By Scott Ross
As ever, click the links on the capsules for the complete reviews and essays.
Funny Face (1957) Fred Astaire’s last major musical, with vintage Gershwin songs, a typically charming performance by Audrey Hepburn and a brilliant supporting turn by the treasurable Kay Thompson.
The Shakiest Gun in the West (1966) A generally amusing remake of the 1948 Bob Hope vehicle The Paleface reimagined for Don Knotts with bits of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance thrown in. It’s better, certainly, than the anemic The Reluctant Astronaut although nowhere near as good as The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. (All three were written by James Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum.) The picture virtually defines the word “inconsequential,” but it’s got some good laughs — the sight of Knotts in drag not the least among them, although the question of why some big, virile Indian brave goes mad with lust every time he lays eyes on him remains unanswered — excellent set direction (Alexander Golitzen and Henry Larrecq), good costumes (Grady Hunt), enjoyable music (by Vic Mizzy, of course) and a lot of wonderful character actors in supporting roles. These include Jackie Coogan, Ruth McDevitt, Dub Taylor, Hope Summers. Burt Mustin, a young William Christopher, Carl Ballantine as a fast-talking wagon salesman and and Pat Morita as his general factotum.
Little Shop of Horrors – The Director’s Cut (1986) Why some people feel the need to tamper with success is a question perhaps best left to psychoanalysis, but some things really are better left alone. Frank Oz and Howard Ashman, trying to preserve the satirical content of Ashman and Alan Mencken’s stage musical, filmed the show’s original ending, in which both leading characters die, then seemed shocked when preview audiences hated what they’d done. They somehow didn’t get that film transforms the human figure, gives it a realism, ironically, that an actual person performing in front of you on a stage often doesn’t have. The pair also designed and filmed a long sequence in which the alien plants lay waste to a city. Both scenes were subsequently cut and a new ending devised in which the nebbish Seymour (Rick Moranis) and his sweetly ditzy inamorata Audrey (Ellen Greene) escape to their suburban dream, with a sly wink at the audience at the climax. Having badly miscalculated once, and corrected the error, Oz replicated it in this “Director’s Cut,” which preserves the nasty preview edit. (Ashman died years ago, before the premiere of Beauty and the Beast.)
What’s always been delightful about Little Shop remains so, even in this overstuffed edition: The witty doo-wop score, Ashman’s darkly funny script taking off from the two-day-wonder 1960 Roger Corman movie, Oz’s creative direction, the performances by the leads (Moranis, Greene, Vincent Gardenia, Steve Martin and Levi Stubbs as the voice of the plant), the wonderful black girl-group Greek chorus (Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks, Tisha Campbell), the superb “Skid Row” production design by Roy Walker, the felicitously-named Robert Paynter’s rich cinematography and Lyle Conway’s miraculous puppetry for the “Audrey II” alien. Bill Murray gives an inspired performance as a dental masochist; his scene with Martin is almost a cinematic transliteration of the old joke about what happens when a sadist and a masochist meet. But Oz’s original finale, with its obvious nod to the original King Kong, goes on and on, pointlessly and annoyingly, for what feels like hours. The Blu-ray on which I watched his preferred cut fortunately contains the original theatrical edit. I sincerely hope the “Director’s Cut” never supersedes it. That would be a horror.
Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976) The writer-director Paul Mazursky’s funny, heartfelt cinematic reminiscence of his youth as an aspiring actor. Mazursky’s previous picture, the splendid Harry & Tonto, had been a “road movie,” and Next Stop is a bit like a road movie without the road: Mazursky’s alter ego, Larry Lapisnky (the wonderful Lenny Baker) leaves home at the beginning for the Village, and exits New York at the end.
Mazursky’s openheartedness informs every moment of Next Stop, Greenwich Village. I don’t think there’s ever been a movie portrait of the Village to match it, and I doubt there’s another American picture that comes close to capturing the headiness, the ardor, the go-for-broke optimism (and the sadness) of a group of talented young people on the cusp of launching their theatrical careers. Mazursky even makes a kind of peace with his own maddening mother who in Shelley Winters’ marvelous performance becomes in a way the ultimate screen embodiment of Jewish Motherhood. Larry’s world, which his creator observes with non-judgmental amusement, includes his girlfriend Sarah (the superb Ellen Greene), his gentle peacemaking father (Mike Kellin), a womanizing dramatic poet (Chris Walken) based on Mazursky’s one-time friend and romantic rival Howard Sackler, the periodically suicidal Anita (Lois Smith, in an astonishing performance), the amiable Connie (Dori Brenner), the gay black hustler Bernstein (Antonio Fargas) forever announcing he’s fallen in love with some trick or other, Larry’s health-food purveying employer (the great Lou Jacobi) and his acting coach (Michael Egan, essentially playing Herbert Berghof). Joe Spinnell also has a good bit as a cop who interrupts Larry’s drunken actor fantasies and Jeff Goldblum has another as an obnoxious actor. Arthur J. Ornitz, who also shot An Unmarried Woman for Mazursky, brought a beautiful, warm, muted palette to the picture, a form that perfectly complements the movie’s content.
The Player (1992) Robert Altman and Michael Tolken’s satirical fantasia on Hollywood, based on the latter’s novel, was the brightest release of its summer and one of that year’s most accomplished and entertaining pictures. I’ve never been sure that Altman’s Brechtian approach, treating the entirety of the action as a film-within-a-film, succeeds — those B- movie, film noir posters on the walls of a modern movie studio which could more reasonably be expected to sport framed examples of its own product only exist, after all, as self-conscious symbols — yet the movie is so light on its feet, and contains so many artfully rendered digs at the naked crassness pervading the movie industry it’s seldom less than both amusing and instructive. The dozens of stars playing themselves, some in what Mike Todd once called cameo roles, others in what amounts to walk-on appearances, lend a strange verisimilitude to the picture… “strange” in that the movie has no particular reality, so personalities such as Harry Belafonte, Cher and Jack Lemmon are like figures in the carpet of a dream. Or perhaps a nightmare; although The Player is often very funny, and its central actor rightly called “a shit-bag producer,” one moreover who murders a screenwriter and gets away with it, the journey of Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is one Kafka would appreciate.
Snoopy, Come Home (1972) The second Peanuts feature, which I loved at 11, made the mistake of putting Snoopy in the forefront and relegating the kids to supporting actors, a tendency it shared with the strip itself in those days. The modestly talented Bill Melendez directed and although the songs are by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman they’re more about mood than character, and character was the Sherman’s forte. Among the artists involved were the Disney veteran Don Lusk, Phil Roman and Bob Clampett’s great (and certifiably insane) animator Rod Scribner.
The Frighteners — Director’s Cut (1996) As with Tim Burton, it’s become increasingly difficult to remember the time when Peter Jackson was an interesting filmmaker. The Frighteners is like its Danny Elfman score: Too busy, too frenetic and, ultimately, not exhilarating but exhausting. The best thing about the picture is Michael J. Fox’s performance as Frank Bannister, a phony spiritualist whose business is kept (barely) afloat through his association with several actual ghosts (Chi McBride, Jim Fyfe, John Astin). The death of his wife in an automobile accident years before has left Frank nearly devoid of feeling and although Fox is engaging he carries a weight of depression. The movie’s larger plot involves the ghost of a young mass-murderer (Jake Busey) who is still killing, and the approach of Jackson and his co-scenarist Fran Walsh to matters of spiritualism are utterly illogical: Shades such as Astin’s Judge are somehow still moldering, losing parts of their bodies as they rot, and the spirits can themselves be destroyed by other ghosts. The crowning horrors of the picture are not the ghostly goings-on but the incredibly overripe performances by Peter Dobson as a recent murder victim and, especially, the appalling Jeffrey Combs as the unhinged government investigator Dammers. However low one’s opinion of the FBI, surely it’s an impossible stretch to imagine that even so corrupt an entity would sanction an agent as obviously deranged as this one.
Where’s Poppa? (1970) One of the sickest comedies ever made and, if you’re open to it, one of the funniest. In this adaptation by Robert Klane of his acid-tinged comic novel, George Segal plays a hag-ridden lawyer coping with his senescent mother (Ruth Gordon) whom he would like to get rid of by fair means or foul. (When he dresses in a gorilla suit in hopes of giving her a fatal coronary she knees him in the balls; as he lies there in pain she gurgles, “Oh, Gordon — you almost scared me to death!” to which he rasps, “Almost doesn’t count.”) It’s a surreal black comedy where nearly everyone is either insane or behaves that way. Carl Reiner directed the picture as if it made perfect sense, and that squareness makes the dialogue even funnier; at a crucial juncture Segal snarls out a hilarious threat to Gordon whose obscene ferocity absolutely fractured me.
Among the other inmates are Ron Leibman as Gordon’s idiot brother, Trish Van Devere as the home nurse Gordon falls in love with, Barnard Hughes and Vincent Gardenia as pathological court plaintiffs, Rob Reiner as one of Gordon’s typically loopy clients, Rae Allen as Leibman’s wife, Paul Sorvino as the barking curator of a nightmare old-folks’ home, Garrett Morris as a cheerful Central Park mugger, William Le Massena as a judge and Alice Drummond, who has a great scene as a woman stuck in an elevator with a naked Leibman.
Mastermind (1969/1976) A silly, enjoyable spoof of Charlie Chan movies starring Zero Mostel that sat on the shelf for seven years before being given a perfunctory release. When you think of the number of truly wretched, slavering “comedies” that routinely infested American screens during that period and were infinitely more successful at the box office it’s hard to imagine why the producers of this one were so ashamed of it, or why they couldn’t find a distributor. Written by William Peter Blatty (billed as “Terence Clyne”) and Ian McLellan Hunter, Mastermind is frequently hilarious and never less than amusing, although you may wonder why, when every other Japanese character speaks perfect English only Mostel’s Inspector Hoku Ichihara expresses himself in Charlie Chanese. (It’s not exactly Pidgin, but if you’ve read the Earl Derr Biggers Chan novels you’ll recognize its contours immediately.) The direction by Alex March is like so much television of the period, as is the cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld. But there’s a funny chase sequence, and the likable performers range from Bradford Dillman as an iffy American government agent to Sorrell Booke as a suspect scientist, Herbert Berghof as a mad German and Felix Silla as his creation, a mean little robot called Schatzi. Jules Munshin and Phil Leeds also show up, as a pair of Israeli agents who may or may not be lovers. Fred Karlin contributed a pleasant score, and Mostel is more restrained than usual; there’s a slightly Zen quality to the character of Inspector Ichihara, and it affects the entire tone of the picture in a positive way.
Peter Pan (1953) The inevitable Disney version of J.M. Barrie’s play and, later, novel. I saw the picture initially on one of its theatrical reissues (ask your parents) around 1970 and it was one of the few animated Disneys I had no overwhelming desire to see again. Watching it now I can understand that lack of enthusiasm. It’s a typically good-looking, well animated exercise that feels utterly empty of content or emotion and, although set in the early part of the 20th century, is wedded to Jud Conlon’s resolutely 1950s vocal arrangements. That it took no fewer than seven composers and lyricists to come up with the anemic song score is telling, and Sammy Fain’s “What Made the Red Man Red?” is, to a modern sensibility, appalling. (And why does the asexual Peter whoop it up like a sex-crazed wolf in some Tex Avery cartoon because Tiger Lily has rubbed noses with him?)
Speaking of Avery, the best thing about this Peter Pan are the realizations of Captain Hook (Frank Thomas), Mr. Smee (Ollie Johnston) and the Crocodile (Wolfgang Reitherman), all of whom seem to have wandered in from another, broader animated dimension and whose vocal characterizations (Hans Conried as Hook, Bill Thompson as Smee) are unalloyed delights. Bobby Driscoll was the model for Peter and gives a nice vocal performance which emphasizes Peter’s unthinking pubescent selfishness.
Carnal Knowledge (1971) Jules Feiffer’s wonderfully titled look at incompatible sexual relationships, icily directed by Mike Nichols in long, long takes and exquisitely photographed by Giuseppe Rotunno. Feiffer initially planned it as a play, and the scenes have a theatrical shape to them. Actually, they feel like elongated versions of Feiffer’s Village Voice strips and the ironies he expresses have a ruthless inevitability. The script grew out of its author’s observation of men who desire women’s bodies yet despise the women themselves and the embodiment of that attitude is Jack Nicholson’s Jonathan. As a college boy he’s the kind of young hypocrite who complains of a girl that she “let” him feel her up on the first date and it turned him off and who is constantly alert for “ball-breakers” yet is brutal to the women who are fool enough to love him. Jonathan’s counterpart, his college roommate Sandy (Art Garfunkel) is gentle and less crude (Jonathan has an adolescent fixation on “big tits”) but he’s every bit as hard to please: He goes from the blank Susan (Candice Bergen) to the steely Cindy (Cynthia O’Neal) to the flower-child Jennifer (Carol Kane) and never seems satisfied with any of them. And Jonathan is such a rat, and so sexually suspect, he isn’t happy unless he can seduce Susan while she’s dating Sandy — actually, because she’s seeing his best friend.
The acting is highly variable. Why anyone ever thought Bergen was an actress is one of those eternal mysteries, while Garfunkel’s character barely exists and poor Rita Moreno is given an impossible scene in which as a call-girl she has to excessively praise Jonathan’s virility in order for him to achieve an erection. Nicholson completely gives in to Jonathan’s psycho-sexual contradictions and obsessions, but the revelation is Ann-Margret as the hapless Bobbie, who under Jonathan’s tender ministrations goes from a happy young woman to an emotional and psychological wreck. Nichols was a master at directing actors, and of developing character through behavior. Where, in this picture, he was less assured was in his showier gambits: The restaurant set seeming to revolve as Jonathan and Bobbie talk, for example, or the way the background behind Moreno appears to be rising as she performs her degrading monologue. The worst moment, naturally, involves Bergen: A tight closeup of her face as the unseen Jonathan and Sandy compete to make her laugh and she does so, endlessly. Earlier Susan has told Sandy that everyone acts, and it’s clear that this scene is supposed to show how she acts as much as everyone else, yet instead of illustrating the thesis the shot becomes increasingly annoying, with Bergen’s incompetence its chief feature. Far better is Feiffer’s often trenchant dialogue, such as when Jonathan complains that Bobbie never gets out of bed:
Bobbie: The reason I sleep all day is, I can’t stand my life.
Jonathan: What life?
Bobbie: Sleeping all day!
If you’ve ever been a depressive, or loved one, you know how true that statement is.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 