"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
For them as cares, the following represents the long-awaited (by me) follow-up to my 11 June, 2021 post on the disintegration of spoken and written* English in America, in which, with the assistance of Eliot M. Camarena, I presented a nauseatingly detailed compilation of some of the worst grammatical offenses against both God and mammon, compiled over the previous several months. I kept meaning to cobble together a follow-up but the longer my and Eliot’s list grew, the less I felt up to the task of detailing these gruesome transgressions against education, meaning, good sense and literacy. It occurred to me, however, that I could at the very least list a few of them, for the edification, disgust and/or amusement of the curious, with some relevant commentary along the way.
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now; these are merely the items that came either my or Eliot’s way since January of this year.
Mock my words. Formerly “Mark my words,” which speakers of English employed and understood from at least the year 1535, when Miles Coverdale employed it in his translation of the Bible (Isaiah 28:23) but which Zoomers, hearing yet again another “eggcorn,” have lately fucked up beyond all recognition. But since they have given me their express permission to mock them…
Do people like this never think about the meaning of the words they use?
“Equivocate.” Used when the speaker means “equate.” Eliot recently heard this one from a news actor who nattered, “He’s trying to equivocate what America is doing to what the Soviets did.” Well, what can one expect from people who think “equity” is the same as “equality” and consider Joe Biden a model of probity and compassion?
“Smoke in mirrors.” Another bastardization of a phrase that has been in use for centuries, in this case since the 1770s. How do they think this alleged smoke gets into the mirrors?
Cow-tailing. As in Larry Kudlow, the former Director of something called the National Economic Council of the United States, praising a certain politician who shall go nameless for not “cow tailing” to the financial sector. And we thought “cow-down” was idiotic. How, pray, does one cow-tail? Or is the answer just too disgusting to air in mixed company?
Cow. Cow’s ass.
Rando. A word much beloved by the older generations now as well. (cf., the once-amusing comedian Jimmy Dore, who uses it, as he would say, “on the regular.”) Altering a word for slang purposes usually involves shortening the original — stupidly, for the most part, but rendering it briefer nonetheless. What is the point of abbreviating “random”? You’re still speaking two syllables. Why bother being that annoying for no good reason?
Chord-in-aye-shin. How sub-literate talking heads currently pronounce “coördination.” Perhaps they got it from Karrine Jean-Pierre, whom Eliot once referred to, wittily, as the Haitian kewpie doll and who perpetually keeps this mispronunciation top-of-mind…
Bumper cars. I once heard an otherwise articulate person repeatedly refer to theoretical impediments to government censorship as the need to put “bumper-cars” in front of them. (Eliot: “Guardrails’ now is not good enough?”)
Splitting image. As Groucho Marx once said, “And that reminds me of a story that’s so dirty I’m ashamed to think of it myself.” In my case it involves Little Johnny, his mother, and a pair of headlights.
Implicate. Formerly “imply.” See Willis, Fani.
Move ford. Or perhaps “Move Ford.” Previously pronounced, “move forward.” The whole company? Move it where? And how — with a winch, or Archimedes’ lever?
Belly-wiggle. “Bailiwick” for morons. I wish Eliot was making this one up: “Fox Business News host Neil Cavuto, considered one of their genuine ‘reporters,’ interviewed a corporate CEO and brought up the subject of artificial intelligence, because that is this year’s Oat Bran, and he prefaced it with: ‘Now, I know this is not your belly wiggle, but let’s talk about AI.'”
“Blotch” for “botch.” As in this, from an otherwise intelligent and well-reasoned letter to the Bismark Tribune: “Who blotched the Afghanistan US military withdrawal, it was Biden,” and which also holds the distinction of being a run-on sentence. (Thanks to Eliot once again.)
Whenever I hear the word “blotch,” I am irresistibly reminded of the hilarious Mack David lyrics to Burt Bacharach’s unmistakable music for the theme-song (I’m not joking!) from The Blob:
Beware of The Blob! It creeps and leaps and glides and slides Across the floor, right through the door And all around the wall, a splotch, a blotch, Be careful of The Blob!
Vociferously. Occasioned by hearing Abby Martin say that after 9-11 she started “vociferously reading.” What does she think the damned word means?
In lieu of. They apparently think it means the same thing as “in light of.”
Betting an eye. As in this, said of a politician: “He lies without betting an eye.” The inevitable result of betting eyes is the blind leading the you-know-who.
Adding a superfluous “s” to the end of words and phrasesthat have neither had nor needed them in the entirety of English-speaking history.“Three-times lottery winner,” “Forty-dollars item.” Did they all flunk basic grammar at the same time?
Based off. Used routinely now instead of the widely accepted “based on,” understood as correct by everyone, for decades if not centuries.
A friend comments: When I complained about this to my 23-year-old son, who makes a living as a writer and editor, he ridiculed me. He suggested that I was ignorant of various factors in current usage (he mentioned hip-hop) that may account for this sudden change, and that my resistance to it could, in certain circumstances, be considered racist. Following Fowler’s rule that usage should serve clarity in writing, I made the case that a base is what a thing rests on; from which a thing originates. The movie is based on the book. The rocket takes off from the launchpad. Simple. But I’m afraid this battle is already lost.
If using words and phrases correctly is now considered racist, I am very much afraid that under that definition I am a hopeless retrograde bigot.
Codgered. Via Eliot: “He codgered up the whole thing.’ From a lawyer… We’re doomed.”
Suspect. Frequently abbreviated to “sus.” Used habitually (and, I am very much afraid, permanently) now by know-nothings of every age and weight, for “suspicious,” as in, I’m suspect of him. No, my dears. You are suspicious of him. On the other hand, I also suspect you are a moron because you sound so suspiciously like one.
Dunk. As in, “he got dunked on.” What does this even mean? We used to say someone was “dumped on,” which immediately conjures up an image that, while perhaps unsavory, is strong and effective. Conversely, one dunks in, as with a donut and a cup of java, or a basketball and a hoop. How on earth does this now equate to victimizing someone?
Dropping the “ex” sound. Along with eliding one’s “t”s, this is now something people of all ages do. “Accept” is “ass-ept,” for example. “Except” is “ess-sept.” Who’d they take elocution lessons from — Al Jolson? We learned how to blend consonant sounds in the first grade. It was important enough they taught it to us as early as they could. But then, they also taught us to write in cursive, which useful skill has since been entirely eliminated from public education.
“Per” for “pre” and “pro.” Heard daily on American media. Eliot: “Pretend is now Pertend. Protect is now Pertect. I can’t go on, it is so annoying.”
Marshall Law. What know-nothing (or do I mean “no-nothing”?) liberals are sure Donald Trump will invoke the moment he’s sworn in again. Presumably as Town Marshall.
Boom for boon. From Eliot, via Twitter/X:
And if they used “boon,” they’d probably use it wrong as well: “He, like, literally lowered the boon on me.”
Sew-crates. The Greek philosopher formerly known as Socrates. College students now pronounce his name this way… although they are at pains to admit they are not sure who he was… Eliot: “Just saw another video with an undergrad talking about ‘this Greek guy, I’m pretty sure they killed him, called Sew-Crates.'” What was once part of a Steve Martin punch-line is now a living reality, and not funny any longer.
Dropped. While it now means, almost exclusively, premiering something, it also apparently means the opposite of dropping. From Eliot: “Several people were taken in for questioning, but no charges were dropped, the NYPD said. Using Jr. High slang in a news article.”
I am convinced that soon there will be two major groups in America: Those who can talk to each other in a known, intelligent language and those who only understand what sub-literates are saying. And the latter will increasingly outnumber the former.
While we’re at it try this, from a paid video advertisement(!) for a biodegradable cleaner guaranteed to get your stainless steel shining again:
And just last week I heard that nice Jewish boy Glenn Greenwald refer, repeatedly, to an Israeli “kibbitz” attacked on October 7th.
Finally, I leave you with this gem of “writing,” from a New York Post story Eliot sent me: New research has confirmed that increasingly less Millennials and Gen Zers are not having children, and there is a “scary” reason why.
We are doomed.
My thanks again to Eliot, with whom I feel I ought properly to share this by-line.
*Not “verbal and written.” To be verbal is to use words, not only to speak them.
Note to my new “followers” in the Mossad and SBU who are unusually interested in a more or less harmless blog about old movies, presumably scheduling their visits here in between making threats to reporters, commentators, college students and international criminal courts:There is nothing in the installment below concerning either American-funded Banderite Nazis or Zionist psychotics, so you needn’t bother visiting this month… but thank you as always for your splendid interest.
As ever, click on the highlighted links for longer reviews &cet.
The Bohemian Girl (1936) For those of us who love Laurel and Hardy, the largest stumbling block to full enjoyment of their feature-length movies is pace. I don’t mean the comedians themselves. We accept that Stan and Ollie’s brand of humor, the way their characters react to each other, operates on a plane vastly different from most screen comics, particularly in their sound work; next to Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers look like a band of delinquents hopped up on speed. With their feature-length pictures, it’s that everything else around L & H is enervated which detracts from the full appreciation of their genius.
I’m not sure where the blame for this lies, although I strongly suspect it originates with their producer. Those of us who grew up watching the old Our Gang shorts (renamed “The Little Rascals” for television) recognize the long takes and reaction shots, the dead spaces that drag on unto infinity, or until the last moron in the house has gotten the joke, not to mention the stock LeRoy Shields and Marvin Hatley tunes playing endlessly and without the slightest recourse to syncopation with the action or dialogue. One can accept that this sort of filler was perhaps necessary (or deemed necessary, anyway) in the very early talkies, but by 1936 it reeked of laziness, and even incompetence. These seem to me the very hallmarks of the Hal Roach house-style, as is the repeated featuring of Roach’s biggest stars in numbingly outmoded 19th and very early 20th century operettas: The Rogue Song (1930; no complete prints of which exist), Fra Diavolo (1933), Babes in Toyland (1934) and this, the weakest of these titles still extant. It isn’t, this time out, merely the leaden pace that sinks the movie, or the terrible songs, but the constant tampering with the material and the death (a possible murder) during production of Thelma Todd, briefly seen lip-syncing to a typically maudlin ballad. Mae Busch is on hand, and that’s to the good, as is James Finlayson’s presence as an overzealous palace guard and charming little Darla Hood’s, then in her first year with “Our Gang,” as the landed child Busch kidnaps and leaves with Ollie, her cuckolded husband.
Very little else works in The Bohemian Girl, and even Stan and Ollie’s routines fail to raise more than the occasional smile. (I laughed out loud exactly once, but the prospect of running the picture a second time, even in fast-forward, to see what elicited that response would tax a well man, and I’d been under the weather for a week.) Worse, the ending involves one of those grotesque sight-gags so beloved by Stan which would be horrible enough glimpsed quickly or obliquely but which is extended in case that prototypical moron I cited above didn’t catch the meaning at first glance. Laurel often had to be talked out of these things by others, and the frequent recurrence of cruelty toward these two characters in their pictures is baffling. It’s one thing when gruesome things happen to the Three Stooges; they’re live-action cartoon characters anyway, so the pain and discomfort (and even, at an extreme, the deaths) they experience don’t hurt. But didn’t Stan understand by 1936 that he and Ollie were, however silly their actions might be, real, and beloved? You don’t want to see the heads of gentle, cherished comedians mounted on a hunter’s wall just for the sake of a laugh. That’s a gag Laurel was dissuaded from including in one of the team’s two-reelers, but the one here is nearly as horrid.
Universal’s idea of blood splatter, ca. 1974: Animated blobs of crimson clumsily splashed over the image of dead bodies in an elevator.
Earthquake (1974) Pauline Kael generously observed of this by-the-numbers ’70s disaster movie that it was “swill, but not cheap.” She was wrong. It’s both swill and cheap. Universal had watched while Irwin Allen raked in millions on The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and was determined to beat him at his own game. An increasingly ludicrous series of Airport sequels was in the works and this utter lox of a movie, calculated to rival Allen’s The Towering Inferno in the Christmas box-office sweepstakes, played very successfully on the national mood. Perhaps, had Mario Puzo been able to work longer on the screenplay he originated for it (he was contractually obligated to The Godfather Part II and had to leave the project before it was completed) Earthquake might have been less pointless and absurd, but I doubt it. (The other credited screenwriter, George Fox, was a magazine writer who had never written a play or movie.) I don’t know why Kael was so forgiving about them but what’s shocking to me, at a 50-year remove, is seeing now just how shoddy the special effects were. Aside from his usual painterly matte shots, Albert Whitlock’s “visual effects” could scarcely have passed muster on an ABC Movie of the Week of that era: Big obvious blocks of Styrofoam fall on screaming victims in the streets, the violent deaths of people in a high-rise elevator is represented by a sudden splash of animated blood across the field of vision and as the buildings burst open and fall apart you’re aware of precisely how calculated, and essentially phony, every move is along the way.
Even the cast, compared to Poseidon and Inferno, feels second-rate, as if they’ve wandered in from the Universal TV movie they were shooting on an adjacent lot. Aside from Charlton Heston and Geneviève Bujold, who provide the only conviction the picture can work up as hapless lovers, Ava Gardner alternately rages and swoons as Heston’s appallingly needy, termagant wife; the one-time child evangelist Marjoe Gortner snarls at everyone as a ticking-bomb psycho who is either a) a closet-case, b) a mass-killer, c) a would-be heterosexual rapist, or all three at once; George Kennedy as an LAPD cop has either to rage at the human condition or perform acts of saintliness; Richard Roundtree and Gabriel Dell storm around in desperate search of characters to play; Victoria Principal is asked to thrust out her alleged 36-inch bust and pretend to be flattered as a bunch of men drool over her; Lloyd Nolan as a doctor corralled to aid the injured of downtown L.A. barks out orders and seems roughly as compassionate toward his charges as the Orkin man would be to a nest of cockroaches; while Lorne Greene and Barry Sullivan exude, respectively, kindness and concern as… no, it’s too boring even to tell you. One of the few “A”-list stars, Walter Matthau, has an entirely unfunny extended cameo as a bewildered bar drunk wearing what looks like one of Bella Abzug’s cast-off hats.
Matthau. And you thought I was kidding about the hat.
John Williams, whose previous assignment was composing the superb score for The Towering Inferno, came to Earthquake utterly spent creatively: His music is so dispirited it depends on wholesale lifts from Inferno and contains nothing like that score’s breathtaking highs. The gifted Philip H. Lathrop could apparently do little for the look of the picture but its direction, by that hack Mark Robson, has even less flavor and flair than a typical episode of “Columbo.” Not that any of this mattered: Made on a budget of $6,675,125, the picture pulled in $167.4 million at the box-office, representing something like $154 million profit on the initial investment. Everyone must have been happy, except the stars, and the unfortunate ticket-buyers who sat through this abortion.*
Blue Sky (1991/1994) Usually when a movie sits on the shelf as long as this one (four years) it’s either because it’s a mess, or the financing studio has no confidence in the picture and doesn’t know what to do with it, or even whether to bother releasing it at all, but although Blue Sky went unreleased due to the collapse of Orion, it’s also a mess. The original screenwriter, Rama Laurie Stagner, based the characters and situation on her family and the movie has the weirdly bifurcated feel of clear-eyed reminiscence grafted onto sheer wish-fulfillment. (The credited re-writers were Arlene Sarner and Jerry Leichtling.) Blue Sky works best when it concentrates on the marriage between Carly and Hank Marshall (Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones), their relationships with their teenage daughters (Amy Locane and Anna Klemp) and the way Carly’s overpowering sexuality causes seemingly endless problems for the four. It is much less successful when it turns around and tries desperately to turn Carly into a heroine fearlessly taking on all comers in an effort to clear Hank’s name when he is unceremoniously dumped in a psych ward and kept insensible on forced psychotropic medication. A military scientist in the early 1960s whose field is monitoring radiation at nuclear testing ranges, Hank is outraged when a test is not called off despite a pair of civilians wandering into the field. His insubordination is the excuse for locking him up but what really rankles his married C.O. (Powers Booth) is his own abortive affair with Carly. The narrative’s mix of personal and political is not integrated — it’s schizophrenic, as if two different sorts of movies had been squeezed together so that the result is neither the fish of personalized drama nor the fowl of social activism. Additionally, and despite its often effective adult content, Blue Sky most resembles an idealization of a “good” parent (Hank) and the excoriation of a “bad” one (Carly). Worse, while the Marshalls, young and old, are depicted with precision, nearly everyone else comes off as a type, bloodless and not living so much as fulfilling basic dramatic requirements, the sort a first-time writer with an axe to grind is prone to. The schematism affects and detracts from everything, including the splendid performances by Lange and Jones, the good one by Locane and the direction by Tony Richardson, whose last picture this was. (He died, of, as they say, “AIDS-related complications,” in 1991, long before the movie was released.) Booth, like his character, is so unpleasant it’s nearly impossible to credit Carly’s attraction to him, and poor Carrie Snodgress, as his long-suffering wife, instead of a character is given attitudes to play, all of them eminently predictable. The icing on the cake is the typically awful score by Jack Nitzsche, complete with his usual hokey riffs on glass harmonica. Nitzsche, a fine arranger of other people’s music, was an object lesson in elevating to composter status someone whose bag of tricks was of extremely limited interest.
On a note of bizarre coincidence, Nitzsche once beat Snodgress with a handgun, threatening to kill her and, in quintessential Hollywood fashion that would never apply to you or me, got off with three years’ probation.
Let’s Dance (1950) Topic for a master’s thesis in film history: “Why Betty Hutton?” Aside from Preston Sturges’ subversive comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (and she can be a trial there as well) I find that even minimal exposure to her extreme mugging and overblown vocalization causes the muscles in my jaw to tighten automatically… that is, when it doesn’t make my eyes glaze over entirely. Although she can be relatively inoffensive dramatically her basic persona, brash when not shrill, is repellant, like a distaff Jerry Lewis. My aversion to Hutton has kept me, despite my near-reverence for Fred Astaire, from seeing Let’s Dance but a new Blu-ray edition from Kino Lorber effectively cancelled my long-standing eschewal. Having finally seen it I dislike Betty Hutton as much as I ever have, but I found Let’s Dance itself surprisingly painless, if entirely inconsequential and, two good routines by him notwithstanding, a title that in no way burnishes Astaire’s filmography. He made worse musicals before this one — You’ll Never Get Rich, Blue Skies and Second Chorus are genuinely bad and only one of them has an Astaire dance worthy of his time and ingenuity — but never, I don’t think, was he paired with a female co-star with whom he had less sympathy. Although he spoke highly of Hutton (amazingly, to me, he was much more discomfited by Kay Thompson, with whom he had one of his best duets, in Funny Face) and her adeptness as a dancer is comparable to that of Judy Garland, there is not a trace of chemistry between the pair and in only one number (the comic “Oh, Them Dudes,” which she plays in cowboy drag) do they express, briefly and joyously, a sense of teamwork or real pleasure in each other’s company.
The plot, which seems rather obviously inspired by the 1930s custody battle between her mother and aunt over the child Gloria Vanderbilt, is complicated for a screen musical, and turns on a dime at the end when the condescending aunt by marriage suddenly and inexplicably relents. (That the old Boston dragon is played by the likeable Lucile Watson at least mitigates some of her character’s appalling snobbery, and she gets a brief, charming waltz with Astaire to an old-fashioned tune.) For a picture called Let’s Dance, there is very little dancing, and Fred’s best number is the “Piano Dance,” with lively music by Tommy Chambers, Van Cleave and Astaire himself, during which he performs over, under and all around an upright and a baby grand, the latter of which, when the music segues to “Hold That Tiger,” explodes with cats.
Allan Scott, Astaire’s frequent RKO scenarist, wrote the often witty screenplay, with, as they used to say, additional dialogue by Dane Lussier and the pleasing songs are by Frank Loesser, fresh off the shockingly successful Guys and Dolls on Broadway. The period Technicolor is rather more subdued than usual, although Let’s Dance indulges in the hoariest of movie-musical clichés: The theatre (or in this case, nightclub) with the impossibly large performing space on which unfold activities never seen this side of a Hollywood soundstage. Norman Z. McLeod, who in palmier days directed the peerless It’s a Gift for W.C. Fields and for the Marx Brothers, Monkey Business and what I consider the team’s funniest picture, Horsefeathers, keeps the nonsense moving at a crisp pace and the good supporting cast includes Roland Young and Melville Cooper as Watson’s attorneys, Ruth Warrick as her sympathetic daughter, George Zucco as a judge and little Gregory Moffett as the widowed Hutton’s little boy, around whom the legal machinations whirl. Moffett gives a lovely performance, entirely free of guile, at least until the final moments when he’s made to look silly.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964) If you accept that it bears, aside from her experience as a survivor of the Titanic and the fact she was married to the wealthy miner J.J. “Johnny” Brown, virtually no relation to the facts of Margaret Tobin Brown’s biography, the picture represents one of the few 1960s Hollywood musicals that is engaging and not just big. Tammy Grimes, who originated the role on Broadway — and was, absurdly, given a Tony as Featured Actress for her starring performance† — had no chance of reprising her role on film, and Molly Brown was planned for Shirley MacLaine, until Hal Wallis put the kibosh on that by claiming she was still under contract to him. The director, Charles Walters, didn’t want her but Debbie Reynolds got the role, for which she had campaigned strenuously, and was subsequently nominated for an Academy Award. (She lost, to Julie Andrews, for what Reynold’s daughter Carrie Fisher wittily called Andrews’ “stunning, multi-layered and moving portrayal of Mary Poppins. Ibsen’s Mary Poppins.”) MacLaine would almost certainly have given a better dramatic (and dancing) performance but her singing voice, good in its way if belty, lacked the warmth, variety and emotional vulnerability of Reynolds’. In any case, the star is well-matched by Harve Presnell’s likeable performance (and his classical baritone) as Johnny and the Meredith Willson score, although its songstack was eviscerated in the transfer from the stage is, even in abbreviated form, beautifully conceived and idiosyncratically realized, the way his The Music Man was. (He composed Johnny Brown’s arias with Presnell’s voice in mind, and it shows.) Only five of the Broadway songs made it to the movie, with an additional three (“Beautiful People of Denver,” “Dolce Far Niente” and “Up Where the People Are”) heard as underscore and a sixth vocal number (“He’s My Friend”) added by Willson to the soundtrack.
Helen Deutsch’s screenplay, based on the Broadway book by Richard Morris, occasionally indulges in bathos, and a little inconsistency, as when Molly encounters her Denver, Colorado nemesis Mrs. McGraw (Audrey Christie) in Europe just before securing a berth on the Titanic, yet McGraw is somehow in Denver to greet her at the finale, or when Johnny is introduced with the exuberant “Colorado, My Home” before we have any idea who he is. Interestingly, the number that provides the greatest audience pleasure, as the kind of elaborate song-and-dance set-piece that can work so well on stage but which seldom replicates that performance excitement on the screen, is the one Willson wrote for the movie. MGM, however, was siphoning so much money to Doctor Zhivago that “He’s My Friend” nearly went un-filmed until the cast agreed to shoot it in a single day, with three cameras. When it’s not being limited by matte shots and indifferent rear-projection (and, during the sinking of the Titanic, black-and-white clips from two pervious movies) Daniel L. Fapp’s cinematography is frequently luscious, Peter Gennaro’s choreography is lively and inventive and Morton Haack’s fulsome costumes include a rich, red ballgown for Reynolds that nearly rivals the one Walter Plunkett designed for Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. The unusually fulsome supporting cast includes Ed Begley as Molly’s adoptive father, Hermione Baddeley as his inamorata with the wonderful name Buttercup Grogan, Hayden Rorke as a prissy society columnist, and George Mitchell in a pleasant performance as a monsignor. Grover Dale and Gus Trikonis as Molly’s old friends dance energetically, and the wonderful Martita Hunt provides one of her beguiling extended cameos as a grand duchess who befriends the Browns. As a bittersweet reminder of what befalls yesterday’s darlings, the gifted silent comedienne Minta Durfee appears briefly in a party scene.
Look, by the way, for a photo of the real Molly Brown and you’ll realize instantly just how apt the casting of Kathy Bates was in Titanic.
Luath (played by Rink), Tao (Syn Cat) and Bodger (Muffy) in a rare moment of rest.
The Incredible Journey (1963) Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel about three pets making an impossible homeward trek across the Canadian wilderness is one of the loveliest of all fictions about animals, and while the Walt Disney adaptation loses a great deal of what makes it special, its essentials remain. James Algar’s screenplay attempts to compensate for the elimination of authorial voice with narration spoken by Rex Allen and while it is only partly successful, Burnford’s empathetic prose, her keen appreciation of the human/animal bond, and of the ways of cats and dogs, remains, in posse if not in esse; the entire project is lit with the special grace that attends movies made with loving kindness, particularly movies about animals. The trio at the center of the story (the young golden retriever Luath, the Siamese cat Tao and the elderly English pit bull terrier Bodger) are devoted to each other, especially Tao and Bodger, and that unusual affection suffuses the movie and gives it its unemphatic emotional power. Humans make their requisite appearances throughout the story, but they do so unobtrusively for the most part, at least until the satisfying finale, where the love of a boy for his lifelong pet gives the conclusion a depth of feeling that has exactly the right resonance.
Banjo the Woodpile Cat (1979) This animated short (27 minutes) directed by Don Bluth and executed by his fellow Disney animators Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy as a personal protest against recent trends at the studio is, like most of Bluth’s later pictures, attractive to the eye, annoying to the ear and insulting to the brain. (Of those I’ve seen, only his feature debut, the vivid Robert C. O’Brien adaptation The Secret of NIMH, was wholly satisfying, perhaps because unlike Bluth’s many originals, it was based on a solid, well-plotted literary source.) The story is by Bluth and his gifted brother Toby, and to a weird degree reflects their Mormon background: Early on a nasty old feedtruck driver headed for the Big Town cackles to an equally unsavory friend about the “good times” he’s going to have in… Salt Lake City, that well-known Utahan hell of fleshpots and loose women. Bluth also wrote the numbingly bad title song, which he pushes relentlessly throughout the action, and the designs of his cat characters voiced by the black actors Scatman Crothers and Beau Richards have, in contrast to all the other felines in the picture, fat, underslung lower lips. And they call Dumbo racist!
13 Washington Square (1928) Hitherto unknown to me, this comic thriller from the year that saw the end of silent pictures has been beautifully restored by Kino Lorber in gorgeous sepia tone and proves, if nothing else, that ZaSu Pitts was as funny a silent comedian as she was a sound comic. The story, adapted by Harry O. Hoyt and Walter Anthony from a novel and play by Leroy Scott, is purest late-Victorian gossamer: A wealthy widow (Alice Joyce) desperate to stop her young son (George J. Lewis) from marrying the daughter of a >>gasp!<< shopkeeper(!) becomes, inadvertently, involved with a thief (Jean Hersholt) posing as a Deacon who, unknown to her and her dizzy maid (Pitts) has plans to steal her art masterworks. (Got it?) Meanwhile… but you’re way ahead of me, or should be. 13 Washington Square is unusually complicated for a silent comedy, and more dependent on intertitles than any silent picture I can recall, suggesting that it probably should have been a talkie. Yet that would have robbed it of the pictorial beauty of John Stumar’s cinematography, half the reason for watching it. The other half is Pitts’ hilarious performance as the wide-eyed, malaprop-prone housemaid, whose solecisms would have made Archie Bunker proud… although a reliance on word-play in a silent movie says something about the material.
Alice Joyce may remind you, as she did me, of a shorter-haired Gillian Anderson, whom she strongly resembles, particularly in three-quarter profile.
James Stewart as “Buttons” the clown saves Charlton Heston’s life at the cost of his own freedom. And yes, that is Betty Hutton again, damn it.
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) A typically overblown, fatuous and hilariously melodramatic piece of self-regard by Cecil B. DeMille that, as usual with that shameless purveyor of spectacle, also provides a hefty dose of genuine excitement. This is mainly confined to the aerial sequences with Cornel Wilde and Betty Hutton perpetually attempting to outdo each other on trapeze and high-wire and which are so successful they ultimately gave this acrophobe a tension headache. I mean that as a compliment. The picture is, essentially, a two-and-a-half hour, intermissionless advertisement for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, with a glowering Charlton Heston as the general manager trying to keep the show rolling amid professional rivalries, competing libidos and perennially simmering catfights. This is not to mention the presence in the center ring of a fugitive mercy-killer (James Stewart) disguised as a clown, a psychopathic elephant trainer (is there any other kind?), a thief in the employ of a big-time gangster and, for extra thrills, a climactic train-wreck that permits Hutton to prove her love to Heston. All popular movies are of course products of their time, and The Greatest Show on Earth depicts the 20th century love for trained-animal acts whose gradual phasing out has seemed to me for once a wholly admirable outcome of social agitation. Even as a child taken to his first and only circus I was uneasy about elephants, those most community-minded and sensitive of large land mammals, being made to dance around the ring, balance on balls and form pyramids for my entertainment; had I known with what sadistic cruelty these animals were trained, I suspect I would have been inclined to set a match to the sawdust. (I used secretly to wish the lions and tigers would gang up on and eviscerate their whip-wielding trainers, which I suppose tells you more about the limits of my personal benignity than I meant to.)
The movie periodically dwells, with dismaying Technicolor rapture, on crowds of all ages in the stands stuffing their faces with every imaginable comestible, from peanuts, popcorn and ice-cream cones to hot dogs, candy bars and cotton candy; it’s almost a pocket depiction of the expanding American waistline. Then there are the musical numbers, warbled either by Hutton or Dorothy Lamour, performed without amplification under enormous circus tents with brass bands blazing away and which in defiance of all the principles of sound reproduction we are expected to believe are perfectly audible to everyone in the crowd. And when the action flags, as it frequently does, we are treated to fleeting pipsqueak cameos by the likes of Arthur Q. Bryan‡, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and even Bob Crosby in the audience, and all-too-brief three-ring bits by circus eminences such as Emmett Kelly as Weary Willie and Lou Jacobs, complete with tiny clown car; at least the young midget acrobat Cucciola gets a specialty number, although why he performs much of it in drag I leave to the psychologists in the audience. Somewhat astoundingly, it took four credited writers to concoct this sawdust mulligatawny, and I suspect there were also legions of uncredited scribes adding reams of DeMille-approved hokum. There are moments of amateurishness that defy credulity, as when DeMille cuts from two actors in front of a bad back-projection of monkeys clambering over an enclosure to the same pair closer to the camera while the rear-screen image exactly remains the same size. Still, it must be said that when one of the show’s principals falls from a great height, the action is achieved with shocking realism, and without a cut. DeMille himself narrates, with that patented sanctimonious/stentorian gasbaggery of his, made even more insufferable by the lines he speaks, which seem to imply that the Ringlings are closer to God than you or me and a lack of enthusiasm for their circus just might be subversive.
Billy Wilder got off one of the great back-handed compliments in movie history when after seeing the picture at the premiere he bowed to DeMille and proclaimed, “Mr. DeMille, you have made The Greatest Show on Earth.” Such are the ways of Hollywood, however, that, in the year of The Quiet Man, The Member of the Wedding, The Bad and the Beautiful, Come Back Little Sheba andSingin’ in the Rain, this was the Motion Picture Academy’s choice for “Best Picture.”
Ethel Waters, Bill Bailey (brother of Pearl) and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson
Cabin in the Sky (1943) Speaking of products of another time, this exceptionally tuneful musical fantasy preserves the work of a cast of black performers at the peak of their energy and ingenuity.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Forty-three years have not withered, nor repeated custom entirely staled, the finite variety inherent in this highly enjoyable collaboration between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan. Watching it again in the 4K UHD edition over the Memorial Day weekend I was struck by two things: That the first quarter of the picture is, as is so often the case with 4K transfers, entirely too dark, and that Karen Allen was and remains the most delightful heroine of a popular action picture in the past five decades. No one since has matched her combination of freckled beauty, spunky independence and amiable combativeness and I cannot imagine anyone, aside perhaps from the young Shirley MacLaine, negotiating the line between passionate determination and riant silliness as Allen does. That she did not become, after Raiders, one of the more important American actresses is one of those eternal mysteries, such as why Tom Cruise is still in any way relevant to life on the planet.
Airport (1970)When it comes to certain things in life, initial impressions made at an early age can, however undiscriminating they may seem to you later, carry through succeeding decades with very little change. This movie, first encountered on commercial television when I was 12, is one of those things.
*Actually, to generate those sorts of profits, even world-wide, I presume that Earthquake had many return customers. But what sort of person would want to see a thing like like twice? Even at age 13 I instinctively avoided seeing it once.
†A few other howlers in the long Tony Award history of nominating leading players in musicals as featured or supporting actor/actress, presumably based on billing: Isabel Bigley as Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls; Yul Brynner in The King and I; Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook and Mr. Darling in Peter Pan; Carol Lawrence as Maria in West Side Story (ditto Josie de Guzman in the 1980 edition); Sandra Church as Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy (the same thing happened to Zan Charisse and Christa Moore, respectively, in the 1975 and 1990 revivals); Theodor Bikel as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music; Jerry Orbach as Sky Masterson in Guys & Dolls; Maureen Brennan as Cunegonde and Mark Baker (as Candide!) in the 1974 Candide; Patti LuPone in The Robber Bridegroom; David Kernan, Millicent Martin and Julia McKenzie, the entire singing cast of Side by Side by Sondheim; Lenny Baker, one of only four cast members in I Love My Wife; Alyson Reed as Sally Bowles(!) in the 1988 Cabaret; and, with Grimes as Molly Brown, the all-time jaw-droppers, Barbara Cook as Marian the librarian in The Music Man, Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera, the stars of the show, in Bye, Bye, Birdie and William Daniels in 1776. Daniels, quite rightly, refused the nomination.
‡The voice, if not the mind or spirit, of Elmer Fudd.
Airport (1970) When it comes to certain things in life, initial impressions made at an early age can, however undiscriminating they may seem to you later, carry through succeeding decades with very little change. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find this especially true of books, music and movies; while there is much I once loved I can no longer abide, I still retain a peculiar sort of fondness for other items that seems to defy my adult sense of taste and aesthetics. This movie, first encountered on commercial television when I was 12, is one of those things. I liked it enough then to check out Arthur Hailey’s 1968 novel from the local library, to read it eagerly and to see the movie a second time when it aired again a year or two later. I recently re-read the book, to judge the quality of Hailey’s writing and to check my memory of it, and although it is by no means what anyone would call literary fiction the novel, except when it occasionally veers off into tangential matters no reader can be expected to care about such as the extramarital escapades of the airport manager’s social-climbing bitch of a wife, is thoroughly engaging, with (for the most part) well-delineated characters, very good dialogue and, particularly as regards the airport manager’s thoughts, interesting digressions about the past and future of commercial aviation. That virtually none of the improvements the man sees as essential have come to pass in the 55 years since Airport was researched and written, and that much has gotten worse, is telling. There were hijackings then, and the threat of terror — the disaster in Airport is precipitated by a deranged would-be suicide setting off a bomb on board a jumbo jet — at least in 1968 one didn’t wonder daily when some cheaply-executed Boeing behemoth was going to come crashing down out of the sky or which company whistler-blower was next scheduled for suicide.
(Front, left to right) Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean Seberg, Burt Lancaster; (Second row) Lloyd Nolan, Maureen Stapleton, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin; (Third row) Dana Wynter, Barry Nelson, Barbara Hale, George Kennedy; (Back) George Seaton and Ross Hunter.
Some of the dialogue, when spoken by actors, is risible, and Seberg’s upswept, 45-year-old’s hairstyle is horrible on a beautiful 30 year old actress, but even at this remove I confess I don’t quite understand why so much opprobrium was heaped on the head of the picture by the serious critics of 1970. (Perhaps because it was produced by Ross Hunter? Not that they mattered; Airport was the most profitable movie of its year.) Part of my continued fondness for this glorified soap-opera is likely tied to gradual attrition: With the exception of Jacqueline Bisset, all of the major actors in Airport have since joined the majority. This matters less in movies released before you were born, or at any rate before you were aware of them. We accept that when we’re watching, say, a Bogart picture, that he’s long dead, but with movie actors we knew in our youth it’s a different story. They were living presences to us once, and knowing they’re no longer around to make more movies carries a frisson of involuntary nostalgia when we see them again in their prime, or in their most identifiable roles. With Airport these losses include Burt Lancaster (as the airport manager), Dean Martin (the senior pilot, sarcastic brother-in-law to Lancaster and the father of Bisset’s unborn child), Jean Seberg (Lancaster’s unrequited inamorata), George Kennedy (the TWA master mechanic), Helen Hayes (the comic stowaway), Van Heflin (the suicide), Maureen Stapleton (his anxious wife), Lloyd Nolan (customs), Jessie Royce Landis (a would-be customs cheat) and Whit Bissell (the oboist in the seat next to Hayes). Other, less stellar, presences include Barry Nelson as the stricken flight’s designated pilot, Dana Wynter as the bitch-wife (softened slightly for the movie but still appallingly social-climbing), Barbara Hale as Martin’s marginalized helpmeet and Peter Turgeon as the passenger everyone wants to slap but only the priest on board gets to. On his movie blog, Ken Anderson identifies a number of other familiar faces playing the Rome flight’s passengers including Pat Priest (the second Marilyn on “The Munsters”) as the woman sitting behind Hayes, Marion Ross and Sandra Gould (the replacement Gladys Kravitz of “Bewitched”), neither of whom has a line to speak between them, and Virginia Grey as the mother of the annoying, bespectacled adolescent know-it-all played by Lou Wagner, nearly 30 at the time but due to his diminutive size and youthful voice perennially cast as a teenager. (Two years earlier he was Lucius, the young chimpanzee skeptical about the older generations in Planet of the Apes.)
Airport cops hear a coded message over the p.a. system in perhaps the most elaborate of the movie’s many Todd-AO split-screen images.
Wagner’s character is one of the writer-director George Seaton’s least felicitous additions to his adaptation screenplay, along with the tear in the ceiling of the fuselage which threatens to give way before the forced landing can be achieved. The gaping hole in its side wasn’t jeopardy enough? Fortunately, Seaton dropped the sub-plot concerning the airport manager’s younger brother, a flight controller who’s suffered a nervous collapse and is preparing for his own death. It works on the page — the phrase shrieked by a panic-stricken little girl about to die in a preventable accident, lodged in the controller’s memory, has stuck with me for decades as well — but would have been one subplot too many in the movie. Considering its age, and the limitations of motion picture technology in 1970, the effects shots in Airport (back-projection and models) are quite good, and never, as is so often the case with 1960s movies, embarrassing. Although some of the snow sequences pretty obviously involved process work, I was especially taken this time around by the shots of the Rome plane rising above the clouds and into the starry night sky, and amused to remember how this sequence inspired the opening gag in the hilarious 1980 spoof Airplane!
Seaton’s direction is square, as might be expected, and there are times when if you lived through those years you might be reminded of a widescreen Universal Movie of the Week, yet its Technicolor/Todd-AO images are also occasionally creative, and even witty, especially Seaton’s use of the then-new split-screen techniques. These were, famously, introduced at Expo ’67 in Montreal, along with the nearly overwhelming, Walt Disney-produced “Circle Vision” show Canada ’67. My family was there, and I certainly remember that 360-degree exhibition, if not the elaborate split-screen picture We Are Young, although I’m sure I saw that too. (I was six-and-a-half and easily tired from walking that huge concourse, so a lot has leached from my memory of the event.) The new split-screen technique was immediately grabbed up by Hollywood filmmakers, notably John Frankenheimer (Grand Prix) and Norman Jewison (The Thomas Crown Affair) and for things like the “Brady Bunch” opening but I don’t recall a more complex application of the process than Seaton and his cinematographer Ernest Laszlo used for Airport. When Lancaster calls home we see him on the left side of the wide screen; as his teenage daughter answers the telephone she appears in the top center. After chatting with her briefly he asks to speak to his younger child (the then-ubiquitous Lisa Gerritsen), who pops up in the bottom center, then to his wife, who then appears on the left side of the screen. What I like especially about this is that it permits the viewers to decide where they want to look, on which actor to focus their attention. By contrast, the standard, by-the-numbers set-up, which involves a cut to the person being spoken to and then back to the original speaker, not only makes your decision for you but is dull to boot.
Airport wasn’t the first so-called “disaster movie” to involve air travel. Hailey himself wrote a play for Canadian television in 1956 called “Flight into Danger” (adapted as the movie Zero Hour! a year later) whose ptomaine poisoning plot was lifted by Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker for Airplane! Going further back, the James Stewart No Highway in the Sky (1951) and the John Wayne The High and the Mighty (1954) predate Hailey’s projects, and we may stretch the “disaster movie” designation to include The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as well. Airport was, however, the most influential such picture, eventually spawning three increasingly inane sequels and inspiring The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm, When Time Ran Out… and, alas, the horrendous Earthquake. One of the qualities — and it is a quality — of Airport is that, unlike so many, busier, action movies of the decades since, it doesn’t feel it has to bang around ginning up new shocks and chases and explosions every 20 minutes, which of course now is considered its greatest detriment. One flight jeopardized by a bomb? That’s it? The rest is talk, and (ugh) characters? Bo-ring! Well, when the people are as interesting as Lancaster, Martin, Seberg, Bisset, Hayes, Heflin and Stapleton, you don’t need to ratchet up the terror quotient. Yes, one can observe that Hayes (looking, at 70, more like 80) is giving out with cute-old-lady shtick, but she’s also genuinely funny, and sly; as with the figure in the book, the movie’s Ada Quonsett knows she’s playing a game, and enjoys it enormously.* Hayes isn’t, like Stapleton, entirely real. Stapleton’s Inez Guerrero is heartbreaking; Hayes’ Mrs. Quonsett is a nip of brandy.
For a nearly lifelong aficionado of film music, one of the most fascinating aspects of Airport to me is Alfred Newman’s score, his last. Some of the music is not only dated now but was dated then: Dialogue sequences over-scored with either romantic or melodramatic strains, souped-up in modish lounge arrangements: The Mancini sound without Mancini’s gift for it. Much of this is foolish, and the work of someone who didn’t seem to understand that moviemaking had surpassed those old ideas of narrative accompaniment. Movie music was going to go in weird directions in the 1970s, and this is one of the last of the big, older-style, symphonic scores to be heard for a while, at least in American movies. Not that Newman isn’t still capable of surprises: His theme for Inez Guerrero is nearly as moving as Stapleton’s performance, but his main title makes me smile with real pleasure, not merely for its driving through-line but due to the composer’s inspired use of percussion beneath it and, near the end, Latinesque brass and woodwinds above it. In Hailey’s book, and in the movie made from it, the phalanx of snowplows and related vehicles in use on the runways is referred to by airport personnel as The Conga Line. Newman picked up on that and, wittily, added the concept to his music.
Old-style or new, there’s something to be said for a composer with a genuine sense of humor.
*It was profitable shtick as well: The role got Hayes a Supporting Actress Oscar.
Reviewing the Jules Dassin-directed Up Tight at the time of its 1969 release, Roger Ebert complained that adapting The Informer to a contemporary black revolutionary context was a graft that didn’t take, arguing that Liam O’Flaherty’s novel did not center on IRA activities but rather on the guilt of the protagonist. That, it seems to me, was too literal a reading for so freewheeling a project as this. Think of Up Tight less as a “remake” or even as a strict transliteration of The Informer and more as a variation on it, and you come closer, I believe, to the spirit of the thing.
O’Flaherty’s book was written in 1925 but set in 1922, following the Irish Civil War; by placing Up Tight in the black ghettos of Cleveland four days after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the filmmakers were getting at something very similar, in expressive terms, to the raw emotions the Irish experienced following partition. (The picture begins with footage of the civil rights leader’s Atlanta funeral.) King’s symbolism within black America, pro or con, cannot be understated, any less than the grief and frustration and rage that exploded after his murder. A killing, moreover, which was carried out, by FBI agents, under the direct orders of J. Edgar Hoover. Scoffers ask why, with Dr. King’s effectiveness as a public figure largely blunted by passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the Establishment would bother. If we may dismiss as ludicrous the idea that a bill solves all the social ills it was meant to address — and we have only to look at the state of things now to do so with impunity — we must also ask: What was the focus of King’s activism when he was assassinated? Poverty, and war; specifically, the war in Vietnam. The powers directing the official powers may tolerate social agitation on matters of race, or sex, or sexuality, but when you question the very structures that hold the working and underclass in poverty and those dictating what the historian Charles Beard called America’s “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” then something must be done about you… and something duly was. That this did not occur to the makers of Up Tight in 1968 is not a grievous fault; the picture rides on so much that was in the air at the time it was made that it may surely be forgiven for missing a philosophical or historical nuance here or there.
Not that Up Tight is necessarily subtle. Its revolutionaries’ dialogue in particular has a blunt feel that places as much distance between us and the picture now, in the third decade of the 2qst century, as lay between the 1935 John Ford/Dudley Nichols adaptation, and Up Tight itself in the late 1960s. Indeed, if anything the latter feel even further in the past. The movie’s concerns, however, were very much in the present when it was written, filmed and released: Race riots broke out in 1964, accelerated after 1966, and hit special prominence in 1968, in Watts, with more to come in the early 1970s. It should be remembered as well that weapons manufacturers, the police and the NRA only got concerned with the enforcement of strict gun control when the Black Panthers talked of buying arms, or went out of doors with them. There were many then who firmly believed a racial war was not merely possible in America and elsewhere in the West, but inevitable. Wither, without those endlessly articulated white fears (and the manipulations of the sick geniuses behind MK-Ultra) a Charlie Manson?
For my own part, I find the adaptation of O’Flaherty, by the movies star Julian Mayfield, its featured actress Ruby Dee, and Dassin himself, not only apt but cunning. Revolution was in the air then (as it damn well should be now, and shows few signs of being, save on the radical left, liberals being content to put on pink caps, denounce a monstrous egotist, snipe at that very left and call themselves — presumably after watching The Force Awakens once too often — the “Resistance.”) And, pace Roger Ebert, revolutionary activities are very much a part of the novel, or why does Flaherty’s anti-hero Gyppo Nolan betray his friend Frankie Nolan in the first place? Gyppo is throw out of the IRA for his inability to murder a Black and Tan as ordered, just as Up Tight‘s protagonist Tank Williams (Mayfield) is ejected from his revolutionary cell for his failure to assist in a robbery of arms that ends with the killing of a white security guard (and the legal implication of Tank’s best friend.)
Raymond St. Jacques (center), Richard Williams (over St. Jacques’ shoulder) and (right) Janet MacLachlan meet in committee.
Betrayal, as a dramatic subject, requires no civil war or even its possibility, although it is in a political sense that it is perhaps most easily grasped. The wages do seem to fluctuate, however: 30 pieces of silver in the age of Judas Iscariot became 20 pounds in 1922; by the time of Up Tight they were a thousand dollars. Today they hover around the eight-thousand-dollar mark — as cheap for the buyer as ever.
The amount hardly matters, of course; the sense of personal guilt in all three cases is where the drama lies. Like Frankie, Johnny Wells (Max Julien) is a fugitive, and Gyppo/Tank betrays his whereabouts to the police, leading directly to Johnny’s death. Tank is motivated in part by his love for Laurie (Ruby Dee) and his desire to get them both out of the poverty that has blighted their lives and the lives of her children, just as Gyppo commits his betrayal of Frankie to secure passage out of Ireland for himself and his love. And here the screenwriters of Up Tight up the ante, having the self-styled revolutionary leader B.G. (Raymond St. Jacques in an intelligent and coldly frightening performance) inform Tank that it was Johnny himself who recommended cutting his friend loose from what is called “the committee.” It is that sense of personal disloyalty (we are never certain whether Johnny made that statement or not, but we would not be remiss in doubting it) that pushes Tank over the ethical edge into lethal stool-pigeonry.
In addition to the sometimes less-than-felicitous dialogue, Up Tight is saddled with occasional directorial flourishes that go horrendously wrong — I’m thinking especially about the sequence in an over-lit arcade that is at once wildly theatrical and pictorially bizarre. A group of well-heeled white liberals surrounds an inebriated Tank, begging to know when the revolution will take place. (One woman in particular seems, in her grinning, pleading fashion, to want to be a victim; it’s a peculiarly direct parody of the extremes of then-current white liberal guilt of the Tom Wolfe gleefully critiqued in “Radical Chic.”) Tank is only too happy to spin an outrageous fantasy of dead telephone lines, beautiful black bank tellers informing their Caucasian customers there is no money, and NASA moon-shots aborted by revolutionaries, and this outré sequence is capped by Tank and his avid listeners being reflected in fun-house mirrors, which puts all too blunt a point on the monologue’s satirical edge: Theatre of the Absurd meets filmmaking of the avant-garde school, and it’s that marriage, not the mating of O’Flaherty and late-‘60s revolution, that falls hideously flat, and dates the movie most thoroughly.
The soundtrack album. Note Trauner’s remarkable set for the projects.
Ebert in his contemporary review also faulted the sets by the redoubtable Alexandre Trauner, and the way they were shot, by the splendid Boris Kaufman, complaining of the artificiality of the settings (he compared them, dismissively, to Catfish Row) and the extensive night shooting which, to him, rendered these sequences as somehow phony in comparison with the day shots of Cleveland’s steel mills, garbage dumps and earthworks. The critic forgot, or did not notice, that Up Tight is a story told largely at night, and for good reasons — intentions an aficionado of film noir would instantly understand, as they would also comprehend why so much of the outside action takes place in the rain that turns gutters into neon-illuminated garbage streams. Trauner’s contributions seem to me especially felicitous, particularly in Laurie’s ramshackle home, the dilapidated boarding house the embittered Tank simmers in and in the oppressive project where Johnny’s mother lives and which becomes the scene of the movie’s violent confrontation between its inhabitants and the Cleveland police. It should also be noted how well Booker T. Jones’ spare musical score (and occasional song) serves the picture, and how effective the animated titles by John and Faith Hubley are — although, oddly, their depictions of Tank and Johnny as youngsters include a clear re-drafting of a famous 1960s Coca Cola ad featuring two boys lying on their backs and, defying all laws of liquid gravity, sipping from glass soda bottles turned straight down and which, if you know it, may cause you to wonder how they got away without that image sans corporate lawsuit.
Roscoe Lee Browne as Clarence spots his pigeon.
One of the more interesting curlicues in the narrative is the presence of a gay pusher and police informer called, variously, Clarence or Daisy,* and played with amused panache by the marvelous Roscoe Lee Browne. The actor hardly underplays the character’s sexuality; indeed, when corrected by a white police commander over his use of the word “nigger” — the cop interjects, “Negro!” — a smiling Clarence replies, in those deliciously clipped tones of which Browne was a master, “No, sir. Nigger… stool pigeon… and faggot.” Yet, despite his elaborately “faggy” (yet somehow tasteful) digs and the presence late in the narrative of a somewhat hysterical young boyfriend, Browne’s Clarence is not nearly as contemptuously portrayed, or written, as any one of a phalanx of such figures cobbled up by white screenwriters, at the time and even much later. Clarence is no more despicable than Tank himself, or B.G., and considerably clearer in his conscience. Even when manhandled by B.G.’s enforcers, he displays no stereotypical, “feminine” cowardice. He stands up to it better than Tank does. One does wonder whether Browne had any input on the shaping of the role. An actor of exquisite dignity as well as diction — see The Liberation of L.B. Jones— he was himself gay, and I like to think he may have had some influence on the conception of Clarence who, while lounging about airily in a very brief bathrobe (and, incidentally, displaying a finely shaped pair of legs, as befits the former track star Browne was) never dips into caricature of the grotesque sort, all too often on display in movies of the period. If anything, he puts one of in mind of a slightly more flamboyant James Baldwin. (The blogger and critic Stephen Winter thinks the performance is a mesh of Baldwin and Jason Holliday, the black, gay hustler-subject of Shirley Clarke’s documentary A Portrait of Jason.) In any event, Browne’s is one of the very few such performances that, far from making you — as is usual — cringe, instead cause you to relish every moment he’s on the screen.
Up Tight teems with familiar names, although not all of them attach to specifically named characters, either in the end credits or at the usually fulsome imdb. The actress and trail-blazing black playwright Alice Childress — the very fine Trouble in Mind is hers — is listed, for example, but in what role? (I suspect she’s the smiling street preacher exhorting her flock in the rain, but never having seen her act I can’t be certain.) Michael Baseleon, as the now un-wanted white activist Teddy, has a fine scene arguing with St. Jacques, and Robert DoQui a very good sequence as a street speaker, with which he does wonders. Juanita Moore shows up all too briefly as Johnny’s understanding mother,† Dick Anthony Williams (billed as Richard) does splendidly by Corbin, whose essential empathy is subsumed by his revolutionary aims and Frank Silvera contributes a superb supporting performance as Kyle, the voice of moderation, overwhelmed by the manner in which non-violent resistance crumbles in the face of exploding impatience of the sort Langston Hughes foresaw in his poem “Harlem” (“Or does it explode?”) Max Julien gives his brief appearances as Johnny an openness of expression that veers believably from rage at Tank’s failure to abet the robbery to, later, a gentle sweetness of spirit that suggest less an idealized revolutionary icon than a fully rounded human being. Janet MacLachlan, alas, playing his sister (and B.G.’s wife) Jeannie, is given by the writers a single mode to express— sneering fury — and is unable to overcome its limitations. On the extreme other hand, St. Jacques, looking especially handsome in full beard, limns a disturbing portrait of the revolutionary whose otherwise admirable zeal has mutated into a rigid ideology that brooks no exceptions and that cuts him off from normal human emotions. Weakness is anathema to him, betrayal unforgivable. Comes the revolution, you feel, and B.G. will begin lining up for execution anyone he believes is less than 100% pure… or who has the almighty gall to disagree with him.
The indispensable Ruby Dee.
We expect Dee to deliver the goods, and she does, most notably in the late sequence in which Tank confesses to Laurie his involvement in Johnny’s violent death, after which she beats and scratches at him, flailing with her hands and fingers in a fury borne of equal parts grief and outrage. But Julian Mayfield, who was both a playwright and a novelist in addition to his work as an actor, is revelatory as Tank, infinitely more varied and moving than Victor McLaglen, who was given a 1935 Academy Award for his portrayal of Gyppo Nolan but who all too often in his screen roles became both brawling and bellicose, snarling one moment and brayingly riant the next. As Mayfield plays him, Tank is a man alienated by his times: Unprepared for the revolutionary fervor his best friend revels in, destroyed by his dismissal first from the only thing he loved without reservation (the steel mills) and later by the only substitutions for it he can find (the committee, and Johnny). As with Gyppo Nolan, Tank’s emotions run the gamut, but Mayfield is more controlled, even in extremis, than McLaglen (the depth of Tank’s pain can easily be read in Mayfield’s expressive eyes) and displays an actorly palette that suggests, poignantly, how fine a movie actor we lost when Up Tight failed at the box office. His own revolutionary concerns, and the usual fascistic surveillance of him by the FBI, may well have curtailed any such hopes all on their own; but that we will never know what he might have accomplished is, as it is always is in these cases, heartbreaking.
The splendid Julian Mayfield. The depth of Tank’s pain can be easily read in those expressive eyes.
While Up Tight is, necessarily, dated, it — like the equally inflammatory The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) — may prove prophetic, and unless we as a nation begin to address the appalling inequities of an increasingly Fascist system whose passive consent to atrocity and active murderousness toward its citizens has, since at least the 1980s, grown increasingly systemic — may prove prophetic. The dream can only be deferred for so long.
The explosion is overdue. — December 2017
Post-script, 2024 Due to “improvements” since 2017 by the Word Press Happiness Boys, or whatever they call themselves, I have had to re-post this review just in order to reduce the size of the accompanying illustrations. As this meant deleting the earlier post, the comments therein by my friend Eliot M. Camarena, whose recommendation led to my seeing Up Tight, were also jettisoned. Since I not only find them relevant but wish I’d made them myself, I reproduce them here:
Eliot wrote, “Worth noting, it’s Jules Dassin’s only American film after the 1940s-1950s blacklist. A time like our own now…
“Ebert to the contrary, I found Alexendre Trauner’s sets so realistic that I did not notice them for the most part. Is that not a designer’s job? Especially pregnant with meaning: the set of a dilapidated bowling alley in which revolution gets planned. To me, it says: The time for games has passed.”
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*In a bizarre coincidence, one of my father’s brothers-in-law, whom no one would have considered in any way effeminate or “faggy,” was named Clarence… and his nick-name was “Daisy.”
†I’m reminded by the brevity of Moore’s role as Mrs. Wells of a remark made recently by, I think, Octavia Spencer, that winning an Oscar diminishes one’s career: Producers who might offer a part to you, she says, decline because they think, holding a statuette, you won’t deign to take it. Or, perhaps, having been close to holding one: Moore, nominated for Imitation of Life in 1959, kept working into her 80s but never again in a role as important, or as showy.
So few critics, so many poets 