Cinemonkey

Links of Interest: Mike Russell on Screening Rats

One of the more interesting but highly unknown aspects of being a daily movie reviewer is the phenomenon of "screening rats" or individuals who scramble for giveaway tickets to advance screenings dispensed by local radio stations and businesses theoretically to create word of mouth. Karen Karbo, a sports book ghost writer who pulled a Renata Adler at  the Oregonian, called them, "Passholes." Though the screening rats are not unique to Portland, Oregon, within the business it is known that this city's screening rats are among the most pernicious. I stopped going to night time radio tie-in promotional screenings in part to avoid the rats; nearly 30 years of them struck me as enough. They are a particularly angry bunch and travel in packs of 40 or more. In any case, screenings in the last two years have become increasingly disruptive and violent (fist fights have broken out). At this link, Oregonian reviewer Mike Russell discusses on KUFO a recent advance screening of Drag Me to Hell that was especially bad thanks to the rats. 

Links of Interest: My Film Class

I'm teaching a summer class at the Sylvania campus of Portland Community College. It's called Intro to Film Criticism (also know as TA [for Theater Arts] 199E), and runs Monday nights from late June to the end of August. It should be lots of fun, if anyone signs up. To that end, here is a link to PCC's on line catalog. The class will both survey the history of film criticism, and also explore the practical side of film reviewing in this, the digital age. 

Recuillement: Hitchcock Hour's "An Unlocked Window"

Though it's not exactly the Library of Alexandria, one of the virtues of the World Wide Web is its granting of easy access to material heretofore expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to acquire. Though most of the Internet is currently a reliquary of first drafts and otherwise invisible pages such as bank statements, soon it will host in some manner most movies and probably all books and magazines ever published. Thanks to the WWW I was recently able to view a clearly-remembered episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour that I hadn't seen since the year of its original broadcast back when I was a kid and budding Hitchcock aficionado in February of 1965, one that I could recount in minute detail. Recently, I was able to access the show via Hulu.com, the relatively new web site that plays host to programs new and old from NBC and other networks.

 

Though not directed by Hitchcock himself, "An Unlocked Window" perfectly embodies some of the lessons of the director's approach to suspense. The episode recounts the situation of two nurses taking care of an invalid in a spooky old country house during a stormy night while a serial nurse killer is on the loose. After a prelude in which we see the nurse-killer in action, the episode then begins to focus on the situation of two nurses, Stella (Dan Wynter), the caretaker for Glendon Baker, who is confined to an oxygen tent, and Betty Ames (T. C. Jones), the recent nurse assigned to assist Stella. Also in the house are Sam, soon sent off to fetch a new air tank, and his wife Maude (Louise Latham, the demented mother in Hitchcock's Marnie), the alcoholic cook and housekeeper. The bulk of the episode strives to isolate Stella and Betty until the shocking and deeply disturbing climax. The storm kills the electricity, Maude passes out, Baker is disabled and asleep, the telephone ceases to function, and Stella, a rather forgetful person, has neglected to lock a crucial window in the basement. Finally it's just Stella and Betty as a male figure approaches the house in the rain, heading, it seems, towards that unlocked window.

 

Penned by James Bridges, who went on to direct such key '70s films as The Paper Chase and The China Syndrome, and directed by Joseph Newman, noted for such popular works as This Island Earth and a couple of Tarzan movies, the episode is on the surface an "old dark house" tale but is also a chilling example of misdirection. The camera returns obsessively to the window, flapping in the wind, focusing this element in the viewer's mind when the danger is even closer than that. Those who remember the premise of When a Stranger Calls (not to mention Psycho) will grasp the episode's stunning twist.

 

I doubt if any other Hitchcock episode was as scary, indeed if there was another suspense anthology episode as scary. Shot in what looks like the Psycho house, and with music by Bernard Herrmann, the episode emphasizes, thanks to Stanley Cortez's cinematography, shadows, separation, and the slow twisting of the plot's screws. Note particularly the clever use of Gus the cat in the revelation that the window remains open. The misdirection is a trick that Hitchcock himself had used frequently, most notably in the clever moment in The Trouble with Harry when the viewer is made to think that Harry's corpse is hidden in the closet whose door won't stay shut. As often happens in Hitchcock's shows, evil triumphs disturbingly in the end, with only Hitchcock's sign off to inform the viewer how justice "prevailed."

 

"An Unlocked Window" is, of course, not the only Hitchcock Hour episode of interest. The season before offered the episode "Final Escape" which starred Edd "Kooky" Byrnes as Paul Perry, a chain gang inmate seeking yet another way to escape prison, who forms an alliance with the camp's aged alcoholic undertaker, who needs an errand performed on the outside to aid his disabled granddaughter. 

The scheme consists of Byrnes hiding in the coffin of a dead prisoner about to be buried, with the undertaker coming to the cemetery later to dig him up. The last few minutes of the episode put the viewer with Perry in the coffin as he waits with mounting terror for the old man to come, until he happens to see the face of the body whose coffin he shares. 

"Final Escape" was directed by William Witney, an old Hollywood hand who invented, among other things, the choreography of the big screen fistfight. Witney is a brilliant choice by, presumably, producer Richard L. Rawlings, because Witney had a knack for tales of rural hardship. Witney has a fan in Quentin Tarantino, and one wonders if he watched this episode in preparation for the sequence in Kill Bill in which the Bride is interred. In fact, one of the minor characters in the episode, a guard, even looks like Tarantino. One of the interesting facets of the story is the contrast between the contempt the camp commander Captain Tolman (Stephen McNally) shows towards Perry and the compassion he shows toward Doc (Robert Keith), the undertaker. In the end, for the small price of watching a few brief commercials, one can ransack the old Alfred Hitchcock shows for further resonances with contemporary cinema.

 

DVD Review: The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Criterion No. 475)

In 1962, a small time Somerville, Massachusetts, hood named Alexander Federico Petricone, Jr., on the fringes of the fabled Winter Hill gang that was later to be led by Whitey Bulger, vanished from Boston and environs. Nicknamed Bobo, Petricone was the catalyst for a war that broke out between two Irish clans: his girlfriend had been hassled by a member of a rival gang at a party which resulted in the man's beating by Bobo's colleagues, and Bobo was subsequently implicated but never charged in the death of the brother of the now-mangeled pick up artist. Apparently narrowly escaping a stretch in the bucket, Bobo decided that life would be healthier in a sunnier clime. Bobo ended up in Hollywood, where he worked as a bartender and took acting classes from Leonard Nimoy, who advised him to lose the Boston accent.

Whitey and the mob never knew what happened to Bobo until they went to see The Godfather in March, 1972, where Bobo suddenly appeared on the screen in the form of Vegas kingpin Moe Green. Bobo was now known as Alex Rocco, with a valid career as a Hollywood character actor. Bobo made a return visit to Boston shortly thereafter in the role of Jimmy Scalise, the crafty leader of a bank robbery crew in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the Casablanca of underworld movies.

Eddie "Fingers" Coyle (Robert Mitchum), of course, has no friends. These "friends" include Dillon (Peter Boyle), ostensibly a bartender, Dave Foley (Richard Jordan), a Federal agent, Jimmy Scalise (Rocco), a bank robber with a need for untraceable guns, and Jackie Brown (Stephen Keats), the gun peddler Eddie contacts to fetch Scalise's weapons, a wagon wheel of betrayers and schemers. It's like Casablanca because it was directed efficiently by a competent studio hand from a good, quotable script and with access to a wealth of character actors to colorize the proceedings (and at least one with some criminal ties that lent authenticity), and with a actor of stature at the center around whom a cult had developed. It is also paradoxically like La Ronde, in that it is a series of charged duologue encounters in which the participants don't know the full weight of what the other is doing. Coyle meets Brown, the gun dealer, who in turn meets his source, while Coyle in a bar meets bartender Dillon, who goes on to hook up with Foley, and so on, until a horrible, unstated web of malice is woven. The premise of the story is that Scalise holds a bank president's family hostage while he helps the crew rob his bank (the criminal premise was later borrowed Barry Levinson's heist film Bandits, though it too is ostensibly based on a real case), but the raison d'etre is the underworld gift for gab, and how talk is a fencing match between opponents with different agenda.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle was made at a time when all crime films seemed to have Dave Grusin scores, when mainstream movies embraced a real world of previously unseen cruminess (Fat City and The Last Detail are other examples), a world of strip mall parking lots polka-doted with oil stains, cramped tacky trailers, anonymous functional official buildings, decrepit bars the size of a dirigible hanger, denuded train stations, and sports arenas filled with drunken, hollering morons thirsting for blood. It's not a noir really, more a film soleil, but it has the inexorable doom that drenches most noir artifacts.

At the center is Mitchum, the ultimate noir actor at the far tail end of the genre. Though he got great reviews for his performance at the time, he's in less than half the movie, and frankly not particularly good, though here it doesn't matter because the film is an ensemble piece. Mitchum's delivery was always rather lackadaisical. Like other famous screen presences such as Gary Cooper he couldn't talk all that convincingly. Instead, Mitchum was a great physical presence, the perfect form to be crafted by the great stylists, lighting men, cameramen, and makeup artists of the era. His big doughy broad sensual face, part boxer and part cartoon character, was a noir theme unto itself. Mitchum remains one of the great noirteurs because his tragic dense narcissism tilted otherwise conventional mystery stories (and the occasional western, such as Pursued) toward noir in the shadow of his tragic sense of life. Noir is a genre with great practitioners but no geniuses, outside of the odd loner genius such as an Orson Welles who drops in on holiday from other forms of film to mark noir with a new and enriching visual vocabulary. Noir is a true group effort where everyone -- writer, director, DP, star, character actor, composer -- contributes equally. It's a genre that can't tolerate individual excellence, but where mediocre or common talents can appear to be grander than they are in an overall tableau of focused dedication.

Kent Jones's essay about The Friends of Eddie Coyle, included in the booklet that comes in the box, captures perfectly all the film's diverse yet cohesive elements: its look, its array of character actors all so essential to '70s crime films (and consequently essential to the population of subsequent films by Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet), the lightly likable skills of director Peter Yates (the director of Breaking Away, The Dresser, and Bullit, who was a disciple of J. Lee Thompson, Guy Hamilton, and Tony Richardson), the iconic presence of Robert Mitchum, the film's source in the novel by high profile lawyer George V. Higgins, and the book and film's subsequent influence on Quentin Tarantino (the only person whom Mr. Jones shorts is the controversial Paul Monash, the film's producer and screenwriter, who was famous for the TV series Peyton Place and for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and De Palma's Carrie on the big screen).

It's difficult to imagine such a sedate film being made for the big screen by a major studio today, a film that is both quietly internal and all on the surface at the same time. When Foley arrests some miscreants, they take the situation with serene equinimity. If the film were made today, the scene would have been the gateway to a 15-minute chase scene full of pyrotechnics, gunfire, imaginative camera angles, and incoherent editing. In fact, there were a few more action scenes that were shot but cut, bearing only a ghostly presence on the disc in a photo gallery. They include a shoot out between robbers and Federal agents, and more details about Jackie Brown's arrest, plus a scene of Scalise beating his airline stewardess girlfriend and the aftermath when she is pulled over by police. For whatever reason, Yates cut them out, reducing the "action" to one shooting in a bank, a 30-second car chase, and the pitiless mob execution of a central character, soon forgotten as life carries on.

Long out of circulation (the film wasn't even on VHS), The Friends of Eddie Coyle finally comes to DVD thanks to the Criterion Collection. The single-sided, dual layered disc (No. 475, paired with another cult crime melodrama, Stephen Frears's The Hit, to be reviewed here later), has modest but effective supplements. Besides the photo gallery, there is a congenial if occasionally repetitious audio commentary track by the aged Yates, whose account of the film's happy and event-free making accords with those found in various books and biographies. Jones's essay appears in a 46-page booklet that also includes cast and crew, transfer information, chapter titles, and excepts from a fabulous profile by Grover Lewis of Mitchum written for Rolling Stone from the set of the film. Lewis is the great, unheralded New Journalism practitioner and the profile is hilarious, capturing the loquacious obscurities of Mitchum's quasi drunken monologues as well as the funny contrast between the jauntily inventive Boyle and the intellectual Jordan. A "best of" volume of Lewis's pieces is due out later this year.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle hits on the street on Tuesday, May 19, 2009, retailing for $29.95, or soon thereafter available via NetFlix or at a video store near you.

Movie Review: A Wink and a Smile

When did audiences conclude that applauding wasn't enough?

There was a time when a group of people signified their appreciation for a public performance by clapping their hands together. At an opera, someone might cry out "Bravo," or at a play "Author!," but these were socially sanctioned deviations from the standard demure clapping. But then, after many centuries, something happened, possibly in the mid-'70s. Then, stoned people in parks began to howl like wolves and emit rebel yells. This outré form of self-expression gravitated to rock concerts, and in recent years, audiences now treat all public experiences as if they are rock shows. Today's audiences, as heard on The Tonight Show, Colbert, The Daily Show, Bill Maher, and nearly every other show, don't just applaud, they also holler, scream, yell rebelliously, caterwaul, whoop, and hoot. Comical dialogue balloons hang over today's television screens like so much apocalyptic rain. Worse, people orgasmically smash their palms and stretch their larynxes at the start of a performance, before they even know what they are getting. It's all curious and vexing, and for a more extensive account and explanation, I await the book,  A Natural History of Approval.

This meditation on applause comes by way of a screening of A Wink and a Smile, a documentary about the new burlesque movement. The main character is Indigo Blue, an ex-stripper and now Seattle-based burlesque performer and teacher. Ms. Blue praisefully discusses numerous fellow professional burlesquiennes, and escorts the viewer through a six-week course of her class, held in the fall of 2007, which culminates in a performance by her students. Each excerpt of a public performance is accompanied by the usual whooping and screeching by people who are about to see something, as if pre-approval is a mandatory entrance fee.

The irritating habits of Northwest audiences aside, the documentary is a thorough and easeful account of who might want to be a burlesque performer and why. If the film is lacking in historically informative cinematic clips of burlesque performers past, it more than makes up for it the collective honesty of the students and the articulate calm of Ms. Blue herself. The fluffy, sequined girlishness of this form of burlesque may not be to everyone's taste, but the pro dancers confound expectations with the variety of their acts, including one dancer who turns herself into a Picasso painting before your eyes.

Director Deirdre Allen Timmons is respectful of her subjects without shying away from their eccentricities, and the documentary is well edited. Music is provided by Northwest staples Pink Martini and Three Legged Torso among others.

 

A Wink and a Smile screens at the Hollywood Theater, May 9 through 14.