The Best American Poetry

Film Still Series - #35

From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman.

Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (I)

Film Still Series -#27

From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman.

Paul Newman: all eyes, and more [by Ken Tucker]

The salutes to Paul Newman's eyes have ranged from 20/20 (Manohla Dargis' sharp squint in the Times) to blurry-teary (Bob  Mondello's drippy evaluation on NPR). As far as filmographies go, no one will best my colleague and friend Mark Harris’ remarkably concise yet complete look at Newman’s work on EW.com.

My only disagreement with Mark is that he doesn't give greater credit to Newmans Slap Shot, the ferociously funny, profane 1977 hockey film that has been given a typically impassioned yet meticulously observed appreciation by Kim Morgan here.

When I was a teenager, my Favorite Film Of All Time (you can have those when you're an adolescent) was Cool Hand Luke, the martyrdom of whose title character suited my teen self-pity so perfectly I saw it 16 times the year it was released including once in Copenhagen when I snuck off from a church-group trip to see it once again (from the silence in the audience, I could only deduce the Danish subtitles didn't do justice to Newman's witty line-readings).

If I had to pick one Newman film to gaze upon over and over these days, however, it would be The Verdict (1982), his last great role and by some accounts his favorite. As the rhuemy-eyed rummy lawyer Frank Galvin, Newman did what he loved doing in the second half of his career—which was to do his best to demolish the first half. By which I mean, this least narcissistic of beautiful men seemed to enjoy suggesting what the ultimate fates of  characters such as Hud, John Harper in Hombre, and the Lew Archer surrogate in Harper would have been had they lived to late-middle-age.

Working with co-conspirator director Sidney Lumet, Newman turned himself into a shambling wreck held up by an expensive-turning-threadbare lawyer's suit. The early scenes in which Newman leans over a pinball machine for drunken support as much for the purpose of playing the game, and—even more chillingly, repulsively, movingly—attends the funeral wakes of people he doesn't know to press his dog-eared business cards into the hands of the bereaved are marvels of actorly control. Newman played cynicism and dissipation with even more of the commitment he brought to his lovely light comic turns in bigger hits such as The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Lesser actors would be content merely to have sketched a portrait of an alchoholic making one last stand for dignity; Newman let you know that, in the end, this was no mere proto-episode of Law & Order, ending with the attorney pulling himself together for redemption. After the credits rolled, you knew that Frank Galvin would probably, eventually, end up looking closely at a bottle for the rest of his short life.

There's another whole piece to be written about Newman's other life as a public personality—I expect David Letterman, his fellow race-car buff, will summon his usual humble grace to salute the numerous appearances Newman made on Letterman’s show over the years, content to sit in the studio audience and wave silently, humorously, once again subverting his celebrity with bright-eyed enthusiasm.

And some time I'll have to tell about the day my construction-worker dad shared a beer with Newman and confirmed everything you may have thought about the man when he was off-camera…

--Ken Tucker

Movie Moments - Richard III (1996)

This might be my favorite "movie moment" of all.  It combines great singing by the singular Stacey Kent, jaunty music, and snappy lyrics by none other than, well, you tell us.  (FYI, the singing begins about 2 minutes in.) Be sure to listen to the very end before you supply your answer.   This version of Shakespeare's Richard III has been moved from England of the 1480s to England of the 1930s, a country about to be overrun by fascists. (Given the non-aggression pact the English entered into with Hitler in the '30s, this setting is not all that far-fetched.) It stars Ian McKellan, who co-wrote the adaptation with director Richard Loncraine. 

-- sdh

"In the Heat of the Night" (by Laura Orem)

Like everyone else, I've been avidly listening to all the election-year hubbub. No matter what your political affliation, it is heady to realize you are witnessing an historical event: the presidential campaign of the first African-American candidate for a major political party. Neat stuff, especially when you realize that it was only 40 or so years ago that it was common to see film clips of civil rights protestors flattened by firehoses on the nightly news.

Over the weekend, I watched "In the Heat of the Night" again (gotta love Turner Classic Movies). I hadn't seen it in a while, and I'd forgotten what a terrific film it is. Released in 1967, the story is complex and compelling beneath its deceptively simple plot: murder in a small town. Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is passing through Sparta, Mississippi, when he is accused of the killing of a local businessman. Chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) doesn't know what to make of this man, especially after he finds out that, not only is he a detective, he is a forensic science expert (we'd call him a CSI now).  Once it's been established that Tibbs is not the murderer, Gillespie, who above all is a cop, realizes he is in over his head and needs Tibbs to help him solve the murder. (A footnote - the producers decided against filming in the actual town of Sparta, Mississippi; it was judged to be too dangerous. Instead, the movie was shot in Sparta, Illinois.)

There isn't a misplaced step in this entire film. The director, Norman Jewison, resisted the temptation to turn all the Mississippi characters into ignorant yahoos and Tibbs into a noble, flawless defender of justice. Even the most minor characters are layered and complicated. Take for example, Harvey Oberst (played by the fabulous and underappreciated Scott Wilson), who is accused of the murder after Tibbs is cleared. Tibbs knows Oberst isn't guilty, either; Oberst starts out railing against the indignity of having a black man in the cell with him, but then, after he realizes Tibbs is, as Poitier puts, "all you've got," he grudgingly answers his questions, and later, goes out of his way to help him.  Even in this character, there is change and development. And every part, no matter how small, is cast with a superb actor -- a lot of them whose names you might not know, but whose faces are familiar.

In the scene below, Tibbs and Gillespie visit the local bigwig, Eric Endicott (played by Larry Gates), whom Tibbs suspects is the murderer. (Another note - the butler is played by Jester Hairston, who, among his many other achievements in acting and music, played Tom Robinson's father Spence in "To Kill a Mockingbird.") Steiger's Gillespie in this scene is a marvel: caught in the conflict of his conscience and his environment and upbringing. The scene not only shows what violence lurks beneath the thin veneer of culture; it show how Tibbs ("like the rest of us," Steiger says) is capable of letting his emotions get in the way of the investigation. That "like the rest of us" is key to the whole movie. It is when Steiger's character really gets it -- that Tibbs is indeed just like him: impassioned and flawed, but wanting to get it right. And Tibbs suddenly gets it, too - that he and Gillespie are more alike than they are different.

Movie Moments - Dead Man (1996)

Although lines from William Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and "Auguries of Innocence" are quoted throughout this Jim Jarmusch film, I've always believed it to be based on Emily Dickinson's #754 (My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun) because of how Depp's character evolves from a timid accountant to an accomplished gun-slinger.  I offer these two scenes as support.  In the second, I have in mind the lines "And now We roam in Sovereign Woods - And now We hunt the Doe - " Note as well that Depp's nemesis (played by Robert Mitchum) is named Dickinson:

-- sdh

Rare Stamps in Black Movies

Everyone who has seen Charade, the Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn thriller directed by Stanley Donen, knows the vital role that rare and valuable stamps play in that mystery.

Can you name another crime-centered movie in which stamps function as a means of transferring large sums of ill-gotten gains?

Hint: a stamp album has a merely incidental role in this movie set primarily in Paris (as is Charade) but with parts in Menton, Rome, and New York.

Second hint: Jean Gabin, who as a young man was most marvelous in Grand Illusion and Le Jour se leve and Pepe le Moko, here is sixty-five years old and the head of a crime family.

-- DL

Anita O'Day at the Film Forum

If you're within the sound of my voice (as New York disc jockeys used to say), hurry to the Cinema Village (12th Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place) to catch "Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer."  O'Day was one of the all-time best, whether singing the melody (as when she swings Rodgers & Hart with Billy May's arrangements) or veering off to the farthest imaginable extent (as in her amazing rendition of "Tea for Two" at Mr. Kelly's restaurant in Chicago, April 1958). Born Anita Colton in Chicago in 1919 she named herself O'Day because it was "dough" in Pig Latin, and dough is what she wanted to make. She sang with big bands (Gene Krupa, Stan Kenton) in the 40s and did duets with trumpeter Roy Eldridge. She then reinvented herself as a solo artist recording on the Verve label. She electrified the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with her treatment of "Sweet Georgia Brown." Her outfit on that sunny afternoon -- chic hat, white gloves, black dress -- was nearly as magnificent as her performance, and when her picture appeared in newsmagazines the public began to catch on to what other musicians knew all along. She was a self-made original: independent in a love-me-or-leave-me way, opinionated, candid. Her style was unique and she refused to compromise. O'Day used her voice as if it were an instrument; her bop scatting is the jazz equivalent of action painting. She lived high and went through dough more quickly than she could make it. Arrested for marijuana use in a frame-up, she figured she might as well try what she was accused of doing, and became, for the better part of two decades, a big-time heroin addict. It didn't hurt her singing. She managed to kick the habit and kept on ticking, unrepentantly, into her eighties. (Her obituary and Betty Comden's appeared on the same page of the New York Times one sad day late in 2006.) See the movie while you can. She'll show you half a dozen ways of approaching the Harold Arlen -- Ted Koehler standard, "Let's Fall in Love." And (in the words of a different song), when you fall you fall, and you might not mind it at all.

-- DL

RIP: Manny Farber, 1917-2008

Manny Farber, major film critic and painter, has passed away at the age of 91.

See Ken Tucker's August 18 post on the EW blog, "Remembering Manny Farber," which begins with these paragraphs:

<<<
Manny Farber, who died last night at the age of 91, was one of the 20th Century's greatest critics, as well as a powerful painter in his own right. Notice I didn’t just say "film critic" — Farber wrote primarily about the movies, but his collection of film criticism, Negative Space, is essential to understanding all modern non-academic criticism. Farber established a tone, cleared a patch of cultural landscape, and filled it with more ideas, opinions, and attitude than a thousand reviewers and bloggers — not just in movies but in music, television, book, and art criticism too — will ever muster.

With the exception of Pauline Kael, Farber was probably the movie critic other movie critics most often quoted, particularly his hugely influential 1962 essay "White Elephant Art Vs. Termite Art," which came as close to anything he wrote to boiling down his critical creed. In that piece, Farber positioned himself ferociously against what he called the "self-aggrandizing masterwork" that "treat[s] every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity." In opposition to this he championed "termite art," which “goes always forward eating its own boundaries… leav[ing] nothing in its path other than signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." At a time when crap nostalgia is routinely praised with unthinking effusiveness, it's harder now to appreciate how daring and emboldening it was to read Farber's championing of supposedly such minor work as the then-ignored Westerns of director Budd Boetticher and the face-slamming camerawork of director Sam Fuller.
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For the rest of Ken's report, click here.

Also just a click away are Ted Burke's "Like It Or Not" appreciation of Manny and the Movie City Indie's feelings on Farber's demise.

Here is one of Manny Farber's remarkable paintings: