PHIL NUGENT GIVES THANKS FOR:
BLUE VELVET (1986)
I'm not sure that it's possible to fully appreciate how thankful some of us are for Blue Velvet, the greatest American movie of the 1980s, without having suffered the indignity of being a movie freak in the 1980s, when this picture arrived like cool water to a man stranded in the desert. The biggest surprise may not have been that David Lynch, who by that time had Eraserhead and The Elephant Man to his credit, had this inside him, but that he was allowed to get it out of his system with the financial assistance of Dino De Laurentiis, who bought the property out of development hell and gave Lynch carte blanche to express his vision, asking only that the sucker come in at no longer than two hours. This was apparently De Laurentiis' way of thanking Lynch for all the unhappy work the director had put in cranking out Dune, another De Laurentiis production. Given that Dune failed to result in the intended franchise hit, nobody in Hollywood would have been surprised, let alone appalled, if Dino had told the boy from Missoula to take a hike, and take his leading man (Kyle MacLachlan, who made his film debut in Dune, and who had signed to appear in a string of sequels that were never going to happen) with him. Instead, De Laurentiis succumbed to an unusually well-timed bout of honor, and given the results, only the churlish would whisper that it's too bad that it didn't last long enough for Lynch to cut a deal with him to make Ronnie Rocket. Because of this, anyone who's thinking of talking some shit about Dino De Laurentiis -- the man whose other credits in 1986 alone included Tai-Pan, King Kong Lives, and Maximum Overdrive -- had better check with me first to make sure you've got the right. Unless you've paid for a movie masterpiece and been married to Silvano Magnano, you probably haven't.
MOUSEHOLES (1999)
Helen Hill, who died in 2007, and who earlier this week was awarded a Leo Award by the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, was a friend of mine. Helen was an independent filmmaker, though given the way that term is bandied about these days, it doesn't begin to capture just how independent she was; she never had an agent or a distributor, but finished her short animated films when she could and trucked them around to festivals with a reel tucked under her arm. Her masterpiece, Mouseholes, is a tribute to her dead grandfather that draws on home movies, Helen's own childlike animation, and tape-recorded conversations to make something sublime out of one of the most remarkable things about movies, and one of the key ways in which they have forever changed our world: their ability to enable us to hold onto a few invaluable pieces of the people we've lost, like ghosts trapped in bottles. For Helen, the film was about hanging onto part of her grandfather; now, for those of us left behind, the film has become about holding onto part of the woman who made it.
HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)
Let's be clear about this: the reason that one of the best, funniest comedies in the history of movies exists is that its producer-director, Howard Hawks, had the balls and the taste to be corrupt in just the right way. A lot of people with as much talent as Hawks would never have thought of taking The Front Page, which then had a pretty good claim to being the greatest American play yet written and is nothing to sneeze at now, and turning it into a romantic comedy by giving the lead role a sex change and turning the other male lead into her ex-husband, who's waiting to make his next move. And while Hollywood was, and always will be, full of crass jackals who'd think nothing of trying something like that, hardly any of them would have been able to pull it off. (A 1988 remake of Hawks' rip-off, set in the world of TV news and starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner called Switching Channels was apparently made just to demonstrate this very point.) By now, His Girl Friday is so solidly (and deservedly) entrenched in its super-plus classic status that most people are barely aware of what a cold-blooded commercial calculation it's based on, or even that it has a title that ought to make you barf. I bring all this up now not because it takes anything away from the wonderfulness of the movie, because it doesn't: if I'm ever exiled to a desert island, this son of a bitch is coming with me. But it's worth keeping in mind, so that in a movie culture increasingly open to conventional wisdom and partisan warfare, everyone keeps in mind the final word on how greatness is achieved: you just never know.
TOKYO OLYMPIAD (1065)
Kon Ichikawa's 170-minute documentary record of the 1964 Olympic Games was commissioned by the Japanese government as part of their effort to use the games as their announcement that the country had transformed itself since World War II and was eager to be regarded as a smoothly functioning, hospitable member of the world of nations. Originally, the Japanese telegraphed both the ambition of the project, and their willingness to meet the rest of the world halfway, by hiring Akira Kurosawa, who at that time had no serious challengers for the title of the Japanese director who was best-known and most revered outside Japan. Luckily, somebody had a reality check and realized that Ichikawa, who was known for his ability to improvise in the face of changing conditions, was better suited temperamentally to this mission that the proud old samurai and control freak Kurosawa. Besides, the world already had one great Olympics documentary showing what the games looked like through the eyes of a director accustomed to bending reality to her will: Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad, legendary for the way it transforms the musclular bodies on display into black-and-white film poetry. Ichikawa's brightly colored film captures the atmosphere, the flavor, the summer fun aspect of the whole spectacle, as well as the awesome mixture of the personalities involved. And though it's a measure of Ichikawa's mastery that it all looks effortless -- a few thousand people got together and had some contests, and all he did was point a camera at it and boil the results down to the good stuff -- the sense it gives you of the scale of the enterprise is explanation enough as to why there weren't more Olympics movies like this prior to the mid-1960s. Of course, there'll never be anything like it ever again; none of the people who might put up the money would see the point, because now we get to watch it all while it's happening, on TV. Whoopy-dink.
THE FILMS OF W.C. FIELDS
Pauline Kael: "From their titles, it's hard to tell the W.C. Fields movies apart; as John Mosher observed, 'Fields is Fields, a rose is a rose.' " Wilfrid Sheed:"...we demand more of Fields than even comic genius. We have to believe he meant it. We want certification that such a one existed: a mean, child-hating con man who was so funny about it that he made these things all right." Although there were other great screen comedians who were funnier in a greater number of ways, such as the Marx Brothers, and others who were more gifted visually as moviemakers, such as Buster Keaton, Fields' scraggly, underfunded, rattily uneven body of work retains the special fascination of representing one mean-spirited bastard's judgement on, and self-defense strategy against, the world. Fields has turned out to be one of those movie figures, like Bogart, who never goes out of style or fully loses connection with the modern world, yet it doesn't get any easier, as the years go by, to believe that the movies themselves got made on the level. The Fatal Glass of Beer, Million Dollar Legs, Mississippi, It's a Gift, The Man on the Flying Trapeze, My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break -- they all look as if they made late at night when the studio bosses had gone home and the security guards had passed out drunk, using money that whimsically crooked bookkeepers had skimmed from the budgets of Rin Tin Tin pictures. Although there are people working today who are probably as talented as Fields, and maybe even as idiosyncratic, there are no parallels for his career; as soon as Bill Murray, probably the closest living point of comparison, showed that he could make people laugh in a thrown-together movie like Stripes, he was thrown into big-budget special effects exravaganzas like Ghostbusters and eventually forced to turn character actor, which might have been his strategy for self-defense. To find anything close to Fields' vehicles today, you'd probably be best off searching the schedule of the Animal Planet channel.
RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT (1979)
Hard to believe now, but there was a time in our culture when stand-up comedians didn't get to leave behind every inflection of their act, cusswords included, perfectly preserved on cable TV specials. Lenny Bruce, who more or less invented the modern conception of the nightclub comic as satirical firebrand and verbal cartoonist, left behind only a posthumously released film record of one of his last performances, caught after his legal and drug problems had snuffed out his energy and wit and reduced him to a wry, paranoid figure snuffling in front of a bare brick wall. (Earlier clips of Bruce doing a TV-friendly version of his act on the Steve Allen show give you some idea of how much of his act was physical, and so is missing from the performances that were released on records.) Bruce's greatest disciple, Richard Pryor, was much luckier: this full-feature performance film caught him in full flight at the height of his powers, at a time when he was using everything he'd learned about working a crowd and applying it to a young lifetime's worth of experiences and observations. The film was released a year before Pryor, in a guilt-stricken, coke-baser's frenzy of despair, lit himself on fire; its sequels, starting with the 1982 Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, record his partially successful attempt to relaunch himself after that traumatic meltdown, and his subsequent discovery that both his health and his inspiration were all but shot. But at least future generations won't be in any danger of thinking that this man was just the guy in The Toy.
McCABE & MRS. MILLER; THE LONG GOODBYE; THIEVES LIKE US; CALIFORNIA SPLIT; NASHVILLE (1970s)
In 1970, Robert Altman, then 45, directed the first hit film of his career, M*A*S*H. Ten years later, on a wavering leash from producer Robert Evans and a fluctuating budget, he directed Popeye, which was to be his second hit, even though it turned out to be the kind of commercial success whose star, Robin Williams, would still be apologizing for it twenty years later. In between those two hits, Altman would be able to make thirteen feature films, make them his way, for good or ill, and get them distributed by major studios whose bosses were still reeling in confusion from the collapse of the old system and cowed by Altman's many prizes and adulatory reviews. The five listed above are my favorites from that amazing body of work, which is as alive and unconventional as any large-scale attempt to understand America that any artist has ever embarked on. You might prefer five others; I'm generally up to taking another look at any of them, except maybe for Quintet and A Perfect Couple, because I find that revisiting even the ones that I think stink on ice feels less like looking at dead, bad old movies than like revisiting distant, weird members of the family who I haven't seen since the last time they got out of rehab. The fact that any of them exist at all is conclusive proof that desperate bewilderment at the top is not the worst thing you could have in the movie business. You might think that the same guys who were prepared to sponsor Altman to such a degree on the basis of one hit would have handed him the keys to the kingdom after he'd had a second one, but by 1980, the corporate heads had decided they knew what they were doing again, and the next year, Altman gave up on Hollywood and spent the rest of the decade working in theater and cable TV and making filmed plays on shoestring budgets, with only one small return to actual feature filmmaking, the barely released O. C. and Stiggs. He restarted his movie career right on schedule, in 1990, beginning with Vincent and Theo, a Van Gogh biopic that is as great as anything he ever made, and as unprofitable.
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)
The greatest fusion of commercial thriller and political satire ever to come out of Hollywood -- and, as directed by John Frankenheimer, a still-stunning mixture of old-studio technique and new-style TV-age hipness -- is fairly high on the list of movies that nobody should have been able to get made at all. The novel, by Richard Condon, was a great success but also widely taken for being unadaptable. In fact, George Axelrod, who did the masterful screenplay, has said that he was stymied with a concrete case of writer's block until the film's star, Frank Sinatra, cured him by calling up and saying that it had been a while and he would like to see some pages. (Axelrod was the film's co-producer, alongside Frankenheimer, so technically, he was Sinatra's boss, but let's get real: having Frank Sinatra call you up and tell you that he sure would like to see you flap your arms and fly over the Chrysler Building might turn out to be the cure for gravity.) It wouldn't be until the late 1970s that the mercurial Sinatra would gain control of the picture himself and pull it from theatrical distribution or TV broadcast until 1988. The reasons for this, mostly financial in nature, aren't altogether clear, but contrary to popular urban myth, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with guilty feelings related to the possibility that the movie anticipated the Kennedy assasination. (By then, Richard Condon had written a novel, Winter Kills, that was directly based on JFK assassination conspiracy lore, and that book was made into a movie, written and directed by William Richart and starring Jeff Bridges, the blighted production and distribution history of which would spur rumors and allegations related to the organized-crime connections of some of its financiers and the disinclination of Embassy Pictures to alienate its own connections in the defense industry.) But I can say that I remember finally seeing The Manchurian Candidate for the first time -- actually, the first three times -- in the spring of 1988 at the Prytania Theater in New Orleans, and that of all my experiences with movies that have been re-introduced to the public after a spell in the vault, none has been as far from disappointing as my experience with this one.
CHILDREN OF PARADISE (1945)
Marcel Carne's three-hour-plus romantic celebration of the life of the theater, as rich and satisfying as any epic-scale film entertainment in history, was made during the Nazi occupation of France, a time when the Vichy government imposed rationing and other restrictions on materials and did not permit the production of any movie intended to be longer than 90 minutes. (Carne got approval to proceed with his script only by pretending that the finished product would be released in two parts.) The production provided employment, and gave cover, to many Resistance members, who worked as extras alongside Nazi loyalists who had been assigned to the project by Vichy, smiling and nodding in polite conversation with those scumbags while memorizing their faces and imagining how they were going to look with nooses draped around their necks. (Legend has it that Carne dragged out the production towards the end in anticipation of the arrival of the Allies so that the movie could wrap in a free France.) This kind of big moviemaking is commonly associated with decadence now, but Carne's commitment to his elegant conception and vast canvas was strong enough that he plowed ahead, creating the illusion that he had much greater material resources than he had. Some contemporary "independent" filmmakers who think they're demonstrating their own artistic integrity when they can't bother to focus the camera properly ought to be made to sit through this movie and then handed ritual seppeku blades, in trust that they'll do the right thing.
JAWS (1975)
I was eight years old. She was two: this was 1977, the first year she was "officially" re-released after her debut in 1975, to compete with this slutty new number on the block named Star Wars. A lot of the kids I knew were all excited about the new girl, and couldn't understand why I was so excited about the chance that I might get to see some old hag who everybody had been talking about for a couple of years, but I had done some asking around, and everything I discovered seemed to confirm that the new girl didn't have a shark. And I had been fascinated by the thought of Jaws for, it seemed, my whole life; it seemed that, for as long as I could remember, I'd heard people talking about her in vague, soft whispers. I knew that I was supposed to be too young for her, because I'd spent so many hours -- yes, hours -- lying on my belly looking at the newspaper ads, and gazing at that special box that read, "May Be Too Intense for Younger Children." (As the Mad magazine parody pointed out, putting that line in the ads as a means of keeping kids out of the theaters was like trying to keep ants away from a picnic by pouring sugar on the ground.) Ultimately, I got to see it because the Disney cartoon The Rescuers was also playing at McComb, Mississipp's only two-screen theater -- McComb, Mississippi's only movie theater -- and because my mom decided that she'd rather be getting her hair done and shooting shit with the girls for those two hours than sitting next to me watching Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor lend their voices to the characters of a couple of mice. After I got home -- following a very awkward car ride during which I, still in a state of shock, deflected my mom's questions about the movie she thought I'd seen with a series of "Hah?"s -- I would go through many stacks of white typing paper trying to adapt the movie to comic-strip form, in much the way that Hunter Thompson, I would read later, had spent his youth copying pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald longhand, so that he could feel their prose rhythms coursing through his fingers. It was the closest I had come at that time to writing a movie a love letter. In retrospect, she probably thought I was kind of goofy, if she thought of me at all. I was just one of millions of boys staring at her with my eyes and mouth wide open, I know that. And in the years since -- Christ, in the decades since -- I've known a lot of movies that were smarter, sweeter, more generous, more mature, more beautiful, and had more to teach me about the world. But you never forget the first one. This year she turned thirty-three, and it would be an understatement to say that she still looks good for her age. I expect that, if I'm still around when she's sixty-six, I'll still want to drink her bath water.
Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg
Contributor: Phil Nugent