"Whats" in the Movies

What do you want to do, Marty? I don’t know. What do you want to do?

What are you doing in my closet, Reggie?  I can explain everything.

What’s it all about, Alfie? Life's too short, init?

What’s happening? I was just telling the boys here to lay low till the heat’s off.

What’s the story, Frank?

What’s a guy to do? I bought you a new hat, didn’t I?
What's that fly doing in my soup, waiter? I believe it's the backstroke, sir.

What’s the big idea? Nothing, boss, I’m just saying.

What do you think you’re doing? Put down that gun. The place is surrounded.

What was that all about? Forget about it. Make like you weren’t here.

What I want to know is how you knew he was stabbed with a kitchen knife.
What's with the violin case? Shut up and keep driving.

What’s a classy dame like you doing in a joint like this?

What’s good today, Mabel, if the lox ain’t fresh, the coffee’s bitter and the hash-browns are overdone?
What's for dinner? There's leftover spaghetti in the fridge. It's bowling night for me.

What will you have, Mac? The usual and make it a double.

What do you mean, I’m fired? I’ve worked here for 37 years. My father built this place.

What a day for a daydream.

What are you going to do when we get home? Me, I’m going to open me up a deli in Brooklyn.

What can you tell us about the investigation, Senator? Just what I read in the newspapers, boys.

What you're about to hear from the defendant is a pack of lies.

What happens in Vegas….you shouldn’t know from.

What do you want from my life? I got a wife and 2 kids.

What if the experimental drug doesn’t work, doc? Then what? What if it does?

What’s it to you? You got a problem?

What was that? I didn’t hear anything. Listen, there’s a scratchy sound coming from behind this wall.
What are you in for, Pops? Got five years for recording a Netflix disc.

What happens to us in this crazy world doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.
Someday, my son, this will be all be yours. What, the curtains?

Suddenly Nothing Happened

And that’s not a bad thing. In the Argentinian-Brazilian film, Found Memories, seemingly little action takes place. If your taste in movies runs toward a strong narrative with fast-paced plot twists do not see this movie. However if you want to sink into a life/death, meditative visual experience of a few people in a rural Brazilian town it is one not to miss. Glacial pacing and repetitive scenes transport the viewer into the spatial and temporal life of the town folks. The indoor scenes, in particular, have the feel of stepping inside a Rembrandt painting. One wants to hit the pause button to hold the image. Many could stand alone as museum pieces; in context they are even stronger.

The setting is a ghost town occupied by near-ghosts, elderly folks, who have forgotten how to die. The gate to the cemetery is locked. The village café owner says he is not unhappy enough to be dead. Their existence is simple, reverent and communal. Madalena, well on in years, is shown kneading the dough for bread each morning and carrying it in a basket along railroad track almost grown over from disuse. Part of the daily ritual is her insistence to arrange the loaves on the shelf of Antonio, the shop owner, followed by his immediate removal of the bread. The playful jockeying between the two closely resembles affection. He then makes coffee which they take outside with a roll. It has the feel of a secular communion, wine and wafer.

The town folk are clearly living in the past, holding fast to memories of their loves and regrets as if time has been halted. Madalena writes nightly letters saving her emotions for her dead husband. When a young photographer arrives routines are hardly ruffled, so quietly is her presence registered. Almost imperceptibly she insinuates herself into Madalena’s household. She is observant of her ways and gradually gains her full trust. At one point she remarks, I’ve never heard so much silence. The girl with the camera might be seen as a stand-in for the director of the movie. The aged Magdalena’s old photos seem to merge with the recent ones developed by the character of the young woman. Out of this linkage a conflation of the two worlds emerges as well as a bond between them. When the time comes, Rita, the young woman is asked to assume the baking of bread which has taken on a spiritual dimension. 

The original Portuguese title translates to, Stories That Exist Only When Remembered, which give the film a faintly surrealistic tone. More impactful than the memories is the rhythm of quotidian lives captured by the filmmaker. She reminds us of the humanity beneath the surface of what first seems like withered lives.

Another art film recently watched is the French movie, The Artist and His Model. It is set in occupied France, 1943, outside a small town near the Spanish border. Art transcends the historical moment in this finely nuanced story. As in the aforementioned South American movie a young woman enters the life of the protagonist and is a catalyst for quietly profound change. We witness the slow process of the sculptor finding his grand subject in the particular form of his model. The camera pans reverently over the contours of her body exploring the light and shadows as only black and white film can do.

I can think of no other film which traces, as a felt experience, the interior movement of an artist as he exceeds his own constraints and breaks into new consciousness. It is the act of discovery; the painstaking extrusion through his material as it comes to life. The grand form is realized not from any classic pose but comes directly out of the raw emotion from the life situation of the model.

The nothing that happens to ordinary people is teeming with life.

Both these films have become available for an American audience thanks to Netflix streaming. It calls attention to the dearth of U.S. art films and the vibrant life of cinema around the world.

To Have and Have Not

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway published what even he called his, worst book. Critics agreed. It was a hodge-podge of short stories and a novella pasted together. He had lost his way after Farewell to Arms. Disappointing as the novel was you have to admire the title.

The name was about all that remained when Hollywood got through with it in 1944. Cuba, the setting in the book, became Martinique, under control of the Vichy government. Warner Brothers’ Howard Hawks tried to reincarnate Bogart’s Rick from Casablanca and give it a WW II twist. After all Casablanca was cash in the bank. In this version Bogey runs a small fishing boat in the Caribbean. The studio enlisted Hemingway’s rival, William Faulkner, to weigh in on the script and cast Hoagy Carmichael at the piano to play it again, Sam like Dooley Wilson to whom it was never quite said in the first place. The result owed more to Casablanca than Hemingway’s novel but was far more than a hill of beans.

The most memorable moments were Bogey’s liaison with Lauren Bacall. She was a sultry 19 year-old model from the Bronx who taught 45 year-old Bogart how to whistle. Just put your lips together and blow, became the most enduring line from the movie. They sizzled on screen and off in marriage till in death did he part in 1957.

The title had a double meaning or so it seems to me. The clear intention was to draw a distinction between the filthy rich and the great unwashed. However if an individual is to both have and have not anything it strikes me that it gets to a more metaphysical plane. To have achieved a measure of success or security is an illusory state which usually begs for more. You have it and you don’t. It’s never quite enough.

In any case the Haves and Have-Nots might be a caption for our times. The gap grows wider abetted by the High Court, stoked by Congress and fueled by Wall St. The top 1% own 40% of our country’s wealth while the bottom 80% own just 7%. The disparity has never been greater. The wealth of the Walton (Walmart) family alone is equal to the bottom 40% (140 million) Americans.

The numbers are numbing and headed south. They only hint at the human toll. The security and privilege that comes with wealth translates into political power. This insures continued domination of our policies and instruments of decision-making. Middle class stagnation can lead to a loss of personal empowerment. Many Americans have grown dispirited, alienated and cynical which removes them further from the agencies of possible change. The landscape of our youth exists only in the rear-view mirror. We have witnessed the slow collapse and disappearance of family farms, factories, downtown stores and inner cities. Morals have been bent so that greed is admired and with it corruption is a normal way of doing business, particularly in Washington.

Bogart seemed to know what was coming. The hard-boiled cynic finds his moral compass joining with the cause of the French Resistance. How far has our ship of state strayed? Seventy years later we have richer Haves and far more Have-Nots.

This country has been through many storms. Every generation or two we seem to experience a sea change of a sort. Yet out of the wreckage something new and unforeseen emerges. As Wallace Stevens wrote, There is a substance in us that prevails.

Populism

Frank Capra would have had a birthday last week if he hadn’t died in 1991 at age 94. Some saw his feel-good movies as Capra-corn. His first big hit was the 1934 film, It Happened One Night, which walked away with five Oscars. He is probably best-known today for his box office failure in 1947, It’s A Wonderful Life. I was a mere slip of a tot when his most telling movies came out from 1936-1941. The films are, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe. All deal with a nobody becoming a somebody, however briefly. They are stories of honest Everyman confronting the corrupt and devious engines of Power, particularly banks, media and political office.

In each of these films the people, the collective, are a central character. They vacillate from hard-working, honest and ultimately wise to a mindless mob. Capra was something of a closet preacher with his populist exhortations, delivered perfectly by a gulping, stumbling, bumbling Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper. At issue was democracy, itself.

Director/actor John Cassavetes (of all people) praised him with these words, Maybe there really wasn’t an America, it was only Frank Capra. He created an idealized myth of small town America, so persuasive that even city dwellers adapted that vision as their own. Tragedy would be no more than a temporary state in this fabulist narrative.

Puncturing the Capra model is too easy but looking back at these movie themes I’m struck by how they speak of those times when we as a nation confronted the near-wreckage of Capitalism and the threat of Fascism. Capra took on these forces, albeit simplistically and sentimentally, but he caught the Zeitgeist.

The pulse of the people has always been the great enigma of our political system. Political party operatives have tried to manipulate it, pander to it, capture people's fears and tap into their aspirations. What were the masses in Capra’s day (132 million) are now the uber-masses (311 million), a polyglot of races with gaps in generations and religions, not to mention class divisions and technological wizardry offering challenges never before encountered.

The greater the connectivity the more pronounced are the centrifugal forces pulling us apart. It would be hard to imagine a John Doe today speaking for everybody but I miss Capra with his vision of our better selves. He thought in terms of a national character that we may have thrown out with the bathwater.

The latest creation of Karl Rove is a Romney commercial that lies in every syllable of every sentence. It is a masterpiece of mendacity which might have found a place in a Capra film with Edward Arnold playing Rove. Through words and images it suggests that Obama is responsible for outrageous spending, foreclosures, high taxes, unprecedented student loans and appeasement abroad. The opposite is true. He might just as well have thrown in undercooked spaghetti and overdue library books.

The Populist movement in our history has ranged from a farmer-labor coalition to antiwar students to state-rights bigots to the current tea-partiers whose distrust of government has been tapped and incited even when that is the very institution whose benefits are the one thing they can depend upon; a classic example of the demotic underside where anger has been subverted through repetitive deceit. If this were a Capra movie they’d wake up in the last reel. Where is Jean Arthur or Barbara Stanwyck to rouse them and Cooper or Stewart to stop them from shooting themselves in the foot til they haven't a leg to stand on?

Once, Twice, Thrice Upon A Time

Tell me a story, Daddy.

I find a parking spot, grab a shopping cart and walk into the supermarket. Then I realize I forgot my canvas bags. I return to the car and start back again when I’m approached by a man waving a petition and then …….

The latest film from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, was the Grand Prix winner at Cannes in 2011 and is a masterpiece of cinematic story-telling. The first forty minutes are excruciatingly slow. A stream of lights winding along at night in desolate, stark country looks like a train in the long shot but as the camera moves closer we see there are three vehicles. The lead car contains a police commissioner and another officer, the driver, a coroner, and a disheveled man. They stop and get out. In the second car are men with shovels and the prosecutor. The third is a military jeep.

Is it here?
Yes, I think here.
Where? Where?
No, not here.

The man under duress is a prisoner who has killed someone and buried the body. Again and again they stop, look and go on. It happens in what seems like real time. We are annoyed, irritated, even bored just as the officials are bored and the way life is boring between the telling points. The director is most concerned with what goes on in those between moments when the characters are so filled with tedium they start to reveal their stories. Interests shifts to the back-stories of the police chief, lawyer and doctor.

Everybody has a story. The man with the petition is asking people, Are you a registered voter? Three out of four say, No. I’m thinking, No wonder we ended up with Bush and the Tea Party. This is Santa Monica, not Bakersfield. Doesn’t anyone care?.............but that’s another story.

The best films tell their story with the camera. They give us fragments. They make demands on us. They digress us, draw us in with images, with tones of shadow and light, close-ups and wide angle shots. Ambient noises are heard. They tell it with pauses and elisions. We experience what is revealed or concealed as if through a window in the rain or are reminded of life’s randomness by the trace of an apple as it falls from a tree and rolls into a stream. We are not told in so many words.

The newspapers say that Obama has lost his narrative as if he misplaced it or fumbled the ball, as if there is only one narrative per person. We contain multitudes, Whitman proclaimed, in his barbaric yawp. People seem to elect the best story. Will it be a fable that puts them to sleep or a tale of awakening; words that pander to dreams deferred or a narrative that urges them to think beyond their fears and cynicism.

The lives in this movie are marked by regret, ennui and angst with a closing shot as the camera moves in and lingers on a face in transformation in which the brutal finding of science yields to a more humane version of the truth. Through cinema art, like any other, we come closer to our true selves. Yet there is an existential lawlessness at the center of human life, something buried perhaps, pulling apart our own stories even as we make them cohere.

Films From the Near-East

We’ve been watching quite a few movies lately coming out of Turkey and Iran. Each in its own way might start a conversation about the mores of the culture as well as the sensibility of the filmmakers. My favorite is Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director whose still photography is striking. I have not yet seen his latest work, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia. The three films I want to talk about each offer windows into the daily lives of ordinary people and as such are most welcomed by Western eyes.

Certain behaviors are seen as universal such as sibling rivalry, coming of age and family conflicts surrounding care for the elderly. Other issues, somewhat more alien to us, grow out of gender politics and the degree that Muslim orthodoxy impacts their lives. Theocracy and the secular pull in opposing directions along with tradition and modernity.

In Abdullah Oguz’, Bliss, a young woman from a remote village is raped and therefore shamed as being a seducer. She is told to hang herself. When she refuses she is sent off to Istanbul with a cousin who is charged with throwing her off the train. He cannot. In fact he finds his own humanity over the course of their journey dodging family members. The film challenges the ancient, male-chauvinist practice, as it delineates the evolution of justice in the big city contrasted with the barbaric ways of Turkey’s countryside.

The Oscar-winning, Separation, by Kirnia Hosseini, might easily be enacted in many American cities which is why it found a large audience in the U.S. Family discord, a daughter’s divided loyalty, her confrontation with moral relativism, care for an infirm grandparent, single-parenting, outside help and the weight of the Koran… all come together in an artful confluence.

In the Turkish film, Times and Winds, written and directed by Reha Erdem, the focus is on three families in a small, rural village, each with children in early adolescence. Life is hard, goat-herding on rugged, un-arable land. The presence of Nature overwhelms, cinematically, with its long shots of the single mosque, marking the place against the vast landscape of wind, boulders and a shifting sky. The effect is to diminish individuality.

The children are lost between the urge of hormones and their place in the lineage of their prescribed life to-be. One boy fantasizes about ways of killing his father but this and all his yearnings will be crushed. The future of the children is foretold. Their identity is to be subsumed by the forces that have prevailed for a millennium. Authority rests with a town council, all male, and trickles down by a hierarchy from grandfather to father to son.

The film is punctuated by the headings, Night, Evening, Afternoon and Morning, the calls to prayer, in that order, which suggests that time moves back toward beginnings. Both the opening and closing scenes show a boy faced with his Imam father’s dying, running off to enlist another villager to call for prayer. Everyone is replaceable; continuity assured.

All these and other such films seem to me bold acts, making visible the shadowy lives of a struggling people. The artistry is evident, told metaphorically yet unsparingly. Turkey has always been a gateway between the Western and Eastern worlds, between two disparate religions and a thousand years of progress.

When an old order begins to die it becomes an art form, seen in new light. Perhaps this kind of film-making will allow us to see the universality of their human relationships; to recognize their family challenges as our own. At the same time one hopes these images and narratives might inspire change within their own borders.

Walkin and Talkin

A few movie lines from about forty years ago say it all and they were both improvised ...

I’m walkin here, I’m walkin.

You talkin to me?

Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy asserts his right of way across Times Square. Dustin Hoffman is little man, the sleaze and scum of humanity but he is a man taking his place against the machine, stopping life’s traffic. He is the Chinese dissident who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananman Square. He might be a tree-hugger or an occupier holding his ground against Wall St.

Travis Bickle, the Vietnam vet is damaged goods in Taxi Driver. He practices in front of a mirror rehearsing for a confrontation with his hands and his mouth. It wasn’t in the script. De Niro had heard it somewhere. We’ve all heard and maybe said it but not the way he did. Since then those words have found there way into dozens of movies and are immediately recognizable.

Powerlessness and defiance are universals. Another way of saying, fuck you. Peter Finch shouted out the window in Network, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. As I recall in the movie he was mad as hell about the TV rating system which ranked his show down on the list. Paddy Chayefsky voiced his outrage that News programs became entertainment, to juice up their Neilson numbers. However the slogan spread to Everyman, mad as hell about their crushed dreams, about conformity or some inchoate spark gone out.

The other iconic phrase which struck a chord in our collective psyche was said by Marlon Brando in the Godfather. I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse. What better sums up concealed muscle, implicit power, the way Congressman are made an offer from corporate lobbyists…….. vote as you are told or you’ll be back collecting shopping carts in the parking lot.

Pop culture insinuates itself in our vocabulary as a common tongue. It is both a huge megaphone and oversized ear. We are walkin here and we’re mad as hell. At the same time we are impotent, listening close how to gain power, how to make people an offer they can’t refuse. Translate all that to politics and you have the Tea Party, Mad Hatters but not quite sure what the hell they are mad about. Any abstraction will do… government, immigrants, people of color, people who don’t need a church to live a moral life.

The most telling scene in Network occurs when Ned Beatty, chief executive of the conglomerate that owns the station, calls Peter Finch into the boardroom and explains how the world really works. He is told that he’s meddled with the primal forces of Nature, that he has howled about democracy and America and there is no such thing as democracy or an America. There is only I.B.M. and AT &T and Exxon etc… only an international system of currency. At the end of the scene Finch is heard to say, I have seen the face of God. We may be doomed but we’re still walkin and talkin.

Pauline Kael- Lights Out

I have always had a fondness for the New Yorker magazine and that’s why I don’t dare subscribe. I’d be spending my retirement reading it cover to cover. As it is, I depend on doctor’s and dentist’s waiting rooms and the kindness of my strange friends.

I first check out the week’s lineup of writers, the pages of poetry and movie reviews. Up until 1991 the reviewer was Pauline Kael who held that post for 23 years. When she took over full-time it coincided with a creative burst in Hollywood as well as a general social upheaval.

She was a tough cookie who had a lover’s quarrel with movies. If I loved a film and she did too I felt ennobled. If she turned against a movie she dipped her pen in vitriol and damned it like a lover scorned.

She never watched it more than once. I admired that because it demonstrated her non-analytical approach. She responded intuitively and trusted her instincts on an emotional and sensory level. Kael’s take on a film was highly anticipated and often surprising. I wondered from where it sprung.

She was drawn to trashy movies as a way in to the American psyche. It seemed as if she tried to align herself with the mass audience and articulate what they felt and often scold them for being gullible. She understood the appeal of certain Depression era gangster films for their identification as folk heroes and by extension embraced Bonnie & Clyde in 1967. The iconic last scene, done in slow-mo, was like an opera of violence. Yet Kael denounced the violence of Clockwork Orange and the Clint Eastwood movies for de-sensitizing the public. Consistency was not her strong suit.

The New Journalism of the sixties ushered in by Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese was a perfect fit for Pauline Kael. She was part of each review, what she brought to the theater with her and the immediacy of her experience. Her passion lent a certain authenticity to her writing whether or not one agreed or took issue. When she attacked a project she couldn’t fathom why the person under assault took offense because she didn’t intend it personally. She disowned her loose tongue, which became even looser with a few drinks.

When she railed against Terrence Malick’s first film, Badlands, she was called into her editor, William Shawn’s office. He told her that Malick was like a son to him. She replied, Tough shit, Bill. Another infamous blurt occurred when she was a guest along with Ginger Rogers on radio. When Rogers related how her agent had discouraged her from accepting her role in, Kitty Foyle, which won her an Oscar in 1940, Kael responded that her agent was right.

It would be difficult to imagine anyone agreeing with Pauline Kael across the board. She was far too idiosyncratic. However she had her acolytes who admired her commitment to filmmaking and the art form she helped create in her erudite reviews. She was more than a movie reviewer. She was, in part, a social commentator who found a vital sign in the popular art of cinema; a portal into contemporary consciousness. When The Godfather came out she saw it as a tragic reality of our times, the nightmare of American capitalism.

She wrote about the mistreatment of women as depicted in Sam Peckinpaugh's, Straw Dogs. She also detected a whiff of fascism in the trend which assumed a primal violence inherent in all of us. It seemed to me she tried, in vain, to reconcile the thrust of emergent filmmakers widening our imagination with the pernicious forces of exploitation movies and the drift toward vacuous values and lawlessness in American life. She raised the low art to an estimable place, as a window into our ways of seeing, how the new technologies had altered our perceptions and numbed our sensibilities.

Anyone interested in her life story will be fascinated by Brian Kellow's biography, Pauline Kael.

Oscar Night

My problem with the Academy Awards is there are too many losers, not only among the nominated but also the worthy ones which didn’t make the cut. Think of all the acceptances speeches we’ll never hear. Meryl Streep must have a file full of crumpled paper.

The very idea of artists competing for a prize makes no sense to me. Why bestow the honor to one and relegate the others to an inferior position? Artistry can not be quantified. Each script asks for its own stretch and exploration of character, some histrionic, some more inner, relying on facial expression, pauses in delivery and gesture. It’s almost like comparing a cleanup hitter to a power forward, or a poet to a novelist to an essayist. Furthermore, acting is part of an ensemble. The players bounce off each other just as quarterbacks require good linemen and execution by receivers.

How many votes does hype buy? Or is there a Romney effect in which an excess creates a negative vibe? Winners and losers are the result of a balanced campaign with measured amounts of humility and ego, not unlike our presidential election. Except November’s outcome will have real consequences far beyond added revenue for studios.

Based upon the amount of good ink he is receiving it appears that George Clooney and his picture will be the designated winners this year. Clooney is one of my favorite people. I like his politics and the way he puts his money and celebrity where his passions lie. And I like his temperament, how he is contained within himself. However as an actor I think he has a rather limited range; as Dorothy Parker said of Kathryn Hepburn, from A to B. I can imagine that even he knows he does not deserve to win the Oscar this year, nor does his picture, Descendants, but he should get recognition as the Mensch of Hollywood.

Without a doubt, one of the most layered and provocative foreign films of 2011, was the Czech movie, Kawasaki’s Rose. Yet it is not in contention. One wonders what pressures the chosen are under to make their choices. How much weight is assigned to marketplace and how much to the art of cinema? Here is a story of moral ambiguity dealing with the erasure and restoration of collective memory. It warrants a wide distribution. Shame on the Academy for overlooking it.

The expanded list of best picture category is welcomed. In my mind every one should be honored and left at that. We’d at least get to hear all those acceptance speeches. Of course this would ensure a few million fewer viewers and ruin the occasion for Las Vegas which salivates over the betting revenue.

Americans love winners and losers, as befits a nation with the world’s largest economy and military. Might this be a function of our self-declared exceptionalism and arbiter of good taste? Certain countries have called it, cultural imperialism. For almost a century Hollywood has been exporting our values from the dream factory, a beacon to some people and a threat to others.

In ten days I’ll be among the billion viewers, world-wide, enjoying Billy Crystal’s wit, the occasional meaningful reference, amid all the fuss and glam, trying to recall who and what won last year.

Spencer and Sam

In my delirium I like to fuse my father, Sam, with Spencer Tracy. They looked alike, at least to my eyes, and since nobody had ever seen them together they might as well be the same person. Same body-type, same equanimity and deliberate nature. Tracy lived with Hepburn all those years but I can’t bend my mind into making her my mother or imagine Spencer living with my Mom.

As we now know, Tracy’s on-screen calm and assured delivery masked an inner turbulence. His drunken binges and infidelities went along with the guilt he felt over the congenital deafness of his son, John. Perhaps the only peace he found was in front of the camera. My father dealt with his grand-daughter’s deafness in stride but who knows what suffering he repressed. Perhaps it was a wounded decency they both possessed.

Their lives intersected only after Spencer Tracy’s death. In 1964 my daughter, Janice, attended the John Tracy Clinic program which was started and presided over by Spencer’s wife, Louise Tracy, who I was privileged to meet as well as his son, John. In 1968, at Janice’s graduation ceremony, my father was also introduced to them.

It isn’t the early Tracy of Father Flanagan or Captains Courageous which captivated me, though I was beginning to see him playing my father as Thomas Edison. I could barely imagine Sam being Spencer in the nine Hepburn films, except for, The Keeper of the Flame written by Donald Ogden Stewart, later blacklisted. In it Tracy spoke with an inner conviction I also attribute to my father, patient but resolute. He plays a persistent journalist who uncovers the fascist activities of a wealthy industrialist. In 1945 there was still a large audience for such themes, seen as an extension of WW II.

By 1950 he was cast in roles, giving away daughters, starting with Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride. He also parented Jean Simmons which would have granted me two beautiful sisters.

It was in his later movies that the two of them became one. That was my Dad as the Chief Justice at Nuremberg, Darrow in the Scopes trial and giving Ernest Borgnine and Robert Ryan a bad day at Black Rock. In the latter, Sam/Spencer wins the day with one arm missing. Also missing was any bluster or weaponry. A triumph of dry and tough stoicism. The film was not only an attempt to redress the stain of Japanese internment but also an allegory of the days of the black list and complicity of a passive community (society).

Neither Sam nor Spencer ever got in their own way. Tracy once said that acting was simply learning your lines and not bumping into the furniture. His silences spoke paragraphs.

My father, in his quiet integrity, could command attention with a look of displeasure or convey love with his eyes. Like Tracy he made a word feel as powerful as a gesture. If he felt ferocity it was self-contained. He never abused the furniture or anyone in the room. There was a grace in him as he presided in his drug store; the way he received anxious patients, took in their alarm, even grief, and shared their troubles, unburdening them.

As an actor Spencer Tracy was always himself; nothing more nor less. He displayed a moral center that flowed organically, unforced and unadorned with decibels or religiosity. His model of a hero has been largely replaced today by a noisier, self-congratulatory kind; telling of our times.

It is remarkable how a man could find his true self slipping into the skin of the characters he embodied. His persona on screen revealed a man with indomitable integrity, what was unattainable in his flawed real life. If his Catholicism confirmed his sins and left him without absolution, he became his idealized self only in his film roles.

I have projected these heroic traits onto my father as part of my mythos. In my revisionist history I can see Sam at our front door questioned by two FBI agents. They know of his membership in the Communist Party, the Tuesday night meetings, his subscription to the Daily Worker. They want names. He blocks their passage into our apartment, refuses to betray anyone. He is Spencer Tracy at Black Rock, taller than ever before. He is the Chief Judge at Nuremberg dispensing justice. He is Darrow defending free speech. I claim that wind as my inheritance.

Golden Tarnished Globe

Who are these stars and where was I when they became household names? I kept waiting for Judy Garland (still dead) or Mickey Rooney (still alive) to put on a show?

Should I really care which films, series, mini-series and maxi-series are admired by the foreign press in Albania or Tasmania? Do the folks living in those places even care?

Was it noteworthy that The King's Speech, about British royalty, got nosed out by the American royalty of San Jose? The former is yesterday's news and the winner is today's. I can only surmise that this clandestine group of foreign journalists were teenagers ten years ago.

The Golden Globe awards are the product of about eighty people, as opposed to 6,000 in the Academy. Their identity is well-guarded. According to some detractors the membership knows more about hors d'oeurves than auteurs. Few of them are actually film critics or in any creative art. Neither Le Monde, the British Guardian or Haaretz are represented. Many are free-lancers for mostly obscure publications. Only four articles per year are required of them.

In a sense both films were about media, understandably a favorite topic of other media. Radio was the new-fangled communication of the thirties. Imagine being His Majesty with a speech defect and Henry Higgins nowhere in sight. Hitler had no trouble spitting and screaming into the microphone. FDR mastered it to better use as did Ma Perkins, the Lone Ranger and Sen. Claghorn; even the Shadow and Charlie McCarthy got the handle.

Fortunately for stutterers Facebook knows no such obstacles. Suddenly you realize you have 400 close friends whom you wouldn't recognize if you met them in an elevator. You can now tell the world whether your spaghetti and meatball measures up, bite by bite.

The other movie which came away with laurels was The Kids Are Alright which was produced by the husband of the daughter of my dear college friend and his wife .....along with 35 other people. I found it a very well-acted story of a lesbian couple with children via sperm donation. I thought Mark Ruffulo stole the show as the nuanced donor character. Another film very Now which, come to think of it, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney couldn't have managed.

The Golden Globes are a triumph of hype over art. Nothing new about that but at least the Academy Awards have a broader voting base with industry people weighing in. Hollywood loves to celebrate itself and millions of us tune in to the party. Awards, lists, winners all help us to bring the illusion of order on an otherwise messy life.

Sequels, Prequels and Re-Makes

Ever since the New Testament, sequels have been problematical. (Right away I'm getting myself in trouble). However as testaments go, this was arguably the most successful …. based on the Amazon rankings.

I'm going to lump together the three categories because the lines among them are rather blurry to my fuzzy brain.

When it comes to movies, for the most part, they should have stopped while they were still ahead. How come I know that and you know that but the studios keep throwing money on the cutting room floor?

A re-make would be a bright idea if they got it wrong the first time. But Hollywood sees it otherwise. If a movie is a smash hit they do it again two decades later and generally fall on their face. When a ballplayer reaches such heights they retire his uniform. The studios would do well to just re-release the original. I suppose the impoverished imagination reverts back to the old cash cow and milks it dry.

One of the funniest films we've ever seen was The In-Laws. Peggy laughed so hard I was ready to administer CPR. Peter Falk and Alan Arkin played off each other to perfection. The re-make was doomed from the opening credits

We recently watched a new version of Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Wouldn’t you think they’d know enough that these two are inimitable? At least in this case they changed the name to, The Truth About Charlie, perhaps so no one would notice the abysmal failure.

In all fairness, Sleepless in Seattle was a worthy makeover of An Affair To Remember just as You've Got Mail updated the original 1940 classic A Shop Around The Corner. As a sequel Godfather-2 was a superb follow-up to the superb original but the third ranks up there with one of the worst films in memory.

Sometimes they are able to re-invigorate the storyline along so it's a fit for today's audience. More often, in their zeal not to be dated, they fumble away the soul or spirit of the original. The difficulty they have in general is a basic misunderstanding of what makes a movie iconic. It's not the plot; or at least not just the plot. As a collaborative art form a film is the coming together of fresh dialog, imaginative direction, chemistry of the cast, lighting and editing….. and perhaps the music. Anyone one of these, under or overwrought, can destroy the project. It's an irreducible whole, greater than its parts.

If sequels answer the universal, and then what, prequels attempt a stab at the pre-narrative. The Saturday matinee serials stretched our limits of disbelief. I could have sworn that car went off the cliff last week and now here it is screeching to a stop. Or the bullet our hero took in the heart resulted in a mere flesh wound to the shoulder. The back-story became the illusion that kept the narrative alive. But does anyone really care what Casablanca's Ric did when he was eleven years old or even the day before he met Ingrid Bergman? They've always had Paris and that's enough for me.

In the thirties Hollywood made six sequels to the Thin Man, even if Dashiell Hammett never wrote any. Fortunately we didn't have to watch William Powell grow a middle-age paunch. Mickey Rooney lived outside of time, as Andy Hardy. He had a serious case of arrested development; he never grew up. Nor did the studios. They still can't resist the wonderment of the winning formula and they are likely to continue making sequels and re-makes until Spiderman-86 gets to be eensy-weensy and tangled in his own web, then finally washed away by the rain.

And The Winner Is.......

I must preface my remarks by admitting that I have not brought myself to see any of the films mentioned herein. My comments are therefore about the idea of them plus numerous short clips. The Academy Awards came down to two films. All of youse Avatar freaks get over dere; and you Hurt folks on the other side of the room. Now go ahead and have a food fight to settle the matter. And why not include Tarentino for some added sadism. Wake me up when we return to human beings in human relationships absent the wet dreams of Cameron and the woman-with-male-sensibility. Extolling the risks of soldiering is, by extension, a celebration of war itself. The most courageous act would be to end it. All the rest is a distraction from our policy of occupation, vengeance and arrogance. It is not enough to declare neutrality on the issue. Support for our troops has no meaning beyond bringing them home. If the Roman Empire had our technology they would have made the same movie. This is no occasion to cheer the first woman director to win an Oscar. Better if we had a man with a feminine sensibility. Film contains ideology however covertly. Certain presumptions are presented as givens and we tacitly accept them. When our sensibilities get blunted war becomes a ready option. Avatar not only patronizes the "noble savages" it argues against humanity in favor of a new, advanced uber-human with techno tough skin. From Schwarzenegger on, this is Cameron's fantasy. Too bad we can't be offered fewer grotesqueries with whom to spend our time and money. As if the human predicament is not enough without relying on computer-generated surrogates to depict our joys and sorrows.

Oscar Night

Ah ha, Oscar Levant, Oscar Homulka and Oskar Werner. Not quite. The louder movies get the more I run for cover. Take your inter-galactic comic book monsters or war weaponry explosions, your chainsaw massacres and mayhem, high-speed chases with high decibel shrieks. I’ll be waiting in my monastic cell practicing my vows or at a Quaker Meeting Hall. For my pantheon I’ll take Nat Cole over Ethel Merman, Benny Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing over Stan Kenton's Artistry In Percussion and YoYo Ma is better yet. Silence is my first language. This is sounding more like your mishagosh. I had my idols but they were the sort that didn’t hang around for the ovation. My war hero was the guy who got off the train one stop before the big brass band waiting for him. He was the Lone Ranger who rode away while the town folk wondered who that masked-man was. I fell for the Green Hornet and Batman because they had doppelganger day jobs. Clark Kent was my kind of guy; a man of steel behind his glasses and a flying cape under his mild-mannered suit. Your classical schizophrenic from Krypton. Henry Fonda, ever humble, was my sort and gulping Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig who proclaimed how lucky he was while dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. I most identified with Spencer Tracy, fierce with few words in Bad Day At Black Rock or just quietly resolute as Thomas Edison. The loudest I needed of him was as Clarence Darrow inheriting the wind. Conversely my tolerance for hysterical actors is low. I can barely put up with Jack Lemmon, Jack Klugman, Red Skelton or Lucille Ball. Give me Walter Matthau, Alec Guiness and Glenda Jackson who knew the power of the understatement over the histrionics of Lawrence Olivier or Al Pacino. Al Jolson is my idea of auditory water-boarding. If not mishagosh then arrested development. I’d rather be killed softly with a song but there are some notable exceptions to my preference for hushed tones. I gave it up for Cabaret and Chicago and laughed myself silly with the rollicking, zany, madcap antics of Alan Arkin and Peter Falk in The In-Laws. If my mother had had me seven or eight years later I’d probably have a different set of names to offer. Maybe I’ll watch the Oscars with my finger on the mute button and when one of those noisy films walks away as best of the worst I’ll just continue on my counter-clockwise spin back to those days when a close-up of an expressive face spoke volumes. So what happened to Levant, Homulka and Werner? They're all dead. How come they died and I didn't? That's debatable.

Award Night

With the Golden Globes last night and Oscars soon to follow I come away wondering why Gable and Grable weren't there or Carrie and Gary. Even secondary actors were household names back then. What ever happened to George Tobias or William Demerest? They were true supporting actors….which reminds me of that all-time great, Zasu Pitts.

Oh, Za Su, Zasu, some said Zazu, your sound alone sends me back to a Hollywood still in its teens before studios dared mess with a name. If they had their way you might have become Carrie Grant or Roberta Taylor and we'd never had plucked you from re-run heaven. Oh dear, oh my, you declared in quavering vibrato and fluttering hands. I'll bet no one had your pizzazz, named as you were for Aunts Eliza and Sue. Too bad Norma Jean didn't learn from you and say, un-hand me, trading her icon for a lesser banana but longer life.

Competition among artists or even just celebrities seems to me a foolish proposition; a tribute to hype, box office, distribution and networking. Yet I watch it to confirm how out of touch I am from the buzz and occasional true artist.

I couldn’t help thinking about the eighty percent of nominees who were losers and the crumpled acceptance speeches in their tux or purse. All those impromptu words withering now in the waste basket.

Since we are all the stars of our own movie I thought I’d write my own spontaneous acceptance speech in case I get a phone call...

I want to thank everyone in the crowd scenes of my life, that cast of thousands, the best boy, the gaffer and the grip. the caterer and the man who waters the lettuce, the un-sung who collect shopping carts in the parking lot and the lady who let me in front of her in line since I had just one item and no coupon. I’d also want to thank all the disembodied voices who are away from their desks rights now but will handle my call in the order given because it is very important to them and the doctor who never answered my call but I got better anyway and the “d” in Wednesday and all other silent letters who know enough to keep quiet when they have nothing to say. And thanks, too, to my mother who finally figured out not to argue with the checker over the price of lemons and that trucks were not assassins out to get her. And to my father who played and hummed Tumbalalaika on his mandolin in a soft celebration of all things inarticulate and to Peggy with whom the air is so charged we know when not to speak.

The Way It Used To Was

Saturday afternoon. We’d come in anytime. Who had watches? There were two movies, a serial, Looney-Tunes, RKO Pathe News, a Pete Smith Special, previews, a sing-along and the March of Dimes collection box. Five hours.

The guy from the other side of the tracks got the girl next door. The schoolyard bully did a stretch up the river while the smarmy class prez went from the D.A.’s office to the Governor’s mansion until a cub reporter got a scoop that he threw his wife down the stairs and the big time lawyer fell while the newspaperman rose and the world was set to rights.

Having been suckled on matinees we had movie-smarts. We could tell the suave double-crosser from the honest sucker by his mustache alone. And when we were ready for the mean streets, just a bit unprepared for the grit and grime we remembered what Tarzan said to Jane, It’s a jungle out there, and that’s when our skin grew its necessary fur.

If the Shadow knew what lurked in the hearts of men who knew what lurked in the heart of the Shadow? Did he have a double life? Was he a mad scientist in his subterranean garage? Not likely.

The villain operated out of an abandoned warehouse on the other side of town. One day the place would be surrounded by incorruptible police and the chief would shout for him to come out with his hands up. If he shot his way out the good cop would simply nurse a flesh wound while Pat O’Brien would appear to give the nut case his last rights.

It was a tidy world. Even second bananas knew who they were. They taught us about the unattainable. If there was an object of desire to be had these were the one’s who never quite got it. There was usually a fellow with glasses who ended up with the second banana(ette). She was crazy about him anyway. How nice when seconds marry seconds, the rule of bananas.

It’s a good thing we don’t get to see the movie of our life before we live it, or even the coming attractions. Then we would know our place by the billing alone and the rest of it wouldn’t be the worth the price of admission.

We got weary as the plot finally caught up to what we already knew. This is where we came in, somebody mumbled. When we left the theatre we almost believed that life made sense. Look how the middle always connected the beginning to the end.

Invention Is The Mother Of Necessity

Those of us raised on old studio movies know that Don Ameche invented the telephone a year before Spencer Tracy worked through the night to come up with the light bulb which he may or may not have put to his ear and said, “Hello.” He was exhausted, of course, and the world was waiting to be electrified.

We learned from movies the basics of life. Namely, that most everyone wore tuxedos, all navy men were great dancers, babies came from towels and hot water and a cough meant certain tuberculosis curable only by a Viennese doctor who had developed a new procedure.

New discoveries happened to meet a crisis. Columbus was sent out for some Chinese food and returned with a continent for Izzy and Ferd. Now Columbus, disguised as Bill Gates has returned with his cargo of information. The world is still round but it just got smaller.

Those of us caught on the super highway with a typewriter and nothing cordless have been denounced for resisting the new orthodoxy. We’ve been put to the rack where every Luddite bone in our bodies has been deleted.

Who’s your mother? Not necessity; it’s invention, itself. Build it and they will buy it, so it seems. Ever since the answering machine I‘ve asked myself whether this or that will make my life more meaningful, or dimensional, or help get me through the night.

Now I’m making room for all the new "essentials of life" I’m told I must own to keep up. I’m dropping my old baggage, Archimedes Principle and Pi. There goes Newton’s Law. My spelling is an approximation and the multiplication table is exhausted. I’ve been purged of all things retro and confessed to thinking in syllogisms. Like a plane circling the ocean might jettison fuel to lighten its landing I am dumping theorems like bricks. All that’s left of me is my pin number and a few sentences from the Gettysburg Address.

Without understanding how anything works I am taking my place at the threshold, learning the new speak as a second language and clicking on the latest breakthrough without which tomorrow is unthinkable.