That '70s Drift

 

SAVE THE TIGER (1973) (B+) - There are few actors who could do the things that Jack Lemmon did. He was a leading man with the heart of a character actor. Here he is Harry Stoner, a harried co-owner of an L.A. fashion house where he and his partner have been cooking the books to survive and now are considering arson as a solution.

Harry is obsessed with the past, in this case (it being the ugly early '70s) the 1939 Brooklyn Dodgers, World War II (he's a vet) and big-band music (he once was a drummer). When Harry wakes up in the opening scene, hung over from a party the night before, he looks ten times worse than the lush he played in "Days of Wine and Roses." But he cleans up well (a running gag throughout the film finds multiple acquaintances complimenting on his Italian silk suit) and heads to the office on the day of a big fashion show for buyers. On the drive in (in his Chevrolet Aircraft Carrier) he picks up a hitchhiker, Myra, a hippie chick who aimlessly car-surfs the Strip and propositions Harry, who politely declines. (An example of snappy dialogue from Steve Shagan, adapting his own novel: when Myra claims to be 20, Harry replies, "No one is 20!" He then lies and says he's 33.)

You just know Myra (newcomer Laurie Heineman) will show up again in the final reel, but before then, we need to explore the depths of Harry's desperation and degradation. Harry, hectored by his wife to see a psychologist, is sullen, but his unhappiness sometimes has a point -- he laments that Capri went from a battle site in Italy to a fashion forum, with no one appreciating the sacrifice. Meantime, doctoring the financials has led Harry and his partner, Phil (an perfect Jack Gilford), into a dance dodging mob shylocks (a nice turn by Ned Glass) and placating greedy buyers, one of whom demands a repeat visit with a prostitute from Harry's little black book. The arsonist, played by an oily Thayer David (the fight promoter in "Rocky"), holds his meetings in a dirty-movie theater. Every step of the way, Harry looks to shield Phil from Harry's deviant intentions.

After Harry has a meltdown in front of the buyers -- imagining maimed fellow soldiers in the ballroom crowd -- he has his reckoning with the arsonist and then a come-to-Jesus moment with his manic pixie dreamgirl. It's clear that Harry is not just cloyingly nostalgic, but he also has a profound need to feel alive again, even if it means just tossing the ball around and reliving the joy he found in that boy's game. This is a fine character study -- brought to you by Lemmon, the master -- even if it overdoes the schmaltz on occasion.

HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS (1981) (B) - Not so much a full-length film but rather a disconnected series of vignettes, this documentary chronicles some of the forerunners of the outlaw country scenes in Austin and Nashville in 1975 and '76. Townes van Zandt, seen here lubricated as he gives a tour of his farm, and Guy Clark are the big hitters here. David Allan Coe wallows in his prison-porn shtick, and we get glimpses of young up-and-comers Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle (barely 20 at the time).

It's fascinating to watch a guy named Larry Jon Wilson record a song in the studio, including overdubs. Coe drives his own tour bus into the grounds of the Tennessee State Prison. We get rambling standup from Gamble Rogers and fiery fiddle playing from Charlie Daniels. In a home jam session, van Zandt brings tears to the eyes of 80-year-old Seymour Washington with a rendition of "Waitin' Around to die." Beforehand, Washington dispenses advice on living well.

Director James Szalapski does nothing to knit these stories and performances together, but he has a decent eye for period detail, and he gets his fingernails dirty capturing these men living the outlaw-country life in the shadow of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, who could at least claim commercial success during this period.

BONUS TRACKS

The opening theme from "Heartworn Highways," Guy Clark's "L.A. Freeway":

 

Here's a good taste of "Heartworn," a studio session with Larry Jon Wilson recording "Ohoopee River Bottomland":

Then there's Townes van Zandt with the first song he ever wrote, "Waitin' Around to Die":

And from the closing credits of "Save the Tiger," one of Harry's blissed-out reveries, "I Can't Get Started," by Bunny Berigan:

Mike Nichols Double Feature

Revisiting a pair of '60s classics, the first two films directed by one of our favorites, Mike Nichols, as a biography of him gets released.

THE GRADUATE (1967) (A) - It's still difficult to disentangle this influential '60s box-office smash from the cultural phenomenon that radiated out of it (including the iconic Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack), but it still crackles with visual wit and burrows deep into the ennui not just of its young boomer hero Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) but into the midlife angst of his parents' postwar generation. It's funny, heartbreaking and challenging.

Director Mike Nichols has fun breaking from convention with unique camera angles, whether it's looking out from the perspective of a scuba outfit or using a stockinged leg to frame (entrap?) Ben, caught in sexual confusion. At times Nichols' groovy perspectives come off like Hitchcock shooting an episode of "Benny Hill." Risque for its time, the narrative holds up over the years as a condemnation of the empty wasted lives of the bourgeoisie. 

Anne Bancroft sizzles as the seductress Mrs. Robinson, the wife of the business partner of Ben's father. She toys with Benjamin both during their affair and after, as she maneuvers to thwart his chances to date her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). The heavy subject matter is leavened by the jangly comic script from Buck Henry and Calder Willingham. Hoffman was pushing 30 at the time but he tracks well as a budding college graduate. (Bancroft was only 6 years older than Hoffman but her character was twice Benjamin's age.) Ben is an absurdist creation, mumbling, fumbling, often bursting into sprints out of desperation, and sometimes squeaking in frustration.

Ben and Elaine have no clue what they want, a winking acknowledgment of a new generation scoffing at its parents' conventions. This culminates in perhaps the most perfect ending in movie history, in which the young couple display a range of emotions on their faces, unsure of what the future will bring. Nichols keeps this all fresh and exciting, smart and snarky, syncing his humor with Henry's complementary dry wit.

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966) (A-minus) - For his debut, Nichols, recruited by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, directed the rambunctious couple in Edward Albee's incendiary stage play. They play George and Martha, a foundering history professor married to the university president's daughter, and their toxic relationship ensnares an unsuspecting young couple, a new biology professor (George Segal) and his mousy wife (Sandy Dennis) for a drunken and disorderly wee-hours cocktail party.

Back in the day, heavyweight boxers used to go 15 rounds (instead of 12 or 10 now), and this script's onslaught of poisonous putdowns -- as slung by Taylor and Burton -- reminds me of those classic slugfests. The vitriol and emotional cruelty, even couched in black comedy, is relentless, and it might simply be too much for some viewers. The performances, however, keep this from descending into abject nihilism. Segal makes for a nice preppy punching bag, and Dennis' loopy young spouse injects a necessary fragility. Burton may never have been so darkly funny, and Taylor gives as good as she gets.

As the sun comes up and George and Martha figuratively slump in their respective corners, you might hear echoes of Apollo Creed's vow to Rocky Balboa -- "Ain't gonna be no rematch" -- but with these two, you suspect that this was just another Saturday night, and that their series of bouts will go on.

Exile in Guyville

THE CLIMB (A-minus) - This novel take on the buddy movie (and the age-old pitfall of the love triangle) comes from a fresh pair of voices, two guys named Kyle and Mike who play friends named Kyle and Mike.

Michael Angelo Covino takes the director's chair to oversee the script he wrote with Kyle Marvin, who starts out the film as the chubby friend to Mike, who waits for an arduous uphill portion of a bike ride to reveal that he has slept with Kyle's fiancee. Mike stealing Kyle's betrothed is just the first darkly comic twist of this bruisingly funny film. 

But he narrative doesn't go where you think it will. Quickly, Mike's fortunes crash and burn, and he becomes a pathetic mess. Meantime, Kyle, who has moved on to another fiancee, has cleaned up and shaped up and is trying to live a good life, said to be the best revenge. Slowly, the estranged friends start to warm to each other again, realizing their long-standing, if co-dependent, connection. Will Mike sabotage Kyle's relationship with a woman who, if we're being honest, is a bit of a controlling witch?

Covino and Marvin mix witty dialogue with old-fashioned slapstick but also penetrating observations in a thoughtful study of these characters. It is both laugh-out-loud funny at times, deeply moving at other times. It might make you wonder if a buddy -- and not the women you pursue -- could be the one best qualified to serve as a soul mate. This feature debut, expanded from a short that survives here as the extended cycling sequence that opens the film, heralds promising talent.

MARTIN EDEN (B) - This would-be epic based on the writings of Jack London -- transplanted to an indeterminate era in Italy -- keeps threatening to break out as a great film but never does. Director Pietro Marcello teams with writer Maurizio Braucci to adapt a novel from 1909 about a working-class autodidact determined to prove himself as a writer in order to win the love of an aristocratic woman.

Lucas Marinelli has the good looks and charisma to pull off the bigger-than-life title role of the fiercely resolved seaman who won't let anything stop him from getting published. Martin Eden fashions himself as a rugged individualist who refuses to get swept up in the socialist cause. He's a bit of a brute, and it is in defending a colleague in a fight that he gets invited to the friend's home and meets the friend's sister, Elena (Jessica Cressy). 

Martin can come off as a boor, trying to hard to prove his love for the lovely but somewhat bland Elena -- or at least to prove his worthiness. She insists that he go off and resume his education and seek out a mentor to learn the craft of writing before returning to her to be married. Martin, rejected by a school, buys a typewriter instead and perseveres by sheer dint of will and hard work to overcome class barriers. 

This all has the earmarks of a classic love story, and you cheer for director and cast most of the way through. However, a jump in time to the final reel -- where Martin's fortunes have changed, both for better and worse -- completely loses the momentum and the connections that had been scrupulously stitched together during the first hour and a half. (This one overshoots two hours, and it's poorer for that bloated runtime.) By the end, the wheels come off, any pathos is unearned, and it feels like a different movie altogether. It's a shame, because this one had promise.

BONUS TRACKS

From our title track, Liz Phair with "Girls! Girls! Girls!":

 

From "The Climb," a country dusty from Gary Stewart, "Drinking Thing":

Best of Ever, Vol. 2: Obsessions

An occasional series in which we revisit some of our all-time favorites.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000) (A) - It's difficult not to swoon over this gorgeous love story. It invites you to flow along with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung -- both old-Hollywood beautiful -- as they glide through 1962 Hong Kong, sometimes artfully in slow motion, ogled by Wong Kar-Wai's curious camera. 

The music, ranging from the hypnotic theme song that gets repeated to intoxicating effect to Nat King Cole crooning in Spanish, wraps everything in warmth and elegance. It takes a while to figure out who's who and why the attraction between the two main characters is taboo, and part of the fun is in figuring out not only their inclinations but what their spouses are up to, as well.

The outfits they wear are impeccable. Occasionally rain slicks the streets. Noodles are always aboil. Glances are stolen. Discretion is observed. It is looping but not repetitive. Cheung and Leung rhyme in more ways than one. If you're not in the mood for love at the start of the film, you'll almost certainly have succumbed by the end.

JAWS (1975) (A) - This is remembered by history as the first real summer blockbuster and for the ominous strains that herald the imminent arrival of the great white, but it is also the epitome of storytelling and moviemaking. Yes, we've had a ban on Steven Spielberg for decades now, but there is no denying that during his first decade or so -- roughly from "Duel" (1971) to "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) -- he had a magic touch and helped define a generation. 

"Jaws," to this day, is a rollicking epic with something for everyone -- it's a thriller, a comedy, a horror story and a snapshot of Americana in the middle of the Me Decade.  It has three lead actors -- Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss -- that feed off each other like dance partners. It updates the classic literature of "Moby Dick" and it skewers the evils of crony capitalism. 

Peter Benchley's screenplay (adapting his novel with comedy writer Carl Gottlieb ("The Jerk")) sings with wit and subtlety. And Spielberg, at the helm, wastes not a single frame or a minute of the two-hour runtime. (Try to catch it on the big screen.) He sweeps you up and carries you out to sea, eventually spitting you back on the beach emotionally wrung. It holds up 45 years later as a thrill ride that would make just about anyone fall in love with the movies. 

BONUS TRACK

That haunting theme to "In the Mood for Love":

And Nat King Cole's Spanish version of "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps":

Holy Crap* - Anal Retentive

 

There's an old Cheech & Chong bit from the 1970s about a guy who takes his kid to the doctor because the kid keeps shoving things up his nose. (Turns out, I'm reminded that it trafficked in stereotypical tropes, which hadn't triggered my teenage sensitivities back then, and it ended with the vaudevillian one-liner "Keep the change." We won't link to it.) 

The point is, it being 2021, the stakes for such crude humor are much higher now -- or should we say much lower? Exhibit A is "Butt Boy," in which our anti-hero, Chip Gutchell (writer-director Tyler Cornack) has a surprisingly enjoyable experience undergoing a prostate exam and celebrates his newfound joy by grabbing anything he can find and sticking them up his butt. Yes, that's the plot of a movie in this day and age. And ol' Chip doesn't just round up the usual suspects to indulge in anal gratification. In fact, you'd be quite surprised at what he can fit up there -- not just the TV remote but also small dogs and children.

If you were to bail out right there, I wouldn't blame you. I might have been better off diving for the remote after all of that is revealed in the first 10 minutes. I could have turned it off and filed a succinct essay under the Life Is Short umbrella. And yet, I persisted. Not that I'm proud.

So, the movie jumps ahead nine years, and Chip is still stuck in a loveless marriage, and he's in Alcoholics Anonymous, where he gets recruited to serve as a sponsor to a hard-drinking police detective, Russel (a ham-chewing Tyler Rice), who pines for an ex and seems to harbor a dark secret or two of his own. The two men find their anonymous world spill out into the open when Russel is called in to investigate the disappearance of Chip's co-worker's son during take-your-kid-to-work day at the office. (It was a mistake, during a game of hide-and-seek, to hide under Chip's desk. You think you've had to deal with anal-retentive co-workers? Wait till you meet Chip!)

This whole thing is not only ridiculous but fairly disgusting. (The trail of the investigation will lead -- literally -- up Chip's ass.) So why not turn it off and brand it with an F? Because there's almost something admirable to Cornack's devotion to the absurd premise. 

It's almost as if Cornack and co-writer Ryan Koch were dying for the opportunity to make their own detective movie -- maybe they were fans of the noir classics of Phillip Marlowe or old westerns -- and some movie executive, just to be rid of these pests, concocted the stupidest plot device they could think of just to toy with them. In my imagined scenario, Cornack and Koch take that dare and they say, "A movie where the bad guy hides all the victims and evidence up his butt? I'll see your crazy idea and raise you this otherwise conventional script starring a love-starved husband and a hard-drinking detective with some secret scores to settle!"

And they did it. Aside from that inane premise which permeates the entire film, "Butt Boy" is a conventional, borderline cliched whodunnit. Replace a man's anal cavity as the stash house with, say, an old barn in the woods, and cast Ryan Gosling in the role of the brooding, boozing cop, and you might have a mainstream hit on your hands. 

To me, that's the true takeaway from this exercise. Two filmmakers had a story to tell, and they knocked out a script, raised some financing, rounded up a cast of pretty good actors, and shot it and edited it. They had a vision, and they realized it. Their vision was an incredibly stupid one, but yet ... 

They persisted. They accomplished something, rather than just sit around feeling sorry for themselves with their thumbs up their ass.

GRADE for 'BUTT BOY':  C-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

New to the Queue

 Brighter days ...

An older lesbian couple must deal with hardship before one of them comes out to her family, "Two of Us."

A period piece about the Black Panther movement of the '60s, focusing on Chicago leader Fred Hampton and an infiltrator in the ranks, "Judas and the Black Messiah."

Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby may be too good to pass up, albeit in another tale of forbidden love in the 19th century, "The World to Come."

We liked Azazel Jacobs' early work ("Momma's Man," "Terri"), but he stumbled last time with "The Lovers," yet we are drawn to his latest, "French Exit."

Ingrid Bergman Double Feature

Confession: Until this weekend, I had never seen "Casablanca," considered one of the greatest movies ever made, an iconic touchstone in American popular culture. The legend goes like this: I was in college at the University of Illinois at Chicago, working a weekend part-time kitchen job at B&B Catering on the near Southwest Side and also co-editing the weekly student newspaper. I was busy while trying to maintain an A-minus GPA. So I decided to set aside a whole evening to unplug from all that -- "Casablanca" was scheduled to air at 7 o'clock on Channel 9. Even back then I knew it should be part of my cultural education, long before I would start writing about film regularly. 

After dinner I went to my room, turned on the portable television set, dimmed the lights, reclined on my bed -- finally relaxing. And then, probably not long after the opening credits, I fell fast asleep. Lights out for the full two hours. Oh, well, I tried. Now, nearly four decades later, I finally patched the hole in my game. Without commercial breaks ...

CASABLANCA (1942) (A) - What can you say? It is filled with lines that have become embedded in our pop culture for decades. It's Bogie and Bergman, the good guys vs. the Nazis. The setting is exotic, the booze flows, the intrigue builds, and there's Sam (Dooley Wilson) at the piano, to tug at our heartstrings with Rick and Ilsa's song, "As Time Goes By." As Herman Hupfeld had written a decade before, during the depths of the Depression: "You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss / a sigh is just a sigh."

Sigh. Even after all the time that has gone by, the parodies that have accumulated, the postwar glow that has worn out its welcome -- "Casablanca" still delivers. The story, the lines, the performances -- cutting edge for their time -- retain their power. It's a thrilling movie, even if you know in advance who gets on that plane at the end. 

Bogart's Rick Blaine is a hardened ex-pat who, after a series of dalliances with underground democratic movements in Europe, finds himself lying low in Morocco running a nightclub while walking a fine line among the Nazis, resistance and collaborators. Bergman's Ilsa is married to Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a resistance leader once feared dead. Ilsa and Victor are among the desperados seeking the transit letters that have fallen into Rick's lap and which will save the lives of whoever uses them to flee to freedom. 

Thus we have the epic set-up -- the "fight for love and glory," as the song goes -- of a love triangle unfolding in the early days of World War II, when no one new if democracy would defeat fascism. (Still an open question?) Amid the decadence of wartime Casablanca -- drinking, gambling, black-market haggling -- an international cast (including a marvelous Sidney Greenstreet as a rival club owner, Claude Rains as the French police captain Renault, and Peter Lorre as Ugarte the street hustler) savors a script (by Howard Koch and Julius and Philip Epstein) that crackles with wit and charm. Director Michael Curtiz makes sure it zips along in refined noir style. It is a cauldron of moral dilemmas tinged with old-fashioned romantic schmaltz. 

All the while, Rick drinks and smolders, and Ilsa agonizes about the choice she must make. Bogart's scowl is softened by those eyes of Ingrid Bergman, where all of her magic is contained. I defer the rest of the analysis to this Roger Ebert reconsideration from 1996. Whether you've ever seen "Casablanca" or haven't for a while, cue it up on a date night, dim the lights -- and hopefully you'll have had a nap earlier in the day, so you can savor this masterpiece.

GASLIGHT (1944) (B-minus) - Our curiosity got the best of us, marking the end of a presidential administration with a throwback to the origins (oranges?) of the term for making up lies and pretending reality isn't what it really is in order to make another person go crazy. Bergman plays the young wife who moves back into the London home where her aunt died, along with the creepy new husband who apparently stalked her and willed her into matrimony.

From the stable of fabled director George Cukor, this one slogs along for nearly two hours, taking its damn sweet time for Paula Alquist (Bergman) to start going crazy and then for her to figure out that she is not. Charles Boyer is magically suspicious, but he's pretty dull on the screen. A teenage Angela Lansbury debuts with a splash as a saucy maid.

This is a classic of film noir, and Bergman does her best to bring some realism to the era of emoting. But the suspense is just too creaky, and the inevitable reveal -- coaxed out by Joseph Cotton's handsome detective -- eventually loses its impact.

BONUS TRACK

HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR (1959) (B) - This foundational film of the French New Wave from Alan Resnais has its moments, but it's a pretty chatty and solemn rumination on both the joys and horrors of both remembering and forgetting. Resnais shows a little too much deference to the flowery screenplay by Marguerite Duras, about a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) who visits Hiroshima 14 years after World War II to film a movie and has a fling with a Japanese war veteran (Eiji Okada). Through flashbacks, the actress slowly unspools the wartime tale of her forbidden love with a German soldier that got him shot and her imprisoned in her family's basement. Rough stuff. Resnais' crisp black-and-white cinematography is bold and assured (it's his first feature after more than a decade of making documentary shorts), and his luxurious images -- in particular the modestly naked bodies of his handsome couple -- must have amazed audiences 60 years ago. However, the story itself creaks and lurches in ways that have not worn well. 

From the soundtrack: