Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 26
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
176/365: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, 1969) (Vudu, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
The Sexual Revolution’s keynote Hollywood movie, Mazursky’s comedy was a legend in its own time, its all-in title (becoming a kind of meme for wife-swapping) and four-to-a-bed publicity photos immediately bringing the Revolution right to the middle-class, middle-aged moviegoers. It’s not a softcore sex romp but a lacerating, if sweet-natured, satire on late-‘60s hipness and on Los Angeles fad-mongering in particular, in which thirtysomething couple Bob (Robert Culp) and especially Carol (Natalie Wood) experience a hippie-dippie enlightenment and try to sell their newfound openness to their skeptical, more conventional friends Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon), eventually leading to the possibility of swinging.
Mazursky’s specialty was always topical comedies charged with a rangy, unpredictable, sometimes meandering but always lovingly humane energy, and this film cooks on behavior and relationships. When Bob confesses to an affair, Carol doesn’t get angry, it’s Bob that gets angry, because she’s not angry; the passive-aggressive man-woman conflict is extrapolated upon in the scene where Ted and Alice, in and out of their own bed, grapple with the news of Bob’s infidelity. She is rabidly dismayed by the news, revealing her conservative streak; having known already, Ted cares hardly at all, and only wants to have sex. Mazursky lets this dynamic play out for twelve whole minutes, the two characters sparring and pitching and fielding from their opposite corners, in a way and with an exhaustiveness that feels like the give and take of a real couple.
In fact, the four young-parent faddists feel genuinely uncertain of themselves, defensive about their own shallowness, devoted to their spouses but not quite happy to be left behind as society seems to be changing around them. All this attention to nuance and realism only makes them funnier, of course, and the cast is fascinating. Wood’s Carol is naturally luminescent, so deft and delicious and wide-eyed you can be forgiven for getting jealous on her husband’s behalf when she flaunts a retaliatory tryst, while Culp and Gould feel seem so unlikely that they must be authentic specimens. Cannon was a natural, like Paula Prentiss and Madeleine Kahn a naturally brilliant and gorgeous powerhouse of comic savviness that ’70s Hollywood hardly knew what to do with, and here a bright find for Mazursky, at once fleshy and golden, wryly amused and seething with moral shock. Alice is not only the quadrangle’s emotional crisis point, she’s our eyes and ears, expressing America’s own uneasy cocktail of fear (of change) and desire (for change).
177/365: David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride, 1967) (Vimeo, YouTube, Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon)
A sly comet in the age of “direct cinema” and New Wavey self-reflexivity, McBride’s film is deceptively simple: the self-introspective 16mm “diary” that a single young Manhattan cinephile (L.M. Kit Carson) makes about himself. At no point does McBride intervene — Carson is obviously alone with his camera in many scenes, and the mock doc paradigm is never compromised. The simulacrum is so convincing in all of its details that you can be forgiven for idly thinking, as you watch, that it’s Holzman’s film, not McBride and Carson’s. What is Holzman, after all, if not the aboriginal creation of the modern A/V geek, lost in an infinitely reflecting hallway of broadcasted self-images? It can be chillingly hilarious watching Holzman descent into oblivious, self-destroying narcissism, all the while casually looking at us — meaning, at the camera and at himself — right in the eye. (Consider how ordinary this creepy, self-obsessed paradigm is today, and what staggering percentage of the world’s population is now deeply experienced with talking to the world this way.)
Telling us in the first scene that he not only lost his job the day before, but subsequently received his draft report notice, Holzman begins by simply, idly, wanting to make a film about his life so, he says, he may fathom it, referring to Godard and his dictum about film being “truth 24 times a second.” Immediately he introduces us to his girlfriend Penny (Eileen Dietz), by way of photos of her. Thus objectified as a filmic image, Penny becomes Holzman’s crucible, as his compulsive filming, and voyeurism (is there a difference?), drives her away and sends him into a desperate, camera-shouldered scramble to assemble some kind of sense out of his dissolving life. Each of Holzman’s appearances in his own movie, fondling his Lavalier mic, peels another layer on an onion; what we thought was affable, earnest cinemania is laid bare as rampaging neurosis.
The movie is also a sterling time capsule vision of Manhattan in the mid-‘60s, and particularly of the Upper West Side’s still-diverse street life. The era is captured as if in a lightning flash by one of the film’s pure moments of documentary — a sultry, cigarette-voiced woman in a Ford Thunderbird pulls up to Holzman/Carter on the street as he’s filming and begins trying to talk him into bed, all the while blocking traffic and yelling at irate motorists around her. She’s like a penis-obsessed comic-relief missile shot out of a Jacqueline Susann novel, and her name does not appear in the film’s documentation. You want to climb into that car with her, she’s such a blast, but of course Holzman/Carter doesn’t, since that would mean discarding the safety of cinema for the risk of actual engagement. Here, in a rousing cameo-sized splat, you can see the unspeakable tension between cinephilia and reality, the tension that ruined Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina, that has made Quentin Tarantino possible, that fuels and troubles our absurdly screen-cluttered world, well over a full half-century after Carson first turned his Nagra on.
178/365: The Last Warning (Paul Leni, 1929) (Archive.org, Mubi)
Something like a postmod camp-riff on the entire idea of German Expressionism, Leni’s film was one of the very last silent films Universal made — except it was also released in a “part-talkie” version, with roughly 60 feet of sound scenes added (only a minute or two), the nature of which go unrecorded and which has now been lost to time. Fine — the film’s a party without it, immediately familiar to audiences in 1929, due to the intense popularity two years earlier of Leni’s The Cat and the Canary — to which The Last Warning is very conscientiously devised to be a companion film. The set up, from an old novel written by Madeleine l’Engle’s father, was already so hoary in 1929 as to be a solid joke: in a vast Broadway theater, a play’s star is murdered on stage during a crowded performance. With the body missing and the death unsolved, the theater is condemned as haunted and is closed, until years later, when a new “producer” suspiciously arrives to restage the play with all of its old cast and crew — setting up the not-at-all remote possibility that the same murder will occur all over again.
Menacing notes from the dead man appear, a phantom figure is glimpsed, hidden passageways are discovered, pratfalls and accidents inflict the long-suffering comedy relief (Slim Summerville, Mack Swain), all of it arriving with a briskness and energy that suggests that Leni & Co., with tongue in cheek, knew very well the thin ice upon which they tread. Leni was playing a well-seasoned fiddle by 1929, and feels free to play it up — his cutaways to the nervous could-be culprits, the harumphing sleuth, the ham-handed explication of clues, the sudden disappearance of cast members in the darkened theater, all of it has the lip-smacking flavor of pulp well-trodden and well-loved and a little well-mocked. Though the star of the film is ostensibly Laura La Plante, as the play’s female star, the real protagonist is the magnificent theater set, which is so thoroughly convincing in three dimensions — from looming baroque balconies to stage area to scaffolding to backstage corridors and dressing rooms — you couldn’t be blamed for thinking it was an actual, fabulous old theater used as is, and for wanting to go visit it. You can’t — it’s actually the leftover set at Universal Studios for Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera, which was later featured in numerous studio-shot films over the next half-century (including The Sting), and still stands.
Meanwhile, Leni’s film never stops swooping and shifting, searching for new perspectives, even exploiting the center stage’s gag lift, intended to disappear or reappear characters in mid-scene, but of course used by Leni for a beneath-to-above crane shot. The film’s climax, ignited by a policeman’s whistle, is a literal explosion of movement, montage and hyper-Feuilladean action. The late-silent-period pyrotechnics — often approaching an Abel Gance-like love of variety and movement within the Expressionist shadow-maze — meshes with the set space and the plot, mustering a fascinating aggregate sense of how theater and life commingle. It’s one of the first films to exploit this hall-of-mirrors reality, as we (and the camera) restlessly examine the ironic relationship between the mystery of the stage play reflected in the story’s “real” murder-mystery saga, which is reoccurring (like the play, or like the movie we’re watching), in a vast theater where both mysteries transpired, and where they’ll transpire again, and so on. Every clue and character secret has a double or triple meaning, and everything is “acted.” As in the cinema of Feuillade and, later, Jacques Rivette, there is no reality — just reflecting layers of make-believe.
179/365: Rocket Science (Jeffrey Blitz, 2007) (Hulu, Vudu, HBO Max, YouTubem, Amazon)
For a time, in the ’90s and ’00s, the teen comedy evolved from the odiously primitive ape it used to be into something far smarter, unpredictable, and even insightful. The chasm is huge between the idiotic froth and exploitation crudenesses we saw in the 1950s through to the ’80s, and the eccentric, inspired, crazy films we saw come out of the indie scene ever since Heathers broke the mold for good in 1989 — Dazed and Confused, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Rushmore, Napoleon Dynamite, Loser, Can’t Hardly Wait, Ghost World, Juno, etc. Blitz’s film takes its seat comfortably on the dais: seethingly articulate yet lyrically at a loss, the film chronicles a very particular high school tribulation, and yet it’s so finely and generously observed that it feels universal. The milieu isn’t many football fields away from the subculture Blitz explored in his breakout documentary Spellbound — swapping out spelling bees for high school debate competitions, Blitz unceremoniously allows his characters their own hyper-learned way of speaking, and all the same positions, as his hero, a beleaguered nebbish with a disastrous stutter.
His father abandons the family, and he fails to choose pizza for cafeteria lunch because he can’t get the word out, but Hal (Reece Daniel Thompson, in a masterfully constipated performance) sees a way up out of the mud after being “recruited” for his high school’s debate team by a go-getter hyper-student (Anna Kendrick). Hal naturally falls for the girl, ramrod or not, just as he becomes seduced into thinking he can win at tournament debating. That could be the plot for a dumb-feel-good Hollywood movie, but Blitz’s film (which features absolutely no slumming guest stars) always sidesteps and dodges the cliches; rarely if ever do the characters — from Hal’s problematic mom to a voyeur neighborhood kid to a deposed debate king — behave in a predictable fashion, or speak as if they only have one thing on their minds. (Hal’s cultured-simian big brother, played by Vincent Piazza, seems perpetually on the verge of exploding from unexplained teenage fury.) This approach sometimes forces things to fizzle — many scenes that seems to be leading up to an easy joke end with none at all — but most often the movie feels spontaneous, thoughtful and hard to pin down. (There is also, not very incidentally, the best-ever use of Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun.”) But having spent so much time already observing the lives of smart kids, Blitz brings no preformulated thematic ideas to the table about teenagers and high school. It’s just life, lived by people too young to understand it.
180/365: The Cycle (Darius Mehrjui, 1978) (IMVBox)
Canonized in Iran as a New Wave mentor, Mehrjui predates them all, and this sly and bitter satire, his fifth, was actually made in 1974 under the Shah’s regime, which predictably banned it for its merciless criticism of the society’s rampaging corruption and bureaucratic evil. (Of course, its modern dress, female flesh, sexy clinches and free-for-all degradations would’ve killed it under the new regime a year later. That it was released at all suggests that the ayatollahs were still figuring out how oppressive they wanted to be.) Absurd but never funny, the film matter-of-factly trails after two protagonists, a studly young man named Ali (Saeed Kangarani) and his wheezy, grizzled father (Esmail Mohammadi), as they come walking into the familiar construction-wasteland outskirts of Teheran as if from off-stage; in no time the old man coughs and collapses in the dirt. But with Mehrjui, there’s always unknown unknowns, and after waiting impatiently the young man rouses him and gets him walking again, continuing on their penniless search for medical treatment they cannot afford.
The pair end up at the gates of a palatial but decaying hospital complex, as impenetrable in principle as Kafka’s castle (getting in isn’t as difficult as actually getting treated), and their efforts to raise money quickly gets the leather-jacketed Ali involved in a sleazy blood-selling ring, which rolls out into other quasi-outlaw schemes that tellingly mirror the capitalist heartlessness of society as a whole. (The title is reportedly from Hafiz: “Because of the cycle of the universe, my heart is bleeding.”) The film is chockablock with the exploited poor, the neglected elderly, embittered modern women (mostly nurses) and all manner of human refuse, but the overriding vibe is Eastern European — the Czech and Hungarian New Waves are pungently invoked, suggesting that 20th century autocracies had much in common on the ground, regardless of ideology or alliance. Everywhere Ali goes, mysterious processions and wanderers litter the desolate background; one of his semi-legal jobs involves a chicken farm where, in order to keep prices down, they pour hundreds of live baby chicks into a ditch and (off-camera) bury them.
181/365: The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, 2011) (Tubi, Amazon, Kanopy)
Majewski, a rangy art film/art installation provocateur, recreates here the world of Bruegel the Elder’s 1564 painting The Procession to Calvary, a massive landscape tableau featuring some 500 characters swirling about the almost-obscured figure of Christ being led to his execution. Enabled by digital technology, Majewski has made a new kind of film — one that literally incarnates and occupies the imaginary three-dimensional space of the painting, following sundry figures involved in sex, farming, milling, soldiering, minstrelsy, etc., from perspectives that range from a bird’s-eye view (literally, with crows that light on bodies hoisted high on Catherine wheels) to foggy journeys through the painting’s forests, farms, cellars, distant city alleys and execution ground. Bruegel himself (Rutger Hauer) haunts the peripheries, drawing and conceptualizing and scrambling to pick up his windblown sketches, but Majewski’s film doesn’t dawdle with story or character arc. Rather, in tableau after deep-dish tableau, the movie examines the human business carried on across the countryside, most of it oblivious to the executions and the Christ figure himself, while also simultaneously examining the tactile experience of Bruegel’s artwork, which is teeming like a Where’s Waldo? drawing with codes, meanings, clues and resonances.
It’s the only film ever made that takes place entirely and exclusively inside a painting, and with his digital layering — always producing an uncanny affect, with its mixture of real terrain and sunshine with dense scrims of Bruegel imagery — Majewski has both quantum-ized the Murnau-Welles-Wyler-Jancso legacy of depthful mise-en-scene and obliterated its Bazinian “meaning” by disengaging the shot in every way from recording anything genuine. The film slyly seethes with irony; no matter who we’re with or what angle we’re seeing through, the looming grain mill atop the high rock outcropping is visible in the distance, always churning. (When it stops for a moment, the action everywhere in the valley freezes.)
That Christ’s execution is an overlooked footnote to the bustle of the crowd was one of Bruegel’s primary satirical points, doubled down by the fact that both the landscape of the painting and the dress and lifestyle of its characters clearly belong to 16th-century Europe. The painting itself is virtually a movie, but Majewski’s film is certainly one Bruegel himself would’ve liked to have made (you could conjecture that Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman would’ve liked to as well). Still, Majewski’s watchful, distancing sensibility is very much his own. Kudos must go to Majewski’s tech team, on the keyboards and on set, because The Mill and the Cross simply looks like no other film — as pure eye candy it is its own unique flavor.
182/365: The Man in the Glass Booth (Arthur Hiller, 1975) (KinoNow, YouTube, Amazon, Kanopy)
This version of Robert Shaw’s 1968 play, cheaply and artlessly filmed in 1975 for the American Film Theater series, and which netted star Maximilian Schell an Oscar nomination, is one of the first serious addresses in American culture of the legacy of the Holocaust. (In the ’70s and before, Nazis were either just stock villains or a source of comedy.) Still, it’s an outrageously comic film, concerning one Arthur Goldman (Maximilian Schell), a wealthy, Euro-emigre real estate mogul and widower who by all apparent lights is in the throes of paranoid, mid-life manic breakdown. At least, that’s how it seems to us, but he’s so rich he commands a battery of assistants, doctors and gofers, none of whom dare to question his decisions. Striding through his expansive Fifth Avenue penthouse in a joyful, jabbering whirlwind of one-liners, explosive pronunciations and argumentative confrontations, Goldman makes it clear he’s a camp survivor, but one whose idea of remembrance includes quoting Hitler speeches at full throat and making his menschy secretary (Lawrence Pressman) sing “Edelweiss.”
His lust for life is a furious theatrical conceit, keeping the ironic rehashing-history-with-a-grin diatribe raging even as he seems plagued by classic modern-Jewish paranoia (watching for ominous cars through a telescope), and as those delusions turn out to be genuine, with tommygun-toting Nazi hunters kicking down the door. Is he really a Gestapo criminal hiding in disguise? He zestily insists as much, and his own irreverent brio in regards to Third Reich culture seems to corroborate it. The film’s second half resumes in an Israeli war crimes trial, where the Nuremberg questions of culpability and relative morality are yanked out into the light again from the perspective of the zealous perpetrator, who evades no responsibility and makes an energetic case for “socially approved acts!” and the efficiency of Germany’s efforts at societal engineering and war-winning.
Of course, little is as it seems. Obviously inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Shaw’s play is a creatively engineered piece of rhetoric — the Nazi rationales are both explained and mocked (Goldman is a riotous portrayal of ubermensch hubris), while parallels are delicately drawn to more contemporary situations. It’s Schell’s show (an Oscar nomination), using up 90% of every room’s oxygen. It was an inspired casting coup, thanks to the echo chamber it creates with Schell’s Oscar-winning perf as the defense attorney in 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg; the same conundrums are put on trial in both films, only this time Schell tries to unravel them from the inside out.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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