As Long As I Have You

The corrupt thieving bore known as The Artist (2011) -- a product with syntax much closer to an Absolut Vodka "White" pimpery than to anything from 1927 -- puts me in mind of Zelig (1983). (The differences in wit, movement, understanding and sincere interest in its time, formal inventiveness -- as opposed to mere decoration -- is tragic.) While I stopped being a Woody Allen fan about the time it became clear he wasn't going to go anywhere upsetting to his mummified, contented audience -- the same audience, both in the seats and in the media, fooled by Michel Hazanavicius's fakery -- certain gems glow brighter as the years go by, as the 70s / Keaton works dim, and as US movie culture becomes more and more the result of Cranial Rectal Embedment (CRE).

It is sweet and honest and in mad love with the Twenties. And very funny. Allen's adoration of his co-star, now seen as tawdry and a cause for snickering because of the bizarre later happenings in the private lives of both Allen and Miss Farrow, deepens Zelig's heart and humor. As it does Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), his best three movies. Farrow was better for Allen's art than was Keaton, and surely better than what came after. . .

And. . .

A radically different view of the American 1920s.

"The common man would now have to find his one-eyed way in the Kingdom of the Blind." -- Dos Passos

While literati such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Miller move their feasts to Paris and gaze at their navels -- taking full advantage of the gap caused by the WWI deaths of half of all French males between the ages of 15 and 30 -- the pygmies known as the American Oligarchy regain full control, flushing whatever remains of late-19th / early-20th Century humanism, and roar their way through the Twenties, the decade of Prohibition, massive coast-to-coast KKK rallies, eugenics, the birth of Organized Crime, and major financing by American bankers of fascist movements across Europe. When things fall apart at the turn of the 30s, FDR steps in and saves US capitalism from (and for) the capitalists.

Who don't see it that way. . .

Apart

We've all heard Kind of Blue ~ one of the great achievements of 20th Century music ~ many times, on vinyl, tape, CD. "Legacy Edition" is best. . .

What's overwhelming is the quiet, the spacing, the stillness. . . and the growing sense of separation and aloneness among the men as we move through the five main pieces. An absolute must have.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

In honor of the convention month where the corporate totalitarian regime will shove the presidential race of Trump/Pence/Biden/[fill in name of female of color, anyone will do] down ours throats, the best English language documentary on the rise of Nazism.

Part One:

Part Two:

This Could Be the Start of Something Big

At last, they begin to emerge. And with timing almost as brilliant as Mr. Allen's.

Until now, nothing of Steve Allen's late-night TV work of the 50s and 60s had been available on DVD. Nor on places such as YouTube. And not much now either, but we do have a start.  What with the ongoing late-night wars, and especially with a flyspeck such Jimmy Fallon not only taking over Steve's old show but doing it in the very same NBC midtown studio space -- well, as Nixon used to say, now more than ever. . .

Westinghouse. August 15, 1962. Amid spacious views of early-60s nighttime L.A. and its cars, Steve plays piano on top a 75-foot flagpole while peeking into neighboring hotel rooms, talks to the passing KTLA traffic copter, and tosses down salamis to his waiting fans on Vine Street. Back in the studio, Steve does a duet with an audience member, teases a pregnant lady, gets involved with a gas experiment that falls flat, teaches us about Mexican jumping beans (there are worms inside?). Introduces his guests: singer Bill Kerry (?), the great and sadly forgotten Slim Gaillard (look at those hands!), and the very young Barbara McNair. Steve finishes by sharing mattresses with a very fetching blonde baby doll (without a single dirty joke), and lets the baby doll take over the show by letting Miss Mattress call her law student husband (who had a very important test that day), and then lets her belt out a rockin' version of "Hallelujah, I Love Him So." Little is planned, or what's planned is turned on its head. Nothing is locked in. Steve takes us wherever the moment takes us.

Just an average Allen show. No topicality, meanness, elitism, condescension, cynicism, or hate. In their place ~ good cheer, silliness, and lots and lots of smart. (Those thinking there's a connection between comedic smarts and Knowingness deserve garbage such as Fallon.)

When we were carefree. . . .

Running

In my post about the great Kim Novak, I mentioned the way of Hollywood and miracles. Novak and many classical stars were the result of happy accidents only possible in an isolated creation chamber where all bets were covered cold. So one could take a chance on an awkward, shy girl from Chicago who came to LA for she knew not why. Or on a rodeo rider/poker player/roustabout just wandering in from the rails, and turn him into Robert Mitchum. Archibald Leach was a trapeze artist from England. Poof! he’s Cary Grant.

And the movies. Can one imagine Detour (1945) being born under any other kind of system? Gun Crazy (1949), Johnny Guitar (1954), The Marrying Kind (1952), The Big Sleep (1946), Holiday (1938), Lady from Shanghai (1948), Out of the Past (1947), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), My Darling Clementine (1946), Angel Face (1952), White Heat (1949)?

Or Some Came Running (1959). Looking at the push novelist James Jones made as he proposed a $1,000,000 sell price for his yet-to-be-completed novel (by far the largest asking price in Hollywood history, eventually purchased for $200,000); looking at the best seller craze which dominated – and in many cases suffocated – 40s and 50s Hollywood; and looking at the seemingly too-cool-for-school cast, one might think the movie, hoping to catch From Here to Eternity lightning-in-a-bottle, would be just another middle-brow social issue project come down with elephantiasis.

Enter Vincente Minnelli. One would be hard pressed to find two male sensibilities as opposed as those of Minnelli and James Jones: Jones a brawling small town southern Illinois street kid who knew little beyond the military and the men in it; Minnelli the complete urban sophisticate, far more in touch with style, beauty, female sensibility, and affairs of the heart. Not a chance in heck that a director such as Minnelli (if we had one) would be brought together with a novel almost exclusively concerned with the problems of men, in the end-of-cinema Branding/Marketeer miasma we now must suffer. But it was possible in 1958. And it is this melding and confrontation between the two sensibilities which gives us the miracle of Some Came Running: a swaying back-and-forth, beyond the control of Minnelli, the true "story" of the film, a thematic resolution unresolved. Until it is.

James Jones – perhaps because of the money and because he was allowed to hang with the Rat Pack – seemed pleased with the movie adaptation of his 1,200 page opus. Which is kind of strange because Minnelli not only works to reverse the meaning of the novel, but challenges just about every part of Jones’s macho value system. Poker, drinking, broads, brothers, cars, back alley fights, the writer-as-warrior – all here, and all eventually trumped by a silly, stupid, madly-in-love girl named Ginny.

Veteran David Hirsch (Frank Sinatra) has decided to return home to Parkman, Indiana after 16 years away and a long hitch in the Army. Arriving from Chicago with a $5,500 poker bankroll burning in his pants, he learns he has arrived with something else as well.

Shirley MacLaine, here so natural and warm and lovely. . .

But for Dave Hirsch, other things. His successful older brother, mostly. In a beautiful mix of sequences, Minnelli shows how much a part of mid-20th Century American male ethos Hirsch is, almost to the point of caricature. Not quite. Minnelli (helped by Elmer Bernstein's fine score) temporarily embraces the ethos, particularly in the strange and moving shot of Hirsch's favorite books. And in the character of gambler Bama Dillert (Dean Martin).

Hirsch meets a girl with the appropriate name of Gwen French (Martha Hyer), the daughter of a famous poet. She's also the teacher of a respected writing class at the University. And she's madly in love with Dave's talents as a writer. As a writer.

Dave's already way past that.

She won't have it. So Dave does what any red-blooded American male would do in the face of female resistance: run off to Terre Haute for girls and gambling. (And to learn of Bama's hat obsession.)

Upon Dave's return to Parkman, Gwen French receives two visitors.

At last, David Hirsch sees the light. And loses his best friend.

In the most famous and bizarre sequence, the work's contradictions erupt into a holocaust of color and movement. The sins are paid for. And in a final gesture of pure cinema, Some Came Running resolves itself.