Here are interviews and an article pertaining to some of the films listed in the previous post.
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Ferrari
Two Q&As from the New York Film Festival. Running tine for the first is 21:08, the second is 37:28.
Below is a discussion between Michael Mann and French director Denis Villlaneuve after a recent screening in Hollywood of Ferrari on November 22. Running time is 29:46.
Two Q&As from the New York Film Festival. Running time for the first is 35:05, the second is 24:48)
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The Taste of Things
Deadline Hollywood interview with Julliette Binoche (26:08)
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I realize these will be of more interest once you’ve seen the films, but I wanted to make them available. That’s it for now. Stay tuned. I’ll be back. — Ted Hicks
There were forty-eight films total in the Main Slate and Spotlight categories, so the fourteen I saw might not seem like that much of a sample, but based on the consistent quality of what I did see, I have to conclude that this was a very strong year. Following are brief notes on what I saw at this year’s New York Film Festival.
Sunday, October 1. Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki, director/writer) Like Kaurismäki’s previous films, Fallen Leaves has deadpan charm, humor, and a lot of humanity. I’ve especially liked Le Havre (2011) and The Other Side of Hope (2017). Fallen Leaves gives us two lonely outsiders, a man and woman who meet and are attracted, but whose efforts to start a relationship are continually thwarted by miscommunication, lost phone numbers, etc. Nothing much happens in any conventional sense, but the feelings are real. It’s a beautiful film.
Sunday, October 1. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, director) This is my favorite film of all I saw at this year’s festival. Per David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter, the film is “non-stop bonkers brilliance.” That it is. It’s just one jaw-dropping moment after another. I wasn’t sure at first, but it pretty quickly overwhelmed me with its insanity and I was helpless to resist, not that I wanted to. It’s a wild ride, an amazing journey that constantly surprises, delights, and sometimes horrifies. Poor Things is described by the distributor as “the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). It obviously has Frankenstein in its DNA, but goes way beyond that. There’s such an overload of images and ideas that I’ll have to see it again to sort things out. The production design is amazing. The cruise ship seen below is but one example of the world the film creates.
The following posters also give a sense of what you’re in for.
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Emma Stone is absolutely fearless in her performance. Mark Ruffalo’s performance would be considered over-the-top anywhere else, but feels just right in this film. He’s absolutely great. Willem Dafoe is excellent as usual. There’s no explanation for the deep grooves and scars in his face, but none is needed.
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Poor Things opens with a limited release on December 8, followed by a wide release on December 22.
Monday, October 2. In Water (Hong Sangsoo, director/writer) Hong Sangsoo is an incredibly prolific South Korean filmmaker. Since his first feature in 1996, The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, he has made 30 features in 27 years, three in this year alone, two of which are included in this year’s NYFF. It often feels like nothing much is happening in his films, which at times remind me of those by Yasujiro Ozu and Eric Rohmer. Writing last year in New Yorker magazine, Dennis Lim had this to say:
“It is a critical truism—and only partially true—that the Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo makes the same movie over and over. His protagonists belong to a particular milieu, which happens to be his: they work in the arts, usually in film, sometimes as novelists or painters. They are maladroit, at times in professional settings, always in personal matters. His plots revolve around romantic anguish and complication. Failures of communication abound. Characters are driven by libidinal urges and petty vanity. Action tends to be displaced to the realm of talk. Awkward conversations unfold over many drinks, alcohol serving as disinhibitor and spur to philosophical rumination. No one ever learns from their mistakes. But to accuse Hong of repeating himself misses the point. Repetition in his films is both subject and structuring device, and, like any artist who works with this formal strategy, Hong finds meaning in the subtlest variations, coaxing compelling moral dramas from prosaic scenarios.”
I like Hong’s films a lot, but In Water is especially challenging in a weird way. For its entire 61 minute running time the picture is out of focus to varying degrees. This is clearly deliberate, as the subtitles are in sharp focus throughout. It’s hard for me to tell what, if anything, this means or why he would do it. Maybe Hong just wanted to try something new, or maybe he wanted to make the audience work harder. Whatever his reasons, possibly passive aggressive, In Water definitely challenges what we expect when we see a film. One of those expectations is that the subject of any scene will be in focus. Excepting experimental or avant-garde films, that’s how it’s always been. In struggling to briefly describe this, I realize Hong has made me consider something I’ve always taken as a given in motion pictures.
In Water opens at the Metrograph theater in NYC on December 1.
Thursday, October 5. The Pigeon Tunnel (Errol Morris, director)
The Pigeon Tunnel gives us John le Carré (pseudonym of David Cornwell) in an extended interview/interrogation by filmmaker Erroll Morris. Le Carré is fascinating to listen to as he talks about his life and work. Much of what he says about his life — his early years, certainly — involve his father Ronnie, a career con man. I’d known nothing about this, so it was interesting to learn how heavily this abusive relationship influenced Le Carré’s life and the themes of his spy novels. Seeing the film I had to get past my aversion to Erroll Morris, going back to 1988 when I saw his film The Thin Blue Line. That film leaned heavily on re-enactments, which I don’t like. I realize this practice goes back to pioneering documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty who used staged scenes in Nanook of the North (1922), so there’s a precedent. In my possibly cranky opinion, it’s not a real documentary if re-enactments are used, but something else. For me, Fred Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and Albert & David Maysles are true documentary filmmakers. Sure, they carefully structure their films through editing, but they don’t make stuff up. That said, if you have an interest in John le Carré and how he came to be what he became, The Pigeon Tunnel is definitely worth seeing. And I have to admit, the re-enactments scattered throughout don’t really get in the way.
The Pigeon Tunnel is currently available for streaming on Apple TV.
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Thursday, October 5. The Taste of Things (Tran Ahn Hung, director/writer) Nancy and I loved this film. This is my second-favorite film from the festival. The preparation of food and cooking has never been more sensual. You can practically smell the food cooking and taste it. I felt wrapped up in the warmth of this film.
From the New York Times review by Beatrice Loayza:
“The movie is about a distinguished gourmand, Dodin (Benoît Magimel), and his preternaturally gifted chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They live together in the French countryside and together concoct lavish meals for themselves and Dodin’s coterie of foodie friends. Their lives entirely revolve around the cultivation and creation of these dishes, which Hung emphasizes through long, elaborate cooking scenes.”
From the NYFF 61 description:
“Destined to be remembered as one of the great films about the meaning, texture, and experience of food, this sumptuous, exceptionally well-crafted work, set in late 19th-century France, stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel (married, decades ago, in real life) as Eugénie, a cook, and Dodin, the gourmet chef she has been working with for 20 years. As they reach middle age, they can no longer deny their mutual romantic feelings, which have so long been concentrated in their passionate professionalism. This simple narrative—based upon Marcel Rouff’s 1924 novel La passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet—sets the table for a sublime, sense-heightening exploration of pleasure, in which the play of sunlight across a late-afternoon kitchen is as meaningful as the image of a perfectly poached pear or the crisp of a buoyant vol-au-vent. Director Trân Anh Hùng (The Scent of Green Papaya, NYFF31) won the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his bravura, scrupulously deployed feat of epicurean cinema.
The Taste of Things opens for a limited run on December 13, with a wide release on February 9, 2024. The film is France’s official submission in the Best International Feature category of the 96th Academy Awards in 2024.
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Friday, October 6. The Woman on the Beach(Jean Renoir, director, 1947) Shown in the Revivals section of the festival. After leaving France in 1940 when Germany invaded, Renoir came to Hollywood, where he made five features, of which this was the last. It was a troubled production, to say the least. Renoir had initially been promised complete freedom, but after poor preview screenings, new executives at RKO demanded extensive edits and re-shoots. I knew this beforehand, but wanted to see it because of Renoir’s involvement and Robert Ryan in the cast. The story is a love triangle between Ryan, Joan Bennett, and Charles Bickford as Bennett’s embittered husband, a blind painter. It’s not very good, but the participants made it worth seeing for me.
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Saturday, October 7. Menus-Plaisirs Les Troigros (Frederick Wiseman, director) The Taste of Things set us up perfectly to see this 4-hour documentary about a French restaurant. Since Titicut Follies in 1967, Fred Wiseman has made a career out of examining institutions of all kinds, often at lengths of three to four hours (or more), without identifying titles, narration, or talking-head interviews. Nothing fancy; we’re just there. This is immersive, in-the-moment filmmaking (though carefully edited and structured). Wiseman is one of the greatest living filmmakers. With the deaths of Al Maysles (age 89) in 2015 and D. A. Pennebaker (age 94) in 2019, he’s probably the last one standing of his generation. At age 93 he does not appear to be slowing down, which is great for the rest of us.
Film Forum, where this film is currently playing, has this description:
“Frederick Wiseman’s 44th documentary takes us to Central France and Troisgros — a Michelin 3-star restaurant owned and operated by the same family for four generations, and destination for gastronomes from around the world. Behind the scenes, we are privy to passionate debates among the head chefs (a father and his two sons) about texture, color, and depth of flavors; visits to a bounteous produce farm, a local vineyard, and a massive cheese cave (where “each cheese has its moment of truth”); and waitstaff meetings focused on individualized customer preferences and food plating at a performance-art level. In his trademark style, Wiseman patiently illuminates the restless creativity of this culinary family as they experiment with dishes, methods, and ingredients — keeping their haute cuisine anchored in tradition while brilliantly evolving.”
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troigros opened at Film Forum on November 22.
Sunday, October 8. Janet Planet (Annie Baker, director/writer)
Description per A24:
“In rural Western Massachusetts, 11-year-old Lacy spends the summer of 1991 at home, enthralled by her own imagination and the attention of her mother, Janet. As the months pass, three visitors enter their orbit, all captivated by Janet and her spellbinding nature. In her solitary moments, Lacy inhabits an inner world so extraordinarily detailed that it begins to seep into the outside world. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker captures a child’s experience of time passing, and the ineffability of a daughter falling out of love with her mother, in this singularly sublime film debut.”
This is a delicate coming-of-age story, sharply observed. Zoe Ziegler is excellent as Lacy, as is Julianne Nicholson as her mother, Janet. I hadn’t checked who was in it beforehand and was very pleasantly surprised to see Will Patton, Sophie Okonedo, and Elias Koteas in the cast.
No release date has been announced as yet, but per A24 it will be sometime in 2024. Watch for it. It’s good.
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Monday, October 9. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson, director/writer)
Per the NYFF 61 description:
“One of the most visually striking, profoundly moving American moviemaking debuts in years, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an arresting immersion into a young woman’s inner world, filmed and edited with an extraordinary tactility and attention to the tiniest detail. This impressionistic journey skips ahead and back through decades to tell the story of Mack, whose upbringing in rural Mississippi is touched by grace, dotted with heartbreak, and always carried aloft by the surrounding natural beauty. As she ages, she loses loved ones and gains others, while making decisions that change the course of her life, and that of her beloved sister. Relying on sounds and images to tell her story, and employing minimal dialogue, Jackson has created something breathtakingly quiet and ultimately transporting—a spiritual tribute to the moments, feelings, and connections that make a life. An A24 release.”
Unfortunately, I found it difficult to relate to or even follow this film. I don’t need to see things in a straight line, but the frequent shifts in time both backwards and forwards, plus different actors playing the same character at different ages and not knowing who was who kept me at a distance. Too great a distance to try to work harder to understand what I was seeing. Many people really like the film, so I probably should take another run at it. As a former film teacher of mine once said, “Sometimes you get on the ride and sometimes you don’t.”
This film opened on November 3 and is still in theaters.
Wednesday, October 11. In Our Day (Hong Sangsoo, director/writer) The second Hong Sangsoo film at the festival. I liked it, and not just because it was in focus! Here’s the NYFF 61 description:
“For his 30th feature film, Hong Sangsoo has crafted a slippery yet captivating inquiry into the search for meaning, connection, and artistic satisfaction. In Our Day alternates two seemingly unrelated stories: in the first, a disillusioned former actress named Sangwon (Hong regular Kim Minhee) who has left her profession behind and is recharging at the apartment of her longtime friend Jung-soo (Song Sunmi); in the second, a middle-aged poet, Hong Uiji (Ki Joo-bong), who has become a cult figure for a new generation of young readers, is being visited by a student (Park Miso) making a documentary about him and a young man (Ha Seong-guk) drilling him with questions about the meaning of it all—which makes it difficult for the artist to refrain from drinking, even though his doctors have sworn him off alcohol. From these two disparate strands, Hong delightfully evokes a world rich with enigma and possibility, in which the most seemingly minute detail (the whereabouts of a cat, the spiciness of a noodle dish) has outsized repercussions and asking life’s big questions often brings us back to square one.”
Hong Sangsoo
No U.S. release date as yet, but should be sometime next year. He has a big following in this country.
Thursday, October 12. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, director/co-writer) A wonderful film about a man, Hirayama, who cleans and services public toilets in Tokyo and how his precise routine is upset by the appearance of the teenage daughter of his estranged sister who shows up unannounced on his doorstep one day.Wenders was initially hired to do a short-film project celebrating Tokyo’s state-of-the-art public toilets, but decided to do something a bit more interesting. Filming in Japan with Japanese actors speaking Japanese, Wenders has made one of his most satisfying and quite moving films. Plus there’s a lot of great music. He listens to the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” on his drive to work, and later, Patti Smith and others, including, of course, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”
Here’s the NYFF 61 description:
“As in his finest movies, Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, NYFF22) here locates the magnificence in the everyday, casting the incomparable Koji Yakusho as the taciturn, good-natured Hirayama, who goes about his solitary hours working as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Interacting on his rounds with a variety of city denizens whose eccentricities put his gentle nature into even more delightful relief, the middle-aged Hirayama becomes the quiet hero of his own story, doing his menial work without complaint, bemused yet often enchanted at the younger folk orbiting him, and delighted by the natural wonders poking out from the corners of the always changing cityscape. Hirayama is a creature very much of the present, devoted to a daily routine that is nearly monastic—until it is disrupted by someone from his past. Working in concert with Wenders’s documentarian eye, Yakusho, who won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, makes his character’s every movement magnetic.”
From what I’ve been able to find, Perfect Days will be released sometime early in 2024.
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Friday, October 13. Close Your Eyes (Victor Enrice, director/co-writer)
From the NYFF 61 description:
“Spanish director Víctor Erice’s fourth film in 50 years, Close Your Eyes is the culmination of one of the most legendary careers in modern cinema, following the masterpieces The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, and The Quince Tree Sun (NYFF30). In this elegiac personal epic about time, memory, and, of course, the movies, an aging filmmaker named Miguel (Manolo Solo) is reluctantly pulled back into a decades-old mystery connected to his final, unfinished work, titled The Farewell Gaze. During production, his leading actor and close friend, Julio (Jose Coronado), vanished and was never heard from again; in the process of trying to track him down so many years later, Miguel must come to terms with his own past, his present life, and the irrevocably changed processes of his art form. Featuring captivating performances from a cast that also includes Ana Torrent (Beehive’s unforgettable child star) in a moving role as Julio’s grown daughter, Close Your Eyes is a poignant, summative work that finds original ways to remind viewers of the moving image’s ability to reach across time.”
Compelling and mysterious. Plus any film that a shot like the one below has my attention. Slow moving, but rewarding all the same. It’s a slow burn that pays off. And it’s about movies, too. At one point, Miguel finds a flip-book of the Lumiere Brothers 1896 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. It’s a very neat moment as he flips through it and the image comes alive. So far it doesn’t have a U.S. release date. Definite art house material. I liked it.
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Saturday, October 14. May December (Todd Haynes, director) While I prefer Carol (2015) and the HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce, this is excellent nonetheless. Natalie Portman is Elizabeth, an actor who has come to Savannah, GA to get to know Gracie (Julianne Moore), who she’s going to play in a film about the scandal that erupted 23 years before when Gracie had sex with her 13 year-old employee Joe (Charles Melton) in a pet shop, got pregnant, went to prison, married Joe, and had more kids. This was a huge tabloid story at the time and people in the community still remember and resent it. Lots of layers get peeled back, but there’s never the explosion I was expecting and probably hoping for. This is fairly tricky material, since Gracie and Joe have stayed together and raised a family, and aren’t the least bit apologetic about any of it, despite the initial circumstances.
May December opened on November 17, is still in theaters and will be available for streaming on Netflix on December 1.
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Sunday, October 15. Ferrari (Michael Mann, director) Michael Mann is one of my favorite directors. There’s a physical weight that you feel on the screen in his films. I’m thinking of a scene in Public Enemies (2009) when a steam engine slowly comes to a stop in a train station. There’s something in the combination of image and sound effects that makes be feel the physicality of what’s on the screen. It felt very real. I think you don’t get that with CGI. I especially value Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995), and The Last of the Mohicans (1992). So I was greatly anticipating Ferrari. I don’t think it’s one of his best, but the racing footage is amazing. Even at the beginning, when we’re just seeing cars being tested on the track, the physicality I mentioned is there in spades, especially in the roar of the engines. There are two major crashes in the film that are extremely intense, overwhelming. I also hadn’t realized how lethal auto racing was in the ’50s. The drivers seem totally unprotected in open cars at speeds in which the slightest error gets you airborne and probably dead. Adam Driver is excellent as Enzo Ferrari, as is Penelope Cruz as his wife Laura. Their frequent blowout arguments are intense. Shailene Woodley has less to do as Ferrari’s mistress Lina, but does as well as the part allows. I think I’m wanting to like Ferrari more than I actually did, but I don’t want to dissuade anyone from seeing it (as though I actually could). I definitely plan to see it again, and on as big a screen as possible with great sound.
Ferrari opens on December 25.
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We’ve since seen the following three films, which we wanted to catch at the festival, but for various reasons did not.
Anatomy of a Fall(Justine Triet, director/co-writer) Loved it! It’s great. Totally deserved the top prize at Cannes this year.
Priscilla(Sofia Coppola, director/co-writer) Didn’t much like it. Cailee Spaeny is excellent in the title role, but otherwise it left me cold.
Maestro (Bradley Cooper, director/co-writer) Very good and quite ambitious. Carey Mulligan is just great as Bernstein’s wife. Some stunning sequences.
I’m also quite anxious to see the following two films from the festival.
The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, director/co-writer) Stars Sandra Hüller, who is great in Anatomy of a Fall.
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, director/co-writer) From the director of Drive My Car (2021).
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That’s a wrap for this one. Stay tuned for supplemental material for some of the films in this post. See you next time. — Ted Hicks
This is a follow-up to “On Set, Off Camera,” posted on April 2, 2018, which can be accessed here, and more recently “On Set, Off Camera Redux,” posted on August 13, 2023, which can be accessed here. They mainly consisted of shots of actors caught in off-camera moments during the making of a movie. They included directors as well as actors, sometimes off-set, at home and elsewhere. I’ve continued that here. Some of these are candid and some are staged promotional photos. But as before, I think they’re all interesting.
Below, Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan during the making of Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and below that, Brando and Vivian Leigh, also during Streetcar.
On the set of Chinatown (1974), with Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, James Hong (with arms folded), and director Roman Polanski.
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Omar Sharif and director David Lean during the making of Lawrence of Arabia (1962).
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Director Sam Peckinpah and William Holden during the shooting of The Wild Bunch (1969).
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Director Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel during the making of Mean Streets (1973), followed by Scorsese and De Niro during Taxi Driver (1976).
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Al Pacino and Christopher Walken in younger days.
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Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster and John Garfield, followed by a shot of Donald O’Connor, Kelly, and a visiting Fred Astaire on the set of Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
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Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Rear Window (1954), with James Stewart and Grace Kelly.
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Hitchcock with Kim Novak during the making of Vertigo (1958).
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Tony Perkins and Janet Leigh at lunch with Hitchcock during Psycho (1960).
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On set with Godzilla (1954) during a break from destroying Tokyo.
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Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters during The Night of the Hunter (1955).
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James Cagney, William Powell, Henry Fonda, Ward Bond, and Jack Lemmon during the making of Mr. Roberts (1955).
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Walter Huston, Tim Holt, director John Huston, and someone I can’t identify during the making of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). **** Since posting this, I’ve learned that the man on the right is Jack Holt, Tim’s father. He has an uncredited part in this film; others include Cat People (1942) and They Were Expendable (1945).
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Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney looking very dapper as they pretend to look over scripts.
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Mrs. Charles Boyer, Jack Benny, Basil Rathbone, and Myrna Loy, possibly in the studio cafeteria or at a nightclub.
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Fred McMurray with Barbara Stanwyck and director Billy Wilder during the making of Double Indemnity (1944).
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James Stewart, director John Ford, and John Wayne in a promotional shot for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962).
Boris Karloff getting a civilized tea break during the shooting of The Mummy (1932).
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Julie Adams being treated for an injury during the making of The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Looking on are concerned co-stars Richard Carlson, Richard Denning (kneeling), and the Creature itself. I don’t know who is on the other side of Carlson. Possibly director Jack Arnold.
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Ernest Borgnine and Robert Ryan during the making of The Wild Bunch (1969).
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Leonard Nimoy in full Spock regalia ready to beam up with a 1970 GTO.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger and director James Cameron during Terminator 2 (1992). I have no idea why Arnold is holding a small child, or who the guy is holding a teddy bear at left, though he might be Arnold’s stunt double.
I’ll close with this shot of Chuck and Stephen Boyd during the making of Ben Hur (1959). I think the idea had been to use Vespa scooters instead of horses for the climactic chariot race in order to save money, but wiser heads prevailed.
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My recap of what I saw at this year’s New York Film Festival should have appeared before this post. Life and other distractions, but mainly procrastination, have delayed it. I should finish it shortly. Stay tuned. In the meantime, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!
I don’t remember the first time I saw George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. It was initially released in 1968 while I was still in the Air Force. It didn’t play anywhere I was stationed the next two years, so I might have seen the film in Iowa City when I returned to the university, or in Minneapolis, where I lived for three years before moving to New York City in 1977. No matter wherever or whenever I saw it, I know it had a big impact on me and everyone else. There hadn’t been anything like this before.
Romero’s film completely reset the template for how zombies were seen in films and fiction; it was a significant paradigm shift. Before Night of the Living Dead (in which the term “zombie” is never used), zombies in films were initially based on Haitian lore, relating to the Vodou (Voodoo) religion, often seen as literal slave labor on sugar plantations in the Carribean. Examples include the Bela Lugosi film, White Zombie (1932), and the sublime I Walked with a Zombie (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton. Zombies figure in the Bob Hope comedy, Ghost Breakers (1940), and its Martin & Lewis remake, Scared Stiff (1953). There are many others.
Made for $114,000 and reportedly grossing approximately $30 million, or over 263 times its budget, Night of the Living Dead is one of the most profitable independent films ever made. Some of that budget obviously went for the gallons of Bosco chocolate syrup that was used for blood, but the most significant thing about it is how it totally changed the game and didn’t look back. Romero zombies became the model. The Romero zombie was a cannibal, eating human flesh (in some later films, they were after brains; in others, they’d just kill you and move on). People killed by these zombies came back as zombies themselves. It would be difficult to overstate the influence Romero’s film has had on the zombie films, fiction, and television that followed. The Walking Dead would likely not have existed. Over the years since 1968, a flood of zombie movies has hit the screen with a splatter. Beginning with Dawn of the Dead in 1978), Romero has made five sequels to Night of the Living Dead. Eventually zombie films began evolving, with results such as Maggie (2015), where Arnold Schwarzenegger cares for his daughter Abigail Breslin, who has been bitten and is slowly becoming a zombie; the ferocious Train to Busan (2016); and the all-out zombie apocalypse of World War Z (2013).
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I was working at Technicolor in early 1979 when George Romero was in the lab Dawn of the Deadready for its U.S. release. A version edited by director Dario Argento had already been released in Italy the previous September. The U.S. theatrical version, which Romero considered the definitive one, was released here in New York on April 20, 1979. I attended a pre-release screening during which audience members applauded and cheered the elaborate gore effects. One that sticks in my mind (so to speak) is when a helicoptor rotor blade neatly slices off the top of a guy’s skull. Crowd went wild, which felt a little weird. Have to admit, the poster has one of the greatest taglines ever: “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”
Before that I’d gone to a screening of two of Romero’s post-Night films, The Crazies (1973) and Martin (1977) in January ’79 at the Entermedia Theater on Second Avenue in the East Village (now a multiplex aptly named the Village East). Up to that point, I hadn’t had a chance to speak to Romero at Technicolor. I went up to him in the lobby after the screenings and introduced myself as working at Technicolor. I don’t remember what we talked about, though I’m sure I blathered on about his films and the horror genre in general. He gave me his address, and a short time later I sent him the following letter.
George Romeo
The Laurel Group
247 Fort Pitt Blvd.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15222
Mr. Romero:We met briefly during The Crazies screening at the Entermedia Theater last month. I currently work for Technicolor here in New York, across the hall, in fact, from Otto Paoloni and Joey Violante, so I’m familiar with your connection with the lab in preparing Dawn of the Dead for American release.
I also do free-lance writing on film, and am planning a piece on modern American horror films, which would concentrate on your work in particular. I was very impressed with your openness at the Entermedia screening, and by the fact that you’re extremely articulate about what you do. I’d like to meet with you, at your convenience, and talk more about your work and the genre in general.
In addition, I’m enclosing the premise for a film I’d like to do eventually. After seeing The Crazies, I realized that my idea has some obvious parallels to your film, which threw me off balance a little, since this is something I’ve been thinking about since 1973. Anyway, it seems like your sort of material, and I think I could learn from your reaction to it.
I hope we can set something up for the near future. It would be inconvenient, but not impossible, for me to come to Pittsburgh, though perhaps we could get together the next time you’re in New York.
By the way, I want to say that nothing prepared me for Martin. It’s quite an achievement. You’ve made the definitive vampire film for the Seventies, and you did it successfully without condescending to the genre, which I think is really something.
Here’s the film premise I enclosed with that letter.
Notes for a film script:
A plague of laughing overtakes a town, spreads throughout the country, perhaps even the world. First signs are sporadic chuckling, then irregular barks of laughter, becoming increasingly violent, a steady escalation that finally brings death.
Genuine laughter would cease to exist. People would have to stifle a laugh for fear it would be taken as a sign of the disease. Real laughter would disappear, go underground, nothing could be directly funny anymore, even smiles would be suspect. The level of paranoia would rise and rise. And of course, there would be less and less to laugh at.
As a safety measure, comedy films, joke books, cartoons, the “funny papers,” anything with the slightest suggestion of humor is outlawed, confiscated and destroyed. Comics and comedy writers are out of work. A vast entertainment industry goes down the toilet.
Underground joke clubs are formed. Chaplin films are screened in secret.
Madmen begin telling jokes to promote laughter.
The President of the United States appears on television to inform the nation of the latest measures against the plague. Early in his address he begins to smile, then chuckle as though at some hidden, childish joke, and is dragged off camera by plague police as the screen goes black and a voice tells us there are technical problems.
There are many ways this could go, and while I haven’t yet worked on specific plot development, I think the possibilities are pretty much endless. I see it as basically a very black comedy. I’m not sure how I’d end it, but I think I’d want to leave people with at least a little hope. Because if you can’t laugh, you might as well commit suicide.
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I was pretty jacked to get the following response from him. Note the 15 cent stamp on the envelope. Right, it was 44 years ago.
Ted,
Fantastic idea!
I love it – Really want to meet next time I’m in N.Y.
Please excuse the rough note –
Just writing between flights –
Expect to be in N.Y. starting March 7 to do final mix on DAWN at Trans Audio – probably be in the city for 3 weeks or so at that time and I’ll be in and out of the lab for the final printing etc.
Look forward to seeing you then.
Regards
George Romero
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It was definitely exciting to read his response. As it turned out, however, we never met when he was back in New York. I seem to remember there were some problems with the mix or something and he was busy dealing with that. I never made any real efforts to follow up later, though I wish I had. I saw him occasionally over the years at pre-release screenings of his films and at least once at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. I was able to speak briefly with him there, but that ship had sailed, so to speak.
I’ve always valued the brief connection I had with George Romero. He was born in 1940 in the Bronx — a New Yorker! — and died on July 16, 2017 in Toronto at age 77. I’m glad we have his films. If a zombie apocalypse ever does come to pass, you can’t say we weren’t warned.
This is a follow-up to “On Set, Off Camera,” posted on April 2, 2018, which can be accessed here. It mainly consisted of shots of actors caught in off-camera moments during the making of a movie. I’ve expanded the parameters to include directors as well as actors, sometimes off-set, at home and elsewhere. Some of these are candid and some are staged promotional photos. But I think they’re all interesting.
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Charlton Heston as Moses on location for The Ten Commandments (1956).
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John Huston, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, maybe at lunch.
Welles and Charlie Chaplin. I wonder what two geniuses talk about. Probably everyday stuff.
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Lon Chaney Jr, Tor Johnson, and Bela Lugosi at lunch while shooting The Black Sleep in February, 1956. The film was released in June ’56. Lugosi died that August.
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Suzanne Pleshette and Rod Taylor on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). Maybe a little bored sitting around, waiting.
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Psycho, 1960. Below this obviously posed shot of Hitchcock reading a copy of Robert Bloch’s novel is a shot on set with Hitchcock directing Janet Leigh and John Gavin in the first scene in the film.
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Steve McQueen visits Janet Leigh and Tony Perkins on the Psycho set.
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Leigh and Perkins, could they be any slimmer?
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Martin Scorsese at left on the set of Taxi Driver (1976), and at right in his apartment with a stuffed bear as a seat cushion, overseen by Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix.
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Scorsese and Robert De Niro while shooting Taxi Driver.
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Natalie Wood, James Dean, and director Nicholas Ray discussing Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
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Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef at the location for the climactic shootout in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).
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Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, and Michael Madson take a break while shooting Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992).
Karl Freund behind the camera on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)
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Karl Freund with Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball on the set of I Love Lucy. Freund was director of photography for the show from 1951 to 1957
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Robert Ryan of the set of what’s probably a Western, though don’t know which one. Such a great actor. The Set-Up, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, The Wild Bunch, to name a few.
Jim Jarmusch and Iggy Pop at Cannes with Gimme Danger (2016), a documentary about Pop. Beneath that is an undated photo of a much younger, very intense Jarmusch.
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Make-up artist Jack Pierce turning Boris Karloff into the Frankenstein “Monster.”
Rock Hudson getting a fast-draw lesson from Audie Murphy in 1952.
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While shooting The Lady Eve (1941), Barbara Stanwyck with her favorite hairstylist Hollis Barnes, director Preston Sturges at left, Henry Fonda in background reading war news.
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Peter O’Toole, a long time ago.
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Marilyn Monroe getting camera ready.
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Well-known photo on the set of The Misfits (1961). Clockwise from Arthur Miller in back on ladder: Eli Wallach, director John Huston, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift. Don’t know identity of the man at left standing under the ladder.
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Lon Chaney with his make-up kit. Looks to be at the time of The Phantom of the Opera (1925).
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Cast photo in costume for Casablanca (1942).
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This seemed very weird until I learned that it’s Humphrey Bogart’s daughter Leslie on the swing with him.
There’s something odd about this photo, or is it just me? Maybe it’s the shorts, maybe it’s the footwear, but this is not the John Wayne look we’re used to.
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Okay, that’s it for this one. See you next time. — Ted Hicks
For those who’d like to get into Oppenheimer a little more, here is a selection of interviews, articles, and behind-the-scenes videos. This is kind of cafeteria style, so just take what you want.
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Making of Oppenheimer (16:49)
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Cast interviews #1 (29:36)
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Cast interviews #2 (29:07)
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New York Times interview with Christopher Nolan re the contradictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer can be accessed here.
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Projecting 70mm IMAX film. (8:51)
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Video interview with Ludwig Göransson (10:31)
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A print interview with Ludwig Göransson can be accessed here.
Wikipedia entry on the soundtrack can be accessed here.
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Full soundtrack (1:34:56)
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That’s all for now. See you next time. — Ted Hicks
I’ve seen Oppenheimer twice now, but I suspect I’m not done with it yet, or it’s not done with me. Of all the films being released this year, this is the one I was anticipating the most. And with Universal’s extensive marketing campaign, I knew it was coming long before it got here. Going back months, a large stand-up advertisement with a digital clock counting down the months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds to the July 21 release date was in the lobby of the AMC Lincoln Square theater at 68th and Broadway here in Manhattan. This certainly created an “event” feeling. Every time you went through the lobby, you saw it.
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Prior to this, I would have said Dunkirk (2017) was Christopher Nolan’s best film, but I think Oppenheimer is bigger, more important, and more of an achievement. I feel that he’s a director who has control over every aspect of what ends up on the screen. That’s especially true with Oppenheimer. I kept checking the AMC website on a daily basis, wanting to make sure I’d be able to order an IMAX ticket as soon as they went on sale. I was still a day or so late, but got a ticket on June 4, a full seven weeks before it opened. It’s a good thing I did, because a few weeks later, when my wife told me she was interested in seeing Oppenheimer, I checked for IMAX tickets and found that every show for weeks to come was basically sold out (and still is). We ended up seeing it in 70mm on another screen in that multiplex, but not IMAX. It was fine.
It turns out there are only 30 movie theaters in the world that are capable of projecting Oppenheimer in the full 70mm IMAX format, 19 of them in the United States, and one of those here in Manhattan. So I can feel like I belong to an exclusive club that gets to see this film in the optimal way Nolan intended, and the cachet that goes with that. Well, okay, but I’ve come to realize that any IMAX theater showing the film digitally would have the same screen ratio as in 70mm (at least I think so). But am I glad I saw it in this format? You bet I am. Though I know that’s also a status thing, and at the end of the day, so what?
Oppenheimer has so far grossed $188 million in the U.S. and $312 million overseas. Barbie, released the same day, has just surpassed $1 billion dollars globally. I suspect one reason both films are doing so well is because they aren’t sequels or superhero blowouts. They feel fresh and new, and aren’t tired retreads.
The Flash is (in my opinion) is a good example of everything that’s wrong with these Marvel/DC superhero spectaculars of late, i.e. bloated, incoherent, and meaningless. I should say that I’ve really liked the Nolan Batman films, Captain Marvel, Logan, the first Wonder Woman, and numerous others. My interest in The Flash was primarily Michael Keaton returning to his Batman role and hearing him say the line, “I’m Batman,” He provided the only spark, but it wasn’t enough. The gimmick of The Flash/Barry Allen going back in time to save his mother from being murdered and his father from being falsely convicted and going to prison for the crime has already been done in The Flash TV series and I think in the comics as well. I’d looked forward to seeing an 80-year-old Harrison Ford back in the saddle as Indiana Jones, but he seemed as tired as the idea of having Indy still fighting Nazis, plus I found Phoebe Waller-Bridge to be especially annoying. I was also looking forward to the new Mission Impossible film, having liked the last several, but other than several impressive set-pieces and Tom Cruise running, it really felt like been here-done that.
After that digression, I should also go on the record as liking Barbie a lot. When I first saw trailers, I had no intention of seeing it, but learning that Greta Gerwig was directing and co-writing (with Noah Baumbach), I got interested. Glad I did, because it’s sharp, edgy, and unexpected. There is some really weird stuff in Barbie.
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Back to Oppenheimer. It opens with these words on screen: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.” Whew! Tortured for eternity is pretty heavy duty. It does not bode well for J. Robert Oppenheimer. That feeling led me into the film.
The performances are, without exception, outstanding. Everyone has brought their best, rising to the challenge of making this film. Cillian Murphy (below right) seems perfectly cast as Oppenheimer. His look is eerily evocative of the real Robert Oppenheimer. Murphy says that Nolan also sent him photos of David Bowie from the late 1970s as inspiration. More than that, he’s excellent in the role.
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Matt Damon is great as General Leslie Groves, who picked Oppenheimer to head the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. He brings something extra to everything I’ve seen him in, from the Bourne films to Ford v Ferrari (2019) and Air earlier this year. He gets deep into every character he plays.
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The most startling transformation in the film has to be Robert Downey Jr. as Oppenheimer’s eventual adversary, Lewis Strauss. His appearance makes him nearly unrecognizable and his performance is like nothing he’s done before. It’s blistering. He really inhabits the character, and dominates nearly every scene he’s in.
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Two key roles are played by Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, whose affair with Oppenheimer and her Communist Party connections cause serious problems for him later on. (Florence Pugh, left and Emily Blunt, right)
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Hoyte van Hoytema, a Dutch-Swedish cinematographer, had shot three previous films for Nolan: Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), and Tenet (2020), as well as Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), Sam Mendes’ Spectre (2015), and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008). As Bilge Ebiri wrote in New York Magazine, audiences aren’t used to the frame-filling close-ups of Cillian Murphy in IMAX, because the format wasn’t designed for that. Van Hoytema says, “You could never, ever put your camera as close as you wanted to your subject in order to get the close-up. So we started to build lenses that gave us that technical possibility to get much closer.” Many scenes in Oppenheimer are in black-and-white, for which Kodak created special stock for Imax.
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Hans Zimmer had scored seven films for Nolan prior to Tenet. When he was unavailable for that film, Nolan brought on Swedish film composer Ludwig Göransson, who has now created an amazing score for Oppenheimer. I don’t think I was as aware of just how important and integral his music was to the film until I saw it again. For one thing, there’s a lot of it — two and a half hours of the three hour running time. The music is as important as the actors, it’s like it is an actor. Nolan wanted the violin to form the basis of the score; violin is present throughout almost the entire film. A friend of mine in Minneapolis, Ed Hewitt, after seeing Oppenheimer there, texted me this: “It (the music) was there all the time, but it wasn’t there.” I like that. The music is practically wall-to-wall, but it’s never overwhelming, until it is.
The following selection of scenes, released by Universal a week before Oppenheimer opened, contains Göransson’s music.
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This cut, “Can You Hear the Music,” accompanies a scene early in the film when Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) tells Oppenheimer that it’s more important to “hear the music” of theoretical physics instead of worrying about the math. This brief (1:50) piece has 21 tempo changes. I don’t know much about music, but I gather this is somewhat unusual. It took three days to record, and like the rest of the score, is pretty amazing.
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I think this lengthy piece (7:52), “Trinity,” is the high point of the entire score. It accompanies the Trinity test itself, when the result of several years of planning and effort will be revealed. Will the “gadget” successfully detonate, will it be a dud, or will it detonate and set fire to earth’s atmosphere, destroying the world? This last was a theoretical possibility. The sequence is incredibly intense. Göransson’s music just keeps building and building and building, winding tighter and tighter. It actually makes me feel anxious just listening to it, even apart from the film.
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A scene I love is set at Los Alamos. For the first time, Oppenheimer is wearing an Army uniform. One of his colleagues, physicist Isidor Rabi (played by David Krumholtz), asks Oppenheimer why he’s wearing that and suggests he get rid of it. We cut to Oppenheimer standing in front of a mirror that’s part of his dresser. He’s now wearing a grey suit. He may also be holding his pipe; I can’t remember. On the dresser is what we’ve come to know as his trademark flat-brimmed hat, also gray. He picks up the hat and puts it on his head. For me this was a stunning moment that took my breath away. It’s like a superhero origin story, where we see Batman or Superman in his suit for the first time. So maybe Oppenheimer is a superhero movie after all.
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“They won’t fear it until they understand it. And they won’t understand it until they’ve used it.” – Robert Oppenheimer
“It’s not a new weapon. It’s a new world.” – Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) to Oppenheimer.
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” – Hindu scripture that went through Oppenheimer’s mind on witnessing the first atomic bomb detonation.
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Supplemental materials to follow shortly. Stay safe. — Ted Hicks
For a deeper dive, here are several interviews with Billy Wilder. He speaks vividly and with humor about writing and directing. He’s great to listen to. The interviews are followed by a selection of Double Indemnity posters, as well as an excellent video that examines Film Noir and this film in particular.
The Writer Speaks: Billy Wilder (Running time: 1:04:29)
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Portrait of a “60% Perfect Man”: Billy Wilder Interview – 1984 (58:13)
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Oddly enough, this original poster for Double Indemnity makes it look like it might be a comedy.
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A beautiful German poster.
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French and Spanish posters.
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Here is an insightful breakdown of what identifies classic Film Noir, using Double Indemnity as a prime example. Once you get past a promo for MUBI at the start, it’s well worth watching. (14:55)
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That’s it for this one. See you next time. — Ted Hicks
I saw this recently as part of Film Forum’s 3-week series of films written and directed by Billy Wilder (July 14 to August 3). Double Indemnity (1944) is one of the greatest film noirs ever made. Though at the time, no one referred to the films that have come to be known as film noir by that name. The term was first coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946 to describe certain Hollywood films. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the term became widely used in this country.
In the Spring 1972 issue of Film Comment, an important article by future film director Paul Schrader appeared titled “Notes on Film Noir.” It opens with this: “In 1946 French critics, seeing the American films they had missed during the war, noticed a new mood of cynicism, pessimism and darkness which had crept into American cinema. The darkening stain was most evident in routine crime thrillers, but was also apparent in prestigious melodramas.”
There’s still a debate about among film critics and historians as to whether film noir is a distinct genre or is it a filmmaking style? Whichever, I know it when I see it. And Double Indemnity is definitely it.
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The plot is Film Noir 101. Ordinary guy Walter Neff, an insurance salesman, meets bored housewife Phyllis Dietrichson. They conspire to kill her husband for the insurance money. Phyllis is a scheming femme fatale. Walter is a wise-cracking cynic, but weak and out of his depth. Big surprise: it doesn’t work out. As Neff says in a Dictaphone confession to Barton Keyes, his friend and mentor and the company’s claims adjuster, “I killed him for money…and for a woman. And I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.” These words sum up how things work out for most noir protagonists.
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Barbara Stanwyck was Wilder’s first choice to play Phyllis Dietrichson. At the time, she was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. Fred MacMurray, who was eventually signed to play Walter Neff, was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood in 1943. Wilder had trouble casting the Neff role. Reportedly, actors who turned it down included Alan Ladd, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Gregory Peck, and Frederic March. Per Wikipedia: “Wilder finally realized that the part should be played by someone who could not only be a cynic, but a nice guy as well. Fred MacMurray was accustomed to playing ‘happy-go-lucky good guys’ in light comedies, and when Wilder first approached him about the role, MacMurray said ‘You’re making the mistake of your life!’ MacMurray made a great heel and his performance demonstrated new breadths of his acting talent. ‘I never dreamed it would be the best picture I ever made,’ he said.”
Stanwyck, MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes, the company’s claims adjuster and Neff’s friend and mentor, were at the top of their game in this film. Robinson is especially good. Watch him in this scene where he’s gone to Walter’s apartment to talk out his suspicions.
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Double Indemnity was based on James M. Cain’s 1943 novel. Here are covers for some of the editions. I particularly like the first one.
Note that the cover at left replicates the following scene from the film.
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Double Indemnity was scored by Miklós Rózsa, who had done the music for Wilder’s previous film, Five Graves to Cairo (1943). Wilder had liked his work and wanted to use him again. Rózsa went on to score a number of significant film noirs, including The Killers (1946), Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948), Criss Cross (1949), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). He wrote music for many other films, such as Ben-Hur (1959) and El Cid (1961). His music for Double Indemnity is powerful and ominous. You can hear it accompanying this main title sequence, which leads into the first scene of Walter arriving at the insurance company building.
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Double Indemnity was co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler. Chandler was a novelist new to Hollywood, but had already written The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell My Lovely (1940), and The Lady in the Lake (1943). They reportedly had a contentious relationship. Per Wikipedia: “To help guide him in writing a screenplay, Wilder gave Chandler a copy of his own screenplay for the 1941 Hold Back the Dawn to study. After the first weekend, Chandler presented 80 pages that Wilder characterized as useless camera instruction’; Wilder quickly put it aside and informed Chandler that they would be working together, slowly and meticulously. By all accounts, the pair did not get along during their four months together. At one point Chandler even quit, submitting a long list of grievances to Paramount as to why he could no longer work with Wilder. Wilder, however, stuck it out, admiring Chandler’s gift with words and knowing that his dialogue would translate very well to the screen.”
Raymond Chandler (at left) & Billy Wilder
There’s a very short scene early in the film where Chandler is seen sitting in a chair outside Keyes’ office as Walter leaves. Apparently, very little film exists of Chandler in any capacity, so this is an interesting cameo.
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The original ending to Cain’s novel has Walter and Phyllis committing double suicide, one of the many aspects in the book forbidden at the time by the Motion Picture Production Code. Wilder wrote a different ending with Walter going to the gas chamber as Keyes watches. Per Wikipedia: “This scene was shot before the scenes that eventually became the film’s familiar ending, and once that final intimate exchange between Neff and Keyes revealed its power to Wilder, he began to wonder if the gas chamber ending was needed at all. ‘You couldn’t have a more meaningful scene between two men’, Wilder said. He later recounted: ‘The story was between the two guys. I knew it, even though I had already filmed the gas chamber scene … So we just took out the scene in the gas chamber,’ despite its $150,000 cost to the studio. Removal of the scene, over Chandler’s objection, removed Production Code head Joseph Breen’s single biggest remaining objection to the picture that regarded it as ‘unduly gruesome’ and predicted that it never would be approved by local and regional censor boards. The footage and sound elements are lost, but production stills of the scene still exist.” Below is one of the surviving stills of the discarded scene.
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Here is the scene Wilder opted to end with. It is intimate and powerful, with a great deal of feeling. When Keyes says, “Closer than that, Walter,” it’s very moving, a heartbreaking punch to the gut.
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Several times in the film, Walter and Phyllis state their commitment to each other and their plan to kill her husband by saying, “Straight down the line.” Of course, it turns out their line gets pretty crooked, not so straight. Here are two clips where we hear this. In the first, longer clip, the plan is hatched. (There’s a detail in this clip that I love. At the end, after Phyllis leaves Walter’s apartment, as he walks across the room he notices the corner of a rug flipped over. He pauses to flip it back with his foot. This is a totally ordinary, inconsequential detail, one that feels very real because of that.)
Double Indemnity was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 1945, including one for cinematographer John Seitz, whose many credits, dating back to the silents, include The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), and Invaders from Mars (1953). His “venetian blind” lighting, with rays of light slashing through a room, creating angled bars of light and dark, became a standard look, and eventual cliché, for film noir and neo-noir.
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For my money, Double Indemnity is as close to perfect as you can get. It’s beautifully written, performed, and filmed. All the pieces matter, and all the pieces fit.
I think that about wraps it up. Stay safe. See you next time. – Ted Hicks
Last week, from Sunday to Wednesday, I saw four movies at Film Forum in their ongoing program, “The City: Real and Imagined.” This series has over 60 films set in New York City and runs from May 12 to June 8. It was a deep pleasure to see four great films on four consecutive days. Here are my thoughts on those films.
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Easy Living(Mitchell Leisen, director. Preston Sturges, writer. 1937) Of the four films, this is the only one I hadn’t seen before. I can blather on incessantly about film noir or classic horror movies, but I’m not as conversant when it comes to screwball comedies. I’ve seen It Happened One Night (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Lady Eve (1941), and Sullivan’s Travels (1941) among others, but I seldom seek them out. Interestingly, the last two were written and directed by Preston Sturges, who wrote Easy Living. Sturges throws a long shadow.
I hadn’t intended on seeing Easy Living. I was geared to see some of the more obvious titles, such as The French Connection and Serpico (and still will). But my wife was doing something with her sister that day, so I had a window, and this is what fit. As it turned out, I’m really glad I did. Easy Living is great! I loved it. Wall Street millionaire Edward Arnold throws his wife’s new sable fur coat out the window from their penthouse where it falls onto office clerk Jean Arthur, riding by in an open-air bus below. The writing is great, the plotting complex and head-spinning, the pace seldom lets up. As Samuel Wigley on the BFI website puts it, “…misunderstanding is piled on misunderstanding like an ever-more precarious house of cards.”
Here is a scene between Edward Arnold and a clueless Jean Arthur after he’s discovered that she has the sable coat.
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Ray Milland, as Edward Arnold’s son, is trying to make it on his own. He’s working at an Automat, where a very hungry Jean Arthur shows up, hoping to have enough coins to buy some food. The sequence that ensues is, for me, a high point of the film as it turns into a hilarious food riot. Here’s the scene. It runs just over eight minutes and takes a little while for things to go crazy, but stay with it. Believe me, it’s worth it.
I hadn’t realized until after seeing Easy Living that Jean Arthur is in one of my all-time favorite films, George Stevens’ Shane (1953), a truly great movie.
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The only source I can find for streaming Easy Living is on YouTube. This is the complete feature. The image quality is excellent, which surprised me a bit. Check it out when you’ve got the time. It runs just under 90 minutes.
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The Naked City (Jules Dassin, director, 1948) Another great film by a great director. What stands out is that it was shot entirely on location in New York City, exteriors and interiors, all of it. This lends a documentary aspect, especially for the street scenes, which provides a look back at the city at that time. The significance of the location shooting in this film can’t be overestimated. As with the location work in Sweet Smell of Success, it lends a sense of reality that is felt as well as seen.
I’ve seen The Naked City numerous times, but this time it seemed even better to me than it had before. It all fits together, every element. This film is as nearly perfect as you’re likely to get. But I remember the first time I saw it, I didn’t like the voice-over narration by producer Mark Hellinger that opens the film and punctuates it throughout. His narration has a folksy, conversational style that seemed out of place for this film. Then I got used to it, and now it’s one more thing that sets this film apart. Here’s the opening, which will give you a sense of it.
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The Naked City is a police procedural that takes us step by step through the investigation of the murder that opens the film. Barry Fitzgerald plays Lt. Dan Muldoon, a homicide detective with something of a leprechaun in his manner, though he’s all business when he has to be, which is most of the time. His partner is Jimmy Halloran, a cop with far less experience, well played by Don Taylor. They make a good team. There’s humor in the film, along with a lot of pain.
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The shot below shows Don Taylor, with pistol, tie blowing, and Barry Fitzgerald in the passenger seat of the cop car. They’re in hot pursuit of the killer. The end is near.
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Below is a clip of the climax, a final foot chase and shootout on the Williamsburg Bridge. Mark Hellinger can be heard making very excited comments on the narration track. **SPOILER ALERT** for anyone who hasn’t seen the film and doesn’t want to see the ending. It’s a knockout, but I understand.
The Naked City is available for streaming on Amazon Prime and Max (previously HBO Max).
Click here for an interview with Film Forum repertory programmer Bruce Goldstein on Jules Dassin and The Naked City. This is a deep dive, especially as concerns the location shooting.
Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, director & writer, 1968) I didn’t enjoy seeing Rosemary’s Baby last week in the same way I did the other three films in this post. I felt angry and irritated at how Mia Farrow’s character was being manipulated by those around her, that there was no way out for this woman as the film closed in around her. The only action left to her at the end is to rock the cradle holding Satan’s son. I’d seen it before, so I knew what was coming. I think my visceral response was a sign of the film’s effectiveness.
Film rights to Ira Levin’s novel were acquired by Robert Evans at Paramount even before the book was published in April 1967. Evans had read galley proofs and saw the commercial potential of a film version. Roman Polanski was hired to write as well as direct the film. They would work together again six years later with Chinatown, Polanski directing and Evans producing.
Exteriors for Rosemary’s Baby were shot in New York City, notably the iconic Dakota apartment on 72nd Street and Central Park West, which became the Bramford in the film. The bulk of principal photography was on sets in Los Angeles.
Rosemary’s Baby is a significant film. It’s part of our popular culture. For better or worse, it launched a wave of religion-based supernatural films such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). I doubt I’m the only one who remembers that great line of dialogue from The Exorcist: “Fuck me, I’m the Devil!” This is a bit of a digression, but the thing about all these films, including vampire movies (thanks to Bram Stoker), is that it’s a given that Christianity is the one true reality. This seems rather presumptuous to me. Just saying. But I’m always amused by the Jewish vampire in Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) who’s unfazed by a cross.
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The cast is excellent. Prior to Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow had only appeared in two feature films, though she had done a fair amount of television work, most significantly appearing in 263 episodes of the series, Peyton Place, so she wasn’t exactly unknown. She’s really the heart of Rosemary’s Baby. John Cassavetes, who plays Rosemary’s husband, Guy, always has a sinister look to me, which makes for effective casting in this case. This was Charles Grodin’s first feature, in a small part as Rosemary’s first doctor. Ruth Gordon received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as Minnie Castevet, Rosemary’s Satan-worshipping next-door neighbor. She’s a trip. Here’s a clip of her entrance in the film.
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I hadn’t seen this poster before. It’s an interesting, though not very subtle, variation on the more well-known poster design (seen at the top of this post).
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Main title sequence.
Rosemary’s Baby is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
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Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, director/co-writer; Ernest Lehman & Clifford Odets, co-writers, 1957) Despite making Time magazine’s and the New York Harald Tribune’s 10-best list for 1957, Sweet Smell of Success was a commercial flop on its initial release. Per Sam Kashner in a piece on the film in the April 2000 Vanity Fair, the movie was just too cynical for the times. A film executive said it seemed to have been made “almost in defiance of the box-office.” We all know better now. This is one of those films, like Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), that has only grown over time.
It is indeed cynical. There’s no one to like, really, excepting the Susan Harrison, Barbara Nichols, and Jeff Donnell characters, and even then it’s more like you just feel sorry for them. The two main characters are not very nice, to put it mildly. Burt Lancaster plays J. J. Hunsecker, a powerful newspaper columnist who inspires fear in most everyone around him. It’s a tightly controlled performance that radiates malevolence. Elmer Bernstein, the film’s composer, said this about Lancaster: “Burt was really scary. He was a dangerous guy. He had a short fuse. He was very physical. You thought you might get punched out.” Accurate or not, this quality certainly informs his performance.
Tony Curtis plays Sidney Falco, a press agent and weaselly suck-up who won’t do anything without first calculating what’s in it for him. His charm and charisma somewhat mitigate the fact that he’s a real louse. Sidney’s livelihood depends on having items about his clients appear in the city’s newspaper columns. The most important of these is J. J. Hunsecker’s. Sidney is a constant supplicant at the table in “21” from which J. J. dispenses insults and sometimes favors. No humiliation seems too great for Sidney to endure. Curtis is really great in this film. His performance here proved he could act beyond his looks.
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Sweet Smell of Success was shot by James Wong Howe, a terrific cinematographer whose many credits, which go back to silent films, include The Thin Man (1934), Hud (1963), and Hombre (1967). Sweet Smell takes place almost entirely at night. His crisp black & white photography shows a noirish view of New York City, streets wet with rain, reflections and shadows. Sam Kashner in Vanity Fair writes that it would have been impossible to get the sort of shots Howe wanted filming inside the “21” club, so interiors were filmed in Hollywood — they spent $25,000 just recreating “21,” with movable “wild walls” to make way for Howe’s camera. He smeared the walls with oil so they would gleam. (I love this detail.)
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One of the greatest things about this film for me is the music by Elmer Bernstein. Though his iconic score for The Magnificent Seven (1960) is probably the one most people know, just a few of his previous scores include The Ten Commandments (1956), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and The Great Escape (1963). His work here is the epitome of big city noir. Check it out in this clip.
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The dialogue is blistering. I think a lot of this had to do with Clifford Odets’ contribution. He came on after Ernest Lehman had left the picture. When director Alexander Mackendrick expressed concern about the dialogue, Odets says he told him, “You’re probably worried that the dialogue is exaggerated and may sound implausible. Don’t be. Play it real fast — and play the scenes not for the words but for the situation. Play them ‘on the run’ and they’ll work just fine.” That they did.
Sweet Smell of Success didn’t have a final script when they started shooting. Odets was working under great pressure, grinding out scenes at the last minute so they could be shot. Odets was put with his typewriter in a prop truck on the set to work. At about three or four one morning (lots of night shoots), Tony Curtis joined him in the truck. Odets suddenly looked up and said, “Come here, kid, I want to show you something. Look at what I’m writing.” Per Curtis: “I see he’s just typed out, ‘The cat’s in the bag, and the bag’s in the river.’ It took my breath away.” This is my favorite line in the film.
Here are interviews and an article pertaining to some of the films listed in the previous post.
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Films etc. 