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.