Jesus and Pontius Pilate, prepared from the
opening scene of Harper in his office domicile..
There remains to
be established the crystallization of a response to Hawks’ The Big
Sleep, a monumental structure. In the meantime there is Penelope Houston
(“it isn’t a bad try, but it never really slips into
overdrive”) and Pauline Kael (“nothing
needs justification less than entertainment; but when something planned only to
entertain fails, it has no justification. A private-eye movie without
sophistication and style is ignominious”), cited in Halliwell’s Film Guide (”formula Californian
detection”).
Bosley Crowther of the New
York Times thought Bogart was missing, that’s all, “eventually it seems a
bit too obvious, imitative, old-fashioned and, worst of all, stale.” Variety, “imbalanced concept, resulting in overlength and
telegraphing”. Film4, “hardly
groundbreaking stuff.” Time Out, “very minor”.
TV Guide, “doesn't begin to approach
the big leagues of hard-boiled detective films.” Michael Costello (All Movie Guide), “consistent with
the mediocrity which characterized the director's career.”
The Fourth Man, private eyeless in Gaza.
Screenplay
William Goldman from the author, Technicolor and Panavision
cinematography Conrad Hall, score Johnny Mandel, one of the Gershwin-Kastner masterworks.
The
Edgar Allan Poe Award.
Kaleidoscope
One might rig
every gambling table in Europe by marking cards at the factory in Geneva (Crowther thought this “a fictional
supposition of the most implausible sort, of course”).
Scotland Yard is
onto the caper, the clever fellow is hoist with his
own petard and sat at a London poker table against the new Napoleon, a wartime
swindler.
Never seen by any
critics with their eyes open, subsequently dismissed even by its makers, as one
is given to understand, and altogether a brilliant film with extremely sharp
acting by Warren Beatty and Clive Revill perfectly
caught in Smight’s astute direction, matched by Susannah York and Eric
Porter as the copper’s daughter and the Emperor, respectively.
The Secret War of Harry Frigg
Five brigadiers,
two American, two British and one French, are captured
by the Italian Army in a Tunisian Turkish bath and interned at a sumptuous
villa in Northern Italy, where they live according to their tastes and cannot
agree on an escape plan.
There, exactly,
is the point of satire.
Weeks and weeks go
by, the U.S. Army sends in a buck private stockade escapologist, promoted to
major general, to order them out and lead the way.
And so, the issue
is joined.
“Down-at-the-mouth
and desperately boring” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).
“Slow,
uninventive and overlong” (Halliwell’s Film Guide).
No Way to Treat a Lady
Between
Cukor’s A Double Life and Fleischer’s The Boston
Strangler, Smight’s tale of a Gotham director in the playhouse named
after his late mother. He likes to dress up and act a part and kill middle-aged
women, thus you have a picture of the seven lively arts as they are sometimes
made to appear.
The
plainclothesman on and off the case lives at home in the shadow of a successful
brother and badgered by a Jewish mother.
His new shiksa girlfriend swang and swung
and now is a Lincoln Center docent, also a witness.
“It has
absolutely no reality,” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times.
Variety would have liked to see “stronger, more
appropriate direction”.
“A
bumpy ride” (Halliwell’s Film Guide).
The Illustrated Man
A film that
profoundly baffled the critics, “and I mean baffled”, as the
title character would say.
Groucho Marx is a
good key, you can learn a lot from Felicia, it’s
the story of a man’s married life from the rose in the hand to the house
that disappears with the wife.
And all the time,
a tale told by one hobo to another, partly imagined.
A superb film,
needless to say, except the reviews drew a total blank.
The Traveling Executioner
America in World
War I, expressly centered on Kazan’s East
of Eden as a comfortable approach, Henry King’s Wilson and Wellman’s Lafayette
Escadrille convey the dilemma of distance, the rueful necessity of repeating
the experience is structurally defined.
At the base and
bottommost rung of backwash yahooism, a distant
strain of poetry, “Homer and Hamlet”, in which The Lady’s Not for Burning
translates “her ass is just too good to cook.”
Variety, “macabre, tastefully seamy”. Time Out, “grotesque
theatrical farce”. TV Guide, “black comedy... macabre script”.
Michael Betzold (Rovi),
“unusual
black comedy.” Halliwell’s Film Guide,
“oddball fable without apparent moral.”
In the midst of
it all, Pound at Pisa, or something else again.
Rabbit, Run
Pascal’s
grace and refractoriness and where one is (Eliot’s “the order of
nature, the order of mind, the order of charity”), quite humorously
applied to an American’s existence in some Eastern town.
His marriage sets
the seal on his childhood, she’s just a sodden imbecile, he sells “phony stone siding”.
He gets himself a
girl and leaves home, the wife has her baby, it dies, he
leaves home and mistress for good.
Last
sight of him running along a road from the town, sounds of nature.
This is expressed
with as much frictional detail as possible, tempered by the wit of the occasion
and the perfectly caustic narrative view.
Dead Weight
Columbo
No tricks here,
as the story is of the “Purloined Letter” kind. Maj. Gen. Hollister,
USMC (Ret.) runs a business in collusion with Materiel Command overcharging the
Government. The Inspector General is onto the crime, so Hollister kills his
Procurement Officer to erase any connection, then he
seduces a vague (“creative and artistic”) eyewitness.
It’s all
very subdued and very quietly played, until there’s a terrific trumpet
blast from Clete Roberts on TV, retailing the
General’s career, “in the Korean War, commanding a regiment of
armored cavalry, Gen. Hollister captured the imagination of the American
people.”
The somewhat
curious set representing Gen. Hollister’s home at the marina serves as a
foil to a strange evocation of Hitchcock’s Rope (after the murder,
two cadets carrying out a crate full of memorabilia).
A young patrolman
modestly describes himself as a “slicksleeve.”
Smight’s self-restraint is repaid with Lt. Columbo walking out of frame
past the camera followed by Gen. Hollister pausing in it with a reflective
look.
“Got a
match?”, asks the Lieutenant. The General walks
over to a foreground table, and the camera tilts down to the golden table
lighter he picks up, only to make the faintest of all possible allusions to
Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame.
Gen. Hollister
hides his victim’s body in a plastic bag (cf. Young’s Wait Until Dark) behind a revolving panel.
His strategy is to overwhelm all opposition with his personal presence or with
the creation of a new dynamic (to borrow a buzzword). Taking the eyewitness out
to dinner accomplishes the first. Lt. Columbo, who’s
“no Columbus” but full of questions, gets a “test run”
out at sea aboard a roaring power yacht.
Somebody’s Out to Get Jennie
McCloud
The main
structural point is in Jennie’s description of painting. A horizontal
line divides sky and earth. Sky is thought of as “a blue
nothingness,” which usually is filled by steeples and such,
or formerly by cherubs and angels. For Jennie (Julie Sommars),
however, it’s “full of unseen forces.”
The opening shot
reflects this. Sky and earth, a helicopter descending.
It lands beside a lake, Robert Devlin (Cameron Mitchell) steps out, there is an
explosion and the company bookkeeper still inside is killed.
Gen. Touhy (Barry Sullivan) has decided to liquidate his
partnership with Devlin. The bookkeeper, a CO and “bleeding heart”
only Devlin would have hired, is accused of embezzlement,
the blast might have killed both. Devlin goes on the lam in Mexico, but his
secretary Jennie knows of the plot, she’s a sensitive creature and gets
the Gaslight treatment from Gen. Touhy’s
tool Ira Mastin (Gabriel Dell), an insurance
investigator with a showbiz past.
In the end,
McCloud is walking down a sidewalk viewed from above. A flower drops into view.
He picks it up in a reverse angle showing the sky as background. The flower has
a note wrapped around it, from Jennie in her hospital room (with Devlin).
A major work from
Smight, closely and visibly related to Harper. He has the finest
technique ever exhibited in the omnibus, which means, for example, that rapid
tracking pans are executed smoothly and precisely, dolly-ins and dolly-outs
construct the scene at a rare angle, and the pool is reflected in the patio
sunshade moving in the breeze on a conversation over money and drinks of a
sunny day.
A Little Plot at Tranquil Valley
McCloud
This incomparable
vaudeville begins at the zoo’s Beaver Lagoon, where McCloud has been sent
by dispatch to counsel a keeper on a New Mexico beaver that won’t eat.
Meanwhile, a tour
guide at Tranquil Valley explains the vision of eternal peace for all fifty
states starting at two hundred dollars plus tax and limousine charges. The
place is run by Marvin Sloan, a fierce man of enterprise who boasts of his
firm’s success and of “the biggest independent smuggling outfit
east of the Missouri River.” His wife is greatly occupied with getting
her brother Ralphie out of TV repair and into the
business.
Ralphie is an imbecile (a “ziphead,”
Sloan calls him), and makes a mess of Sloan’s master plan. Morgan and
Richard, who are “graveyard technicians” at Tranquil Valley, are to
go with Ralphie to Olton Pharmaceuticals in the
uniforms of Security Transfer, Inc., present an invoice and drive out with half
a million dollars worth of penicillin, which Sloan will dilute and sell for two
million dollars south of the border. Ralphie shoots a
guard, is shot himself and captured.
The tour guide
leads a party through the grounds and buildings, describing some of the famous
clientele, a silent film actress, for one, and a protest leader “who was
the first to advocate non-violence while confronting the police.”
Sloan has his
picture taken for publicity, and deals with his wife’s wrath. An
attorney, Walter McKay, pays a call on Ralphie in the
prison ward, thinking he’s a whiplash case, and departs hurriedly after
suggesting Ralphie make it easier on everyone by
taking his own life.
McCloud is
kidnapped at a rendezvous at the Statue of Liberty, but the Commissioner
won’t swap prisoners. Richard blurs his vision with eyedrops,
and Morgan (who likes to quote the Bard) counsels patience, but McCloud escapes
from his waterfront hole and brings back the police by remembering sounds along
the way.
Richard’s
had 72 head colds in the past year, and is developing a limp. Morgan senses
it’s worriment over mortality, counsels
patience.
Embalming Rooms 8
through 15 are busy diluting the penicillin, reports Dr. Dudley, a Tranquil
Valley embalmer with a nursing credential at the hospital, who is dispatched to
dispatch Ralphie. Chief Clifford keeps the body under
wraps, provoking a second attempt.
McCloud investigates
Tranquil Valley, passing by a funeral for the incredible Judge Harper. One of
the bereaved asks the Marshal if the Judge owed him money as well,
then offers to sell him Everglades property, “the whole thing’s
going to be built around an amusement park, we call it Reptile Land.”
McCloud drives
off in a hearse full of penicillin followed by Morgan and Richard in a Tranquil
Valley van.
Sloan blames his
troubles on “some bad-apple employees who have banded together for some
criminal purpose, but to accuse me, a mortician!” Chief Clifford
puts him in irons. McCloud marvels to the Chief, “down in Taos, the only
time they’ll escort you through a cemetery is when you’re in the
box!”
The tour
guide’s voice is heard at closing time announcing a 9 a.m. re-opening
“under new management.”
The main lines
come from Reed’s The Third Man by way of Richardson’s The
Loved One. There is ample material from various sources. Much of the
vaudeville seems to reflect William Friedkin’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s. The concealment gag comes from
Yates’ Bullitt, and there is a direct citation of Maté’s D.O.A.
(McCloud jabbed in the belly by Richard retorts like Frank Bigelow upon
Chester). Philip Dunne’s Blindfold supplies the mode whereby
McCloud retraces his steps to his captors. There is even a joke on Jack Smight
in the judge’s eulogy (Judge Harper, that is, “think not of the
lies and libelous accusations flung at him by the pseudo-intellectuals of the
Northern press...”).
The aim of the
satire is revealed by the initials of the funeral home (just as the key of
Hitchcock’s Spellbound is partly found in the name of the asylum).
A most brilliant
episode, filmed on location in New York.
Let’s Hear It for a
Living Legend
Banacek
“T.
Banacek, Restorations”. His father was replaced by an insurance company
computer and given a gold watch.
Things disappear,
American masculinity (“Let’s Hear It for a Living Legend”),
Impressionist paintings (“The Greatest Collection of Them All”), he
finds them. A wedding coach, a Book of Hours, a jeweled crucifix, a
thoroughbred horse, things of great value impossible to miss, heavily insured
and requiring his services.
A medical
computer so vast it has its own building simply vanishes, for example, gone
like the passenger jet on a Nevada airstrip, and the prototype
“safe” automobile on a railroad flatcar in transit, defying all
logic.
“I make a
good living at it,” he says, referring to this terrible wave of crime
lapping at the door of his headquarters in Boston, where insurance companies
pay him a sizeable fee each time.
Yours Truly,
Johnny Dollar, “the man with
the action-packed expense account”, is his progenitor, also Harry
Houdini, the magician who could make elephants disappear before a crowd of
witnesses.
A surly football
player disappears from the field in the midst of a scrimmage. Banacek reviews
the videotape, interviews witnesses and associates, uncovers the plot.
His own
father’s experience lends him empathy for the ballplayer, whose father
was killed overseas in 1944. Independent analysis is Banacek’s stock in
trade, “which is why I’m not working for you or anyone else,”
he tells the team’s publicity-minded owner (Robert Webber) with
$2,000,000 in ransom to pay.
Smight is in great
form throughout, nowhere more so than on a school playground where Banacek
interviews the player’s disaffected wife (Stefanie
Powers), a teacher, he maneuvers the camera discursively around a
screen-filling chain-link fence and pans right just at the close to watch a
little girl sliding down a slide, before cutting to the football field at
night. He films Webber and Peppard delivering dialogue while jogging in one
continuous take, and later on at an unpromising angle John Brodie’s
adhesive way of catching a football, ending in a stadium vomitorium
alla Fellini.
Linda
Who has a lovely
lie to tell that locks her husband up for a crime passionel
she committed for gain.
Folie à deux is on her side, but madness is not a communicable
disease, the victim’s husband is amenable to reason.
Ed Nelson as the
accused is practically Jack Benny up a tree, John Saxon as the rival plays an
earnest trouper touring the provinces, Stella Stevens en
règle the hardened prima donna,
with John McIntire, Ford Rainey, Alan Fudge and Ross Elliott on the side of law
and order, by Merwin Gerard out of John D. MacDonald.
Frankenstein
The True Story
The
Doctor’s dead brother is the impetus for the experiments under the sway
of a confrere invoking Prometheus, the fiancée’s
visit brings a note from Losey’s The
Servant.
Pieces
of quarrymen for the creature, after a fall.
“You know,
I find I enjoy being a criminal.”
“The
Bible of the New Age... the second Adam!”
The
brain of the cracked confrere. The sun’s rays. The apparatus certainly recalls The Traveling Executioner. “Beautiful” the result.
The Harper theme in the collected butterfly
given life but smashed by “Mrs. Blair’s Bible” for flying at
the fiancée galvanized, “evil”.
In the memorable
phrase, “the process is reversing itself!” Cf. Hitchcock’s Torn
Curtain throughout. “You who know nothing of greed and hatred, you
shall teach us how to live.”
“Fig—Fi—Figaro!”
“My name is
Legion, for we are many.”
“Strange,
he seems vigorous enough, and yet I sense—” The creature’s
coldness is also a feature of Losey’s These
Are the Damned.
With
James Mason from The Trials of Oscar
Wilde (dir. Ken Hughes) and Ralph Richardson from Doctor Zhivago (dir. David Lean) among the stellar players.
“Your Adam
is hardly an inspiration, if I may say so, this time we shall start with
Eve.” Chemical sorceries, a pre-Raphaelite creature,
Mason as Laughton in Island of Lost Souls
(dir. Erle C. Kenton). Shaw’s Pygmalion
gradually, and there follows very shortly Embryo (dir. Ralph Nelson), “an
angel”, a recording angel in her mimicries.
John
Osborne’s A Patriot for Me on
the “dainty conscience”, positively Salome’s Last Dance (dir. Ken Russell). “We’ll
make it back to England, Bligh did it, and so can I!”
The Arctic finale
beats everything (Arthur Ibbetson cinematography, Gil Mellé
score).
Tom Milne (Time Out), “a misogynistic reading
is clearly intended.” Alan Jones (Radio
Times), “the most striking aspect of the production is the sympathy with which the
monster is portrayed by Michael Sarrazin, minus the once obligatory nuts and
bolts, and his relationship with his creator (Leonard Whiting) has a tragic
resonance.” Guy
Adams of the British Fantasy Society, “a hint of homo-eroticism”.
Airport 1975
Kubrick’s Spartacus
proposed the feminine hysterics of the dictator Crassus
as a mental derangement with disastrous consequences (this is reflected in the
finale of Losey’s Modesty Blaise,
perhaps).
Star Trek accomplished a thorough analysis by having a
female rival change bodies with Captain Kirk (“Turnabout
Intruder”, dir. Herb Wallerstein).
And yet, the most
radically surreal transformation of this theme appears in Smight’s Airport
1975, which simply imagines a stewardess at the controls of a 747, from
Andrew L. Stone’s Julie.
The approach to
this is a great study of femininity in the abstract, as it were—thus the
great gallery of women (Gloria Swanson, Myrna Loy, Nancy Olson, Susan Clark,
Helen Reddy, Linda Blair, etc.) without men.
The introduction
of a man (“m’introduire dans ton histoire,” as Mallarmé wrote, “to
introduce myself in your tale”) is transfigured along the lines suggested
by Altman’s Countdown, a film about the first moon
landing—specifically, the line of approach is the dictum that the first
man on the moon be not a military man, but a civilian.
This is one of
the most beautiful dramatic constructions on film, by dint of the intensity and
singleness of purpose brought to bear upon it (the model is, perhaps, La Voix Humaine). Smight treats
the crash very slightingly, and almost immediately
cuts away to Efrem Zimbalist,
Jr. as the pilot blinded like Œdipus.
The magnificence
of the aerial sequences is matched by the refinement of the characterizations
as reflections of the central gag. The primary weight falls on Karen Black, and
she carries it with a perfection that alone justifies the film and makes it
marvelous. The withdrawn abstraction of Charlton Heston’s performance is allusive,
and it is hard to think of a better representation anywhere of the actress and
the director (or even the writer), for example, not even in Fellini or Truffaut
(or Bergman).
In view of the
critical response, it’s worth noting that two of the worst offenders, Variety
and The New Yorker, have long since ceased to be taken seriously for
precisely the sort of ineptitude they displayed here.
And then, nerds
hate it for some reason or other, the way Andrew Sarris hates Andrew L. Stone.
Midway
A
superfine analysis of the battle, reckoning into account its own reckoning of
analysis per se.
Critics found it
only confusing, and that’s the most remarkable thing about it, because
it’s so straightforward. It’s the film that goes with Ford’s
two documentaries.
The single strong
dramatic theme (cf. Fleischer’s Tora
Tora Tora) is applied
to shape the wartime experience, “six months after Pearl Harbor”,
of the combat footage.
Damnation Alley
The effect of a Soviet
attack on the United States is to create giant scorpions, killer cockroaches,
depraved rural folk (a note from Boorman’s Deliverance), a vast flood.
A handful of the
living travel cross-country between radiation clouds, hence the title (cf. Preminger’s The Human Factor), following the only
radio signal in operation (a note from Kramer’s On the Beach).
A very cogent
film, despised by critics.
Fast Break
This is about a
basketball coach who gets hired by a university for three $20 bills per winning
game, with the promise of a real contract if he beats the champs. One might
imagine seeing it at a poetry club with a quire of poets, between sets, all
sneering at this improbable arrangement and then remembering the fifty bucks
they’ve picked up here or there for the verse they wrote. The sneering
stops, they start to weep. A gag from Silverstein’s Cat Ballou is pointed out
to them, Smight’s quiet technique, Gabe
Kaplan’s steady deadpan, and the real poetic understanding behind the
film, but every single one of those poets is sobbing in his beer.
Remembrance of Love
The coup de télévision
can be stated from Litvak’s Act of
Love and Dmytryk’s The Juggler,
not only is the wench not dead, she’s happily married, thank
you very much, at least gratefully.
A
long weekend in Jerusalem at the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
The kvetching
Columbia Journalism daughter meets a security man, back in New York one has
just become a grandfather.
The state of
things in Israel, bombs and bomb scares, the seaside, Yad
Vashem.
The
Lodz ghetto.
John
J. O’Connor of the New York Times,
“questionable
entertainment drenched in facile sentimentality.” Joanna Berry (Radio Times),
“should come with free tissues.”
Number One with a Bullet
Smight’s
technique is at or near its most impressive. The uptilted
dolly shot turns a corner at the tennis courts, tracking out with an advancing
player. At the church carnival, a chase on foot with a Steadicam
at the run (or on a dolly). Unfailing acumen.
Trumpet player,
jazz combo behind opening credits. Trumpeter steps off stage, into scene (Billy
Dee Williams).
Carnival, lady
reading The Sensuous Woman, revealed to be undercover cop (Robert
Carradine). Two costumed figures toss balls and miss the milk bottles,
effecting a shipment, chased separately. The man in hacienda costume is
apprehended in a church confessional by Williams, the woman is cornered in the
church casino, where she takes a priest hostage (he is calling bingo numbers)
and reveals herself to be a man also. Carradine bids him carry out his threat
to “kill this idiot,” effectively calling his bluff.
Someone at LAPD
HQ is a fink. A chartered plane transporting a prisoner is attacked mid-flight
with a machine gun in a helicopter (Smight apparently sets his aircraft
interior on an eminence and shoots the helicopter in blue sky through the
windows). A barn with Polled Herefords is the scene on the ground. The farmer
shoots their man for an intruder.
They trail a
source of information to a club on the Strip (he plays drums for the house band
on mud wrestling night). “Drug condos” they’re called, and
one’s going up in Westwood where they drape the source by his heels from
a girder with a dizzying view.
Briefcases full
of cash or dope change hands, until the detectives (nearly done in by the fink)
nab the whole load.