Joy: “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)

When A Hard Day’s Night was reissued to theaters in 2000, I went with a friend to see it at a local art house and afterward as we stood chatting on the sidewalk I noticed that all the muscles in my face were sore; with a pleasant jolt I realized I had just been smiling continuously for 90 minutes.

Although I had seen the movie numerous times before on television and home video, I don’t think I recognized until that night just how special a picture A Hard Day’s Night really is. Perhaps this is because I was a child of three when it first hit theaters and up to that evening had never experienced it on a big movie screen.* Despite what the pushers of ever-shrinking visual popular culture who wish you to become accustomed to downloading and looking at movies on cell ‘phone screens roughly analogous to the average Post-It Note would have you believe, the size and quality of the medium on and the venue in which you view a motion picture does make a difference, as does seeing it with an audience of people responding to it as you are, whether with laughter, tears or bleats of terror. (Even rapt, silent contemplation of a picture’s charm or beauty, experienced with others, can be communicable.) When people who know movies say, as Roger Ebert did, that the pleasure received from, and the overall greatness of, A Hard Day’s Night are comparable to those of Singin’ in the Rain, they aren’t being hyperbolic, or blinded by Baby-Boom nostalgia. The movie is a rapturous experience — pure , entrancing joy from the opening guitar chord to the final end credit. It’s no wonder I smiled so broadly that night.

**^{Richard Lester “framing” George Harrison}**

It could have been a disaster. When you think of all the terrible so-called “rock movies” that had been made up to that point — and would be made immediately after — essentially updates of the boring all-star musical revues of the late 1920s and early 1940s, you can well imagine A Hard Day’s Night being every bit as anemic and disposable. Fortunately the Beatles wanted nothing to do with that format, and United Artists didn’t care what sort of picture they made so long as whatever it was came in on time, on budget and produced a marketable soundtrack album. † While it’s certainly possible to create good or even great popular art under confining conditions, it’s when what they do isn’t being taken all that seriously and no one above them is paying strict attention that creative people slip their best work into the marketplace. (Think of the men who made the great Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1940s and ’50s.) Alun Owen, after observing the Beatles’ personalities and the prison-of-success in which they were trapped, wrote a comic, slightly surreal “day-in-the-life” which Richard Lester, himself a bit of a Surrealist, filmed with a friskiness and a willingness to try anything — to be open to the possibilities of the moment — that were (and are) very rare in controlled studio moviemaking and probably only achievable then in an independent production. Borrowing some of the effects embraced by La Nouvelle Vague (jump-cuts, hand-held Arriflex cameras and documentary realism)‡ Lester and his team fashioned a kind of cinematic jeu d’esprit that nips playfully at conventions but seldom draws serious blood.

**^{The movie’s great comic duo: Anna Quayle and John Lennon.}**

No one of course was sure how the Beatles, whatever their extemporaneous wit with the press and the public, would perform scripted dialogue and movement on film, but they proved remarkable adepts. They were naturals in front of the camera, making it all look both easier than it was and as if they were making up the lines as they went along. In this, as in a number of things, they resemble another quartet of performers: They’re the Marx Bros. for the rock ‘n’ roll generation, antic and cheerfully disdainful of everything the straight world demands of them. That’s one of the reasons, I imagine, that viewers often think the four are ad-libbing, although the people who made the movie aver that Owen wrote most of their characteristically accurate one-liners. (Lester maintains that the structure of the script was his, the dialogue entirely Owen’s.) And while none of the Beatles is remotely like the Marxes, it’s easy to see John Lennon as a Groucho figure, the natural leader and chief cut-up. His scene backstage with Anna Quayle in which they trade elliptical exchanges rivals some of Groucho’s great duologues with Margaret Dumont, and Lennon has an enormously appealing screen persona throughout. Paul didn’t get a specialty sequence as John, George and Ringo did, presumably because he was yoked to Wilfrid Brambell, playing his rambunctious Irish grandfather and Ringo’s largely silent “runaway” scenes may seem like attempts to make him over into Harpo Marx, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton rolled into one§ (the bit with the camera and the one involving a long coat and mud puddles are especially Keatonian) but the drummer has his own idiosyncratic charm that doesn’t rely on our memories of anybody else. George meanwhile got one of the movie’s best dialogue scenes as the honest innocent in a land of hard-edged hucksters, sweetly popping every pretentious balloon in the tastemaker’s display.

Aside from the Beatles, the engaging cast includes Norman Rossington as their dyspeptic manager, whom no one would confuse with Brian Epstein; the amiable John Junkin as his somewhat off-balance assistant, who moves his lips while reading Son of MAD; young David Janson (billed as “Jaxon”), who looks a bit like a miniature version of Robert Stephens, as the hooky-playing boy Ringo briefly encounters¶; John Vernon, peerlessly stuffy as a train passenger who thinks riding the rails twice a week confers some sort of exalted set of rights on him; the writer Jeremy Lloyd as a nightclub patron whose grinning leaps into the air Ringo copies; Victor Spinetti, hilariously splenetic as the harassed, Angora wearing television director; and Kenneth Haigh, who snobbishly refused a credit for his wonderful performance as the marketing genius George deflates and whose inane jabber (“She’s a trend-setter. It’s her profession.”) is creepily relevant to our own period, in which clueless untested teenagers list theirs as “social media influencer.” Brambell as Grandfather McCarthy is the movie’s sly secret weapon, continually complicating everyone’s lives, encouraging arguments, getting what he can from his reflected glory and generally putting (to paraphrase one of John’s puns) a Spaniard into the works. When he accidentally rises up in an elevator under the stage to interrupt two Wagnerian singers in rehearsal it’s funny enough; when he pops up a second time during the Beatles’ concert it’s unexpected, and riotous. At the time of filming, Brambell was the star of the popular comedy series Steptoe and Son (Americanized later as Sanford and Son) where he was often referred to as a dirty old man, hence the recurring deadpan joke here about his being a clean old man. And although he was scarcely old enough to be Paul’s grandfather, Brambell is the antic antidote to youth-worship, particularly welcome against the scenes of Beatlemania the movie captures and which gave so many parents the whim-whams in 1964.

It’s the depiction of that adolescent phenomenon which so memorably starts the picture, and which came to define the contours of the Beatles’ off-stage existence — in Grandfather McCartney’s apt phrase, “A train and a room, and a car and a room, and a room and a room.” The screenwriter saw something rather desperate in that, and while he did his best to make it more comic than tragic, even in 1964 one can see how their fans’ brainless (and, presumably, erotic) idolatry was eventually going to wear on the four to such an extent they stopped performing in public; of their shambolic Shea Stadium appearance in 1965 they later complained, quite understandably, that they couldn’t hear themselves or each other over the screaming. While kids of the Beatles’ own age also went gaga over Elvis Presley a few years earlier the only previous sustained edition of this teenage mass hysteria I know of is the comparable emergence of Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theatre 20 years before… although what Heinrich Heine famously called Lisztomania predated that by a century. Some have suggested the war and the disappearance of so many eligible young men from the home front had something to do with it, but as Sinatra’s fans were teenagers, that explanation doesn’t hold much water. It may be true that adolescent anxiety about the war contributed, just as it’s remotely possible that “Beatlemania” may have been triggered by the murder of Jack Kennedy. Still, and even if we grant that some of those bobbysoxers may have been paid by Sinatra’s promoters to scream their heads off, the whole business baffles me, as does the concomitant behavior of the kids in 1964. Erotic compulsion? The simple inherent madness of adolescence? Sex does seem to be the likeliest explanation. But some of the girls in the audience of the movie’s climactic live television concert appear on the verge of complete mental, physical and psychological collapse, not merely screeching but tearfully wailing — sobbing as if their hearts are breaking. Jesus, what were they weeping about?

Readers of these pages will know that while I honor certain favorite filmmakers (usually, with the notable exception of Sidney Lumet, writer/directors) I do not subscribe generally to the whorishly applied Auteur Theory. Still, in an exercise like this one, shot on the cheap in black-and-white (an asset, although it may not have seemed so at the time) and on a foreshortened schedule, a director whose attributes include both nerves and adaptability is probably essential. Lester, who had worked with the Goons on television and directed their crazy-quilt short The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (both projects anticipating the visual approach taken by Monty Python) was ideal in this respect, although his sense of style never obtrudes on A Hard Day’s Night as it did a couple of years later on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Gilbert Taylor’s superb cinematography, often achieved via hand-held camera, is unerring and includes a beautiful panning shot of Paul singing “And I Love Her” with lens flare from an arc light creating a striking halo effect around him. (Naturally the brass at United Artists thought it was a mistake.) And John Jympson’s masterly editing makes each moment feel simultaneously surprising and inevitable; you can’t second-guess any of his choices.

However well A Hard Day’s Night works as a comedy, or even as a kind of fictional semi-documentary, the filmmakers never forget that it was as a band that the Beatles were famous, and the musical respites are among the most radiantly happy ever committed to film. That opening twang on the title song, married to the image of John, George and Ringo running toward the camera pursued by dozens of young people, never fails to make me smile, and it’s so perfectly of a piece you can’t quite believe it wasn’t all planned that way. (It wasn’t; the song was an after-thought.) The train sequence at the start contains some surreal moments, as when the boys are seen outside the compartment window, running beside the locomotive and begging John Vernon for their ball back, and this is extended in the next scene, when they begin playing cards in the baggage compartment and, after “I Should Have Known Better” begins, are suddenly seen with their instruments, singing and playing. You don’t question it, you just accept the parameters of it as the movie Beatles’ reality the same way you accept the topsy-turvy world of the Marx Bros. A number can begin mischievously, as when John attempts to cheer Ringo out of his funk by singing “If I Fell” directly to him or on the soundtrack only, divorced from the boys’ actions, like the exuberant “Can’t Buy Me Love” sequence, which feels in retrospect the apotheosis of the Beatles as, in Ringo’s description, “just four guys who loved each other.”#

Speaking of Ringo, this seems to be as good a place as any to shamefacedly acknowledge how criminally I underrated his musicianship several years ago when I used routinely to refer to the drummer as “the luckiest son of a bitch who ever lived.” Beyond that being a cheap, sneering crack, it wasn’t at all accurate. True, Starr was not the songwriter or the singer John and Paul were but, at least in the beginning of their recording career, his accompaniments were technically miles beyond the merely adequate guitar playing of the other three, and he continued to provide expert and even inspired rhythm until the band broke up in 1970. He was also likable in the extreme, and, like John, a genuine screen presence in a way Paul and George could never hope to be.

In any case, as the writer Mark Lewisohn has noted, with Pete Best at the drums the Beatles would have likely remained merely a popular Liverpool band. With Ringo, they became themselves.

*Weirdly, I do have distinct memories from that time of hearing the Beatles on the radio and, missing the wit of the third-person writing, thinking the song was called “She Loves Me,” not “She Loves You.”

†The movie actually went into profit before it was even released due to advance orders on the soundtrack LP which was UA’s primary concern.

‡Lester himself used a hand-held the camera to shoot the train sequences — the dialogue of which because the camera lacked a sound recorder had to be looped in post-production.

§The silent comedy links in A Hard Day’s Night are made explicit late in the picture, when the boys are chased by the London police; for an American audience (and Lester is an American by birth and upbringing) the sight of a small army of bumbling constables in their helmets running through the urban streets inevitably merges with our images of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops. As for my Marx Bros. analogy, Groucho was adamant after seeing the picture that the Beatles in no way resembled himself and his brothers, claiming, absurdly, that they were “real people” — when did you last encounter anyone remotely like Chico or Harpo? His contention that the Beatles, as they come across in A Hard Day’s Night, have little to differentiate one from another, however, has some merit… just not much.

¶Janson/Jaxon is quite good, but clearly too old for the role as written; his character admits to being just under 11 but the young actor is pretty obviously closer to 14.

#Although John, who had a book-related event while the sequence was being shot, disappears at odd moments, reappears and then vanishes again.

Spoilsports at the orgy: “The Big Fix” (1978)

By Scott Ross

“Do you know why being a revolutionary doesn’t work in this country? Being a revolutionary in America is like being a spoilsport at an orgy. All these goodies being passed around and you feel like a shit when you say no.” — Howard Eppis (F. Murray Abraham) in The Big Fix

In, to borrow from Scott Fitzgerald, my younger and more vulnerable years I was often susceptible to the opinions of mainstream critics, most of whom in the case of The Big Fix I let steer me away from a most engaging movie, a genial modern private detective picture featuring a very likable lead performance by Richard Dreyfus.

By the time it opened in 1978 Dreyfus had won his Best Actor Oscar™ for The Goodbye Girl, morphing overnight from an appealing actor who “just happened” to be in a trio of blockbusters (American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and one fascinating, under-seen character study (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) into an Important Young Star. If the four portrayals for which Dreyfus became famous shared a common denominator (aside from his giggle) it was his highly-strung persona, which while often very funny occasionally verged on hysteria. Here, as Roger L. Simon’s P.I. Moses Wine, he is more measured and, while the character is troubled, more centered. Although Dreyfus’ Wine is occasionally angry (with justification) the scruffy charm which occasionally peeped through the actor’s previous performances is meted out here in more generous portions; when he softly sings his younger son to sleep over the telephone with “Animal Fair” the moment is quietly sweet, without any of the cloying treacle that usually accompanies such things. Wine, a one-time ’60s “radical” — you know… a believer in such arcane/Commie concepts as free speech, pacifism and personal liberty… all those things a modern liberal despises — gets caught up, first with a sexy former flame (the ever-winsome Susan Anspach) and a possible plot against the vaguely leftist Democrat candidate for whom she works, then, once she is murdered, with unraveling the political plot and solving the mystery of the woman’s death.

Presumably because Simon adapted his own book, a canny updating of Chandler and Hammett, the movie enjoys remarkable fealty to its source. This is to the good; although there is, as with all good detective stories, a complex mystery at the core of the narrative, it’s primarily Moses Wine’s past and character that compel interest. The divorced father of two young boys whose ex-wife (Bonnie Bedelia) has taken up with a nauseating self-help guru (Ron Rifkin), Wine nurses a healthy cynicism about mainstream politics, populist demagogues and human gullibility in general: Whenever he’s asked about the plaster cast on his arm he calibrates the answer to best ingratiate himself with the inquirer.* His basic ideals haven’t died; they’ve ossified from lack of oxygen. I wish Simon had made room in his plot for an observation or two on how effectively the agents of our permanent government quashed dissent in the late ’60s and early ’70s, leaving millions of passionate young people so thoroughly dispirited that the only things that seem to exercise their sense of righteousness now are any sane questioning of their sociopathic Democrat heroines and your not wearing three masks when you go out shopping. (Formerly liberal, Simon is now a deeply conservative supporter of the phony “War on Terror,” so I doubt he’d even acknowledge that historical truth today.)

The movie’s rich supporting cast includes John Lithgow as the candidate’s slightly disreputable campaign coordinator; Fritz Weaver, silkily insinuating as a wealthy L.A. businessman seeking his lost radical son; Nicolas Coster as one of Moses’ former Berkeley professors; the wonderful Rita Karin as Wine’s old unreconstructed Trotskyite aunt; and a genuinely frightening performance by Larry Bishop as an FBI agent so used to intimidating American citizens he never even raises his voice — his very blandness as he attempts to railroad Moses is chilling; he speaks as if he’s bored by having to go through the motions of threatening the public. Only Mandy Patinkin, in a brief appearance as a weird pool man, overdoes it. Well, he would. Bill Conti’s score for the picture is among his most ingratiating, and the Twilight Time Blu-ray blessedly restored Leon Redbone‘s recording of the delicious Gary Tigerman song “Seduced,” previously cut by Universal from home video releases, presumably due to the corporation being unwilling to pay the undoubtedly modest re-use fee.

**^{Enjoying the goodies: F. Murray Abraham as Howard Eppis.}**

While the movie’s director and cinematographer (Jeremy Paul Kagan and Frank Stanley respectively) effectively limn the funky/elegant Los Angeles milieu of the novel, Kagan keeps the narrative loose, and perhaps that’s what offended those critics of the time who dismissed the picture as lightweight. Yet they had all strewn rose petals before Robert Altman’s progress five years earlier when he did the same thing with his, to this viewer anyway, wrong-headed (and far nastier) adaptation of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Everyone involved respects Simon’s alternately bitter and elegiac sense of loss for youthful ideals. Take, for example, the elusive, Abbie Hoffmanesque radical played by F. Murray Abraham. When Moses finally tracks him down, he’s an ad agency executive with a swimming pool, happily sucking at the hated capitalist tit for whatever it will net him. There’s something ineffably sad about this, yet the character is still able to get everyone (including Moses) dancing around that pool singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” which at least suggests that for all his cynicism he hasn’t entirely abandoned his values on the altar of prosperity. Was it the very human ambivalence of this scene that disturbed those critics in 1978?

*Dreyfus broke his wrist just prior to filming, which might have delayed shooting. Instead his cast was written into the movie.

He loves and she loves: “Manhattan” (1979)

By Scott Ross

Gordon Willis’ incomparable photography made Manhattan one of the most beautiful movies of the 1970s, and although reduction to home-screen size has always diminished his often dazzling black-and-white work on the picture* — the sequence at the Hayden Planetarium suffers especially from the transfer — what’s really aged poorly are Woody Allen’s self-righteous one-liners and pinched attitudes about people. Take for example his character’s “joke” concerning a fear of being struck by lightning and ending up like “one of those guys who sell comic books outside of Bloomingdale’s.” In his contemporary review of the movie, John Simon noted that Allen knew very well there was one man who did this, a mental unfortunate who could have benefitted most from assistance, not ridicule by a smug millionaire living on Central Park West. Nearly everything out of the mouth of Isaac Davis, Allen’s protagonist, is either a sneering observation about someone else or a feeble wheeze about himself; Isaac is what Alvy Singer in Annie Hall would have been without the annealing vulnerability. When near the end of the movie he confronts his philandering academician pal Yale (Michael Murphy) about personal ethics the dialogue is undercut by Allen’s inability to refrain from making jokes: Told he acts as if he thinks he’s God, Isaac ripostes, “I’ve gotta model myself after someone!” This is not the statement of an intellectual engaging in a serious argument about crucial matters of the soul; it’s the knee-jerk reaction of the former nightclub comedian who thinks he has to kill with every line. (As I don’t pretend to know where Allen lets off and Marshall Brickman, his screenwriting collaborator on this as well as on Annie Hall, begins, I’m afraid Brickman will have to accept as much blame in the aggregate as his colleague for the picture’s surfeit of yocks.)

What works in that scene is what works best throughout the picture. Allen’s growing mastery of the film medium was apparent in Annie Hall and Interiors, but his framing of the scenes in Manhattan is a quantum leap beyond either, and I don’t think it’s solely the influence of Gordon Willis. (Although God knows you can have worse mentors to learn from.) And I don’t necessarily intend that praise only in dramatic or picturesque terms. In the scene described above, Allen the actor is placed by Allen the director next to a hilariously anthropoidal skeleton, and the image is such a riotously funny juxtaposition it lifts the sequence, visually, into an entirely different, comic/surrealistic realm… even as Allen’s constant verbal schtick defeats it.† Where the picture does exhibit a real level of maturity is not in the main characters’ sleeping arrangements nor in the occasional use of the word “fuck” but in those rare moments where Allen resists the urge to kibbitz, as when, after Yale has left his wife Emily (Anne Byrne) for Mary, the Diane Keaton character (with whom he was involved with extra-maritally at the beginning of the movie and later dumped, and who Isaac falls in love before Yale swoops back in to take her away) the abandoned Emily admits to Isaac over luncheon that she spent some time being angry at him for introducing Mary to Yale. We in the audience know the exact reverse was true, but Isaac cannot admit to this without also revealing that he knew all along Yale was cheating. The sense of irony has a genuine sting to it, made even more potent by Isaac’s not objecting to Emily’s statement. Knowing when to stay silent shows real growth in a dramatist. I wish Allen had learned something from that.

Aside from Willis’ wonderful photography, the next best thing in Manhattan is Diane Keaton’s fulsome portrait of an unhappy intellectual neurotic. Mary is exactly the sort of person Keaton and Allen satirize in Love and Death, for whom art and concepts are more thrilling than people when the only thing that makes either worthwhile or effective is what creative people put into them about other human beings. Mary is ultimately more a collection of attitudes than a person we can fully comprehend or pity, yet Keaton somehow brings this walking anthology of tics to life, and reminds us anew of what was lost when she and Allen stopped working together and his audience had to settle for Mia Farrow. Mariel Hemingway, as Isaac’s 17-year-old girlfriend, shows remarkable poise, and her tearful reaction to Isaac opportunistically breaking up with her is heartbreakingly true. Susan Morse’s editing is among the best in any Woody Allen picture, and the George Gershwin score, blessedly free of brother Ira’s often commonplace lyrics, exhilarates.

After having children of his own, Allen rightly criticized the climactic sequence here, during which Isaac lists into a tape recorder the things that for him make life worth living and never mentions his young son. What bothers me more than this omission is the way Allen simultaneously steals from and diminishes Chaplin’s City Lights climax, which James Agee once called “the highest moment in movies.” It may not be that, but in concept, performance and directorial execution it’s among the most beautiful, and moving, moments in the history of motion pictures, and the close-up of the Tramp just before the fade-out, already unusual in Chaplin’s filmography, has a radiance and a humanity that transcend nearly everything the movie camera had achieved before Chaplin made it. And if Mariel Hemingway is a far better actress than Virginia Cherrill, Allen is just as surely no Charlie Chaplin; comparing his dopey, reluctant smile to the breathtaking look on Chaplin’s face is to note the difference between Fred Astaire dancing and a junior high schooler hoofing a routine for the annual talent show… except at least the adolescent dancer isn’t insulting Astaire’s memory. (Admittedly, the soaring Gershwin on the soundtrack almost makes it work.)

Allen the celebrity carries a certain amount of weight when we re-view his older movies. When the messy business with Farrow and Soon-Yi Previn broke and what have since been revealed (and indeed seemed to many of us at the time) as the spurious and vindictive accusations of molestation of a half-mad collector of children were first aired, my mind instantly wandered to Isaac’s romance with the teenaged Hemingway here. Perhaps, it was easy to muse in retrospect, the Woody Allen of 1979 was telling us something about himself? Revisiting the picture today I can also see the filmmaker and the actor reaching too hard for effect. When he’s being rowed by Diane Keaton on the lake in Central Park and trailing his fingers in the water, for example, you can see him moving his arm downward just before Isaac withdraws his hand to discover it coated with black or brown gunk, and the preparation for the sight-gag kills the joke. I wonder why I never noticed that before.

*In widescreen, a rarity for Allen, who generally works in Academy Ratio. I gather this was his notion, not Willis’.

†When I first saw Manhattan on its opening weekend with a group of my high school theatre friends, one of them (also called Scott) got hysterics looking at that skeleton; every time Allen cut back to the set-up, my friend fell apart. Scott’s laughter is forever wedded to that scene for me.

How much is it a gallon, Jamison? or, Quotes, un-quotes and quotes: The incredible disintegrating English language (It’s a doggie-dog world)

By Scott Ross

Note: Anyone under 40 who reads this should be given what I gather is the standard injunction now when dealing with the tender and easily bruised psyches of the young. So here it is:

I’m finally old enough to have grown into my fogyhood, which has been choking me at least since I was in junior high school and, to paraphrase Thoreau’s splendid phrase, not keeping pace with my companions. So don’t think I’m going to spare your feelings now. I am going to make a number of sweeping generalizations about you and your generation with regard to the way you misuse and abuse language and grammar. The neologisms “Millennial” and “Gen-Z” will flow freely here, and without a scintilla of shame on my part. I neither dismiss you as human beings nor align myself against you with others of my age on general principal, solely because you are young and we no longer are. I merely deplore the half-assed way so goddamned many of you express yourselves. And if sarcasm offends you, you would be well advised to skip this little essay entirely.

Consider that your official Trigger Warning.

In the latter half of the Broadway play and subsequent 1930 Marx Bros. movie Animal Crackers, Groucho as Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding famously dictates to Zeppo as his secretary Jamison a letter to his lawyers (Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga and McCormick) that is a sparkling put-on of all such business correspondence, wickedly parodying a form of inane legalese still in use today.

Groucho: In re yours of the 5 inst: Yours to hand and beg to rep, brackets, that we have gone over the ground carefully and we seem to believe, i.e., to wit, e.g., in lieu, that despite all of our precautionary measures which have been involved, we seem to believe that it is hardly necessary for us to proceed unless we receive an ipso facto that is not negligible at this moment. Quotes, unquotes and quotes. Hoping this finds you I beg to remain—
Zeppo: Hoping this finds him where?
Groucho: Well, let him worry about that. Don’t be so inquisitive. Sneak! I say, hoping this finds you, I beg to remain, cordially yours, regards… Now read me the letter.

Which Jamison duly does, leading to this immortal exchange:

Zeppo: “Quotes, un-quotes, and quotes.”
Groucho: That’s three quotes?
Zeppo: Yes, sir.
Groucho: Add another quote and make it a gallon. How much is it a gallon, Jamison?

One can only imagine with what delight, possibly alternating with nausea, George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, the writers of the book for Animals Crackers, might contemplate the near-complete wreckage of American popular speech in the 21st century. I don’t know who, or what, exactly is responsible for the decline, noticeable to me when I was a teenager but seemingly accelerating, of speech and simple phrases, concepts, cliché and even individual words. But I have my suspicions. (See below.) I actually heard a young man on a podcast yesterday, while reading aloud from a newspaper article and encountering an attributed quotation cited therein, say, “Quote, unquote” and then read the quote. The open and closed quotation marks were right in front of him, in their proper place at, respectively, the beginning and end of the phrase… as, I would argue, they have been all of his reading life. When did he start thinking they only occurred at the beginning of a sentence? And this was an otherwise bright, articulate, college-educated person, one who had studied ancient Greek, fer crissake.

I realize the idiot reflexive mass-adoption of this ignorant phrase is not confined to any particular age group or demographic today. People of all ages, types and conditions now utter this cringe-inducing barbarism more often even than the dopes who say, “My thinking has gone 360 degrees on that issue” when they mean 180. But just as a trip of 360 degrees means arriving right back where you started, so too with “Quote, unquote.” If you say it before reciting the quotation, that quote is exactly and precisely nothing: The dead air between those two words becomes the quote. Is that really what you meant?

When I was 9, our classroom was visited by a representative from Funk & Wagnalls — at that time a rather shockingly suggestive punchline from Dick Martin on Laugh-In — there essentially to sell sets of encyclopedias to the parents of us breathless and easily-influenced 3rd graders. (I duly tried. Mom, having already, in 1961, invested plenty in the boring old Encyclopedia Brittanica then gathering dust in a bookcase in our living room, used only occasionally, and grudgingly, by my older sister and I, took one look at the F & W brochure I brought home from school and told me to go pound sand up my… er, to go play outside.) Years later when I remembered this come-on from the realms of corporate America the naked commercialism aimed at vulnerable children appalled me. Yet I have never forgotten the publisher’s admonishing catch-phrase, emblazoned on the pin-back buttons this woman handed out to each of us that day: “We Never Guess/We Look it Up!“

^{Thanks to Eliot M. Camarena for finding one of those pins, and gifting me with it.}

As dopey as that sounds, I think of it every time the temptation arises to use a word or a concept, or to parrot a “fact” I have not examined. It nearly always stops me… and when it doesn’t, I inevitably regret it. The many sub-literates I am about to cite here, most of them anonymous, either misread a word or phrase, or heard someone else use it incorrectly, and couldn’t be bothered to look up the damn thing up in his Funk & Wagnalls.

Misunderstanding of complex phrases is at least explicable. The seemingly universal misuse of simple, everyday words and heretofore well-known phrases is more difficult to comprehend, such as the way “incredulous” has replaced “incredible” in the Millennial lexicon (presumably rendering the old ABC television series as That’s Incredulous!) These things occur with such regularity now that Eliot M. Camarena and I, who alert each other to these atrocities committed against language, grammar and common sense when we come across them, have considered the advisability of compiling a Millennial Dictionary to catalogue the worst offenses. The spoonerisms alone are incredible — or do I mean “incredulous”? I joke, but only slightly, that the generations of the 1980s and ’90s (not to mention the Aughts) all went to Archie Bunker Memorial Grammar School… which I presume they would pronounce as “Gramma School”… and its adjunct, Archie Bunker High where, one imagines, in sex ed (do schools, after Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell, even have sex ed?) they learned to identify on an anatomical chart the human “prostrate” and to become good citizens who would never, as a self-described internet journalist recently complained some of his listeners were doing with their comments, “sew discourse.”

Millennials (and their immediate successors in the so-called Gen-Z) seem to have swallowed a dictionary by mistake sometime around the age of 10, and are in the process of throwing it up, in undigested pieces, for the rest of their lives. But call them on it and their witty riposte is likely to be either the sneering “Who cares? It’s just words,” the spurious cop-out “Language changes,” or the dismissive catch-all “Okay, Boomer.”

I have exposed my own childish faux pas before in these pages, including my confusing the word “piccolo” with something my four year old brain identified as “pickle loaf,” a luncheon meat of especially repellent provenance. As a teenager, and owing to a routine on a Monty Python album, I once in my high school Honors English class mispronounced “hyperbole” as “hyper-bowl.” We all make such mistakes. It’s when we continue to make them, well into adulthood, and refuse to look up the words or phrases in question, that we risk the errors becoming a permanent part of the way we speak and write… and, because others see and hear them and likewise will not bother checking them for accuracy, of infecting the broader culture for years to come.

Herewith some outstanding examples of the breed, read or heard within recent memory. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Legendary. A once honorable word that now means either “famous,” “long-lived” or merely “worked in some profession or other for more than five years.” cf., Albert Poland, a man I had never heard of before last week but who is described in the blurb for his new theatre memoir as “Legendary Broadway and Off [not “Off-“] Broadway Producer and General Manager.” A legendary general manager?

It’s. Not a contraction of “it is.” Interchangeable now with the non-possessive form “its.” I wish someone who knows would explain this one to me. See also: “CD’s,” “Video’s,” “Movie’s,” “Record’s” and (yes, I’ve actually seen this) “Book’s.” Weirdly, and conversely, words and names that should, in their possessive form, receive an apostrophe-S, now often don’t; for example, “Chelsea’s” in the title of a recent video about the former Miss Clinton’s hand-picked wedding guest list including one Ghislaine Maxwell became “Chelseas,” which makes it sound as if there are more than one of her… a horror I haven’t the intestinal fortitude to contemplate. I suppose the old rules governing such things are now considered hopelessly oppressive, and possibly sexist, or even racist.

The word “hopelessly,” of course, inevitably leads me to:

Hopefully. The epidemic misuse of this defenseless word is one even the most dedicated grammarians gave up on well before the end of the last century. I sometimes wonder what the people who routinely employ that one incorrectly think when one of them sees Sweet Charity, which ends with the legend (legend!) “… and she lived hopefully ever after”? It must blow their parched little minds. Being an old movie, however (i.e., one made before March, 2021) I doubt any of them will ever see it.

Pundint. Used most often by politically-minded Millennials as a self-description. Since the origin of “pundit” is Hindi, maybe they’re the racists for adding a superfluous consonant to the word?

Literally. The complete misuse of this one to express exactly the opposite of its definition (“His head, like, literally exploded!”) was, like inserting the crutch-word “like” multiple times into every sentence, presumably as a place-holder while the speaker tries desperately to sort through the jumble of his or her disordered mind for the appropriate next word, despaired of decades ago. The crisis shows no signs of improving.

Like. See above.

You know. See “Like.”

Sort-of. See “You know.”

Pro-offered. Otherwise known as “proffered.”

Agree to agree. Once understood as “agree to disagree.”

Taken back. As in “When I saw that, I was taken back a bit.” Nearly always spoken by a Millennial. Where do they think they’re going? Back a year or two? Decades? To infancy?
Eliot: “There’s a Groucho radio show in which he recounts his military experience, saying that when the commanding officer burst in and found him with the man’s wife, ‘I was taken aback. I was taken aback to the guardhouse.’ These twits would not recognize the joke.”
They wouldn’t even recognize Groucho. I once had a young man over to the house who, seeing a book of photographs of the (genuinely legendary) comedian on my coffee table asked, “Who’s Groucho?” and I thought, with an inner sigh, “What won’t a man put up with for the possibility of getting laid?”

Legislators. Formerly “Legislatures.”

A consorted effort. Presumably enacted by the Prince Regent?

Expresso. Meaning “espresso.” I made that mistake when I was a teenager too, so I’m not saying I was ever perfect in my speech or deportment. I also, as a child, said (and didn’t everyone?) “pasghetti,” “Valentime’s” and “vanilla envelope.”
But I learned…

Ex cetera. Why “et cetera” even needs to be used at all outside an academic treatise we’ll leave to one side. This one, alas, is not confined to the young.

Bottle/Bag, out of. Heard on a recent podcast:
Person 1 (Millennial): I’m afraid the genie is out of the bottle.
Person 2 (Gen-Z): You’re right! The genie is out of the bag!
And took the cat with it?

Balled out. What you get when you… no, I’m not going there.

Backstory. A trite cliché used by screenwriters and other Hollywood hacks and their reflexive fans to describe the life of a character before the movie or television series begins. I recently heard a Millennial podcast host ask his guest, an eminent medical researcher, to give the audience his “origin story.” I wish it had been me. I would have said, “Well, I’m a human being and not a comic book character, so I have a biography. Would you like to hear that?”
Origin story! Jesus Christ!

Verz. For “vs” or “v.,” or “versus” in legal terminology. Verz?!? Is C.V. likewise pronounced “seeve”? Who makes up this shit?

You’re/your. The former is now written almost exclusively to mean the latter, and vice-versa. (Or is that “verza”?)

Take it for granite. Do I really have to explain this one? Archie Bunker Memorial, folks.

Eggcorn. From whence mighty chickens grow?

Kerfluffle. The sound a marshmallow might make if it exploded. Try “kerfuffle,” you clots.

Full board. The pet phrase of the somewhat estimable investigative journalist Jason Bermas when he means to say “full bore.” For Eliot, this was reminiscent of people saying, “bull faced liar,” which sounds to me like a visual pun in a Tex Avery cartoon. “When,” Eliot asks, “was phonics eliminated from grade school?” When, indeed?

Cow-down. Another bit of nonsense, also used by Bermas, when what he obviously means is “kowtow.”
Eliot: “I see some online dictionaries attempt to justify this idiocy by claiming it should be COWER DOWN, which makes even less sense.”
Bermas, slightly over 40 and generally articulate, also habitually elides his “t”s. “Important” is, always, “impor’ant.” Why? Isn’t it more strenuous to not dentalize the “t,” to work around it, than to just say it? Where did Millennials pick up this weird habit? In their classes on how to use Upspeak and most efficiently obtain the proper level of vocal fry? I once, while making an appointment with a rental agency, had to ask the Millennial office drone to repeat what turned out to be the name “Martin Street” about a half-dozen times before I finally caught on. She kept saying “Mar’in.” I should have requested she spell it for me. The only times these types don’t slur over the “t” is when it’s at the beginning of the word, or when it’s supposed to be silent. I feel like yelling at them a variation of what Truman Capote says to Peter Sellers’ Charlie Chan-like detective in the Neil Simon comedy Murder by Death when he screams, “Say your goddamned pronouns!”

Noble Prize. Used by Whitney Webb, an even more estimable investigative journalist, when she means “Nobel.” How she could have reached the age she is now and never heard the name properly pronounced is as puzzling as her continually (which does not, my dear Millennials, mean the same as “continuously”) mispronouncing the name of the ghastly Ghislaine Maxwell, on whom she has done splendid research and reporting, as “Jizz-lane,” and her repeated references to “MAY-er” (not “MEY-er”) Lansky, whom one supposes was distantly related to Louis B. of M-G-M fame. As for “Noble Prize,” when I hear this I always picture Sir John Gielgud, head held haughtily aloft, being given a small statuette for dignity above the call of histrionics.

Schizofrania. The word Ryan Cristián, the host of The Last American Vagabond website podcast, who originally went nameless here (I appreciate his investigations and insights even as his personal manner causes me distinct nervous tension) uses when he means “schizophrenia.” When he attempts the adjectival form, it sounds as if he’s saying “schizophranic,” or perhaps even “schizofrantic.” Cristián also consistently mispronounces the name of the Biden-Harris (as the President habitually refers to his Administration) Press Secretary: To him, Jen Psaki is, has been and always and ever will be Jen “Passki.” (Which once more brings Groucho Marx to mind, this time in The Coconuts: “You know… Passki down the streetski?”) But I suppose even that is at least marginally better than the YouTuber I heard refer to her as “Puh-sackey.” The website MedRxiv Cristián, having apparently having gone his entire life without encountering the universally recognized abbreviation “Rx” for medical prescription, refers to as “Med-R, xiv.” He also pronounces “exacerbated” as “exasturbated,” which sounds at least mildly dirty and — here the mind really boggles — mispronounces La Jolla, California in the snob-British form, as “Lah JOE-lah”… even though his own heritage is Puerto Rican. I also heard him, last week, struggle mightily to pronounce the drug name “thalidomide.” (“THALL-id-OH-myde” was the closest he was able to get.) It only caused the deaths or disfigurement of tens of thousands of children 60-odd years ago, but Cristián had clearly never heard of it before.

It’s a doggie-dog world. And some of them have been known to eat other doggies.

Trailer. This now constitutes, in Eliot’s words, “Any video consisting of clips from a movie.” Even video advertisements for theatrical productions of plays announce themselves as “trailers.” No one has the slightest idea what the word means.

Tout his own horn. Eliot notes, “From the Times comments re Cuomo: ‘For him to take a victory lap and tout his own horn for a job well done’…”

I’m suspect. The new “I’m suspicious.” I keep wanting to ask what the speaker is a suspect in. Theft? Murder? Vaccine-hesitancy? As Eliot once commented, “The centuries of evolution and culture that go into a MIND and look what we end up with.”

Having quoted Eliot thrice in a row, I leave the floor to him for a brace of his own examples of linguistic idiocy:

“Speaking of a movie he really likes, one of the twits said, ‘I’ll always have a sore spot for that film.'”
“Serena Williams said, last week, about her tennis abilities, ‘Nobody can light a candle to me.'” [Perhaps she meant “under”? Oh. come on, Ross. We all know she didn’t.]
“Was about to note the complete absence of blandishments in their approach, when I remembered that from reading what millennials write they think that means insults! I recently read one who said, ‘He threw all kinds of nasty blandishments at me.’ It’s as weird as the many people of all ages who think ‘The Hoi Polloi’ refers to the wealthy class. I give up.”
“I must be addicted to agony, what with listening to millennial chatter. One putz discussing film kept referring to Warner Bros as in Bernie Bros.”
“Just heard a talk by a millennial. He used the ‘word’ OFTENLY. Maybe we could use a good, cleansing plague.”
“Did I tell you about the pipsqueak who said, of a meal, ‘It made my appetite wet’?” [Is it wrong that that remark sort of excites my libido?]
“BTW, heard a millennial (in a podcast, of course) discuss his success in some measly endeavor; he said, ‘I didn’t think I would accede to this degree.’ That’s up there with the other one who, changing the subject said, ‘Now let’s leeway into this next topic.’ I assume the ignorant twat meant segue.”

And speaking of segues…

Now, hold onto your lids, kids. The Old Fogy is about to pontificate.

I am afraid that Eliot and I are writing for a dwindling readership; even the more intelligent Millennials are often linguistically appalling. And they know fuck-all about the shared popular culture. Forget the 1930s — most of these people can’t identify anything from before they drew breath, or first got plunked down in front of their unpaid baby-sitter, the television set. I heard one Millennial a few months ago refer to “that old movie where the woman is singing in the flowers on the hill” and realized after a moment he meant Julie Andrews in the opening scene of The Sound of Music… I was reminded by this of the college-age clerk in a Blockbuster Video outlet several years ago who was absolutely stumped by a customer’s request for a DVD rental copy of My Fair Lady. He’d never heard of it, didn’t know what sort of movie it was or where in the shop to find it. You work in a video store, I remember thinking, and you’ve never heard of any movie that wasn’t released before the year you saw Star Wars? And you couldn’t look it up? I had to find it for your customer? I felt like asking for a salary. (This is not to mention the young Barnes and Noble bookseller around the same time who, when I called to ask whether the store had a copy of Thurber’s Dogs, which I’d hoped to purchase as a gift for a friend and after I’d patiently spelled “Thurber” for him came back to the ‘phone after an interminable wait to say he couldn’t find it in the Pets section…)

Dwindling cultural memory aside, and returning to the gravamen of my complaint about reasoning and the decline of language skills, the question I suppose is why? Why have so many people lost the ability to reason, and to speak with efficiency? As a writer, I ever bear in mind the injunction of Professor Strunk, who opined in The Elements of Style that, “vigorous writing is concise,” and concision denotes intelligence. I am more and more convinced that chemicals, television and our appalling mis-education system are the chief culprits, and that much of this was planned; the extent of the mass dumbing-down is just too large to be entirely natural. A friend is equally certain the blame for the state of mass-mindlessness, which manifests itself currently in a widespread inability to understand the basic rudiments of viral science or to look past the inflated numbers routinely issued or proclaimed by government entities, is the internet. She believes, and I think she’s on to something, that over the last two decades the Web became the unofficial babysitter of children, the way TeeVee did for those of my generation and after. God knows the majority of the people who grew up never knowing a time when the ‘net didn’t exist are now hopelessly addicted to it, unable to refrain from staring down at a small-screen version, their thumbs racing in a constant and furious blur as they hack out instant messages to all and sundry as if their very lives depended on it. (I can only imagine what arthritic agonies they will endure after a couple of decades of this repetitive motion.) Not that this activity is in any way restricted to the young. The other day I nearly ran down a pedestrian who looked considerably older than me because she couldn’t lift her eyes from her Smartphone long enough to notice the traffic bearing down on her as she crossed an intersection against the lights.

I recall with a wry smile my foolish notion, when the Internet first took root in the culture back in the mid-to-late-1990s, that since the user was required to write, rather than merely speak, greater literacy might be the result. (You may all now have a good horse-laugh at my expense.) Smooth composition and actual, as opposed to accidental, word-play, as Eliot suggested, is lost on people for whom Dumb & Dumber is — and I actually heard this opined by Jason Bermas a few weeks ago — “high art.” No wonder we’re at a point where millions of people believe the lies they are told by government. Government! Imagine! When I was a child the cry was not only “Never trust anyone over 30” but “All governments lie.” Maybe if these half-educated semi-literates saw a president forced to resign for subverting the Constitution they might stop trusting anyone in a goddamned suit and tie. As bad or worse: They think a word or phrase means whatever they decide it does because they heard or read it wrong and are too goddamned lazy to look it up. I wonder if they’ve ever even been taught how to use a dictionary.

I hope that woman from Funk & Wagnalls is safely dead now. Not that I wish her ill, but otherwise the shock of what she would be seeing and hearing every day might give her a stroke.

I’m telling you: Archie Bunker Memorial exists. They all went there.

Monthly Report: May 2021

By Scott Ross

The Ipcress File (1965) It was probably impossible, in a standard narrative movie of the period, to adequately film Len Deighton’s first novel featuring his literally anonymous MI6 agent, so the people involved in making this one didn’t bother. Some of the threads of Deighton’s book remain, including the capture and attempted brainwashing of the agent, called “Harry Palmer” in the three movies in which Michael Caine appeared, although even the contours of that event have been altered. (The filmmakers were also at rather extreme pains to have Palmer assert his heterosexuality lest his eyeglasses and penchant for >gasp!< cooking unnerve wary ticket buyers.) The long middle section of the novel, set on an island military enclave preparing for a missile test, was jettisoned but the central question of identifying the enemy agent remained. The brainwashing techniques are less physically brutal than in the book and more techno-psychological, with the viewer being made to wonder how, if those weird lights, images and sounds assailing Palmer are supposed to be altering his mind the people, seemingly unprotected in any way, who are inflicting them are spared the effects.

I may be seeming to suggest The Ipcress File is a bad movie. It isn’t. In fact, it’s a rather good one. It’s simply not as good, or as satisfying, as Deighton’s novel. There is something to be said for fealty to the source material when adapting good books, although the producer, Harry Saltzman, and his partner “Cubby” Broccoli were at the time routinely going further and further away from the Ian Fleming novels on which their wildly popular James Bond franchise movies were ostensibly based, so perhaps he didn’t think it mattered. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that on the first day of filming the director, Sidney J. Furie, contemptuously tore up the screenplay in front of the cast and crew; he was then forced, sheepishly, to ask for someone to lend him a copy so filming could commence. Naturally, the auteurists swoon over his work. Again, I’m not knocking Furie’s direction of The Ipcress File, merely his arrogance. The picture has an unprepossessing look, achieved in part by the use of Techniscope, which gave the filmmakers fewer visual options but allowed for greater depth of field.

Saltzman deserves real credit for taking a chance on the little-known Michael Caine, and the movie’s success established the young actor as a rising movie star. He’s splendid as Palmer; his underplaying perfectly captures the unnamed character of the Deighton novel in his cynical lack of ideological zeal. (As with John le Carré, the British spymasters in Deighton’s books have no particular anti-Soviet axes to grind; the leave that to their American cousins.) The excellent supporting cast includes Guy Doleman and Nigel Green as Palmer’s superiors and Gordon Jackson as a jovial Scots agent. The score by the Bond composer John Barry, emphasizing the cimbalom, essentially consists of a single theme and variations, and you can only carry that off when theme is a damn good one. Barry’s is.. The James Bond connection is maintained as well by the effective editing by Peter H. Hunt. The somewhat jumbled script was by Bill Canaway and James Doran with an un-credited “polish” by Jimmy Sangster, who allegedly was responsible for removing the novel’s ambiguity.

The Glass Bottomed Boat (1966) Occasionally when I was between the ages of eight and twelve and in my early phase of movie-love, the entire family would sit down to watch the television network premiere of a picture, usually one our parents had seen when it was new in the 1960s. This was one of them. Although we had been taken to the Doris Day/Brian Keith “family” comedy With Six You Get Eggroll in 1968, I knew Day best from her weirdly malleable television series and from the recording of “Que Sera Sera” in the collection of my mother’s EPs and 45s which she gave when I was seven and which I played incessantly, learning early the orphic glories of Frank Sinatra, Nelson Riddle and Nat “King” Cole. Being a child, I liked Day very much, and liked her especially in The Glass Bottom Boat. The biggest surprise to me in seeing this agreeable Frank Tashlin-directed space-age farce again for the first time in 50 years is that I still do.

I know all the arguments against her: That she played the perpetual virgin, that she was puerile and aggressively wholesome, that her sunny optimism was at odds with realities of the national mood — or, indeed, anything human — that she supposedly had all the sex appeal of the faithful family dog, and that her comedies were mostly un-funny. (Some of her harsher critics even maintained, foolishly, that she was a mediocre singer.) Many of her pictures, particularly the later ones, are admittedly bad. But even insufficient fluff like Pillow Talk, The Thrill of it All, Move Over Darling and Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? have their moments. And if she could be shrill, particularly when her characters were outraged, or overwrought when they were in peril, as in the thrillers The Man Who Knew Too Much and Midnight Lace (in both of which she is otherwise quite good) she also projected an intelligence, a comic presence and an enviable gift for timing that are very appealing in screen comedy. And at least since she’s playing a widow there’s no virginity to guard in The Glass Bottom Boat, and no adorable kids to trigger your gag reflex. There is in fact no sentimentality in the picture, which I attribute both to Everett Freeman’s mildly satirical screenplay and to Tashlin’s live-action cartoon direction.

Some of the comic set-pieces are labored, some too broad and the gags are occasionally more obvious than clever. But what works, works exceptionally well, and that includes the sparkling supporting cast: John McGiver, Edward Andrews, Dick Martin, Ellen Corby, Alice Pearce, George Tobias, Arthur Godfrey and Paul Lynde, who even gets a drag sequence… and God, what an ugly woman he makes! Rod Taylor, always likable, is the rocketship designer who sets his cap for Doris, Eric Fleming the meany posing as a government agent and Dom DeLuise, who is annoying in larger roles, has just the right sized one here. (Robert Vaughan also has a gag cameo at a party.) While the back-projection in a few scenes is poor, Leon Shamroy’s widescreen color photography is otherwise glorious. There are also a pair of charming musical sequences. In the first, Day and Godfrey perform a duet of the deliberately silly title song, whose melody is taken from Day’s recording of “Soft as the Starlight,” written by Joe Lubin and Jerome Howard (itself based on “Hush, Little Baby”); it feels entirely spontaneous, with Doris fluffing some of the lyrics as if she’s trying to remember a song learned from her father in childhood and which she hasn’t sung in years. The second is “Soft as the Starlight” itself, which she sings beguilingly while snuffing the candles on her father’s Catalina porch and which Tashlin films in a single, long take (at least until the end when he’s forced to make a cut due to the overhead beams.) It’s a lovely respite from the picture’s sometimes frenetic comedy — a breather, like the songs in Roman comedies.

The Love Bug (1969) This, and the “Dexter Reilly” series starring Kurt Russell, were the apogee of a certain type of comedy associated with the Walt Disney studios. Beginning with The Shaggy Dog in 1959 and running through the 1960s and into the ’70s, these were broad farces, often with science-fiction style special effects or supernatural elements, frequently written either by Bill Walsh or (as this one was) by Walsh and Don DaGradi. The gimmicks occasionally overwhelmed the humor, but in the cleverly-titled The Love Bug the elements are perfectly balanced. It was a movie I loved at eight, and which inspired in me an enduring ardor for the classic 1960s Volkswagen Beetle, an enthusiasm my father, knowing his car engines, did his best to dampen. (Of course, Dad didn’t apply that caution to himself, as his folly in falling in love with the 1970 Sunbeam Alpine attested.)

I wouldn’t have known what it meant at the time, but I’m pretty sure my affection for the movie was related, at least in part, to a pre-pubescent crush on “Herbie”‘s driver: Dean Jones, a perennial presence in my childish Disney universe, dealing, in various shades of charm and frustration, with monkeys, great Danes, racehorses and the ghosts of pirates, his conviction as much as his good looks turning him into an ideal figure on whom to fasten my unfocused devotion. (You can imagine how much that fondness deepened in me when, at 15, I discovered the original cast album of Company and heard the extent of Jones’ vocal range. Has anyone since sung “Being Alive” as powerfully and yet with as much vulnerability as he did?) I don’t think Jones gets nearly the credit he deserves as an actor, probably because of the many Disney movies in which he appeared. He has, for example, a scene in the otherwise horribly misguided adaptation of Jerry Sterner’s wonderful play Other People’s Money that in its quietly guilt-racked way is one of the finest pieces of acting I’ve ever seen, and I seem to be almost alone in having seen it. That sense of conviction I mentioned is his acting bedrock. If you wish to sell a fantasy, or a far-fetched narrative of any kind, you’d better have stars who can convey belief or you’re just slumming and the audience will know it. Good screenwriting helps, of course; the pivotal moment when Jones’ likeable but undistinguished race-car driver realizes the extent of sentient feeling that exists in the little VW and goes chasing after him through the San Francisco fog sells the rest of the picture. We can believe in Herbie because Jones does.

Except for a rather ugly little throwaway joke involving a pair of overage hippies, one of whom calls the other “Guinevere,” the picture is the most amiable family comedy imaginable, and the tricks are so well done you seldom see the joins. (A sight-gag involving David Tomlinson and a black bear was pretty obviously done in part with an animatronic bruin, but it’s funny enough you don’t mind its slight air of artificiality.) Walsh and DaGradi keep things humming with well-defined comic characters, the director, Robert Stevenson, frames the comic set-pieces efficiently, and a terrific cast of comedians does the rest. Aside from Tomlinson, either smilingly unctuous or barking with irrationally self-serving rage, this includes the chipper Michelle Lee as the young woman with whom Jones meets-cute and with whom he bickers before the inevitable clinch; Buddy Hackett as the overage flower-child Tennessee Steinmetz whose lightly and absurdly philosophical bent is a tonic; Joe Flynn as Tomlinson’s toadying associate; Benson Fong as a savvy Chinese entrepreneur; Joe E. Ross as a smiling detective; Iris Adrian as a cranky car-hop (ask your mother); and Ned Glass as an exasperated toll-booth attendant. (Gary Owens, familiar to television viewers of the time from “Laugh-In,” also shows up as a race commentator.) The drivers and stunt men, one of whom was Bill Hicks, received a special credit in the main titles, and with good reason. And the score by George Bruns adds exactly the right touch, especially in the quirky, sunny little waltz theme he composed for Herbie. It’s the essence of the little car summed up in purely musical terms and it makes me smile every time I hear it.

It’s a rare and enchanting thing to re-encounter something which gave you special pleasure in childhood and that you find you’re not ashamed to bump into again years later.

“They make ten thousand cars. They make them exactly the same way. And one or two of them turn out to be something special. Nobody knows why.” — Jim Douglas (Dean Jones) in The Love Bug

Zelig (1983) Technically, Zelig is Woody Allen’s most accomplished movie. But as he rightly pointed out when his cinematographer, the great Gordon Willis, got the first of his only two Academy Awards nomination for it, it’s a trick movie, not one of Willis’ demonstrable masterpieces of lighting like The Godfather, All the President’s Men or Manhattan. Still, it’s at least trick photography in support of something: A simultaneously funny and troubling faux documentary about a nebbish so devoid of a personality he assumes the characteristics of any man around him — a person Bruno Bettleheim, interviewed about him onscreen, describes as “the ultimate conformist.”

Some reviewers in 1983 thought that in his use of interviewees Allen was taking off from Warren Beatty’s “Witnesses” in Reds, and I wondered at the time if they’d ever seen a documentary before. Talking heads are de rigeur in these things, especially on television, and Zelig has the flavor of a vintage BBC program. Besides, Beatty’s interviewees were all there. They’d lived through the first World War and the Russian Revolution. Allen’s interview subjects are mostly writers (Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow), historians (Irving Howe), academics and psychiatrists (Bettelheim) commenting on an historical phenomenon older than themselves. (The exceptions are people like the Parisian nightclub owner Bricktop, there to give a whiff of verisimilitude to the movie.) They go with the doctored 1920s and ’30s footage in which, well before Forrest Gump, the filmmaker places his fictional protagonist among contemporary figures from Babe Ruth to Adolph Hitler.

The absurdist vein of some of the picture’s narration sounds a little too like the jokes in Allen’s New Yorker pieces and his early movies for comfort; they’re the least successful things in those projects, and we’d thought by 1983 he’d outgrown them. I also don’t buy Mia Farrow as a psychiatrist, perhaps because she needs one of her own too badly. Eric Lundegaard in his 2011 review feels that Leonard Zelig shouldn’t have spoken because hearing Woody Allen’s voice ruins the idea of the “chameleon man,” and while I’m sympathetic I would argue that seeing Allen as Zelig is a spoiler as well. Full success of the gimmick would have involved an actor almost no one had ever seen or heard before. In any case, Allen is more subdued here than usual, hence less obnoxious, and his gift for physical comedy is best represented by the hilarious moment in which he gets into a shoving match with an aged psychiatrist, all the funnier for being shown in the distance so that when it begins we’re not quite sure what we’re seeing.

The best things in the movie, aside from Allen’s imaginative use of physical types for Zelig to morph into (including, in a photograph, the famous portrait of Caruso in Pagliacchio) are Willis’ work and the music. Dick Hyman not only arranged, in his (as they used to say) inimitable style, a program of period songs, but wrote several pastiche numbers of his own: “Leonard the Lizard,” “Doin’ the Chameleon,” “You May Be Six People, But I Love You,” “Reptile Eyes” (performed by Rose Marie Jun) and even some snippets of a “Changing Man Concerto.” The musical highlight, however, is the delicious “Chameleon Days,” performed, so we are told, by Helen Kane but actually by Mae Questel. Since Kane famously sued the Max Fleischer Studios over Betty Boop, for whom Questel provided the voice, this can legitimately be cited as irony.

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) A charming compilation of three Disney featurettes from the work of A.A. Milne: Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968) and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1974).

Q & A (1990) Sidney Lumet, acting as both writer and director, delivers a tough, visceral account of the equally striking novel by Edwin Torres, featuring a frightening performance by Nick Nolte as a psychopathic New York City cop.

Will Penny (1967) The writer/director Tom Gries’ character study of an ageing cowboy is one of the few genuinely adult Westerns made in America, and one of the most satisfying.

The Odd Couple (1968) The funniest American play of the post-war era in its equally hilarious movie adaptation.

The Professionals (1966) Richard Brooks’ enormously engaging latter-day Western from the delicious Frank Rourke novel. It may not speak to the human condition the way Will Penny does, but it’s still one of the most entertaining movies of its era, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Laugh machine: “The Odd Couple” (1968)

By Scott Ross

If there is such a thing as a fool-proof play, Neil Simon’s 1965 comedy may be it. College groups, community theatres and high school students can perform it and even with indifferent or downright poor performances the laughs roll on undiminished. Of course, it’s better to see almost any play done by professionals (not that getting paid precludes bad acting) but the structure of the thing is like some exquisitely tuned clockwork mechanism, and the dialogue has a shape and beauty that go beyond funny one-liners. Anyone with a fair sense of humor can write effective one-liners. It’s the human force behind the jokes that makes our smiles more than mere musculatory reflex actions. Take, for example, Oscar Madison’s peerless response to the bereft Felix Ungar saying, late in the first act, that without his wife and children he’s “nothing”:

What do you mean, nothing? You’re something. A person! You’re flesh and blood and bones and hair and nails and ears. You’re not a fish. You’re not a buffalo… You’re you! You walk and talk and cry and complain and eat little green pills and send suicide telegrams. No one else does that, Felix. I’m telling you, you’re-the-only-one-of-its-kind-in-the-world!

I can’t speak for any other playwright, but that’s a monologue I would have happily sacrificed at least one actor on a stone slab to have written.

_{Oscar’s apartment, B.F. (Before Felix): John Fiedler, Herbert Edelman, Walter Matthau, Larry Haines, David Scheiner. Note the lovely parquet floor.}

If the play, arguably the funniest and best-written of all post-war American comedies (at least until Larry Gelbart’s Sly Fox 11 years later) is nearly indestructible, how much more impressive it is when performed by a cast of great farceurs. And in the movie it has them — indeed, Gene Saks was able to cast half of the original company for the picture and his replacements (Herbert Edelman, Larry Haines and David Scheiner as three of the poker players)* are splendid. I have always been nonplussed by Leonard Maltin’s observation, in his capsule review, that Jack Lemmon’s “realistic performance” as Felix “makes [the] character melancholy instead of funny.” Now, just because Lemmon is my favorite actor doesn’t mean I expect him to be everyone’s, or for others to see what I consider his nearly unerring genius as both a comic and a dramatic performer. But how Maltin was (and is; his opinion stands as late as the final edition of his movie guide in 2015) incapable of appraising Jack Lemmon as a comedic technician in this role is staggering. Lemmon’s Felix is no less funny than Walter Matthau’s Oscar, itself a true original, a comic invention on a par with Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau. Simon, as the screenwriter, gives Lemmon a comic leg-up right at the beginning, when we see not only Felix’s suicide attempt being thwarted by a stubborn hotel window but by his own physical ailments when he tries too hard to open it. It sets the character up concisely, and nearly without words, perfectly reflecting the “nut” the poker buddies are talking about in the following scene, so that when he shows up at Oscar’s apartment we understand, better than a theatre audience ever could, exactly who Felix Ungar is. We’re laughing at his pain before we even know his name. Does a “realistic,” “melancholy” performance allow us to do that? Can someone who is not a comic technician of considerable instincts and aplomb make you laugh as hard as Lemmon does in the coffee shop scene (does anyone remember coffee shops?) when Felix, oblivious to the public spectacle he’s making of himself, tries to open up his blocked eustachian tubes?†

^{Only two years after their initial teaming in The Fortune Cookie, the Lemmon/Matthau pairing was being advertised — along with the title of Neil Simon’s phenomenal hit play — as all the justification you needed for buying a ticket. (Poster art by Robert McGinnis.)}

A churl could cavil perhaps that “Oscar Madison” is too WASP-y a name to entrust to an ethnic comedian but to them I say, Gai kaken oifen yam. We’ve seldom been given the opportunity to see a theatre performance as beautifully preserved as Matthau’s is here, and it isn’t set in amber, worked to death by repetition. It’s fully alive, and spontaneous, the way the true classic comedic performances are on film. You know that Chaplin and Keaton and Cary Grant and W.C. Fields worked out their lines and routines meticulously but they feel entirely unstudied, as if everything they do or say has just occurred to them. When Oscar, opening cans of beer, douses the poker players with the spray, it comes across as entirely fresh, even though we know Matthau probably played that action hundreds of times along the road and on Broadway. (It’s funny, now, to see him doing it with a church-key. We’ve gotten so used to pop-tops that even those of us old enough to remember a time before they became ubiquitous have to remind ourselves that we used to open drink cans that way in the 1960s.) Matthau’s comic timing, and his way with a line or a set of lines, are nonpareil, especially when he elides the full stops and runs mildly amusing sentences together until they are suddenly hilariously funny: “Iwantyoutogosogo [Briefest of pauses] Whenareyougoing?”

And then there are Monica Evans and Carole Shelley as the simultaneously maddening and endearing Pigeons Sisters, and how they made those giggles of theirs seem spontaneous eight shows a week I can’t imagine. One gives credit to Gene Saks, the director, who with Simon so beautifully re-imagined the play for the movies, for these blissful performances, especially since Saks was himself an actor, and a very good one. Yet one should also, perhaps — especially in the cases of Matthau, Evans, Shelley and John Fiedler as Vinnie — also credit Mike Nichols, the director of the original 1965 Broadway production, who was genuinely brilliant at staging not merely action but behavior.

One of the most boring phrases ever invented for movies is “opening up,” which everyone in a suit wants a play to be when it’s filmed, as if the effectiveness of the play itself was not the reason you bought the rights to it.‡ Simon’s means of taking Oscar and Felix out of their apartment (eight rooms at the Dorchester on Central Park West, imagine!) not only don’t feel tacked on, they’re completely organic; they give additional shape to the action, and, for those who enjoy, as I do, the time-capsule aspect of movies, provide pleasing glimpses of New York City ca. 1967, such as the old Metropole Cafe, where Lemmon guiltily looks at the girl go-go dancers out of the corner of his eye and, hilariously, activates the crick in his neck knocking back his drink.

Robert B. Hauser’s gorgeously muted deep-focus widescreen photography is another asset, as is Neal Hefti’s charming brief musical score anchored to his soon-to-be-famous waltz-like main theme. Hal Pereira and Robert Benton, who the same year created the memorably cramped, accurate indoor settings for Will Penny, did superb work of a very different sort on Oscar’s expansive apartment (Walter Tyler shared the art direction chores with Pereira). The “Kep Out” message scrawled on the outer door of Madison’s children’s room and which Felix occupies, like the bunk-beds he has to sleep on, lend the perfect touch, un-remarked upon in the dialogue, that hints at a certain sentimentality Oscar Madison maintains towards his young sons, three thousand miles away in California. I have the almost certain feeling that, today, the people putting together a movie like this (not there are any movies like this now) would demand the screenwriter make a comment on that lest the popular audience, unused to exercising its functions of deductive reasoning, become hopelessly confused.

It is to Saks’ and Simon’s (and the producer, Howard W. Koch’s) credit that such a thing presumably never occurred to any of them, and to the credit of the American movie-going audience of 1968 that it didn’t need these things explained.

*Edelman, Haines and Scheiner were replacements on Broadway and in road companies of the play. The other, and (aside from Matthau) only carry-over from the original cast is the wonderfully church-mousey John Fiedler.

†At least Lemmon is believable as Felix, something the terminally prissy Tony Randall seldom was on the long-lived television series… a show that never made sense to me, since Oscar’s adoption of Felix as his roommate is a temporary situation.

‡Speaking of rights: Simon’s then-agent talked him into selling the rights to his early plays to Paramount outright rather than (as any sane agent would have advised) granting the studio one-time rights to film his work. As a result, Simon never made a dime in royalties from the successful Odd Couple television series (or its three subsequent cartoon and live action versions) or from Barefoot in the Park, which also showed up in 1970 as a nearly all-black version featuring Scoey Mitchell and Nipsy Russell and which ran for only twelve episodes.

Too soon old and too late smart: “Will Penny” (1967)

By Scott Ross

One of the few genuinely adult Westerns made in America, and one of the most satisfying. Written and directed by Tom Gries and based on a teleplay he’d done for the Sam Peckinpah television series “The Westerner” in 1960, it’s an almost novelistic character study of an ageing, ordinary cowboy in a young man’s profession, like Monte Walsh in the great Jack Shaefer book, arguably the best and most completely captivating Western fiction published before Lonesome Dove. Like Walsh, Penny is incapable of stopping for longer than a few months, and then only when the job demands it; he’s been conditioned to roam. The movie confronts its eponymous loner with two crises which, while initially unrelated, merge into a single cataclysm. Nearly everything about the picture is a pleasure, from Gries’ remarkably assured script and direction and the glorious Lucien Ballard photography to the superb, lived-in sets by Roland Anderson, Hal Pereira and Robert Benton and the musical theme by David Raksin in which, with his usual uncanny alchemy, the composer makes every note sound both surprising and inevitable.

Perhaps the most gratifying, and revelatory, aspect of Will Penny is the superb central performance by Charlton Heston. Heston is often referred to as an heroic actor and his outsized persona, which can work in movies scaled to that big, unsubtle presence, tends to dwarf anything smaller. For me the only exception, before seeing his work here, was his wry Cardinal Richelieu in the Richard Lester/George MacDonald Fraser Three Musketeers pictures, which is an entirely different sort of character. There’s something oppressive and unpleasant about Heston, and a little sinister even when he’s playing heroic figures; Richelieu allowed him to indulge that, and to add in small curlicues of nasty, dry wit. Here, with Heston playing a workaday, unlettered cowboy, you’d think the ordinariness would be beyond him, but he gives into it so completely there’s nothing on the screen but the character. It’s the kind of performance Paul Newman gave, often, but which we never expect from Heston. Something about the material pretty obviously inspired him, maybe pushed him to delve deeper than he was accustomed to on less interesting projects. It’s a clean performance, entirely free of heroic clutter and movie star quirks; Heston isn’t as cynical here as Eastwood often is, and he reacts to almost everything that happens to the character as if he wasn’t expecting it but is willing to accept the reality anyway.

There are those who feel that the mad preacher played by Donald Pleasence and his weird family who keep cropping up to menace the characters (and which includes a surprisingly low-keyed Bruce Dern and a mute, predatory girl) are unbelievable. They may have a point, although I think the unbalanced Quints bring an almost Faulknerian quality to the narrative. God knows they’re memorable. The supporting cast is one of almost profligate richness: Slim Pickens, fed up and surly as a trail cook; an amiable G.D. Spradlin as a rancher; Clifton James as a jolly, mercenary innkeeper; William Schallert as the combination barber/doctor in a town that doesn’t look large enough to support either; and Ben Johnson, his eye twinkling merrily, as a fair-minded cattle rancher. Best of the men are the young Anthony Zerbe as the immigrant cowboy “Dutchy,” who smilingly parlays a gunshot wound into bids for whiskey and feminine sympathy, and Lee Majors as his and Will’s friend Blue. Majors is so eminently likeable here, and so at ease in front of the camera, you may find yourself wishing he’d never been involved in television and wondering why casting directors are sometimes so damn dumb they can’t see what’s in front of them. As the woman traveling alone with a young son on the frontier whose plight intersects unexpectedly with Will’s own, Joan Hackett gives one of those understated, intelligent performances of hers that those of us who fell in love with movies in the ’60s and ’70s quickly came to treasure. And as the boy Horace, Jon Gries, the filmmaker’s son, is so wholly ingenuous you can understand why the movie’s producer Walter Seltzer insisted on his being cast. There’s nothing “Gee, whiz” or “Come back, Shane!” about the script, and that lack of phoniness extends to young Gries, who might have had a thing or two to teach an entire generation of child stars who came after him.

I called Will Penny one of the few adult Westerns when I began, and I stand by that. Much as I enjoy a good Western picture, there aren’t many that really challenge you. Unforgiven does, and The Outlaw — Joey Wales, and High Plains Drifter, and Track of the Cat and The Wild Bunch of course, and parts of Winchester ’73 and The Naked Spur and Day of the Outlaw and The Searchers, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. But even John Ford at his best often dealt more with concepts and simple home-truths than with the real concerns of the people in his movies. Why show a man endangering others with his violent, wild-eyed obsessions and then excuse him because he was an officer, as Fonda is excused posthumously at the end of Fort Apache? And who is Clementine but a convenient ideal Wyatt Earp can romantically leave behind at the end? When Will Penny ticks off the reasons why, despite his deep love for both the woman with whom he’s been stranded and her young son, he isn’t for her, you find yourself agreeing with everything he says even as your heart is aching for all three of them. That’s a scene that doesn’t show up often, probably because negative word-of-mouth can kill a movie’s chances at the box-office, as I suspect was the case with this one. But the climactic dialogue between Heston and Hackett earns its impact honestly.

I cited Shane above, about as badly mangled an adaptation of a great short novel as I’ve ever encountered, and the way Tom Gries wrote and directed the final scene of leave-taking in Will Penny could almost be seen as creating an anti-Shane. The restraint is everything; it breaks the heart without exposing the effort it took to do so. Will Penny deserves to be seen, if any Western does.

Inside/outside, our side/their side: “Q & A” (1990)

By Scott Ross

“Brennan ain’t no racist. He hates everybody. He’s an equal opportunity hater.”
— Detective Luis Valentin (Luis Guzmán) on Lt. Mike Brennan (Nick Nolte)

If New York City was Sidney Lumet’s perennial subject, examining police corruption was within that sphere his particular forte, and the Edwin Torres novel Q & A seemed almost written for him to make into a movie. Torres’ taut, disturbing book, published in the 1970s, limns the investigation of a veteran police detective’s shooting of a Latino gangster by an un-tested assistant district attorney, himself once a cop, the case hopelessly complicated by the peripheral involvement of a young Latina with whom the D.A. was once in love. As can be imagined from the foregoing, the novel was a complicated affair, and I haven’t even cited the wealthy, sophisticated drug lord with whom the girl is now living; a frightened gay junkie who, aside from being one of the police force’s paid informants, is the shooting’s only witness; his explosive-tempered drag-queen boyfriend; the young assistant D.A.’s shady superior who is somehow involved with both the Latin gang and their Mafia rivals; a black cop whose loyalty is primarily to the shooter; his coeval, the sharp, funny Puerto Rican officer on whose sound instincts the young lawyer relies; and the Jewish prosecutor, once the D.A.’s boss, who is perhaps the single person in authority the young attorney can trust. Yet as complex as that precis makes it sound, both the Torres novel and the superb picture Lumet fashioned from it can easily be followed by anyone with a functional reasoning apparatus… which is, alas, at least in America, an increasingly reduced pool of respondents.

Lumet was both the screenwriter and director on Q & A, and proved as adept at the former as he nearly always was at the latter. Part of the reason for the picture’s artistic success, I think, lies in how closely Lumet hews to Torres’ plot. Indeed, the only major component of the novel from which Lumet deviates is in eliminating the annoying, self-consciously literate speech of the District Attorney played by Patrick O’Neal, and that’s a loss to be celebrated. On the page you can’t believe in him; he sounds like a figure in a Henry James story, or a British stage play of the early 1950s. I suppose, given the character’s lowly origins, this might be considered a case of over-compensation, but that impossibly florid manner of speaking is one of the two areas of the novel Torres got wrong. The other is also related to speech: The way Al Reilly, the assistant D.A. (Timothy Hutton in the movie) veers suddenly from modulated sentences and educated thoughts to ungrammatical, slang-heavy sub-literate patois from scene to scene. Lumet’s screenplay renders both characters more consistently and believably.

While race and systemic corruption are the heart of the narrative in both book and film, Torres also cannily raises the question of the murderous cop Brennan’s buried sexuality. Indeed, the gay paid snitch (Paul Calderón in the movie) explicitly opines that while Brennan (Nick Nolte) would never admit to it, he is homosexual. It is of course a popular truism that the most viciously homophobic are those with the shakiest sexuality, and Brennan’s victimization of gay men, both in the Torres novel and the Lumet adaptation, suggests this without either author forcing the issue. Lumet, whose rather striking liberal contempt for homosexual men ran like a malodorous streak throughout much of his 1960s and ’70s oeuvre, at least until Dog Day Afternoon, honors this psychologically valid conceit although, thankfully, he spares us Brennan’s particularly horrible M.O., inserting lit cigarettes into the rectums of his “faggot” victims. Twice in the escalating violence of the picture’s last third Brennan plays seducer to a man he is about to murder; as with the scene when Brennan harasses a drag-queen prostitute on the street by groping his genitals and forcing him to admit he’s a man, we are left to wonder from this how much of the cop’s tactics are a ruse and how much an expression of genuine desire. Likewise, when he realizes that Reilly has become his enemy (“You went from our side to their side!”) he runs his large fingers along the younger man’s cheek, in a manner that feels both obliquely threatening and extraordinarily intimate, like the regretful act of a rejected lover.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is q-a-hutton-nolte.jpg

With his dark hair and mustache and his imposing physique, Nick Nolte is a quietly terrifying figure, routinely intimidating petty criminals, stool pigeons, gangsters, attorneys and even his fellow police officers to get what he wants. Brennan seems to be a man with no interior life other than a need to cover up his crimes — a true sociopath equipped with a badge and a gun.* Nolte gives himself over completely to the role; there’s no actorish special-pleading in his performance, no wink to the audience or attempt to soften Brennan up. He’s a psychopath for whom no rules apply, and he’s gotten away with it for so long he sees no reason not to believe he always will. He thinks he’s invincible. (The character has no idea he’s being conspired against from all sides, and wouldn’t believe it if someone told him.) There isn’t a weak link in the rest of the cast either, and which includes Armand Assante as the felon around whom the murders revolve, Lee Richardson as Hutton’s former boss, Charles S. Dutton and Luis Guzmán as the officers investigating the initial killing, Fyvush Finkel as a grandstanding attorney and the wonderful Dominic Chianese as a deceptively benign mafioso. Hutton, who has always been exceptional at locating the pain with which his characters live without emasculating them, does so here as well. Aside from Nolte, however, the movie’s other great acting comes from three much less famous sources.

Jenny Lumet, the writer/director’s daughter, gives a performance of enormous poise as Nancy, the Latina with whom the Hutton character was involved. And while both Al and Nancy can be apportioned equal blame for the demise of that love affair, she is, quite understandably, unable to resurrect feeling for him for what she sees as his racist reaction to meeting her beloved father without first being told he was black. Lumet uses her beautiful features (her grandmother was Lena Horne) to express Nancy’s emotions, and aside from her initial unexpected meeting with Al as he questions witnesses she has virtually no filter; whether she is angry, or bitter, or hurt, or a combination of all three, the character’s feelings are written across the actress’ features, nakedly. The only other exception is the final scene — which unlike the original author the movie’s writer/director leaves tantalizingly ambiguous, Al Reilly’s infinite hope poised above the precipice of Nancy’s ultimate acceptance or rejection. Only then is Jenny Lumet’s face unreadable, and we become grateful for the refusal on everyone’s part to depict a definitive answer to Al’s plea. As the junkie informant Roger, unable to control his appetites for blow and sex or to govern his emotions even when failing to restrain his tongue puts him in mortal peril, Paul Calderón gives a loose, brave, defiant performance, and he’s matched by the sensuous playing of International Chrysis as Roger’s lover Josè, who doesn’t understand just how dangerous Brennan is until too far late.

I have only two cavils about Lumet’s screenplay. Although he deviates from the climax of Torres’ novel, and its aftermath, I don’t think the filmmaker’s more cynical view of things inapt; we know too much now about how the cyst of corruption is lanced and dressed by those in positions to expose it to quite believe in the old Capra solutions… which anyway were scorned by the knowing even when they were new. (Lumet also reduced Brennan from an ethnically bifurcated Irish-Italian to pure Mick, I suppose to emphasize his Anglo-Saxon bigotry.) I do question, however, why the Patrick O’Neal character insists on calling Al Reilly “Francis,” unless it’s simply the arrogance of the man. Of more concern to me, however, is why Lumet softened the contours of Brennan’s youthful crime when the one described in Torres’ book was more shocking and less explicable. But those are pretty much my only complaints about his work here, which is shot through with his usual intelligence and respect for his audience. Lumet was not interested in genre pictures, and tended in general to eschew the standard action movie set-pieces, but the conventional thriller sequences here are exceptionally well done and without the “Hey, look at me behind the camera!” excesses of others who have made crime in America their primary subject. His cinematographer, Andrzej Bartkowiak, delivers a New York which, desaturated and often rainy, somehow seems even more vibrantly alive, and the Rubén Blades score, which includes a re-working of his song “The Hit,” has exactly the right feeling — spare and foreboding, with a Latin feel appropriate to the story and its characters.

Because I was in the midst of producing my first full-length play at Hampshire College when Q & A was released, I had no time to see any movies at all and accordingly missed this one, which I regretted. It’s a pleasure to encounter it all these years later, and to salute the humane popular artistry of the man who made it.

*Since Q & A was made in 1990, decades before our tax dollars began going to Israel’s thuggish police force to train our equally brutish cops in how to most efficiently escalate violence against American citizens, particularly — although by no means exclusively — non-Caucasians, that image feels rather prescient today.

	scottross79 on You think I’m an idiot,…
	Vegetarian Burrito on You think I’m an idiot,…
	R Kress on I’m an Indian too (A Sio…
	scottross79 on Perfectly swell romance: The F…
	Rev. E.M. Camarena on Perfectly swell romance: The F…

So few critics, so many poets

"If you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets." – Pauline Kael

Month: June 2021

Joy: “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)

Spoilsports at the orgy: “The Big Fix” (1978)

He loves and she loves: “Manhattan” (1979)

How much is it a gallon, Jamison? or, Quotes, un-quotes and quotes: The incredible disintegrating English language (It’s a doggie-dog world)

Monthly Report: May 2021

Laugh machine: “The Odd Couple” (1968)

Too soon old and too late smart: “Will Penny” (1967)

Inside/outside, our side/their side: “Q & A” (1990)