By Scott Ross
Thelma and Louise (1991) When this simultaneously engaging and absurdly provocative road movie opened 32 years ago, Time magazine’s breathless cover story on it rushed to assure us that men and women were debating its content over water coolers all across America. I don’t know whether Time, Inc. offices still contained such things as water coolers in the last decade of the 20th century, but in the building in which I worked at that time, I never overheard a single discussion about Thelma and Louise, let alone a debate on its dubious feminism. It was an all-too-typical bit of cultural-elitist hyperbole from a magazine not known for progressivism of any kind but whose whiskers twitch with exquisite sensitivity whenever it identifies a trend… usually well after the point at which the rest of the country has already moved past it.
The new 4K UHD Criterion transfer, which emphasizes the beauty of Adrian Biddle’s rich, fine-grained cinematography, reinforces my initial response to Thelma and Louise in 1991 and my strong sense of both its strengths and its weaknesses. Everything that impressed me about it then impresses me still, and everything that bothered me when it was new bothers me now. Callie Khouri, who wrote the screenplay (and was given an Academy Award for it) later noted of the writing that, “It was such a pure experience. There was no self-censorship there, there was no second guessing. From a creative standpoint, it was the freest I had ever been in my life.” On the basis of the finished movie I would have argued in favor of a little creative self-censorship, which might have rid Khouri’s script of the things in it which seemed then, and seem now, both silly and pernicious and which rendered her movie less a character study than a half-assed neo-feminist fantasy trading on one-dimensional masculine stereotype. (Imagine the squeals of protest had all the women in a similar big-budget Hollywood movie directed by a serious filmmaker been whores, harpies and airheads while only the men were intelligent and two- if not three-dimensional. Is this how parity between the sexes is achieved? Through caricature?)
With the notable exceptions of the Arkansas police detective (Harvey Keitel) investigating Louise’s killing of a thwarted rapist and Louise’s understanding boyfriend, nicely played by Michael Madsen, all of the men in Thelma and Louise are cartoons of varying levels of ridiculousness, from the sex-hustling thief played by Brad Pitt to Thelma’s utterly ludicrous, self-pitying chauvinist husband (Christopher McDonald, whose embarrassingly over-the-top performance is a study in thespic neoteny.) Further, while Khouri complains of American movie stars who “make a fortune from violence,” her own most famous picture contains a sequence in which one of the heroines holds up a general store at gunpoint, rendered as comedy, and another in which her counterpart gleefully pumps bullets into the semi full of gasoline driven by a noxious pig who pisses the pair off — a scene designed to make audiences cheer as the pig’s tanker explodes. That’s not to mention the scene in which both women force a strutting martinet of a patrol officer, at gunpoint, into the trunk of his car, on a desert road, where he is further made the butt of a stupid joke involving a Rastafarian cyclist and a blunt. Khouri’s idiotic false equivalencies on the matter of guns (“We have a speed limit. Why can’t we have a bullet limit?”) exhibit the same level of militant illogic as her own fortune-gathering movie. Or is it simple hypocrisy?
What’s best about the picture are Khouri’s dialogues between Thelma and Louise, which for the most part bear the shape and texture of the way friends talk together; Ridley Scott’s assured direction, even when the narrative is going awry; Thom Noble’s kinetic editing; and Susan Sarandon’s uncompromising, and unassailable, performance as Louise. Geena Davis, I suppose, does what she can with Thelma, but the part is largely impossible. She’s dumb beyond the simple needs of dramaturgy, and annoying to boot — when did any woman who’d just been raped, as Thelma is near the beginning (her assailant doesn’t get a chance to bring the act to completion but does penetrate her) suddenly go all weak at the knees for a college-age boy and pursue him to bed? — and I can never decide whether Davis is honoring that characterization or just giving in to it. I’ve also never quite believed the picture’s ending, and in any case the final image isn’t held nearly long enough to be effective. But even it is better than Hans Zimmer’s superfluous and irritating score. I know people who think John Williams is overrated, but is he anywhere near as overrated as Zimmer?
The Lady Eve (1941) Although its plot hinges on an entirely unbelievable premise, this sparkling sex-comedy is one of the writer-director Preston Sturges’ most consistently entertaining pictures. While its stars, Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, had appeared together in a comic mystery (The Mad Miss Manton in 1938) neither was known as a comedian. Their performances here are unerringly funny, however, especially Fonda’s; the sequence in which Stanwyck holds him tight, runs her fingers through his hair and coos into his ear while he squirms in a fit of erotic agony is perhaps the funniest seduction scene ever put on film. I don’t think there is a better one, at least in American movies, and none to equal it until Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman’s first hotel room scene in The Graduate. My only complaint about The Lady Eve is my usual cavil about Sturges’ best work — his unfortunate penchant for unmotivated slapstick. The seemingly innumerable times Fonda is made to trip and fall, usually with or into food and/or drink, throughout the picture are protracted, unnecessary and (at least to me) resolutely unfunny. It isn’t as though his character is a stuffed shirt, or a snob or a villain, or in any other way deserving of constantly being made a fool. Do other people actually laugh at this?
1776 (1972) Any movie that can get an 11-year old interested in American history and musical theatre has something going for it, even if either of these strikes you as a negative.
What we saw in 1972, we now understand, was a truncated edition of a longer picture that more faithfully transcribed the long-running Sherman Edwards/Peter Stone Broadway show — the director of both was Peter H. Hunt — and which was cut by its producer, Jack L. Warner, in part for time and in part because Richard Nixon objected to a single musical number in it. (Not that any of that mattered, since the movie was a flop anyway.) 1776 was re-edited for laserdisc in the late 1990s with the cut footage, un-restored and visually jarring, put back in. Later DVD and Blu-ray editions restored the entire thing and presented it in editions of varying length. The recent 4K UHD “Extended Cut” is the most satisfying version thus far, and Harry Stradling, Jr.’s glorious widescreen cinematography haven’t looked this good in 50 years.
The Servant (1963) The initial collaboration between Harold Pinter and the director Joseph Losey, from the strange, disturbing 1948 novella by Robin Maugham. It was beautifully lit by Douglas Slocombe and well acted by a cast that includes Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles and the young James Fox. (Wendy Craig, who Losey later correctly said was miscast, gives such an arch, cold, hostile performance you feel empathy with the serpentine manservant played by Bogarde, which works against the situation.) Although there is nothing explicitly homoerotic about either the source material or the movie made from it, a strong whiff of the sadomasochistic permeates Waugh’s narrative about a young man (Fox) hiring a servant (Bogarde) who eventually takes over his life and gradually turns him into a passive, alcoholic mess. This is especially noticeable in one scene not in the story, in which servant and master bicker like a married couple and another in which they play ball on the stairs inside the townhouse. I’m not sure how I feel about either Waugh’s story or Pinter and Losey’s movie, since both depressed me. I suppose that means they achieved their respective objectives. It seems a dubious triumph to me.
The one thing, aside from Craig’s performance, to which I absolutely objected was the recurring song by John Dankworth, sung by his wife Cleo Laine. It’s the only record Fox seems to own, and hearing those overly-pointed and awkwardly written lyrics, over and over, took me slowly from annoyance to rage. For collectors of trivia, in the restaurant scene between Fox and Craig, Patrick Magee appears as a Bishop, Alun Owen (soon to write A Hard Day’s Night) as a Curate and Pinter himself plays a socialite.
The Great Mouse Detective (1986) A minor Disney feature directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, Dave Michener and Burny Mattinson, the first two of whom would, in three years time, be responsible for the picture that changed everything for the company. Based on Eve Titus’ clever little children’s novel Basil of Baker Street (and its sequels), the movie was originally given that name before the odious Disney CEO Michael Eisner objected, leading to a hilarious satirical memo by the animator Ed Gombert retroactively re-naming the studio’s classics (The Wonderful Elephant Who Could Really Fly, The Puppet Who Wanted to Be a Real Boy…) It’s an often sumptuous-looking movie, largely respectful of the Victorian contours and well-voiced by Barrie Ingham (Basil), Val Bettin (Dr. Dawson), little Susanne Pollatschek as the kidnapped girl mouse Olivia Flaversham and Candy Candido, in radio and movies for over 50 years at the time, as the peg-legged bat Fidget. The casting coup, however, and half the reason to see the picture, is Vincent Price voicing Basil’s Moriarty, the appalling Professor Ratigan. Price was clearly in his element, and having a high old time of it, never more so than while crooning Henry Mancini, Larry Grossman & Ellen Fitzhugh’s big number “The World’s Greatest Criminal Mind.”
Mancini’s score is felicitous — spirited, charming and, during the action scenes, rousing. There are also some good uses of early computer animation, particularly in the climactic sequence involving the Big Ben works, but there are two miscalculations, it seems to me. One was the filmmakers’ eschewing how Titus’ mouse community evolves in the basement of 221B Baker Street, which I admit is a peripheral complaint. The other, which irks me considerably more, is Melissa Manchester’s resolutely anachronistic (and typically sloppy, lyrically) music-hall number “Let Me Be Good to You,” which she also (alas) performs in a vulgar, sexually suggestive manner much too blue for a movie aimed primarily at children. It’s as if Mae West walked into Pinocchio and suddenly started coming on to Geppetto.
King of Jazz (1930) A real curio. For those who disparage Paul Whiteman as a band-leader, this celebration of him unfortunately supports the view that he was to jazz as Lawrence Welk was to Tin Pan Alley. And for a movie with “jazz” in the title there’s almost no jazz in it.
Mary Poppins (1964) In an era that produced one bad movie musical after another, here was that rara avis: An original as tuneful as it was eye-pleasing.
Treasure Island (1950) I’m not sure why I never read Robert Louis Stevenson’s marvelous 1883 novel when I was a child — I didn’t pick it up for the first time until late in my 5th decade — but I wish I had because I can well imagine how it would have appealed to me. Stevenson’s novel, written for his step-son, is the essential boy’s book (although young girls apparently love it too) and it’s hard to imagine the child who couldn’t get excited about it, what with its mysterious strangers, ocean voyages in search of buried treasure, talking parrot, one-legged cook, half-crazed hermit, vivid dialogue and sailing ship full of bloodthirsty pirates, not to mention a 12-year old protagonist who is curious, brave, resourceful and kind.
Walt Disney’s early live-action transliteration, the first of his post-war pictures to be made in Britain, in order to take advantage of frozen funds, is a good one, covering most of the important incidents of the book and leaving out very little. It’s largely well cast, with one glaring exception, about which more anon: Basil Sydney as a robust Captain Smollett, Walter Fitzgerald properly blustery as Squire Trelawney, Denis O’Dea as sane and generous Dr. Livesey, Finlay Currie a frightening Billy Bones, John Laurie an even scarier Blind Pew, Geoffrey Keen a properly treacherous Israel Hands, Geoffrey Wilkinson an engagingly half-mad Ben Gunn and, best of all, Robert Newton as Long John Silver. It’s Newton everyone is imitating when they say, “Aarr, matey” and think they’re talking like a pirate, but if that is all there had been to his performance it would be of very minor interest. Newton, the bone-chilling Bill Sykes of the David Lean Oliver Twist and the unforgettable Inspector Fix of Around the World in 80 Days, gives an account of Silver that locates his slippery, adaptable weathercock nature, his blood-thirstiness (or at least his indifference to the deaths or sufferings of others) and his avarice but also his humor and his genuine fondness for young Jim Hawkins.
Lawrence Edward Watkin, who also wrote The Great Locomotive Chase and Darby O’Gill and the Little People for Disney, did the flavorful and largely faithful adaptation, the splendid cinematographer Freddie Young filmed it with an eye for supportive impact under Byron Haskin’s effective direction, and Clifton Parker composed the pleasing score. The picture has one basic flaw, and it’s a major one: The miscasting of the otherwise very good Bobby Driscoll as Jim. It isn’t Driscoll’s performance that detracts but his unfettered American accent. Disney knowingly violated British labor laws in casting Driscoll, then compounded matters by completing the boy’s scenes and sending him home while the case was under appeal. But then as now, when the company that bears his name protects a known Irish serial rapist from prosecution, no one ever pins Disney to the mat.
Who is Harry Kellerman and why is he saying those terrible things about me? (1971) This comic shaggy-dog story by Herb Gardner is very much a playwright’s movie, especially this playwright; Georgie Soloway, the singer-songwriter played by Dustin Hoffman, is a stage conception, and his monologues (indeed, much of the picture’s dialogue) seem conceived for the Broadway theatre of the time. Like Murray Burns in Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns, Georgie is as maddeningly idiosyncratic as he is charming, articulate and funny. And as with Martin Balsam as Murray’s agent-brother Arnold in the movie of Clowns, Gardner gave Barbara Harris, as a neurotic actress auditioning for Georgie’s Broadway musical, an extended monologue that resulted in an Academy Award nomination. (Unlike Balsam, Harris lost.) I don’t mean to imply by this that Who is Harry Kellerman… is stagey. It’s very much a movie, with fantastic things happening in jump-cut and juxtaposition, and realistic settings that suddenly seem surreal based on what is going on in them. (The excellent Ulu Grosbard directed, but such moments were scripted.) Still, Gardner was primarily a playwright, and his screenplay was written with a playwright’s sense of the shape and texture of effective stage dialogue, which doesn’t always sound natural coming out the mouths of movie characters. I have been platonically in love with Barbara Harris since the age of 16, when I first heard her on the Broadway cast recording of the Bock and Harnick The Apple Tree, and have long wondered what she did in Harry Kellerman to get an Oscar nomination. Now I know: Like Balsam in A Thousand Clowns she makes a Herb Gardner character who’s really more concept than human being into a living person. I cannot fathom why Harris had so little confidence in herself as an actress. She hated performing, and she was brilliant at it.
It’s a strange little movie, and not ultimately successful as either a dramatic comedy or a satire. Yet I enjoyed a great deal of it, and much of the picture is hilarious, even though I knew who Harry Kellerman was from the first 20 minutes. As a phenomenally successful singer-songwriter — when we look at him we’re supposed to think of Dylan — watching his private life veer out of control and contemplating suicide, Hoffman is terrific, and the supporting cast is marvelous, especially Dom DeLuise, wonderful as Hoffman’s accountant; Gabriel Dell as his songwriting partner; David Burns as his father; and Rose Gregorio as his ex-wife. As Georgie’s shrink, Jack Warden is very funny and there is a moment with him that I feel sure inspired Dennis Potter’s writing “Pennies from Heaven.” There’s also a beautiful sequence of Hoffman in a private plane featuring aerial views of Manhattan I have never seen in a movie before; you really see that it is an island, which people outside the city tend to forget.
100 Rifles (1969) An entertaining late-period Western adapted by Clair Huffaker from a Robert MacLeod novel, revised by Tom Gries and directed by him. Gries, who two years earlier also wrote and directed the beautiful Will Penny. It’s outlandish, and scarcely believable for a moment, but it’s got its own weird integrity; for a movie that doesn’t really make sense, the action in it has unassailable logic. Jim Brown plays an American marshal improbably sent to Mexico to retrieve the half-Indian/half-Mexican bandit “Yaqui Joe” Herrera (Burt Reynolds) who reluctantly gets himself involved with a band of native revolutionaries led by (wait for it!) Raquel Welch. Reynolds: “I was playing Yaqui Joe, supposedly an Indian with a mustache. Raquel had a Spanish accent that sounded like a cross between Carmen Miranda and ZaSu Pitts.” Whatever you think of her accent, Welch is much better than you might expect, while Reynolds exudes that unique amiability and wit that was his popular specialty and which (along with the appositely stupid action movies he starred in) made him, for a time, the biggest box-office draw in the world. There is one odd scene in 100 Rifles, however, in which he’s seen from the side in extreme close-up; whenever he turns his head to speak to the actor next to him I could swear I saw the join of his toupée. Was he that bald already in 1969?
Fernando Lamas is the hissibly nasty villain who comes to an appropriately grisly end, Dan O’Herlihy is amicable as an opportunistically inconstant American official, and Eric Braeden (credited under his real name, Hans Gudegast) is equally self-serving as Lamas’ German advisor. The young Lorenzo Lamas can also be spotted, as an Indian boy, but the role played by Akim Tamiroff, alas, was cut when his scenes were deleted. Gries’ direction is swift and well-staged, with occasional moments of real surprise. Cecilio Paniagua’s color cinematography is mouth-watering and the propulsive score by Jerry Goldsmith ranks as one of his best for a Western, and one of his most enjoyable in any genre.
Interiors (1978) When Woody Allen chose to follow up the delightful (and extremely successful) Annie Hall with this utterly humorless homage to Ingmar Bergman, there were those who wondered if it was intended as some sort of sly satire of Swedish nihilism. As a 17 year-old Allen fan, I hated it. I no longer hate it, but it does represent the danger to the creative artist of immersion in other people’s movies. Interiors plays like what it is: The deliberate imposition onto one filmmaker’s style and sensibilities of someone else’s. Although the movie is intelligent and, occasionally, felt (the scene between E.G. Marshall and Geraldine Page in the cathedral is genuinely shocking) it doesn’t feel in any way organic. It’s a set of chic Scandinavian attitudes gleaned from too many screenings of Bergman and grafted onto the world-view of a wisecracking Brooklyn-born college dropout trying too hard to make others believe he’s an intellectual. (He isn’t, and never was.) In one of the books about him, Allen cites James Thurber drunkenly pounding a table at a party and slurring that he is “nothing but a God-damned humorist!” To Allen, who loves the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope’s screen persona so much he imitated it for years, comedy (in his words, not mine) is “sitting at the children’s table.” He seems to think that empty verbal imposture and pictorial prettiness equates to being seated with the adults. But would those “adults” be anyone you wouldn’t jaywalk across a busy street at rush-hour to avoid?
Although the main figures in the picture are embodiments of attitudes rather than living characters, some of the images (like the shot of Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt and Kristin Griffith staring out the window at the end) are steals from both Bergman and Chekhov and the dialogue is often risible, I have to admit that, as filmmaking, Interiors is exceptionally handsome and effective — the photography was by Gordon Willis and the editor was Ralph Rosenblum, who shaped Annie Hall from a formless mess into the most plangent romantic comedy of the era — and it is often wonderfully acted, especially by Page as the emotionally fragile interior-designer mater familias and Marshall as her equally emotionally distant husband, who finally endures enough of her mercurial behavior and seeks a new life without her. The rest of the cast, which includes Richard Jordan as Keaton’s failed novelist husband, Sam Waterston as Hurt’s frustrated documentarian mate and Maureen Stapleton as Marshall’s new bride, flails about in search of something human to play. Jordan has the movie’s ugliest moment, when he attempts to rape Griffith in the family garage, while Stapleton tries to pump air into a figure who is nothing but a symbol. Yet even they are not as lost as Hurt and Keaton, gifted actresses reduced to attitudinizing. Hurt comes off the worst; her character is so impossible you can’t imagine how anyone could put up with her. Although it is possible to regard her as the pathetic result of how parents can emotionally retard their middle child, she’s so filled with rage and so impervious to anything approaching pleasure or personal achievement she’s a braying, angry bore. And Keaton, who almost seems to be playing an early edition of the pretentious dilettante role she assayed in Manhattan a year later, is saddled with the picture’s biggest howler: “I can’t seem to shake the real implication of dying,” she says to her psychiatrist. “It’s terrifying. The intimacy of it embarrasses me.”
That is, hands down, the best bad line heard in a movie since in The Ten Commandments Anne Baxter as Nefretiri was made to say to Charlton Heston, “Oh, Moses, Moses! You stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!”
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) Notable, if that’s the word, as the first of his movies to star Mia Farrow, this lighthearted romantic roundelay written and directed by Woody Allen is also, like Interiors, an homage to Ingmar Bergman. This time, instead of the Persona Bergman, Allen emulates the Ingmar of Smiles of a Summer Night (with bits of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya thrown in) as mismatched couples arrive for a weekend at a turn-of-the-century country home and leave or stay, their various love-lives sorted out by a magical intervention. You don’t believe Allen believes a minute of it, but it’s easy on the eyes (Gordon Willis again), charmingly scored to Mendelsohn’s music and amusingly acted by its game cast. This includes, aside from Allen as an impractical inventor haunted by a foiled romance with Farrow (would that it had remained so…), Mary Steenburgen as Allen’s unhappy spouse (well, I mean, really!), José Ferrer as a pompous academic, Julie Hagerty as a sexually accommodating secretary and Tony Roberts as a dissatisfied rake. The picture is inoffensive and often funny, but so inconsequential it blows away from your memory like dandelion seeds 20 minutes after you’ve finished watching it.
Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 