Kubrick Gets His Kicks; Hawks Hyperventilates
Lolita. This is the story that taught a whole generation how to thank goodness for little girls. It also gave America's greatest mad scientist director, Stanley Kubrick, the chance to experiment with Nabokov's novel--and the result remains titillating. Some will argue that Sue Lyons was too old to play Nabokov's beguiling nymphet. But you have to know that those sunglasses and red lipstick and tight pants sum up the early 60s' teen angel. Others will tell you that James Mason's manners are too good to convey the sick depths of Humboldt Humboldt's jealousy; but it's precisely this polish that lends Humboldt that extra edge of perversity. And then there is Peter Sellars, who is more wicked and twisted than ever as Humboldt's tormentor. Kubrick takes advantage of Sellars' game of character changes to build an elaborate cinematic labyrinth, and keeps us cleverly puzzled as we grope our way through. It's more accessible and less cerebral than Kubrick's recent work and still quite a fine film--as well as being one of the definitive variations on the theme of Lust's Labor's Lost.
His Girl Friday. Of the two Howard Hawks pictures playing around this weekend, this is the equally triumphant. In his man's world, Hawks and his screenwriter Charles Lederer twisted the tension in Hecht and MacArthur's wildman farce "The Front Page" by turning Hildy Johnson into a woman, and one who was trying to excise herself from the male society she had tailored herself into. She can't do it. Hecht and MacArthur's play proved that it was not indestructable when Billy Wilder made it move like a sludge barge. "His Girl Friday" is louder and faster than any other movie ever made. Cary Grant did everything right as Walter Burns; it must have been a great surprise to see him work in this sort of part after the more submissive work he'd been used to. Rosalind Russell talks like a robot with too many "D" batteries in her--and she's a wonder.
Casablanca. It's too bad that seemingly every joker in the world can imperfectly quote at least three lines from this great movie. After you've seen your fortieth Peter Lorre imitation that's not even close, enthusiasm simply wanes. Nonetheless, "Casablanca" (1942) remains one of the best films to emerge from Hollywood in the age of talkies. This film is a stellar example (oops) of great acting rescuing an otherwise mawkish plot. Bogie crystallizes his persona in "Casablanca" as Rick, the disillusioned, cynical tavern-keeper. Ingrid Bergman was never more beautiful, and Claude Rains, the aforementioned Lorre, and Dooley Wilson head a marvelous cast. Really great films can be rated by how many times one can sit through them and truly enjoy the experience. Although "Casablanca" has become somewhat overworked as everybody's "favorite," it's still worth seeing at least four times (more for the really hard core).
Yellow Submarine. Attractively packaged drivel. When it premiered in 1968, "Yellow Submarine" was supposed to be the vanguard of a new age in animation. Since it featured cartoons of the Beatles--and a ridiculous plot regarding the salvation of "Pepperland" by the Fab Four, loosely constructed from their songs--the film was a big hit. Ten years later it's difficult to see why. The animation is quite good, the colors are splendid, but only a rock-ribbed Beatlemaniac could love this movie. Druggies beware, though. Our sources claim that this is a great movie to trip, snort, smoke, shoot, or see God with. For children of all ages.
The Lady from Shanghai. The mellifluous brogue of Orson Welles' Michael O'Hara flows, swells and laps against the corners of this classic, covering like the South Seas (where a bored Rita Hayworth and her brilliant, embittered husband spend their money) what O'Hara himself calls the carnivorous sharks below. Shark fights serve as metaphor for the cynical, sordid goings' on between the lawyer, his berserk business partner and the aloof, gorgeous Hayworth. Welles, despite himself, gets caught up in the carnage, dragged in by unrequited adoration for Hayworth, a nose for adventure, a soul filled with romanticism and nothing particularly better to do. The denouement of the murder mystery is as subtle and complex as the one in "The Big Sleep," and hauntingly handled. But even more memorable is what Welles does with his peerless sense of theatrical cinematography; some of his South Sea and courtroom shots are dazzling, and, of course, the final scene of confrontation in a house of horrors and in a hall of mirrors will forever stand as one of the most ingenious pieces of footage in all of movies.
Gilda. Done in 1946 by King Vidor, "Gilda" is the best of the "film noir" style that emphasized the dark side of the American character in the climate of national disillusionment following World War II. The film features Glenn Ford, Rita Hayworth and an actor whose name I always forget, who plays a Rio casino owner-cum-international tungsten cartel boss. It revolves around two sinister triangles: one, a quasi-homosexual link between the tungsten boss, the boss's sword-cane, and Glenn Ford (the other, between Rita Hayworth, the tungsten boss (who marries her), and Ford (who has had a bitter affair with her and becomes the boss's lieutenant). The clash of the two triangles nearly destroys all three of them, and makes possible the emergence of the movie's real theme, the relation between sexuality and power. "Gilda" is extremely similar in its tone and its themes to another favorite of mine, Orson Welles's "The Lady from Shanghai."
North By Northwest. Clever. One could say as much for any Hitchcock film. But this one has to be his most ingenious, the plot is devilish--and although Hitchcock never really wrings the full terror out of it, terrifying. Cary Grant plays a Madison Avenue smoothie with a doting mother and life of business luncheons who gets taken (figuratively, and literally) for a spy. "Nice play-acting, but it won't wash," his abductor, a chillingly villainous James Mason tells Grant when he tries to clear up this misunderstanding. Grant breaks free, then does some romantic interluding with a seductive Eva-Marie Saint. But she turns out to be Mason's agent (although ultimately a double agent) and the persecution continues. Scary enough. But Hitchcock invests even more genius in a few intricately-constructed and flawlessly-carried-out chase scene: the escape from the rare antique auction, the low-flying crop-duster in the cornfield bit, and the film's finale, a rush from death across the carved faces on Mount Rushmore. Hitchcock himself jaunts onto the screen in the opening minutes, his belly pulling up to and bouncing off the closing door of a bus. He knew what a brilliant film he had constructed, and he wasn't above giving himself a little doff.
Play It Again, Sam. So what do you do if you're short and ugly? We wouldn't know. But Woody Allen has had to grapple with this problem for several years now, and apparently he has come up with a workable--if not ideal--solution: turn your shortcomings into assets. To date, Allen has made half a dozen films in which short guys come out on top. By far the best of these is "Play It Again, Sam," the tale of a romantically successful Bogart fan. In Bogart, Allen has found the perfect role model for all the short, ordinary-looking people of the world; after all, for Bogie, life--and dames--are simple. This is one of the few Allen films that Allen himself did not direct, and what is lost in manic humor is gained in coherence and sensitivity. Diane Keaton plays the paramour as usual, with the perfect blend of love, whine and neurosis. And the brilliant recreation of the famous Casablanca airport scene seems a perfect ending touch to this wonderful film.
Outrageous! Only Woody Allen at his best could outdo some of the one-liners in Richard Benner's brilliant comedy about a female impersonator's rise to stardom and the whacked-out woman behind his success. Craig Russell's unabashedly gay hairdresser has graced us with a character we will not soon forget, completely stealing the show in the movie's plot and the movie itself. His series of famed singers and actresses belting out "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" will bring down any house, so carefully honed are his Channings and Ellas. Co-star Hollis McLaren is inevitably overshadowed by Russell's stagewise presence, but the delicate treatment she gives to her Crazy Liza perfectly complements her outlandish buddy.
Pretty Baby. The come-on was irresistable. Brooke Shields--the 12 year old prepubescent tart of our most secret fantasies. And Louis Malle--the man who might have done for the topic of child prostitution what he did with the incest taboo in "Murmur of the Heart." But the product is confused in its story line and unidentifiable in its ideology, all in all a pretty big let down. Shields conveys all the mischieviousness of childhood, and none of the mystery. Her mother (Susan Sarandon) strands her in their New Orleans brothel without us ever really understanding why. And although a photographer named Bellocq (David Carradine) comes to save Shields and sweep her into marriage, Carradine is never really all there. Even the cinematography, exquisite as it is, never really hangs together; unlike in his other films, Malle never really uses his colors and compositions to illustrate his theme. But that's the real problem: there is no theme. Just a series of pretty babies, that in the end is pretty boring.
Saturday Night Fever. Since a major national magazine recently ran a cover piece on the Vietnamization of Hollywood, maybe a free-lancing stargazer somewhere will write something on the Italianization of its box office idols. John Travolta's disco-dancing Tony has joined Sylvester Stallone's Rocky as one of America's favorite silver screen heroes, and the similarities between the two films do not end there. There is the same low-budget feel to "Saturday Night Fever"--the obscure director, in this case a fellow named John Badham who seems bent on dazzling his audiences with bizarre camera angles when the mere sight of Travolta on a dance floor would have been enough; and the same schmaltz-filled discovery of love, in this case--Tony's ultimately Platonic crush on a fellow Brooklynite (Karen Lyyn Gorney) trying to elbow her way onto the promised island of fame and fortune on the other side of the East River. True to the spirit of "Rocky," "Saturday Night Fever" amounts to little more than another serving of accessible cinematic pulp; as such it has furnished Travolta with his very own stairway to heaven. So long as the film is accepted for what it is--highly marketable entertainment and nothing else--"Saturday Night Fever" will deliver for most of its two-hour length. And if Norman Wexler's cliche-plagued screenplay leaves you numb in parts, one of those ubiquitous Bee Gee standards is waiting just around the corner to rouse you from your slumber.