Between Two Women (2000)

For reasons I've never quite figured out (besides the obvious one) I've always been attracted to movies about gay women.  I've seen a few lately like A Marine Story, The Gymnast,  and The Fish Child as well as watching episodes of The L Word and The Real L Word and all the women in those are as gutsy and dynamic as you would expect in this "out and proud" era.  Between Two Women is a different beast, a 2004 British release told with classic English reserve that almost plays out like a lesbian version of Brief Encounter.

The film is set in an English industrial town in 1957. It concerns a factory worker's wife, Ellen, who develops a friendship with a local teacher, Kathy.  The two bond over Kathy's genuine interest in Ellen's son, Victor and his potential as an artist but it's soon obvious that the two women enjoy each other's company even without the kid involved.  The fact that Kathy feels trapped in a joyless marriage to a disagreeable and insecure husband doesn't exactly retard their growing affection either.

The film's arc is no surprise but the singular thing is how quietly it goes about its business.  There are no screaming dramatics or sweaty love scenes (though I wouldn't have minded one of those).  Things are as understated as they would have had to really been at that time in real life. You never see the women kiss, just hug. They sit on a park bench holding hands, quickly let go when someone (who we never see) strolls by, and join hands again when they're alone.  When Ellen, finally conscious of her feelings, says to Kathy, "Can we go somewhere?", they walk off together and the scene fades to black.  The ladies are given their privacy.

 The acting is uniformly fine. Barbara Marten is excellent at showing Ellen's suffering at home and her happiness with Kathy mostly through facial expressions. The way her face lights up in Kathy's presence is really enchanting. Andrew Dunn is also very good as the poor, dim husband, emotionally wounded and hurt but by the end sadly realizing that he's happier himself with other people than with his wife, and as Kathy, Andrina Carroll is a smart, attractive modern woman who could inspire anybody.  I could have done without so much of the kid but given that part is played by the director's son, I guess the emphasis on him was a necessary evil.

Despite the period setting and the "behind closed doors" attitude, this is not some throwback to the days when even works written by gay people looked on homosexuality as a source of shame and misery.  Ellen's family and husband never find out her true leanings but it's obvious by the end her love for Kathy is a means of personal liberation for her. She is happy, smiling and eager to live when she rides a train to meet her girlfriend as the movie ends.  The entire film is quiet, touching and a nice change of pace from heavier lesbian fare.

The Guitar (2008)

On its own merits The Guitar is a fine little film, a story about a woman finding her true passion in life after she's been diagnosed with a terminal disease.  It's no fault of its own that it comes up a little short when compared to a certain classic Japanese film with a similar premise.

The Guitar stars Saffron Burrows as Melody, a New York woman who is told by a doctor that she has inoperable cancer and has only two months left to live.  The same day she subsequently loses her job and is kissed off by her boyfriend, leaving her in a suicidal state of mind.  She doesn't kill herself though. She instead decides to spend her remaining days living it up. This means moving into a huge loft apartment and using her credit cards to buy everything she wants, new clothes, new furniture and especially her childhood fantasy toy, a red electric guitar. She does all this without ever leaving her apartment, having all her meals delivered to her. The only people she comes in contact with are the parcel delivery man and a girl who delivers pizzas and she ends up having affairs with both of them.  She lives out her time blissfully in this environment but then something unexpected changes everything...
                                    
As I said this is a charming and uplifting little movie in and of iteslf,  but after watching it I couldn't help but think of another film about someone who was dying of cancer and had to decide how to spend the rest of his life, one of my favorites, Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru.

Ikiru stars Takashi Shimura as a middle-aged government clerk who is the recipient of the bad news. Like Burrows' character, he's alone in the world. His wife is dead and he's lost contact wiht his children. His first impulse is also to live it up and he spends much of the first half of the film on a drunken trawl through Tokyo night clubs but he eventually realizes he should finally accomplish something in his life so he spends his last weeks pushing the paperwork through the city bureaucracy to convert a swampy slum area into a decent playground for children, not exactly the same as shutting yourself up with a guitar and making whoopee with the delivery people.

To be fair, Kurosawa's film was made in a very different culture than The Guitar.  That was done in post-World War II Japan,  a country that had just undergone the shame of losing a war and the trauma of seeing two of its cities incinerated by atomic bombs.  Also Kurosawa was known to pay homage to self-sacrifice and nobiilty in his films. It's no surprise then that in his story, the best way to spend the end of one's life is by helping others.

                                           (SPOILERS FOLLOW)

21st century New York is a very different place of course. The overriding impulse in The Guitar's world is if you've got to go, have as much fun as you can on the way out.  To be fair I can't think of one American film with a termainally ill character that doesn't have that philosophy.  Here though there's an uncomfortable air of self-absorption throughout the movie.   There are flashbacks that show Melody as a child becoming bewitched by a red guitar in a music store and stealing it when she gets the chance but nothing that suggests she ever thought about actually working and saving money to buy a guitar as she got older. At the end of the film Melody has lost all her new possessions, is completely cured and happily playing her guitar on stage in a band. She's living her dream but so what?

And yes I said "completely cured".  By the end Melody is completely cancer-free and the implication is that the tumor disappeared simply becasue she was finally enjoying herself.  I realize there's a bit of the fairy tale to this movie but that is really a little much.

Despite all this I really enjoyed the movie, mostly because of Saffron Burrows. She's such a vital human presence, scared and vunerable then slowly growing in confidence throughout the movie that I couldn't help feel something for her plight.  It's only after the movie was over that all the "Hey, wait a minute!"s started forming in my head and I realized how selfish her behavior was.  I guess you only have to believe in a film for the duration that you're watching it.  Besides if I found out I only had a short time left to live, I probably wouldn't think much about other people either.

The Pawnbroker (1964)

When I was a child in the 1960's I'd pay attention to the big important movies of the day. I was too young to actually see any of them but I'd follow TV reviews, particularly on The Today Show, and the annual Oscar telecast.  That's how I heard about films like Breakfast At Tiffany's, Days Of Wine And Roses, Never On Sunday, The Hustler, Lawrence Of Arabia and many more.  Catching up with some of those films in recent years, sometimes I'd be left wondering what all the fuss was about. Other times I'd run into something that more than lived up to its reputation. I've just watched The Pawnbroker and it's definitely in the second category.

This film, directed by Sidney Luemt, stars Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman, a Jewish concentration camp survivor who lost his entire family in the Holocaust and now runs a pawnshop in Harlem. The trauma and guilt of his experiences has caused Nazerman to psychologically withdraw from the rest of humanity.  All day in his shop he deals with people at the end of their rope selling off bits of their lives and does not display an ounce of compassion or mercy.  Encounters with his shop assistant, a well-meaning social worker, a local gangster he does business with and others cause him to have flashbacks about his time in the camps, breaking through his defenses and making him eventually come face to face with his inability to feel anything.

Steiger, a classic scenery chewer if there ever was one, puts on a remarkable show of being totally suppressed and devoid of emotion throughout most of the film, which make his silent cries of despair at the end much more powerful. He was 39 years old when this came out but he was completely beliabvalve playing a man 20 years older, his natural robustness becoming a sagging, stoop-shouldered burden.  Given his roaring performances in other films, it's a revelation seeing him like this and he was probably helped along by being directed by Sidney Lumet who really gets his signature New York grittiness going here.  It is pariticularly notable the way he has Nazerman constantly framed by cages and fences in many shots reflecting his internal isolation from the world, notably the rat's nest of wire fences in the pawn shop itself. 

 The film tunred out to be significant in several ways.  Released in 1964 it was the first American film to deal directly with the Holocaust.  Also it broke ground by including frontal female nudity in a crucial sequence that was denounced by both the Catholic Legion of Decency and the Motion Picture Association of America.  For all that you rarely seen anything about this movie anymore.  Holocaust movies have practically become a punchline in recent decades and when Rod Steiger's name is mentioned,  On The Waterfront and In The Heat Of The Night are brought up way before Pawnbroker.  The actor was nominated for an Oscar for his performance but he, along with Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier and Oskar Werner, lost to Lee Marvin for the comedy Cat Ballou in what now looks like one of those inimitable, head-shaking, "What were they thinking?" Oscar moments. The Pawnbroker does not deserve to be lost to history. It is a powerful film with a remarkable central performance.

Fourteen Hours (1951)

"Are you sure Harold Lloyd started this way?"

Fourteen Hours is a 1951 20th Century Fox film available on DVD under the brand "Fox Film Noir" but it isn't really that.  There's no crime plot, hard boiled hero or femme fatale in this movie but it does share a one thing with noir, a reliance on psychological explanation. Besides that it's an entertaining movie full of familiar faces.

The plot is simple. A young man walks out onto the ledge of a New York City hotel and threatens to jump.  Most of the rest of the film's 92 minutes is concerned with the police trying to figure out why he's doing this and get him down from there.  The story is very well directed by Henry Hathaway who keeps everything going at a brisk pace and it's a bonanza of fine acting from the principals and well known actors at the beginning of their careers in bit parts. 

Richard Basehart in convincing as the troubled young man on the ledge and Paul Douglas, then a top Fox star, is very good as the simple, compassionate cop who gets the task of of trying to talk him off.  Then there's Barbara Bel Geddes as the young man's fiancee and the great Agnes Moorehead acting up a storm as his self-absorbed mother. The other main support comes from the likes of Howard Da Silva as a police chief, Martin Gabel as a psychiatrist and Robert Keith as Basehart's father. 

Below that the cast is insanely full of now-familiar names who would go on to bigger things after this.  Frank Faylen is the waiter who first sees Basehart on the ledge. Jack Benny's TV nemesis, Frank Nelson, is a hotel guest, Jeff Corey is a policeman, Joyce Van Patten, Jeffrey Hunter and Debra Paget play onlookers, Harvey Lembeck and Ossie Davis are cab drivers and above all, there's the movie debut of Grace Kelly as a woman on her way to divorce her husband.  According to IMDB, Leif Erickson, John Randolph, Brad Dexter, Janice Rule and John Cassavettes are also somewhere in the crowds of rubberneckers, police and reporters shown but I didn't notice any of them.

The psychological element comes near the end of the film when Gabel delivers a detailed diagnosis of Basehart basically saying that all his troubles stem from confused feelings about his parents and resulting self-loathing.  It's the kind of pat explanation that would be spoofed a few years later in Psycho but in this context it sounds plausible.  There's also a sense for the callousness of the watching crowds that is reminiscent of Ace In The Hole but the overall feel  of the film is nowhere nearly as cynical. Peripheral characters may act as though the idea of a man jumping to his death is just a big show but the main folks involved, especially Douglas' cop, are shown as good, caring people.  That's probably one of the reasons Fourteen Hours has gotten lost in the shuffle over the years, not dark enough. Nevertheless it still holds up as tight, engrossing entertainment.

Jeanne Lee / Ran Blake - "The Newest Sound Around"

Ran Blake is one of my favorite pianists, a man whose playing is a singluar blend of dissonance, blues and film noir elements. Over a fifty-year career he's mostly played in solo and small group settings but some of his greatest work has come when paired with female singers. He's worked with Chris Connor, Christine Correa and Dominique Eade over the years but his most remarkable duo work came on his very first recording, The Newest Sound Around, where he was paired with his fellow Bard College classmate, Jeanne Lee, who was also making her first recording.

From the first notes of the opening track "Laura" it's obvious this is something special. The dark sensuality of Lee's voice and the icy, clipped notes of Blake's piano create a memserizing effect, attractive and unsettling at the same time. Their version of "Blue Monk" may be the best example of their partnership. Blake goes into the tune with a rattling, alienating strangeness but when Lee brings her velvetly voice in, the oddity gets a human dimension and turns into a downbeat melancholy. Much of the rest of the session, like "Where Flamingos Fly" and "When Sunny Gets Blue" comes off equally ominous and delicate but there are other facets in the work. Blake's solo piece, "Church On Russell Street" is charging gospel piano with a strong Gershwin-like melody, Lee's acapella versions of the traditional "Motherless Child" and "He's Got The Whole World In His Hands" are pure spun beauty and there's even a little frivolity on a Fran Landesman song "Season In The Sun" when George Duvivier joins in on bass and the solemn duo momentarily becomes a frisky jazz trio.

This record orignally came out on RCA in 1962 and has been revived a couple of times in the CD era. I first bought it when the format first came around and RCA reissued a whole slew of their jazz rarities on disc. Like a lot of older jazz sessions that have fallen into public domain lately, it's just been reissued, this time on a Spanish label, Solar, and with a nice bonus, some 1963 Blake and Lee live tracks from a concert in Germany that have never been released before.  These sound a little rough but still can be clearly heard. The highlights of this section are a gospel waltz version of Cannonball Adderly's "Sermonette",  a dramatic but lively Blake solo piece called "The Outcast" I'd never heard of before and an arrangement of the song "Round About" with a lilting carousel-like theme that foreshadows Blake's later masterwork "The Short Life Of Barbara Monk".

Altogehter The Newest Sound Around is a singular classic of voice and piano blending in a way no one has quite been able to match in the fifty years since its release.  It's a masterpiece that deserves to be far better known than it is and it's good that it's finally available again.

Margaret

Even in this "everything comes out eventually" era, once in a while there's a film that its studio dislikes for one reason or another, resulting in its sitting on a shelf for years before a token run in a New York theatre for a week or two and an anonymous DVD release.

The film Margaret was almost one of those. Sitting in the Fox Searchlight vaults since 2007 because the studio and Kenneth Lonergan, the film's director kept squabbling about its length and Lonergan's difficulties in coming up with a finished cut, it did finally get released in New York in September 2011 and that would have been that except some critics saw the film and were impressed enough to make it a cause celebre in the film press and get it more exposure. It did eventually some acclaim and made a few critics' "Best of 2011" list. It's finally getting a wider release now and my personal opinion is...eh.  In a lot of ways this feels like the airless film about self-absorbed West Side New Yorkers that Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach are always accused of making.

The main thrust of the film concerns a 17-year-old prep school girl, Lisa, who is involved in a bus accident that results in a woman's death.  The woman was run over by a bus whose driver had been distracted by Lisa.  The woman literally dies in her arms and although she at first tells the police the woman was at fault, she becomes consumed with her own guilt and obsessed with making the bus driver legally responsible for the death.

 Anna Paquin plays Lisa and she really conveys her confused senses of guilt, loneliness and outrage well.  When the movie concentrates on this main plot everything works fine.  It's all the bizarre tangents and parallels that drag things down.  Lisa's parents are divorced (naturally) and she lives with her mother, a stage actress who is starring in a hit play and is dating a Colombian businessman.  The mother-daughter estrangement angle is understandable but there seems to be too much time spent on Mom's dates.  As for Lisa herself, when she isn't haranguing police and lawyers about having the bus driver fired, she spends her school time getting in political arguments with a Syrian-born student and having very casual sexual encounters with a classmate she barely talks to and one of her teachers.  There are also some random background statements about the arbitrariness and mystery of existence that further confuse the issues.

All these elements could be part of a compelling movie but they feel poorly organized here.  Lisa comes off selfish, unsympathetic and sometimes so arbitrary you wonder if she might need a therapist.  Paquin is excellent but Lisa is not someone I'd want to watch for two and a half hours. Her character reminds me somewhat of an even more unsympathetic woman Sigourney Weaver played in a 1999 film nobody knows called A Map Of The World. There Weaver portrayed a cold, hostile woman wrongfully jailed for child molestation.  Her frostiness was compelling because it came from a grown woman whose inability to communicate with others seemed a lifelong tragedy.  Paquin's moods come off just come off as the petulance of a spoiled kid.

The acting is really good all around. Paquin, as I said, is convincing and there are also good turns from J.  Smith Cameron as her mother, Jean Reno as Mom's beau, Alison Janney as the accident victim and Matt Damon as the teacher who gets lucky.  Matthew Broderick also appears as another teacher but I have no idea why he is even in the movie.

In the end the film did need a good editor.  Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, no slouches, contributed to putting this version togetrher but making a coherent whole out of all this seemed even beyond their powers.  Not every unseen film is a suppressed masterpiece.

Sister Clodagh's Spring Movie Quiz

Dennis Collazio runs an interesting movie blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, where he occasionally runs a movie quiz to get opinions on a number of film topics. Here is the quiz and my answers are below.

1) Favorite movie featuring nuns

An easy one. Black Narcissus.











2) Second favorite John Frankenheimer movie

Seven Days In May second only to The Manchurian Candidate.

3) William Bendix or Scott Brady?

Bendix. I always confuse Brady with his brother, Lawrence Tierney.

4) What movie, real or imagined, would you stand in line six hours to see? Have you ever done so in real life?

I've never done it but for the 42 reel version of Greed, I'd think about it.


5) Favorite Mitchell Leisen movie

Murder At The Vanities. It was insane but it's the only one I really know.

6) Ann Savage or Peggy Cummins?
.

Cummins as Annie Laurie Starr? I'd rob a bank for her any time












7) First movie you remember seeing as a child

The animated 101 Dalmatians. (So I'm old. Deal with it.)

8) What moment in a movie that is not a horror movie made you want to bolt from the theater screaming?

I'd say Medea's first appearance in Diary Of A Mad Black Woman except I saw it at a family gathering on DVD, not a theatre.

9) Richard Widmark or Robert Mitchum?

Widmark because he could play cowardly punks as well as tough guys.

10) Best movie Jesus

Jeffery Hunter in King Of Kings. I haven't seen a lot of Jesus films.

11) Silliest straight horror film that you’re still fond of

The Brain That Wouldn't Die. It's both ridiculous and sleazy.

12) Emily Blunt or Sally Gray?

I know who they are but I haven't seen any of their films.

13) Favorite cinematic Biblical spectacular

See #10.

14) Favorite cinematic moment of unintentional humor

The murderer's hysterical confession in Murder At The Vanities.

15) Michael Fassbender or David Farrar?

Farrar. I've missed all of Fassbender's ubiquitous 2011 appearance so far.


16) Most effective faith-affirming movie

2001: A Space Odyssey. It really makes the case that there's something bigger than us out there.










17) Movie that makes the best case for agnosticism

Through A Glass Darkly. No one does loss of faith like Bergman.

18) Favorite song and/or dance sequence from a musical

Two by Busby Berkeley: "Lullaby Of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935 and "Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish" from Garden of the Moon.

19) Third favorite Howard Hawks movie

Red River coming after Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday

20) Clara Bow or Jean Harlow?

Harlow. Clara Bow has never connected with me.

21) Movie most recently seen in the theater? On DVD/Blu-ray/Streaming?

In a theater: Headhunters.  On DVD: Apocalypse Joe, a Spaghetti western

22) Most unlikely good movie about religion

The Last Temptation Of Christ.  From the publicity I wasn't expecting it to be that positive about faith.
23) Phil Silvers or Red Skelton?

Ernie Bilko, of course.

24) “Favorite” Hollywood scandal

The William Desmond Taylor murder

25) Best religious movie (non-Christian)

The Burmese Harp













26) The King of Cinema: King Vidor, King Hu or Henry King? (Thanks, Peter)

King Vidor

27) Name something modern movies need to relearn how to do that American or foreign classics had down pat

Create characters with the emotional maturity of adults, not hyperactive six-year-olds.

28) Least favorite Federico Fellini movie

And The Ship Sails On.

29) The Three Stooges (2012)—yes or no?

Heck no. I don't do cover bands.

30) Mary Wickes or Patsy Kelly?

Kelly for her shorts with Thelma Todd

31) Best movie-related conspiracy theory

William Randolph Hearst hushing up the accidental shooting of Thomas Ince on his yacht.

32) Your candidate for most misunderstood or misinterpreted movie

Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny. Most people hate it but I thought it was a powerful statement about guilt and loneliness.





33) Movie that made you question your own belief system (religious or otherwise)

The Crying Game. Do I have to explain?

Don Byron New Gospel Quintet - "Love, Peace, And Soul"

In his recording career, clarinetist Don Byron has done tributes to a daunting variety of artists such as Junior Walker, Lester Young, Raymond Scott, John Kirby and Borscht Belt comic Mickey Katz. His first CD in four years, Love, Peace, And Soul, expands that list to include gospel pioneers Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey and Sister Rosetta Tharpe and like all his previous projects, he makes his explorations sound perfectly logical and burn like nobody's business.

In his liner notes Byron makes a argument for Dorsey being the first composer to bring an African-American blues influence into religious music to create modern gospel, one of the foundations of all 20th century Black popular music, making Dorsey a monumentally important figure.  Byron and his quintet put forth a hell of a compelling case for this, performing Dorsey's songs with all out gusto. D. K. Dyson sings the house down while Byron shows his prowess on tenor and baritone sax as well as his usual clarinets and the entire band makes a holy stomping noise. Most of the pieces are gospel based but there are also side trips into blues, country and rock and roll and an Eddie Harris funk tune, "Sham Time" fits into the program perfectly. Besides the excellent work of the quintet, Dean Bowman's powerful pipes and a horn section add to a swinging version of Dorsey's "Consideration" and Brandon Ross and Vernon Reid contribute shredding guitar solos elsewhere.

It's been way too long since Don Byron had some new music out. Now with this triumphant reappearance on a new label, Savoy, hopefully we'll be hearing what his fertile mind comes up with a lot more frequently.