Summer Film Roundup, Part 3: Continuing the Italian Theme

Death in Venice (1971)

High-class gay kitsch.  Luchino Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella looks gorgeous but has none of the subtlety of the original work.  Visconti changed the protagonist, nicely played by Dirk Bogarde, from a novelist to a composer loosely based on Mahler, probably as an excuse to cover the soundtrack with Mahler's music, which overwhelms the film itself.  It also provides Visconti with justification for ignoring the complex inner life of the hero, whose thoughts about writing and art and his own emotional turmoil are completely absent from the film. Presumably composers don't have all those heavy thoughts in their heads the way writers do. The result is over two hours of middle-aged Bogarde staring longingly at an effeminate blonde boy on the beaches of Venice. I found it difficult to keep up with the agonizingly slow pace.  Instead I amused myself with speculating on how Pauline Kael must have eviscerated it, but when I looked in her 5001 Nights at the Movies, I was disappointed to discover that the film wasn't included.  I guess Penelope Gilliatt (who alternated with Kael every six months as The New Yorker's film critic) was saddled with reviewing this white elephant.

For those looking for better examples of Visconti's work, The Damned (1969), also starring Dirk Bogarde is a compelling look at Nazism but shares Death in Venices's (and Visconti's) obsession with the gay theme (not that there's anything wrong with that, to quote Seinfeld), since it focuses on the SA, or brownshirts, a paramilitary Nazi group which was heavily homosexual and eliminated by Hitler shortly after he took power in the Night of the Long Knives.

La Terra Trema (1948) is a nearly three-hour long neorealist film about Italian fishermen and their families.  (All right, it's 2 hours and 40 minutes, but it felt longer.)  One of my college film professors thought it was one of the three greatest films ever made. (I still wonder what the other two were.)  I struggled to stay awake.

The Innocent 1976, with Seventies Italian  superstar  Giancarlo Giannini and the  ineffably lovely Laura Antonelli, was Visconti's last film.  It's visually impressive and enjoyable.

I haven't seen the two Visconti films that are perhaps most highly-regarded, The Leopard (1963), and Rocco and His Brothers (1960); I dearly look forward to seeing his first film, Osessione (1943), an adaptation of the 1934 James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which would be brilliantly made in Hollywood with John Garfield and Lana Turner, 3 years after Visconti's version.

Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo, was an Italian aristocrat, a communist, an openly gay man, a screenwriter and director whose films are long and leisurely and invariably beautiful to look at. There's no question in my mind that Kubrick was influenced by him (and by Antonioni and Max Ophuls), particularly in Barry Lyndon.  (Marissa Berenson plays the wife in that film and also Death in Venice).  I think both Kubrick and Robert Altman appropriated Visconti's slow zoom ins and zoom outs and graceful panning shots.  Eyes Wide Shut seems to be influenced by Visconti's fascination with decadence as well. 

But enough about influences.  Get hold of the above films and prepare for many hours of dazzling imagery and pointed social critique. Unlike so much of today's Hollywood product, you won't find climaxes every 3 minutes. Or is it every 2 minutes?

Summer Film Roundup, Part 1: Alienation High & Low

In a quasi-passive revolt against the mindlessness of so many summer movie "blockbusters," I chose to forego the comfort of air-conditioned movie theaters and instead watch old, classic, sometimes obscure films in the comfort of my air-conditioned home.  My 48-inch HD TV and sofa provided a perfect escape from the heat and hype.  I offer these brief reviews as encouragement for you to do likewise this autumn.  (Though the fall usually does yield new films of real quality, seeming to drop from the sky like dead leaves, enlivening the landscape with their bright colors.)  No doubt you've seen some of these films before; here's a chance to consider them yet again, and perhaps watch them once more with a new perspective.

The Projectionist (1971)

What better counterintuitive way to begin this series of reviews of films watched  at home on TV than one about  a projectionist?  Made at the height of the nostalgia craze of the early Seventies, writer/director Harry Hurwitz's 1971 vehicle for the talents of Chuck McCann is strictly amateur night.  (Unfortunately the film is an hour and 28 minutes.)  The story alternates between drab color sequences of McCann's depressing life as a projectionist at a theater in seedy pre-Disneyfied Times Square and his black-and-white fantasies of being a 1940s movie-serial superhero. The fantasy sequences are presumably meant to be funny, but regrettably they are not.  Hurwitz has speeded these scenes up and intercut them with clips from classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane, which has the unfortunate effect of making you remember what really good films look like.  And the sight of the overweight McCann in superhero tights is not a pleasant one. Eventually the film clips overwhelm the story and for long periods even McCann disappears from them, leaving us with a hodgepodge of rapid intercutting between John Wayne westerns, Flash Gordon serials, and Nazi and Ku Klux Klan footage. If the film is trying to make a satiric point about Hollywood or America, it's crude and undeveloped.  And one shot of Hitler making a histrionic speech dubbed over with JFK saying "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" is downright offensive.  The fantasy scenes with McCann imagining a romance with a pretty girl plays like a bad student film production of Marty.  But if the film was cut down to a half hour, it would be a pretty good senior student film project.

The one shining light in this mess is the film debut of Rodney Dangerfield, playing the tight-assed theater manager. His few scenes are hilarious. He is the boss from hell that everyone has had at some point in their lives. If The Projectionist had featured more of Dangerfield and less of McCann, it might really have been something.  But as it stands, you sort of wish the film would break and the projectionist shut down the screening well before the actual end.

Interestingly, most of the reviews of the film praise Dangerfield for doing a straight, non-comedic role so well.  And yet I thought Dangerfield was extremely funny precisely because he plays it straight. He's such an obsessive anal retentive theater manager, treating the projectionist and ushers and old guy at the candy counter as if they're his troops and he's Patton.  The scene when Dangerfield tells  McCann that he has to pay for the box of lemon drops  the kindly counter man gave him for free  is  possibly the best scene in the film.  Dangerfield has all his trademark nervous tics but does them here in a realistic, low-key manner, which makes his character more believable and funny.  Nobody else seemed to see his role as comedic except me.

I admit that the film has a certain charm. There's a likeable quality to it despite the amateur quality, or maybe because of it. Those old enough to fondly remember Chuck McCann's old  TV show on New York station WPIX  will  enjoy seeing him  in a full-length feature. But there are too many long sections that just don't work.

Today The Projectionist is considered  a cult film, but apparently every low-budget 1970s movie that doesn't fit into a niche and was not successful in its time is automatically classified as a cult film. Or, as TCM likes to call them, "underground cinema."

Rather sad to note that both the director and the leading lady died in their 50s. 

The Michelangelo who paints with a camera...

La Notte (1961)

After a truly unforgivable delay of many years, I finally saw the middle film of Michelangelo Antonioni's celebrated trilogy.  La Notte (The Night) comes between L'Avventura (1960) and L'Eclisse (1962), and if not the most impressive of the three, it's probably the most intellectually accessible. The film is notable for its astonishing black-and-white photography of Marcello Mastroiani and Jeanne Moreau living in the ultra-modern section of 1961 Naples, with lots of great jazz on the soundtrack. Pauline Kael famously dismissed Antonioni's films as "Come-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe parties," and in fact there is a very long party at the center of the film, probably the best film of a party I've ever seen, and yes, many of the characters do indeed have sick souls.  There will always be those  who  bristle  at  works of art  which examine the spiritual emptiness of the wealthy and privileged.  Nonetheless, La Notte seductively brings you, if not into, at least close to their troubled inner lives through a masterful use of architecture and external surroundings. Not a fun movie in the conventional sense, but I would call it a must-see, whether you have a sick soul or not.

Red Desert (1964)

Michelangelo Antonioni and his  actress wife Monica Vitti  are reunited for the penultimate time in Red Desert, perhaps the only film about the ugliness of post-industrial landscapes that's ravishing to look at.  (A told me he of a  beautiful film about an industrial wasteland inherently preposterous, or words to that effect.  But seeing is believing, and this film should be seen  if not believed.)  It features one of the most sophisticated use of color in any film up to that time, employing a highly deliberate color scheme reminiscent of Mark Rothko paintings (Antonioni was himself a painter and a great admirer of Rothko). Unlike Fellini in Juliette of the Spirits and subsequent films, Antonioni was not completely corrupted by color.  But  as some critics noted, color is virtually the star of the film. That's unfortunate for the actors and story, both of which could use more meat on the bone (or fewer brushstrokes from the palette, to employ a more apt metaphor).  Richard Harris, dubbed into Italian, is a brilliant actor forced into an inhibited role.  As for Monica Vitti, the John Simon rule about actors (google it) tends to apply here, since John Simon himself said she resembles Barbra Streisand wandering around an industrial hell.  He accurately points out that the character played by Rita Renoir (no relation to Jean and Auguste) is the sexiest actress in the film. No wonder -- she was France's number one stripper in the 1950s.  The film is basically a melancholy look at how industrialism disfigures the landscape, but Antonioni can help making even industrial desolation look beautiful.  (Yet the most gorgeous scene in the film is the one with a young girl swimming and bathing on an island off the coast of Sardinia.)  Andrew Sarris amusingly titled his review "Antoniennui," and you may have trouble keeping your eyes open to the very end. Probably better to fast forward the film and stop at random, because every shot looks like a perfectly composed painting.  Methinks Stanley Kubrick had Red Desert in mind when he was making his superior Barry Lyndon.

Heaven forbid we search for messages in the three films under review, but if there is one that unites all three, it's that you don't have to be an upper-class European to be alienated.  Alienation, like so much of modern life, has been democratized.  It's now available to the common man. And woman.

An Introduction, an Apologia, and a Hearty Welcome

No, that isn't a typo.  It really says "Robert Nason's Culture Bog."  And considering all the times I (and probably you) have valiantly attempted to type the highly-common word "blog" in an email to a friend, only to have that pesky spell check "correct" it to "bog," why not simply give in to technology (or to serendipity, which may just be a cheery mask for the same thing) and accept "bog" for "blog," though this is indeed a blog (or, How I Learned to Stop Recorrecting and Love the Bog.)  

But where, exactly, does the "Culture Bog" come in?  Well, you've come to just the right place to find out.  The culture bog -- a concept I've adapted from R. Emmett Tyrrell's, earlier, more narrowly political and somewhat Germanic formulation, "kultursmog" -- is the bog we all live in -- an all-encompassing swamp of texts, images, memes, sound bites (or bytes, if you will), classics and commercials (thank you, Edmund Wilson), and conflicting contexts that permeate the air we breathe and the space we inhabit for now and the near future; a cacophony of warring websites and unsocial media that fill our brains from the moment we take our first breath, accompanied by understandable wailing and gnashing of baby teeth, to our last, medically-induced, addled spurts of consciousness of the nursing home TV's current offering of disaster and catastrophe, either fictional, news-informational, or "reality" based -- and who can tell which of the three at that point, or even long before then?  Pixels and propaganda now fill our waking hours while our dreams are increasingly dominated by whiz-kids from Industrial Light & Magic.  We're stuck in the bog, and there's no escape.

But as the late Marshall McLuhan -- one of the unsung heroes of this blog -- famously said, the way out of the whirlpool was discovered by Edgar Allan Poe, a well-sung hero, in his story "A Descent into the Maelstrom": The hero must give in and stop resisting; by riding the whirlpool out to the very end, he can be sucked into the center and find an escape of sorts. But you'll have to read (or reread) that tale for yourself.

To put that into practical terms, it means that I, along with you, derive a great deal of pleasure from savoring the detritus and desire swirling about in our shared bog -- films old and new, novels cheap and novels classic, beloved TV shows from vanished youth, comics (now reborn as Graphic Novels), science fiction, mysteries, comedy, painters and sculptors, poster art and architecture, and the political machinations of scoundrels and statesmen, who surprisingly switch from one to the other given the crisis at hand.  And culture more broadly includes the whole farrago of customs, fads, forgotten trends, romance, disillusion, hope springing eternal, then ending again.  It's all part of the mix. And with luck, perseverance, and Poe's hero in mind, we might rise up from the swirling muck like the fabled Swamp Thing and find ourselves composed of the same stuff we were mired in, the same stuff that stars are made of, ready for action.  In other words, there's fun to be had and adventures to be embraced.  We'll walk that contemporary tightrope between academic naysayers who insist that all culture is mediated by power and privilege and the unwashed masses who simply love the show in all its myriad forms.  The former will grouse that it's just Bread and Circuses; those of us who are not entirely unwashed since we do believe in bathing now and then, will cheer that the human imagination has been so fertile in so many astounding ways.  We'll shoot zingers at both sides and pray they don't let go of the rope.

(A friend has advised me that there is indeed a distinct difference between a bog and a swamp; and in fact, there are many kinds of bogs, from the Valley bog to the Raised bog, the Blanket bog, the Quaking bog, and even, God help us, the Cataract bog.  There is even a sport known as "bog snorkeling" -- don't ask.  But the promising aspect of bogs in general is their "accumulated peat, "a deposit of dead plant material," plus assemblages of plants and animals, leading to a biodiversity from which the living can be reborn from the detritus of the dead -- or, for our purposes, the decayed but still valuable peat of old films, paperbacks, TV shows, comics, and ideas.  And since Stanley Kubrick is one of the resident gods of this blog, it's worth remarking that in the Anthony Burgess novel from which A Clockwork Orange was made, "blog" is the slang word for God.)

Bog is to the early 21st century what Beat was to the mid-20th.  They were beat, we're bogged down.  But to be beat was also to move to the beat, to beat the system, to achieve beatitude.  Our bog god beckons us to move beyond stagnation and overproliferation.  (Call it stagliferation -- not unlike the "stagflation" of America during the Carter years, that lethal combination of stagnation and inflation of the late 1970s).  This blog will, with luck, help encourage the nutrients in the bog to flourish, and provide hints for all of us to develop a more discerning culture-diversity.

In am interview some year ago, culture critic Susan Sontag was asked by Christopher Lydon, "What writers influence you, which ones do you light candles to?"  Sontag protested, "I don't light candles.  I read the writers I admire, and reread them," and went on to say she was interested in many things, and that listing all of them "would be pretentious."  I'm hoping the following list won't be pretentious.  At least I don't light candles to them (though in the case of Grace Kelly I've been tempted to).

Some of the people and subjects that might pop up here (and ultimately I'm the one who does the popping) are:  

Cinema masters Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Preston Sturges, Woody Allen, Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut; screen icons Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Groucho Marx, Gene Tierney, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood; TV legends  Rod Serling,  Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Mary Tyler Moore, 1950s' Superman's George Reeves, Honey West's Ann Francis, Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder; magisterial film critics Pauline Kael and David Thomson, British giants and eccentrics George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham, Philip Larkin, Malcolm Muggeridge, Colin Wilson, Winston Churchill, The Beatles, and honorary Brit Arthur Koestler; Irish geniuses Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; French writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Boris Vian; American literary virtuosos F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler, James Thurber, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, P. J. O'Rourke, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; literary critics H. L. Mencken, Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Joseph Epstein, Clive James, and Louis Menand;  playwrights Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard; speculative fiction wizards Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein; historians Paul Johnson and John Luckacs; artists Salvador Dali, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Edward Hopper, Fairfield Porter, and Charles Addams; plus The New York World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, Aurora monster model kits from the 1960s, Commentary, MAD, EC comics, Film Comment, Charles Krauthammer, Ben Hecht, jazz, Gustav Mahler, women, Paris, Vienna, kibbutzim, coffee, and the joys of Elmer's Disappearing Glue Stick.  (It sounds like it should be called Elmer's Disappearing Glue Trick, but we'll leave the magic for another time.)  

I should warn you that some of the above eminentoes are people with whom I have strong disagreements, but they nevertheless occupy significant places in my own mental culture bog.  (The links above will take you to some surprising and delightful places.)  I should further warn the faint-hearted among you that some of my views could be categorized as moderately conservative -- a good friend of mine has suggested I'm to the right of Carnegie Hall.  I'd revise that to read I'm slightly to the right of the Carnegie Deli.  That should provide the appropriate flavor to the proceedings to follow.

To conclude:  This is the place to come for the real lowdown on both the High and Low and every hybrid imaginable.  Put your cards on the table, face up -- and remember that the odds always favor the house, but here every man's a king and every woman's a queen, and there are two chickens in every garage and a car in every pot.  But please, no pot in here -- we welcome sober (but not solemn), thoughtful, clear-minded readers eager for a probing analysis of all the news that's not yet fit to print -- though as Ezra Pound noted, literature is news that stays news.  Personally I'll be shocked if any scoops are broken here, but I welcome any you might have to offer.  This blog will sometimes be playful, even silly, but despite Cary Grant's admission to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, "At my age the last word a man wants to hear is 'serious,'" it won't hesitate to be serious when the seriousness warrants it.  And remember -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  So jump right in, the water's brine.  Or at least mine.