When the Boy Scouts Met the Hippies at Woodstock

The Los Angeles Times published my 50th Anniversary reminiscence of the Woodstock Music Festival in their August 16th issue. I guarantee that it's not the usual Woodstock anniversary piece.  And it's perfect for my "bog," because there's lots of mud in it.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-15/woodstock-anniversary-hendrix-baezx

Harold Pinter in Israel

British playwright Harold Pinter and his then girlfriend Lady Antonia Fraser visited Israel in May, 1978 to celebrate the country's 30th anniversary. As it happens, I was working on a kibbutz in Israel that year and eagerly followed Pinter's trip in the English language newspaper, The Jerusalem Post.  When I recently learned that Fraser kept a diary during their trip and that it was going to be published, I knew I had to review it. Happily, my review has now appeared in the perfect place, the winter issue of the Jewish Review of Books, under the apt title "The Homecoming."   I invite you to enjoy it here:

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/4979/the-homecoming/

Harlan Ellison (1934 - 2018)

Photo by Beth Gwinn/Getty Images. 

Harlan Ellison's death on June 27, while hardly unexpected, hit me hard. His was the latest in a series of deaths of men around my father's age, writers and artists whose work I had grown up with since my teens. Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe, Steve Ditko, and Harlan Ellison -- large parts of the verbal and visual accompaniment to to my life. None of them were as omnipresent and life changing as the words that Harlan sometimes characterized as his "reporting in." His urgent, unique voice makes me want to thank him even after he is no longer here to receive those thanks. Neither of us believed in an afterlife, but I'll say this anyway. Thank you, Harlan, for your stories and essays and books that helped me get through adolescence. Thank you for the wisdom and passion I continue to find in your work in my adulthood. Thank you for the kind words and encouragement you occasionally offered me on your website, Harlan Ellison's Art Deco Dining Pavilion. I sincerely doubt I would have broken through into being a published writer without your hard-headed but sympathetic noodging. I regret I didn't have the guts to approach you at Lincoln Center where they were showing the terrific film about your life, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, when I saw you chatting with your wife and some friends in the alcove before the film. I didn't want to bother you, and frankly, what could I say except what I'm saying now, only it would probably have come out sounding much worse then. Still, I wish I'd walked over and said hi. Thank you for living a life of unimpeachable integrity and the pursuit and achievement of artistic excellence. Thank you for being one hell of a raconteur, a brilliant writer, and someone who made this world a more exciting during the years you walked upon it. Thank you for making me laugh and think and realize that it's essential to give a damn.

I cheered myself up during the last week reading Blood's a Rover, the last book to be published in Harlan's Lifetime and one he held in his hands not long before he died.  It was a kick to see Vic and Blood's adventures continued after all these years of wondering what became of them. The book's short stories and snippets and teleplay, written over the course of several decades, may not quite add up to a novel, but they provide a good idea of what the novel would have been if Harlan had lived to complete it. I suspect it might have become the Huckleberry Finn of speculative fiction, and probably been banned in just as many libraries as Twain's classic. Reading "A Boy and His Dog" as part of this longer narrative caused me to realize how much your work is in the main tradition of American literature, particularly according to critic Leslie Fiedler's theory that the classic American story is about the relationship between the friendship between a white man and a non white man (African American, Native American, an alien, or, in this case a telepathic dog), and their efforts to escape being "civ'lized," as Huck Finn famously says. But like Twain, Harlan believes the romance between outsiders can ultimately lead to a greater and more truly humane civilization than the one that previously existed. Moreover, Blood's a Rover demonstrates even more clearly than before how artfully Harlan drew on his experiences running with a gang in Brooklyn and brought those insights to create a new kind of SF. Few people can write about the turf wars between gangs, whether in the 1950s or the near future, as well as Harlan did. And it's obvious to me now that there's more than a little of you in both Vic and Blood -- Vic, the classic Ellisonian man struggling to survive in an uncaring and dangerous universe, and Blood, the wise-cracking and wise-headed mentor who cares about the proper use of grammar in one's speech as much as in sheer survival. Finally, the book dispells the absurd notion that the story is in anyway misogynistic, a notion which Harlan attributed to the influence of the 1970s movie of his story. The teleplay in the last section of the book introduces us to Spike, a very different woman from the Quilla June of "A Boy and His Dog." Spike's resourceful, tough, street-smart and a good shot, with ultimately a good heart. She's a heroine that any feminist could be proud of in 2018. The book reaffirmed that despite the darkness in Harlan's work, he was a humanist who believed in the potential of our too-often misguided species. For most of his 84 years he successfully instructed, guided, chivvied, emlightened, and most of all entertained us. His many books on my shelves are a constant reminder that he's going to continue doing that for me for years to come. What can I say? I miss the guy.

Just a Guy from Queens

My article in the summer issue of The City Journal is now available online. Here's the link:

https://www.city-journal.org/html/just-guy-queens-15346.html

Summer Film Roundup, Part 8: Humblings, Horrors and Heroics

The Humbling (2014)

This gem may have slipped  past you when it first came out several years ago.  It's one of a group of recent films based on Philip Roth's late novels and, like them, it deals  with mortality,  the loss of creative powers, and other sobering matters.  I think of these as Philip Roth's "winter stories."  Barry Levinson refused big studio funding so he could direct this film his way; armed with a shrewd script by Buck Henry and the acting chops of Al Pacino in what's arguably his best performance in years, Levinson filmed the movie on a low budget in his own house, but the result is far better than any home movie.  Pacino doesn't scream and yell as has been his wont of late, but is admirably restrained, low-key, and thoroughly convincing as an aging actor who's convinced  that he's lost his talent and gets involved with a much younger woman.  (It's clear that Pacino has not lost his talent.)  He's likeable, sympathetic and moving, and the film is funny in a quirky way that's unlike the factory-made blockbuster laughs of most Hollywood comedies made these days. It has quite a few good moments and interesting characters, and I enjoyed it a lot. There's an undeniably melancholy element to The Humbling, but the humor saves it.  The young woman, adroitly played by Greta Gerwig, is a lesbian. Pacino converts her.

Batman Begins (2005)

It's quite a leap from  the diminished powers of an aging Philip Roth hero to the near-superhero powers of Christopher Nolan's retooled version of Batman.  It's an impressive example of a yet another quintessentially American story filmed with a largely British cast and British director in England.  (For yet another example, see Michael Grandage's 2016 film Genius  about  legendary book editor Maxwell Perkins relationship with Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.)  The gradually developed backstory is seductive and well done, especially if Ninja warriors are your fetish, but unfortunately we get to the main plot, about bad guys trying to destroy Gotham City by poisoning the water.  It's something right out of the old 1966 Batman TV series. Yes, stunning photography and state-of-the-art special effects (state-of-the-art a decade ago, at least) dazzle the mind but also numb it, as the predictably "big ending" fills the screen with explosions and cars and planes and action and buildings and elevated subways collapsing with smoke and flames everywhere.   Much in the film is very good -- Batman's costume and cowel look more like the Batman of the comics than ever before -- but the one element that made the comic books so entertaining was Batman's ability as a master detective able to figure out diabolical mysteries.  (Remember, Batman made his debut in 1938 in Detective Comics.)  In this Batman film, as in so many of the previous ones, only his physical prowess is on display.  Batman's allure has always been his mixture of both physical and mental strength.  I enjoyed the film but wanted more. This view maybe heretical to the many Batman and Christopher Nolan fans out there, but I'll grant them that Christian Bale is a suitably dark Dark Knight, and Michael Caine might be best Alfred yet.  Or at least a close tie with the dapper and resourceful Alan Napier, a buckler not just for the 1960s but for the ages.

Night Watch (1973)

The early 1970s  was a rather good time for  suspense films and thrillers. Perhaps  it was the  disappointed utopian  dreams  of the 1960s  that  led so many moviegoers to embrace nightmares  in the theater.  Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, Joseph Mankiewicz's Sleuth, William Friedkin's The Exorcist, and a bevy of chilling horror films from British film studios like Tales from the Crypt and The House That Dripped Blood helped audiences wrestle with their demons as America seem to be sliding from the Great Society into the great abyss.  

In Night Watch the deserted house next door to the elegant house lived in by Ellen Wheeler (Elizabeth Taylor) seems to be dripping blood too. Ellen  insists that she's seen first one, then two  people being brutally stabbed to death in the house next door as she helplessly watched from her  window. Ellen  has recently recovered from  a mental illness , not to mention that the killings occurred during violent thunderstorms which obscured  her view, so naturally her husband and best friend, played respectively by Laurence Harvey and Billy Whitelaw, are a bit skeptical. After all, a thorough search of the house by Scotland Yard has revealed no foul play. Is Ellen telling the truth? Has she imagined the murders?  No spoilers here.

Nearly every critic dismissed Night Watch when it was released in 1973, characterizing the plot as "tired" or "predictable," offering praise only for Elizabeth Taylor's clothes. Even the usually reliable Leonard Maltin  gives  the film only two and a half stars in his Movie Guide.  Nonetheless, all three actors are outstanding in this neglected thriller, though Taylor's histrionics  can become wearying at times.  Though not as witty and sure-footed as thrillers like Sleuth or Deathtrap, the story cunningly leads you up and down various garden paths and then brilliantly fakes you out at the end. It's been awhile since the ending of a movie took me completely by surprise (I guessed one piece of the puzzle early on but missed the big picture) and done it, or shall I say whodonit, in a thoroughly logical way.  A large degree of credit goes to Lucille Fletcher, author of the play the film is based on, as well as the author of the famous radio play and film Sorry, Wrong Number.  She also happened to be Mrs. Bernard Herrmann, composer of course of the scores for Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and countless other classics. One can only imagine what their home life was like.  (They divorced in 1948.) 

Summer Film Roundup, Part 7: Notes on Woody Allen

Café Society (2016)

At first I thought it would be Radio Days about movies instead of radio, but it turned out to be something entirely different. 

I admit that I was disappointed when the film abandoned Hollywood midway and resumed in New York, but then I warmed up to it again. In any case, Woody has never been interested in Hollywood or California (see his caustic portrait of La La Land in Annie Hall) and doesn't really have anything fresh to say about its culture. But I loved all the movie references and settings.

It's one of the most the most ravish-looking films Woody has ever made, thanks in part to the brilliance of the cinematography of Vittoria Storaro, who helped make The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, Reds, and Apocalypse Now look so good.  It was a relief to see Hollywood in the 1930s presented in electric colors instead of the usual sepia, which has become the default setting for any films set in the 1930s.

A somewhat irritating aspect of the film is Jesse Eisenberg's performance. I don't know if it's the way Woody directs the young actors he now casts as his stand-ins, but they always adopt his vocal and physical mannerisms, making you wish that the young Woody Allen was doing it himself and doing it right. Fortunately Eisenberg drops the Woody mannerisms when he achieves success in New York. The Woody persona implies a nebbish and our hero has become a man.

The horse-drawn carriages through Central Park at dawn look beautiful, but haven't we seen all of that in Woody's films so often before? At least they serve the purpose of prompting us to thank God that Mayor DeBlasio wasn't able to get rid of the horse-drawn carriages.

It was good to see Tony Sirico ("Paulie Walnuts" from The Sopranos) again, even briefly.

Woody knows he could make every line in the film a knockout joke as he did in his "earlier, funnier movies," but these days he distributes his gags sparsely throughout his films, almost as rewards to the audience for sitting through the drama.  Yet he has learned to be a very good dramatist.

Funniest line: "It's bad enough he was a murderer but then he becomes a Christian!"

Funniest line that I couldn't believe the character would actually say: "If Jews had an afterlife maybe they would have more customers."

Woody is a liberal Democrat but has no real faith in politics or ideas. He has trouble empathizing with people who are actually motivated by ideas, so the Communist brother-in-law in Café Society is gently mocked, not so much because he's a communist but because he lives his life according to philosophical notions rather than reality. Woody is fascinated with gangsters because they presumably understand reality -- remember the gangster who turns out to be a better playwright than the film's actual playwright in Bullets Over Broadway?)  Unfortunately they put their understanding of human nature into practice in a rather disagreeable way.

Kristen Stewart is superb as the female love interest who embodies both Woody's idealism and cynicism.  You find yourself loving her even after she's ceased to be the person  you loved in the beginning. 

I was delighted by the ending. Woody often ties his stories into a nice little bow with everything too neatly resolved. This film has the kind of ending but I wish more films had the courage to make, where everything is still unresolved and the last shot fades out on a hero filled with regrets.

Not one of the best  of Woody's films but the most satisfying one in recent memory (Blue Jasmine was not so much satisfying as heartwrenching.  I can easily imagine seeing it Café Society again again and enjoying it just as much if not more; I would be a bit more hesitant to see Blue Jasmine again until I'm in a certain mood.)

Who would have guessed when Woody Allen was making  films like Bananas and Sleeper that the biggest influence on him would turn out to be not Groucho Marx but the short stories and plays of Anton Chekhov.  Yet the raffish smile and upraised eyebrows of Groucho are never far below the surface.

Summer Film Roundup, Part 6: Coming to America, Surviving in America

America, America (1963)

A moving and magnificent film that Elia Kazan considered his personal favorite -- not surprising, since it's the tale of how his own Greek family came to America, leaving behind their lives as an oppressed minority in Turkey.  The immigrant story strikes home because it's really the story of so many of our own families. The Turkish Greeks in the film are reminiscent of Eastern European Jews who fled Tsarist Russia for a better life in America.  It's probably one reason why Kazan got along so well with the Jewish playwrights and directors he worked with in New York like Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Lee Strasberg, and countless actors.

Stavros, the young hero of the story played by newcomer Stathis Giallelis, is based on Kazan's own uncle; he's an Odyssean hero (though in The Odyssey, Odysseus is returning home whereas Stavros is seeking a new one.  He allows nothing to divert him from his of reaching America, and there are plenty of diversions along the way.  A lesser man would have given up and returned to his family after being swindled of everything he owns by a smooth-talking  bandit he meets early in his journey; the lesser man would have settled for marriage to the wealthy merchant's homely daughter, Thomna (portrayed by Linda Marsh who's actually a rather attractive young woman, but whose make-up gives her dark eyebrows and swathes of facial hair).  Could I have made the trek to America the way Stavros did? No way.  Could you? Ask yourself that as you watch this compelling film.

I particularly relished Paul Mann's as Aleko Sinnikoglou, Stavros's would-be father-in-law.  After the big meal when he opens his belt and tell Stavros about the life they're going to enjoy together in the years to come, getting old and wealthy and fat, the expression on Stavros's face is not unlike that of Christopher in The Sopranos after his girlfriend tells him she's been cooperating with the FBI and that the two of them can go into the Witness Protection Program, and he sees a disheveled husband and his fat wife and two kids coming out of the supermarket. It's not an appealing vision of the future. But Christopher ultimately chooses death whereas Stavros choose his life. In pursuit of his dream he has a touch of a amorality In him that I think Kazan had as well. I genuinely felt sorry for the poor girl who really loved him and lost him.

Kazan's based this film on his own novel, which was published a year before the film was released.  It's revealing that he wrote the book in a style that's half-fiction, half-screenplay, the same style in which Arthur Miller wrote the book of The Misfits.  I don't think that's a coincidence.  Kazan was somewhat  envious of Miller and Tennessee Williams because he wanted to be a writer himself during all the years he was directing their landmark plays.  I think America, America, the film, is very well written, but I noticed that some of the reviews say that the writing is clunky, which may be the impression given by characters from different cultural environments attempting to communicate with one another.

In her review of the film Pauline Kael confesses that  she finds the actor who plays Stavros uninteresting and unbelievable as someone with the brains and stamina to make the journey to America. She also asserts that despite some memorable scenes, there are embarrassing melodramatic touches, like the Judas figure who betrays Stavros and steals all his money, and the Christ figure at the end who gives up his life for him. I disagree with her on both points.  I suspects Kael just didn't find the affirmative nature of the film hip edgy enough for her taste.  Full throated affirmations always left her uneasy. 

The one aspect of the film that the reviewers unanimously praised is Haskell Wexler's remarkable cinematography. This nearly three-hour epic benefits enormously from his gorgeous black-and-white photography, mostly shot on location.  But Kazan doesn't linger for too long on any of the many striking compositions the way Antonioni would. Kazan is a storyteller who lets you see the image and then quickly moves on.  He later said that Wexler was the most brilliant cinematographer he'd ever worked with, and also a huge pain in the ass

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Virtually all the critics slammed it when it first came out, but their judgment was based on the version butchered and released by MGM to 103 minutes; this leisurely film is in fact immensely enjoyable and it's now-restored length of 124 minutes. (I have a hunch the bordello scene with its casual nudity was the first thing to be cut by the studio back in 1973. Nudity was hot in movies back then, but only when presented as something shocking, not natural and a matter of everyday life.)  Sam Peckinpah's "revisionist westerns" are highly addictive -- he captures the grit and realism of what certainly seems like the authentic Old West so that you can almost smell the leather holsters and feel the floorboards of a bar beneath your feet. No cheap indoor sets to be found here. Critics found the film slow and even boring, yet the deliberate pacing gives you the feeling of what it must really have been like to slowly stalk an outlaw like Billy the Kid, surprisingly well portrayed by Kris Kristofferson. And of course James Coburn is unmatchable as Pat Garrett, along with countless supporting players like Slim Pickens and Barry Sullivan, who are not presented as star cameos but casually allowed to do their thing and then let the film move on. 

Peckinpah knows how to fill a wide screen with endless details while subtly directing your eye to the main action. His style reminds me a bit of Robert Altman, letting you take it all in without highlighting moments or parts of the screen in the old Hollywood manner.  Lots of gun fights and killings, as you would expect in a Peckinpah film (the sights and sound of men being shot off their horses soon feel as expected as characters bursting into song and dance in a musical) but they too seem entirely natural in the American West at that time.  Even the odd friendship between Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett comes across as convincing, since they both started out as outlaws together in the beginning.  The unlikely inclusion of Bob Dylan in a supporting role along with his music on the soundtrack gives the film a 1970s spirit at the same time you feel you're in the late 19th century. It's a crime that this film was overlooked in 1973 and that it's critical and commercial failure helped derail Peckinpah's career.  Peckinpah grew up out west and knew and loved that part of the country; he had no illusions about it, though he may have retained an illusion or two about Hollywood's willingness to allow a director to pursue his personal vision in a mass medium like feature filmmaking. The failure of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid left a bitter mark on Peckinpah, I'm the man who had directed Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969) never made another Western again.