Films, A — Z, Jan. 29, 2017: C
A year-long series of essays about my favorite films from A — Z
City Lights
1931, Black &White, United Artists
Written, Produced and Directed by Charlie Chaplin
Starring Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Florence Lee and Harry Myers
The first time you watch a Chaplin film is a special occasion. Even more special, to me, was the first time I introduced someone else to his films. Indulge me a few hundred words.
Christmas, 2004. I joined my parents on a trip to Florida to spend the holidays with our maternal grandmother, always known as Mamà. Not Grandma or Grandmama or anything that affectionate. Just Mamà, short first syllable, long second. She lived in Punta Gorda (Fat Point), an hour outside of Tampa, Florida. Hurricane Ivan swept through the area earlier that year, caused a lot of damage. Mamà’s home lost only some shingles, but she wanted company that Christmas.
Mamà was imperious. You didn’t speak to her — you answered her questions, and promptly at that. She could tell you how many olives were in the jar, and you didn’t eat anything out of her fridge unless she prepared it and served it to you with steam rising off the plate. If invited for a visit you were expected to be as much in the way as a family picture on the wall. I could understand. She was raised in Puerto Rico, married at 19 a man who moved her to Chicago, and she bore him 13 children in 17 years. She buried that husband and the two others who came after him. Now she had a house to herself. She didn’t need anybody around cramping her style.
Everything in the house was locked up. If you wanted to step outside for some reason (and why would you? since there’s exactly nothing in that part of Florida) she would fetch her keys and unlock the security door so you could get out. You might call that was a fire hazard, but it would be foolish to assume Mamà ever kept her home below the draconian standards of a marine barracks.
Ed was a neighbor and gentleman caller who visited every day. Ed was a WWII vet who loved talking politics. Together he and Mamà talked about their illnesses and George W. Bush, ate dinner at 3:30 pm, and consumed a steady diet of CNN and TNT. Behind all the locked doors and TV programming for the elderly, the rest of us got very restless very quickly; you can only watch so much CNN* and Law and Order before the specter of growing old and dying fades, so long as death brings deliverance from this.
(*Mamà did provide plenty of entertainment herself whenever CNN did a piece on the recently-reelected Dubya. She liked to clap her hands and stamp her feet at the televised sight of him — “Heya Boosh, getit your ass off my TV!” — as if she were scaring off a rodent.)
I had brought my new box set of Chaplin’s films with me, and on the third night I pleaded with Mamà to let us watch something other than cable news and police procedurals. If refused I may have checked the airlines for an early flight back to Chicago. Well, maybe Mamà had finally had her fill of Dubya, or maybe Law and Order was programming episodes she had already seen, because she relented and let us install the DVD player we just bought for her so all of us (including Ed) could sit together and watch City Lights.
The only thing possibly better than watching a Chaplin film is watching someone else watch a Chaplin film for the first time. Their faces change instantly from placidity to surprise to pure delight, and when things really get going, as when the Little Tramp makes his unexpected entrance, the laughs bounce off the walls and redouble by the moment. The look on the person’s face is like that of a child who has heard all his life about baseball but never had the chance to play, and then he gets a new mitt for Christmas: surprise, joy, and the wonder of Where have you been all my life?
Chaplin was a silent actor almost his entire career. The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux demonstrated how good he was in the sound era. But his greatest performances, and some of the greatest performances in any era, were in his silent pictures.
There is not an expression or gesture that does not advance or comment on the story, or allow us to see clearly what his character is thinking. City Lights is a perfect blend of action, staging, camera movement and music (music he composed!). You’ll forget you’re watching a silent film. No words are necessary to tell the story.
But in case you don’t know it:
Wandering the big city, the charming Little Tramp encounters a blind flower girl and is immediately drawn to her. She mistakes him for a millionaire, and he decides he must maintain that illusion in order to win her heart.
Coincidentally, the Tramp also meets a real millionaire, a depressed and debauched drunkard determined to kill himself. When the Tramp saves him from drowning the millionaire makes him his new best friend. They dine together, drink together, drive together, party all night together. Only problem is the millionaire remembers the Tramp only when he’s drunk — as soon as the hangover arrives, all he sees is a grimy pest to be gotten rid of.
The girl’s eyesight could be restored with an expensive surgery, but she has nothing. The Tramp has nothing, except his pluck and his devotion to her. Worse than that, her landlord is threatening eviction because she can’t pay her rent. The Tramp must come up with some fast cash to save the day, and perhaps become the man of her dreams.
And with that the Tramp’s journey into the world of work and hustle begins. To describe it in any detail would spoil the experience of watching it.
MOMENTS AMONG MANY TO TREASURE:
· the dedication of the statute, with The Tramp as the surprise guest;
· the staging of the flower girl scene — a brilliant conceit wrapped in music and images so lovingly rendered, infused with such lush romance, tenderness, and unabashed sentiment they bring tears to the eyes;
· the Millionaire and the Tramp spoiling for a fight at the café;
· the Tramp uses a town car to chase down a cigar butt, but another tramp gets in his way;
· Chaplin’s performance as he brings groceries to the flower girl’s home;
· the Tramp boxes a street tough for a $50 prize, and you’ve never seen a boxing match like this;
· the Tramp’s way of flicking a cigarette butt over his shoulder and kicking it away with his worn-out heel (you try it sometime, it’s much harder than he makes it look);
· the ending, when the scales of the romance we’ve witnessed fall away and are replaced with the aching possibility of true love.
When I screened City Lights that night, The Kid the following night, and The Circus the night after that, I didn’t know this was the first time any of them had ever seen a Chaplin film before. I was reminded how magical films can be even for those who’ve really seen it all and are not easily moved. That night, all of us, disagreeable as we had gotten during our stay, were reduced to a state of child-like giddiness. After the film was over we went to our separate rooms and slept deep and peaceful, reliving those moments and giggling to ourselves.
FINAL NOTE: Mamà is still kicking and scraping. She turns 90 in March.
Ed is now her house mate. That’s all I’ll say about that.
California Split
1974, Color, Columbia Pictures
Produced and Directed by Robert Altman
Written and Co-Produced by Joseph Walsh
Starring George Segal and Elliot Gould
My old college friend Jeremy introduced me to California Split, the film Robert Altman slipped in between Thieves Like Us and Nashville. It’s a classic example of Freewheelin’ Altman, an informality of language and presentation that belies the mastery demonstrated in every shot and performance.
My friendship with Jeremy even mirrors the one between the two leads, both of them gamblers always on the hunt for action. One of them is even named William. He’s played by George Segal. William is a magazine writer who can’t sit still for two seconds, so deep is the itch to place a bet at the track or sit in on a card game. He’s caught between worlds.
William’s partner in crime is Charlie Waters, a full-time hustler who has the smarts to win big and a case of motor mouth bad enough to ensure he won’t keep his winnings very long. He’s played by Eliot Gould in the last of his great performances for Altman, and it’s his endless patter that makes this story about pikers and their desperate lives feel effervescent. He has no illusions about the security of the square life. Gambling is not just a career for Charlie, it’s an ethos; in one scene he gets held up even as he’s counting the thousands he just won, and bets the stick-up man he’d settle for half if it means not having to hurt anyone.
A common complaint made about films about gamblers is that they glamorize a set of behaviors that constitute a serious disease. So the antidote, supposedly, would be a film that focuses almost exclusively on the ravages of that disease. For those interested in that kind of film, check out Owning Mahoney. It stars the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman. But it’s basically a character study with elements of a police procedural tossed in. What it doesn’t have is a visceral understanding of why a person would risk everything on a throw of the dice, or any real sense of the allure of gambling, or the once-in-a-lifetime thrill of winning.
That’s not to say a movie like Owning Mahoney doesn’t understand its subject, but its understanding is entirely on an intellectual, clinical level. In California Split, we see the sad, myopic lives compulsive gamblers lead. We also see how much fun they have. Their lives really are better than the ones they left behind; Altman (and screenwriter Joseph Walsh) don’t cheat by portraying the squares as craven, gutless cowards, or their lives as boring and pathetic falsehoods. Instead they show us William and Charlie celebrating their wins and finding solace in each other when they lose or push — in one remarkable moment, Charlie pulls William out of his funk by showing him what a one-armed piccolo player looks like. We cheer every bet they place (the bet Charlie makes with the stick-up man is easily the best).
In nearly all of Altman’s films we witness the exhilaration of living in the moment, and California Split captures the seductive joy of winning that could lure a reasonable man like William to abandon his life to take up with Charlie and the pair of wacky escorts who share his home. We could imagine ourselves getting caught up in the action (if we aren’t already caught up in it in our actual lives), chasing hands and hot tips, waking from a dream with a feeling that compels us, as it does Charlie, to take off for Tijuana and bet on the dog races.
We wouldn’t want these characters to reform or learn the error of their ways — they have found what makes them truly happy: the action.
A lot of credit goes to Walsh, who wrote the script and has a cameo as Sparks, William’s very chafed bookie. Sparks is true down to the last detail: an ex-ballplayer who has alimony and sick parents, he limps ominously on one crutch into a meeting with William. William tries to tell Sparks he doesn’t have his money without saying so. Sparks sees right through him: “Are you telling me a story?” They always have a story when they can’t pay. Then Sparks threatens William with something much worse than broken kneecaps, something no gambler ever wants to hear: he going to cut him off.
Chinatown
1974, Color, Paramont Pictures
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Robert Towne
Starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston
I’ve seen this film in theaters, on VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray. I’ve read about it in articles and publications daily, monthly and quarterly. And books? It’s in all of them: a page in a glossy catalog of Movies to See Before You Die and whole sections of tomes, miles of words without a single still to offer an oasis to the eye, a pit stop for the mind. I’ve heard more lectures on this film than my mother ever gave me on the perils of poor school grades, and I made for a very poor student. Eventually came the day, after I discovered my calling, when I delivered my own lecture on Chinatown.
There are plenty of reasons to love this film, most of them already discussed, so I’ll offer up just two that are special to me.
There is the movement of the camera, subtle but always achieving its effects with just the right motion.
A few examples:
- outside the restaurant J.J. “Jake” Gittes confronts Evelyn Mulwray about her “hiding something,” how her evasions almost cost him his nose, and at first their profiles just bookend the frame, but then the camera pushes in until all we can see are their faces, and when Jake leaves the camera lingers on Evelyn screwing up the courage to tell him everything;
- after the infamous “She’s my sister, my daughter,” revelation, Evelyn tells Jake the address to Kahn’s place and the camera pushes in on him, and Jake knows (and we know he knows) Kahn’s place is in Chinatown, the settled turf where the misdeeds of his past are buried, and he has to conceal his alarm;
- the climax in which Jake confronts Noah Cross with his crimes — fraud, murder, and incestuous rape — is completed in a single moving master, a choreography of camera and characters that tells Jake’s entire story in a single scene, the story of a man who thinks he has the bad guy right where he wants him and ends up being ensnared in a trap he couldn’t see.
And then there’s Jack Nicholson. I predict I’ll be writing much more about him in the weeks and months to come.
Even with the dark storyline, and the convolutions the detective endures as he schemes and fights toward the downbeat ending, there is so much joy in his performance as J.J. Gittes. How could there not be, as we watch this intelligent and determined character pursue his case?
Behind those hooded eyes radiates an intelligence that burns through the gossamer woven by businessmen and bureaucrats, chippies and midget thugs, all of them in the clutches of a man whose deeds are so evil he can only understand them as quirks of fate.
It is a sad fact of the story that Jake is set up from the film’s first scene to be a pawn in Noah Cross’ game, that for all his talents he never catches up to the old man’s machinations. But Jake wins so many battles on his way to losing the war, and his style and humor are never far from the action. Despite the film’s focus on failed dams, land grabs, poisoned wells, artificial droughts, rape and murder, it is the injustice done to Jake that really stings. We know he would win if this were a fair fight.
On the pretext of finding a nice place for “Dad,” he questions the director at a rest home in Mar Vista about his residents. “Do you accept people of the Jewish persuasion?” The director apologizes flatly they do not. “Don’t be sorry,” Jake chirps, “neither does Dad. I just wanted to make sure!”
Jack the Lad, Jake the Dick, one and the same in that moment.
Citizen Kane
1941, Black &White, RKO
Written, Produced and Directed by Orson Welles
Starring Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore and Everett Sloane
When I was 18 there were two movie theaters I loved more than all the others: The Brew ‘N View at the Vic Theater on Belmont and Sheffield (on Friday and Saturday nights they charged $3.00 for a triple feature, served lots of pizza and never carded for beer, though I looked all of a child back then), and the Fine Arts on Michigan and Van Buren.
The Fine Arts was up the street from Columbia College, and after classes I would walk two blocks north and watch art house, foreign and classic films in a space originally designed to showcase opera and theatricals. Housed in what was traditionally called the Fine Arts Building, the theater was originally called The Studebaker, and the main auditorium had private boxes and seats in the balcony that reached the rafters. A screen was installed to exhibit films when there were no theatricals to stage, and like so many theaters that struggled to attract audiences in the post-war years the theater showed porno films under its new name, the World Playhouse. In the 1980s Loews moved in and called it the Fine Arts, and for almost 20 years it showed mainstream films before finally succumbing to indifference and closing forever; it was in this penultimate state that I knew the theater and loved it.
I’ve seen Kane plenty of times, have written about it and even lectured on scenes from it. Watching it at the Fine Arts in downtown Chicago was not even 12th time I had seen it. But one Saturday morning they screened it, so I ventured downtown to watch a classic in a grand old theater.
Maybe it was the architecture or the seating that felt as old as the film itself, but I started having an out of body experience — I had a sense of what this film might have felt like to the people who first saw it in 1941. Despite having seen this movie dozens of times, that morning I successfully imagined that I was seeing it for the first time, that I was in fact the first person to ever see it. At first the feeling was vague, as though I were willfully ignoring everything I knew already, and then suddenly I felt genuine surprise at what I was watching. In the moment I felt the film happening from cut to cut, from one line of dialogue to the next, as though Welles were up in the booth, splicing his shots together even as they were fed into the projector, as though he were assembling the film in real time like he did with his famous radio shows. There was light and darkness, and fearless invention in nearly every scene.
It might seem a waste of time to list Citizen Kane as a favorite because it is so revered. It is the film every one has to see, and because of that it is more respected than loved. It took me years of viewings before I could see the film with fresh eyes, and I know that for most other people, that kind of repetition is simply too much to ask. But if I’m being honest about favorite films, I must include it; I had a moment, after watching the film dozens of times, when I fell in love with it on my own terms.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Clerks
1994, Black &White, Miramax
Written and Directed by Kevin Smith
Starring Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes and Smith
This movie was made by amateurs, starring amateurs, for amateur filmgoers; its grainy, black and white look is the only way to salvage a grimy, overlit mis en scene; it’s full of overripe, pretentious dialogue delivered in undigested chunks by actors who seem to have only a vague idea of what they’re expressing (whenever they have to say more than eight words they lose me); the plot is juvenile and episodic in a way that transcends the slacker comedy genre to which it belongs; its ideas are puerile and dated — absolutely no one longs for a return to the days when people thought and believed these things.
Despite all of this, Clerks is beloved the way only a smelly dog can be, a smelly dog that can’t keep his nose out of your crotch, the day before you have to put him to sleep. When you see this film at 17, as I did at the Three Penny Cinema on Lincoln Ave. (located across the street from the Biograph, where John Dillinger watched a movie before having his eyes shot out, the Three Penny closed years ago is now the site of an upscale bar and venue called Lincoln Hall), Clerks’ fugly aesthetic and noon bright spirit are an inspiration to every wannabe filmmaker in the audience. That inspiration has launched many careers and been the ruin of many more individuals, but there is something elemental in this film’s power to show its ass all over the place and still win your favor.
The Corporation
2003, Color, Zeitgeist Films
Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott
How can we talk productively about the phenomenon of the modern corporation, and its stranglehold on the lives of nearly every person on Earth? Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott imagine the corporation as a person, since it already is endowed with all the rights of one. But because it is not a person, it does not have the same responsibilities, and cannot be held accountable as a person.
Though it ends with some inspirational tidbits about how people have resisted corporate attempts to impose its will on them, this film does not lie to us about our conventional tactics of resistance and dissent (particularly in its dissection of how corporate interests have undermined the work of investigative journalism and activists). We have been surrounded on all sides and had our democracy cut in two. Before we can do anything purposeful we have to confront that fact.
This can seem all very depressing, and maybe I have a yen for downbeat films, but watching this film diagnose the sociopathic tendencies of corporate culture and its prospects for continued dominance was as bracing as discovering a long suspected truth that you feared to face, and needed to know. What do we do next? They don’t really say.
However they do show a glimmer of redemption: we witness the startled awakening of consciousness of one Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, a carpet and fabric company. Anderson goes from the cheerfully ignorant mien of a typical corporate executive to an understanding of “the Birth of Death,” to a galvanizing moment when he stands before colleagues and announces, “I stand convicted by me, myself alone, not by anyone else, as a plunderer of the earth.”
The debate of the corporation’s ultimate place seems over, but for the duration of this film the issue is up for debate, and the films sees that issue in all its bewildering complexity.
Crumb
1994, Color, Sony Pictures Classics
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Starring Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Charles Crumb
“When I was 13–14 I tried to be a normal teenager and I was just a jerk,” says Robert Crumb, the brilliant comic artist and satirist. Describing his early attempts to be like everyone else, he failed because he aped how he thought his classmates were acting instead of how they thought they were acting. The results were unpleasant and strange.
“So then I just stopped completely…became a shadow, wasn’t even in the same world they were in and that just freed me completely.”
It’s hard to describe how impactful these observations were when I first saw Crumb as a teenager. I had the rare feeling at the movies of being with a kindred spirit. I made similarly disastrous attempts to fit in, unable or unwilling to accept the possibility that I was a misfit, until some wisdom seeped into me and I decided just to be myself.
Bask in the glory of the results, world ;)
When I went to see the film at the Music Box Theater the line outside stretched down Southport to the El station at Addison. I went with my friend Steve, himself a gifted comic book artist. We stepped out the door of the old brick elevated station and met the back of the line. It seemed everyone on the North Side wanted to see Crumb that Memorial Day weekend.
Because the main theater is so immense we had no trouble getting tickets, back in the way when there were no online reservations. We even found great seats in the middle of that theater. And we watched the story of this popular artist told with unblinking frankness and an edge of hard-won cynicism. The R. Crumb depicted here is a man purified by fear and self-loathing, who is utterly focused on his mode of expression to the detriment of nearly everything else. And yet he survives and even thrives. He’ s such a decent fellow. You’d like him if he ever let you get close enough.
We witness the dysfunction in his mother’s life, locked behind doors of a house crowded with awful memories of a brutal husband and father. We meet R. Crumb’s brother Max, an epileptic just as wounded by the traumatic past they shared but more at peace, and we see the agonizing processes by which he maintains equilibrium. Most painful to watch (and most insightful in his observations) is Crumb’s older brother Charles, who started Robert and Max out on comic books, who was brutalized by his father and bullied at school, was left behind like a POW after his brothers escaped their violent upbringing, and now carries on a shuttered existence in the same bedroom in which he grew up. Heavily medicated but always cogent, Charles provides a heartbreaking glimpse into the fate that might have claimed R. Crumb if not for some speck of luck.
At the end of the film, a tarp is rolled down over a grimy window, darkening the screen to black, and a brief postscript lights up the screen. The information it conveyed sent a chilling gasp up the spine of the seated auditorium. The loss felt was shocking but not at all surprising. As I left the theater the emotions rippled through me, from shock to pity to sadness, and finally they settled on a deep admiration for Crumb’s steely resolve, and gratitude that a person could find a piece of work that meant survival and, ultimately, purpose.
AND MANY MORE
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921), Call Northside 777 (1948),
A Canterbury Tale (1944), Capote (2005), Cape Fear (1991),
Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Carnal Knowledge (1971),
Casino (1995), Cat Ballou (1965), Cat People (1942), Carol (2015),
Charade (1963), Children of Men (2006), Chimes at Midnight (1966),
The China Syndrome (1979), The Circus (1928), A Civil Action (1998),
Clash by Night (1952), Cleopatra (1917), The Color Purple (1985),
The Conformist (1970), Contempt (1963), The Conversation (1974),
Cool Hand Luke (1967),
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989),
Coup de Torchon (1981), Crash (1997), Cries and Whispers (1973),
The Criminal Code (1931), The Crime of M. Lange (1936),
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), The Crimson Pirate (1952),
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), The Crowd (1928),
The Crying Game (1992), Cul-de-sac (1965), Cutter’s Way (1981)
