Subversive Narratives: Taxi Driver, Joe, WUSA

Although Classical Hollywood had already been dealt a series of death-blows, it might have taken a much longer time dying had it not been for the major eruptions in American culture from the mid-sixties and into the 1970s. Overwhelmingly, the echoes of Vietnam, and subsequently Watergate, were part of the growing force and cogency of radical protest movements—black militancy, feminism, gay liberation. There are two keys to understanding the development of the Hollywood cinema in the seventies: the impingement of Vietnam on the national consciousness, and the astonishing evolution of the horror film genre. The obvious monstrousness of the Vietnam war definitively undermined the credibility of “the system”. Popular protest became common, the essential precondition to a valid revolution. The questioning of authority spread to a questioning of the entire social structure that validated it, and ultimately social institutions, the family, the symbolic figure of the father as superego. The possibility suddenly opened up that the whole world might have to be recreated. Yet this generalized crisis in ideological confidence never begat a revolution. Society appeared to be in a state of advanced disintegration, yet there was no serious possibility of the emergence of a coherent alternative. 

Central to the incoherence of Taxi Driver (1976) is its director Martin Scorsese, with his Catholic Italian background, his fascination with the Hollywood tradition, and his comparatively open responsiveness to contemporary issues. Travis (De Niro) becomes obsessed with the mission of washing the scum from the streets—the scum being both literal and human flotsam. The outcome of this obsession is his violent final release and the rescue of Iris in order to send her back to her parents, the act that establishes Travis as a hero in the eyes of society and the popular press. We see the big city is pure filth, Betsy as the angel of true love is an illusion; so what is left? During one of Travis’ conversation with Iris, he asks her if there is any place she wants to go to escape the squalor of her current existence. She replies tentatively that she has heard about “a commune in Vermont.” But Travis dismisses it immediately: he once saw a picture of a commune in a magazine and it “didn’t look clean.” 

Travis’ behavior is presented as increasingly pathological and antisocial, with his new ambitions he's become more  insane (among his plans, an assassination of a politician). Yet the film can neither clearly reject him (Travis remains, somehow, The Film Hero). I don't think anyone doubts that Travis’ finger-to-forehead gesture of mock suicide is ironically made, yet the irony seems curiously unfocused, and its aim is uncertain. The effect for the viewer is of a kind of paralysis. Being unable to achieve any clear, definitive statement about the hero, the film retreats into enigma. Travis becomes a public hero (ironic), feels satisfaction at what he has done for Iris and her parents, and reaches some personal serenity and satisfaction with himself. The spectator can think either that the hero will continue to cleanse the city of its filth, and he will explode again with another bloodbath. There is another alternative, which comes closest to rendering the action and narrative intelligible—the notion that Travis, while drowning in an obviously beyond-help society, has achieved through his massacre some kind of personal grace or redemption, and that is really all that matters, since civilization is demonstrably unredeemable.

Joe (1970) takes place over several days in New York City and focuses on the unlikely relationship that develops between two middle-age men: Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), a bitter tool-and-dye maker, and Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick), a wealthy advertising executive. While they have nothing in common socially or personally, they share a deep resentment toward hippie youth culture and the radical shifts in the American society. Joe is ranting and raving about “niggers,” “fags,” and “hippies,” grousing about his perceived disenfranchisement and an unfair system that coddles the lazy and punishes honest workers like himself. There is always the suggestion that Bill is just trying to stay on Joe’s good side out of concern that Joe might turn him in to the police, but the film also wants us to believe that these two men forge a real connection, one that feeds off their collective anger. 

Of course, that anger, to some extent, derives from jealousy, and when they have the opportunity late in the film to participate in an orgy with a group of hippies, their hesitation is minimal. They see the youth generation as cultural rot, but rot they want a part of, yet they can’t really share. At its best, Joe captures with raw, direct power the intensity of cultural animosity—one might say loathing—that was gripping the nation at the time, and in some ways it was prophetic; it was made just before the Kent State shooting and the subsequent Hard Hat Riot in New York City, both events that Joe Curran would have endorsed. The script merges zeitgeist-defining cultural awareness with a streak of vigilantism that is at times critical and at other times dangerously regressive. It’s hard to get a read on what the film’s ideological positioning is, which is compounded by Wexler’s choice of a contrived scenario about the violence of the generation gap.

Peter Boyle embodies the embittered Joe with a unique mix of angry bluster, coldness, foolish naivete, and dangerously coiled rage. He is simulatenousyl pathetic and scary, yet there is something relatable about him, even as he blurts out his generally misanthropic view of the world. In an interview with The New York Times, Boyle expressed his dismay that certain audiences misread the film and even cheered Joe’s violence (he contended that Joe was a clear anti-violence cry against U.S. involvement in Vietnam). The film seems to condemn Joe’s regressive social attitudes and love of violence, yet the objects of his derision are largely deserving, as most of the hippies portrayed in the film are criminals and frauds who betray any sense of progressive values or morality (it is clearly a post-Manson hippie world).

One of the great joys of Stuart Rosenberg’s WUSA (1970) is the way it evokes the New Orleans that was still visible but disappearing even in the 1980s—the Canal Street department stores, the French Quarter dives, the jazz clubs, the bars with wood paneling. If that New Orleans resembled anything, it resembled the blue collar city that disappeared when the dot com boom remade San Francisco in the early 1990s. The YMCA building on Saint Charles Avenue was long gone, as was the Hummingbird Grill, an all-night diner on the ground floor of a residential hotel where ex-cons worked the grill, and the waitresses brought you a thermos when you ordered coffee. Oddly, WUSA can’t seem to make up its mind whether it wants to glorify or condemn Reinhardt’s moral apathy. In fact, apart from fringe elements on both sides of the political spectrum, moral apathy seems to be the defining characteristic of just about everybody in the movie. As in Yeats’s poem, in WUSA, only the worst are full of “passionate intensity.”

Reinhardt finds work as a disc jockey on WUSA; though he identifies as “liberal,” he doesn’t mind reading news with an openly conservative spin. In short order, Reinhardt and Geraldine (Joanne Woodward) move into an apartment in the French Quarter, meeting a group of disaffected hippies and Rainey (Anthony Perkins), a liberal southerner (also a judge’s son) who after a stint in Venezuela with the Peace Corps, has come home and started collecting data on New Orleans welfare recipients for some vague municipal entity. Rainey excoriates Reinhardt for working for WUSA, which pushes Reinhardt to a state of self-delusion. In the film, Newman turns in such a charismatic performance, it’s kind of a contradiction, since the apathy he makes so appealing runs contrary to what would seem to be the movie’s left-leaning political message. When he’s not with Geraldine or working at the radio station, Reinhardt spends most of his time drinking and getting high with the hippies downstairs, who seem as unfazed as him. Along with Reinhardt, they sneer openly at Rainey, the only idealist. 

In the novel, all three protagonists, Reinhardt, Geraldine and Rainey are self-destructive. In their film version, Paul Newman’s charisma, his on-screen chemistry with Joanne Woodward, and Anthony Perkins' obsessive personality, all cause the film to express a worldview much closer to Reinhardt’s ultra-individualism than it is to Rainey’s sincere, if somewhat patronizing liberalism—which is a problem, since the movie clearly wants us to sympathize with Rainey’s convictions. If this constitutes one of WUSA’s chief failures, nevertheless, it also makes the movie suggestive of the contradictory philosophical underpinnings of American counterculture, and maybe one of the reasons for becoming the biggest flop of Paul Newman’s career.

Over Neil Diamond's song Glory Road in a montage, Reinhardt walks through a derelict graveyard, grieving Geraldine while trying to find her tomb. In the movie’s final scene, ruefully, Reinhardt tells the hippie guru that he is “a survivor.” Then he flings his jacket over his shoulder and walks out the door, presumably to board yet another Greyhound for a different city. WUSA captures much that was (and is) wrong with American counterculture, which suffers from deeply conflicted philosophical underpinnings, not least the conflict between the individualism at all costs of Reinhardt and the communalism inherent in any leftist critique. Consider the hippies living below Reinhardt, who openly have mocked Rainey for not being “cool.” By all appearances, they’re card carrying members of the American counterculture of the time, and yet throughout the film, they behave so inconsistently. Granted, we realize Rainey is disturbed enough to resort to violence. And yet while the film’s hippies mock Rainey’s idealism, they seem untroubled by Reinhardt’s opportunism. Does this make them opportunists, or worse, radical capitalists? 

If anything, the movie posits a world where everybody’s on the grift, from Reinhart’s preacher friend (a conman from New York) to the African-Americans who are dependent on welfare. In point of fact, the WUSA conservatives have it right; in both the film and the novel, most of the welfare recipients Rainey interviews are collecting benefits fraudulently, a fact that only serves to justify Reinhardt’s moral apathy. In WUSA, the closest Reinhardt comes to a change of heart is a speech condemning the Vietnam War at the film’s climax. “When our boys drop a napalm bomb on a cluster of gibbering slants, it’s a bomb with a heart.” As a parody of Newspeak, Reinhardt continues, while the rally turns into a riot. “And inside the heart of that bomb, mysteriously but truly present, is a fat little old lady on the way to the World’s Fair, and that lady is as innocent as she is motherly.” And yet by the time Reinhardt’s lecturing us from the podium, the film’s one committed leftist, Rainey, is being beaten to death by an angry mob.

In one scene, Reinhardt and Geraldine take a night swim in Lake Pontchartrain. After they get out of the water, Reinhardt accuses Geraldine of being a “man-killer” for luring him into the lake. Is he really so paranoid? Among other things, in WUSA, we observe the uneasy relationship countercultural values have with traditional American ideas about maleness, and with the American mythology of the outsider as both hero and anti-hero, at odds with most leftist ideology. In A Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1991) Christopher Lasch argues that much of what passes for counterculture is countercultural in appearance only, since it actually apes the values of the mainstream culture; as an example, Lasch cites 1960s countercultural icon Jim Morrison, frontman of the commercial rock band The Doors. In WUSA, won over by the star’ charisma, we might forget Reinhardt’s apathy, and the film would seem to contradict itself. Nevertheless, in part because Newman embodies such a glaring contradiction, the film tells us a great deal about the contradictory forces shaping American culture both before and since it was made. —Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond: A Revised and Expanded Edition (2003) by Robin Wood

Marlowe (2022) starring Liam Neeson

Open Road Films has acquired North American rights to Marlowe, a noir crime thriller that stars Liam Neeson atop an ensemble that includes Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Danny Huston, Alan Cumming, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ian Hart, Colm Meaney, Daniela Melchior and Francois Arnaud. Neil Jordan directed the film from script by The Departed’s William Monahan. The film will be released theatrically December 2 through Open Road/Briarcliff Entertainment. In what is Neeson’s 100th film, the star plays detective Philip Marlowe, the protagonist from the hardboiled Raymond Chandler mysteries that included The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. 

This one is based on author John Banville’s book The Black-Eyed Blonde, an original novel authorized by the Raymond Chandler estate. The action is set in late 1930’s Bay City, centering around the brooding, down on his luck detective Marlowe. He’s hired to find the ex-lover of a glamorous heiress (Kruger), daughter of a well-known movie star (Lange). “It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you begin to wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the look of something that knows it’s being watched. Traffic trickled by in the street below, and there were a few pedestrians, too, men in hats going nowhere.” So begins The Black-Eyed Blonde, and Marlowe is embroiled in a deadly investigation and web of lies he’s determined to bring to light. Ortenberg said he is “very excited to continue working with Liam Neeson on Marlowe. It’s the type of film we love to be part of: an incredible cast, an Oscar-winning writer and director, and a gripping story that audiences are going to love.”

Marlowe is a simmering crime noire with a screenplay written by Academy-award winner William Monahan, whose credits include Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Ridley Scott's Body of Lies and more. Set in Bay City in the '30s, the story itself follows Detective Philip Marlowe (Neeson), who has, as of late, been down on his luck. Everything changes when a beautiful and glamorous heiress, played by Diane Kruger, hires Marlowe to track down her ex-lover. When the ex's disappearance turns out to be only the tip of the iceberg, the detective finds himself at the center of a deadly investigation, spurred by a string of lies that will put his "very particular set of skills" to the test. Marlowe is hard-pressed to fall for the genre's femme fatales, and prefers to use violence only as a last-resort. He's the epitome of those black and white noire crimes with a rain-drenched city backdrop and a beautiful woman sitting on the edge of the desk, pleading for help. Marlowe is an adaptation of a specific work by Booker Prize-winner John Banville, The Black-Eyed Blonde, which featured Detective Marlowe, and was officially authorized by Chandler's estate. Source: collider.com

Marilyn Monroe, Mulholland Drive, Kim Stanley

Sixty years on from her untimely death, Marilyn Monroe remains the definition of a Hollywood icon. Her films, her look, her voice and her persona all are forever etched in the annals of movie history – which means any actor hoping to step into her shoes really has their work cut out. For Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ fictionalised story of Monroe’s life, Ana de Armas is tasked with embodying the blonde bombshell – and it’s a responsibility that came with considerable pressure. Speaking to Empire about inhabiting Marilyn Monroe, de Armas admits she felt insecure. “I was insecure about my voice, about the accent, about the choreography, about working with American actors who know her better than me, everything!” she says. That reaction, she explains, became part of the performance. “All of that was exactly what she would be feeling. So it was incredible. Even though it seems like everything was very sad, and a lot of traumatic things were going on, we had a great time.” 

The actor had a wealth of material to draw from when crafting her performance – not just Oates’ novel, but a tome consisting of iconic Marilyn Monroe photos curated by the director. “Andrew gave us a bible of 700-and-something pictures,” de Armas says. “The whole movie was in this bible, picture by picture, every scene.” That stack of photos informed the film’s formally-playful presentation, switching between aspect ratios, and from colour to black-and-white. “That’s the relation between the black-and-white and colour; it’s because of the pictures, it’s not random,” de Armas explains. “You want the audience to immediately engage, even in their subconscious, to something that they’ve already seen, and get them into the story.” Norma Jeane shared her mother’s love of movies and the escapism that they provide, and Marilyn Monroe became her mythical alter ego. De Armas points out that Monroe wanted to be taken seriously. “She wanted to have control of the material she was going to work on. No one was thinking like that at the time.” Source: empireonline.com

C.S Lewis has written extensively on the concept of Sehnsucht, a German word which signifies "sense of deep, inconsolable longing, yearning, the feeling of intensely missing something when we don't even know what it is." Perhaps no film conveyed this sense more powerfully than David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DR. Roughly, the first four-fifths of the film are immersed in a kind of dream-fantasy-haze, spawned within the mind of an unstable actress named Diane Selwyn. The surreal alternative universe of Selwyn’s fantasies ranges in style and mood from comedy to romance to horror to absurdism to ‘art film’. There are some funny bits, especially with the old couple with frozen faces in the limousine and the cocky movie director who finds his wife in bed with another man and later confronts the ‘cowboy’. Likewise, the story of Betty Elms (the fantasy alter ego of Diane Selwyn) goes from light comedy-drama to romance to dark romance to something approaching suspense and tragedy and finally horror. Betty is Diane’s main alternative character, much like the Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe dichotomy. 

Though ‘Rita’ is based on or ‘inspired’ by Camilla, a real-life person, she has certain attributes that are closer to Diane’s mind-set. And the movie director, Adam Kesher, faces obstacles in the fantasy that echo the problems faced by Diane herself in real life. Diane could only hate what became of Camilla, but she’s still in love with the Camilla whom she once knew. Also, as Camilla was beautiful and glamorous with or without stardom, she served as a psychological crutch for Diane. Even if Diane didn’t make it in Hollywood, the mere fact of being best friends and lovers with Camilla would have sufficed in filling her life with some degree of happiness. 

But a woman like Camilla is bound to be discovered by the industry sooner or later, since she's a perfect sex-symbol, a temptress. Paradoxically, men hanker for the greatest loyalty from the alpha female or temptress even though the allure of such a woman rests in the very qualities that are dynamic and hyperbolic, therefore most unstable and potentially disloyal. There’s something about Camilla that says, “I’m a born winner who must seek another born winner”, so to be associated with her charisma and beauty is to feel as a winner oneself. It is also true that the very unstable quality of Camilla/Rita is what turns Diane/Betty on the most. Through her death, Camilla now belongs to Diane alone, at least in her fantasy. 

As Camilla is gone from the world, she can only exist as a ghost, a phantom, a figment of imagination. No one can own her as a person in the flesh. Yet, what Diane now possesses of Camilla also haunts her. When Camilla was alive, Diane couldn’t have her because she ‘lost’ her to the Hollywood elites. After Camilla is dead, Diane can take possession of Camilla’s ‘soul’ as Diane, more than anyone else, has the obsessive need to weave Camilla into her elaborate myth of hope, love, and promises. But then, no matter how many times Diane resurrects Camilla as ‘Rita’ in her mind, the fact remains that Camilla is gone. 

Betty and ‘Rita’ are alternates of Diane and Camilla. Though Betty is physically the same as Diane, her radiance and talent (noticed by Hollywood casting directors) makes her more like the real-life Camilla. Though ‘Rita’ is physically the same as Camilla, her seating in the limousine in the opening scene is a variation of Diane’s situation in a limousine to Kesher’s mansion later in the film. ‘Rita’ (suffering from amnesia and unable to remember her real name) has attributes that refer to both Diane and Camilla. One of the first images of the film is the subjective view of someone moving toward a bed and laying her head on a pillow. Presumably, it’s Diane going to sleep to plunge into another stupor. In her dream, she, as Betty, is an ideal young woman. 

So pretty, so nice, so full of promises. She’s so sunny and cheerful that the whole world seems to be smiling down on her and on her side. The sun seems to exist just to radiate its heavenly rays on her. Like Doris Day. Even when she finds her suitcases missing outside the airport, it turns out that a friendly cab driver picked them up and is placing them inside the trunk as if it’s only natural to treat her like Hollywood royalty. It’s as if Los Angeles and Hollywood just can’t wait to greet her, indeed as if they are just as excited about her as she is about them. It’s Los Angeles of her mind where everything rolls out before her like a red carpet. But no matter how bright and blooming a fantasy may be, elements of doubt and doom are always hiding just around the corner. Little by little, Betty’s idealized dream fantasy begins to crack and erode. But then, the cracks are cemented and ‘repaired’ with her imaginative ‘rationalizations’ as to why things are getting weirder.

Her mind plays on three narrative threads. A confident and even principled movie director who is hounded by some sinister conspiracy that he must cast a certain woman in his new picture. He is not only pressured by a strange network of ‘gangsters’ but also a victim of marital infidelity who finds his wife in bed with some beefy working class type that is a staple of Hollywood movies. The second narrative thread involves a strange, mysterious, and beautiful woman(who is later known as ‘Rita’) who has lost her memory and has taken shelter at Betty’s place of residence. And the third thread is about Betty’s adventure for fame and fortune in Hollywood. Betty is brimming with pity and warmth for the disoriented and pitiable ‘Rita’. Indeed, she even leaves before the second audition — her first, for a soap opera, was a smash — to pick up ‘Rita’ to check out an apartment that might be Rita’s. Betty might as well be Cinderella. 

She would even risk her career out of her concern for Rita. She never reneges on her promises. When Diane is in the world of reality, she wants to escape into fantasy. But as alluring and beautiful as the fantasy is, there’s also forces within the mind that gnaws away like a sewer rat at the fantasy, thus creating a hole/portal back to reality. So, Diane is simultaneously running from and returning to reality. But both reality and fantasy are dead-ends. There’s no bringing back Camilla in the real world. She is gone forever from the real world. No matters how many times Diane awakens afresh from her dream/nightmare, the reality it that she finds herself lost, living in a desolate world without Camilla. 

Though Diane Selwyn’s dream/fantasy has elements of whimsy and romance, it also has horror-istic elements of paranoia, diabolic conspiracies, nightmarish surrealism, and lurking dangers. The horrible things in the dream/fantasy have an element of dark mystery that seems either unsolvable or inaccessible. She could also make believe that Camilla-as-Rita is a woman of beautiful soul who’s dependent on her love and support, someone whose rejuvenation is made possible by Betty’s kindly angel-like intervention. Of course, this Betty is the perfect girl who has the talent to be both a great actress and a great star as well a heart of gold that goes out of its way to help her muse. In a way, the fact that the two women are lesbians (or bi-sexual) underline Selwyn’s dilemma. In Chayefsky’s 1958 movie The Goddess, the Marilyn Monroe–type heroine (Kim Stanley) sought movie stardom, fame, and adulation in order to compensate for her inability to love, and ends up dependent on her lesbian secretary's care and adoration. Also Marilyn Monroe was rumored to depend emotionally on her friend and publicist Patricia Newcomb. 

Chayefsky said in 1958 that his heroine Emily Ann Faulkner “represents an entire generation that came through the Depression with nothing left but a hope for comfort and security. Their tragedy lies in that they never learned to love, either their fellow humans or whatever god they have.” Diane Selwyn in MULHOLLAND DR. has a scar that cannot be fixed. So, whenever her mind, via many detours, arrives at the dark truth, it doesn’t lead to clarity and luminance but greater horror and abject darkness. When she opens up her deepest scar, it just festers and hurts to the point of unbearableness. Truth doesn’t set her free. It just deepens her bruises. It just makes her infection fester even more. Source: medium.com

Kim Stanley: I remember that Newman was something of a joke--an erotic joke--at The Actors Studio, because he was so handsome. Frighteningly handsome. He caused as much physical commotion as Marilyn Monroe did. He created a lot of tension, jealousy and competition among the men--merely by showing up. He is a kind, patient and careful man--and he is a patient and careful actor. His incremental method of working can give some the impression that he doesn't know what he's doing, but he usually does: He investigates stealthily, and he gets things done. He waited a long time to prove that he was a real actor. And he found his soul mate in Joanne Woodward, a splendid actress. I don't know how to speak to people about acting if they don't recognize it as an art, as a high calling, as a terribly demanding pursuit that will require not only more than you realize but more than you will ever possess. For the entire life of an actor, you are burnishing and sharpening and replacing tools that you need to have at your highest levels of performance--over and over again. 

It is never enough. Your heart has to be broken. Your mind has to be challenged and stretched and adapted. It is an almost impossible task. Actually, it is an impossible task, but in bravely attempting to fulfill it, you might achieve truth or greatness or inspiration. I just don't see that passion as much as I used to. I see the aching wants, but I don't see the dream, the passion to give up everything else to become a warrior of the art of acting. Religious orders remind me of how I lived when I first began to realize the challenge that was ahead of me. When I was working with Herbert Berghof, Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, I began to see how hard it would all be, but also how gratifying, how ennobling. When you see what is demanded, you think of bolting, and many are right to do so. Most of the time I know I fail. Because what I'm after is perfection, truth in art. This is exceedingly rare. It's very hard to achieve and overwhelming to maintain. –Follies of God: Kim Stanley Interview with James Grissom (1992)

King Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Breathless

Elvis had just returned from doing military service in Germany and was back in Hollywood working on his next movie, GI Blues. While overseas Elvis had met and fallen for Priscilla Beaulieu but fidelity was never the superstar's strong suit. He was also officially dating 22-year-old starlet Anita Wood at the same time. The King was even visited by the actual princesses Margrethe of Denmark, and Margaretha of Sweden on set that summer, but it was an alleged encounter with the reigning queen of the silver screen that remains speculated about to this day. According to Hollywood agent Byron Raphael, it all started when Elvis' representatives at the William Morris Agency were keen to send him and Marilyn on some high-profile public dates for publicity – but she said no. Byron said that he had kept the details secret for fifty years, but finally told Playboy and then the New York Post all the details in 2006: "He was very embarrassed but I think she turned him down because she felt it was too public, but Presley didn't give up and secretly set up a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. The agent claimed that when it was all over, Elvis called a cab for Marilyn. "A few days later when I mentioned Marilyn to Elvis, he said, 'She's a nice gal, but she's too much for me.'" Elvis was certainly very attracted to the sexually confident Ann-Margret, with whom Elvis had a long affair after starring together in Viva Las Vegas. Marilyn, conversely, was drawn to older, powerful men, like Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, and President John F Kennedy. —King Elvis: The Untold Stories Of Elvis Presley (2022) by Nicholas Spielberg 

A Rip-off with Genius: Marilyn's  mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn’t take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack—as if she died between wolf calls. She seemed to have become a camp siren; her comedy was self-satire—conscious parody that had begun unconsciously. She was not the first sex goddess with a trace of somnambulism; Garbo was often a little out-of-it, Dietrich was numb most of the time, and Hedy Lamarr was fairly zonked. But they were exotic and had accents, so maybe audiences didn’t wonder why they were in a daze; Monroe’s slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style. For Norman Mailer, she was “a proud, inviolate artist, a sex angel,” and he suggests that “one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her.” 

Arthur Miller had split her mystique into The Misfits and After the Fall, and since each was only a side of her, neither was believable. Marilyn Monroe might have “grown” as an actress but she would have died as a star. The pity is that she didn’t get more of the entertaining roles that were in her range; she might have been right for Sweet Charity or for Lord Love a Duck or Born Yesterday or a remake of the Harlow comedy Bombshell. She might have had a triumph in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and she probably could have toned down for Tennessee Williams’s Period of Adjustment and maybe even Bonnie and Clyde. In his caping for Marilyn, Norman Mailer is supremely cruel to Arthur Miller, who was left devastated after her death. “Instead of jetting from New York to the funeral to get my picture taken, I decided to stay home and let the public mourners finish the mockering ritual. I loved her so much. Not that everyone there will be false, but enough. Many of them there destroyed her, ladies and gentlemen. Now you stand there weeping and gawking at this lovely girl who you at last killed.” —The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (2016) 

What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the young hood with his loose random grace and the impervious American girl seem so remote. And you’re left with the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting chaos as natural, and not caring one way or another about it. The heroine, who has literary interests, quotes Wild Palms, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.” But that’s just an attitude she likes at that moment; at the end she demonstrates that it’s false. Michel states the truth for them both: “I’d choose nothing.” The European critic, Louis Marcorelles, describes their world as “total immorality, lived skin-deep.” And possibly because we Americans are used to live among just such people, the film may not, at first, seem quite so startling as it is. And that’s what’s frightening about Breathless: not only are the characters familiar in an exciting, revealing way, they are terribly attractive. They seem giddy and gauche and amusingly individualistic, until you consider that this individualism is not only a reaction to mass conformity, but, more terrifyingly, is the new form that mass society takes: indifference to human values. 

Despite the unrest and anarchy in the moral atmosphere, Michel is as romantic as Pépé Le Moko and as true to love (and his death scene is just as operatic and satisfying). He’s honest and likable, though socially classifiable as a psychopath; she’s a psychopath, too, but the non-classifiable sort—socially acceptable but a sad, affectless doll. Patricia seems to be playing at existence, at a career, at “love”; she’s “trying them on.” But she doesn’t want to be bothered; when her lover becomes an inconvenience, she turns him in to the police. Shot down and dying, the young man gallantly tries to amuse her, and then looks up at her and remarks—without judgment or reproach, but rather, descriptively, as a grudging compliment: “You really are a bitch.” 

And in her flat, little-girl voice, she says, “I don’t know what the word means.” If she does know, she doesn’t care to see how it applies to her, and it wouldn’t bother her much anyway. The codes of love and loyalty depend on stronger emotions than her idle attachment to this lover—one among many. They depend on emotions, and she is innocent of them. An updated version of the betraying blondes who destroyed so many movie gangsters, she is innocent even of guilt. As Jean Seberg plays her—and that’s exquisitely—Patricia is the most terrifyingly simple muse-goddess-bitch of modern movies. Next to her, the scheming Barbara Stanwyck of Double Indemnity is as archaic as Theda Bara in A Fool There Was. Godard's film was dedicated to Monogram Pictures—who were, of course, the producers of cheap American gangster-chase movies. Breathless was made for $90,000. —Deeper Into Movies: Film Writings (1969-1972) by Pauline Kael

JFK: America's Last President, WUSA

JFK warned of the danger of a comfortable complacency: The barrage upon truth will grow more constant. And some people cannot bear the responsibility of a free choice which goes with self-government. Finally, shrinking from choice they turn to those who prevent them from choosing and thus find in a kind of prison, a kind of security. We, as a society, have lost the spirit we held when John F. Kennedy was our president.Today, those who question power are considered conspiracy theorists. But where did that term originate? While there was a minimal reference to the term “conspiracy theory” in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not used in a derogatory way. The term became ubiquitous in the late 1960s after the CIA distributed a memo encouraging its assets to use the term to belittle anyone who questioned the Warren Report. The Declaration of Independence was essentially a conspiracy theory document, accusing King George of many things, some of which he was guilty, others not. Our country was born in the spirit of questioning power, John F. Kennedy embodied that spirit, and it died with his assassination. Today, we celebrate fitting in, not standing out. We honor those that follow the established and approved narrative, not those that offer opposing perspectives. Not since John F. Kennedy have we had a president who genuinely worked in the public’s interest. He was thoughtful, intelligent, and empathetic. He tried to create a fairer society, he tried to raise the living standards of the many, and he tried to create opportunity for all. He respected self-determination and abhorred imperialism. He was the president of the people. His presidency was one of those rare shining moments in history when the common man was actually represented in the halls of power. America died on November 22, 1963, and what remains is an illusion. As Robert Kennedy wrote in his book To Seek a Newer World, “Sharp criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country.” We have the right to demand better. And we once did have better. We had a president who genuinely served our interests—and not only our interests but the interests of the common man all around the globe. We are still living under the system that allowed these murders to be perpetrated, and that system is even more entrenched today. —America's Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy (2022) by Monika Wiesak 

WUSA is a perfect example of what could be labeled “liberal nightmare” cinema in the form of an abstract political artifact. A garish example of liberal exhibitionism. Stuart Rosenberg over-directed this under-written story of a right-wing political plot in New Orleans, based on an obscure novel by Robert Stone (A Hall of Mirrors, 1967). Paul Newman here is an alcoholic who drinks because he can't face himself. He's married but estranged from his equally alcoholic wife. Joanne Woodward's character is an uneducated young widow and a former hooker. Also, Anthony Perkins is an idealist going mad, and Cloris Leachman is a crippled naïf. First, I have to confess I have a fundamental aversion to movies about beautiful women whose souls have been lost, stolen or destroyed, especially when it isn't clear why. Paul Newman said he wanted the film served to critique “corporate greed” and “apathetic indifference to our national future.” 

Paul Newman plays Rheinhardt, a failed musician turned into a radio newscaster who becomes intrigued by Geraldine (Joanne Woodward), maybe falling in love with her. Geraldine befriends Morgan Rainey (Anthony Perkins), a social worker who is duped by a sinister neo-Fascist radio-station operator: Bingamon (Pat Hingle). Anthony Perkins plays an addled idealist, while Bingamon uses the burn-out Newman as his cat’s paw on his WUSA station. The score by Lalo Schifrin occasionally overwhelms the dialogue, and a late scene in which Newman's Rheinhardt delivers a harangue against the Vietnam War is difficult to hear because of the music—which I can only guess is supposed to mirror the riot that’s occurring onscreen.

In short, WUSA is a mess - but a fascinating mess, that ends in the most overtly manipulative tear-jerking way imaginable. The truth is there aren't enough politics in WUSA. The film is hobbled by an emphasis on too many wounded or compromised characters. Even the hippies living down the hall turn out to be shameless opportunists who take a gig singing at the right-wing rally, and then they slip their stash into Geraldine’s purse when the cops arrive. But WUSA is strangely fascinating in its complete defeatism. Nothing is ever really stated outright and instead the viewer is left to infer what's going on. It serves as a scrapbook of American sensibility at the end of the 1960s, a time when there really were people who believed we were on the brink of a revolution, when it was not difficult to imagine that the cycle of political assassinations and conflict begun in Dallas in 1963 would not only continue, but would escalate catastrophically. —Deeper Into Movies: Film Writings (1969-1972) by Pauline Kael

"At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept being shown acts of violence. The directors used to say they were showing us how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that if everyone is brutal, the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don’t believe in censorship the use of a counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there’s anything conceivably damaging in these films—the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don’t use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us—that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?" —The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (2016) edited by Sanford Schwartz 

WUSA was a giant flop in 1970 and the film was lost to history, barely remembered as a footnote to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s careers. Despite its high-quality stack of actors and ideas, WUSA never delivers on its promise to become a political thriller. The screen time spent in examining the rootless characters played by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward seems unrelated to the story's center of interest, the barely-glimpsed conspiracy. Geraldine sees herself as too dumb for working for a phone company and is quite antisocial. When Rainey goads Rheinhardt to show a conscience about the deal-making he sees back at the WUSA station, the DJ's response is to turn hostile. 

As much as Rheinhardt's disenchantment and apathy may reflect reality, it only frustrates the audience that expects Newman's character can find his moral footing and stop being so passive. WUSA belongs in the company of other "conspiracy" thrillers like All the King's Men, A Face in the Crowd, The Manchurian Candidate, Network, The Candidate, Executive Action, JFK, and Bulworth. Either way, these movies all envision a political environment beholden to corporate interests, a mass media run by capitalist sharks who manipulate the public opinion through demagogues, and an electoral process where candidates are stripped of their ideals in order to gain power. Director Stuart Rosenberg fails to bring WUSA to anything resembling an articulate conclusion. Rheinhardt's hippie neighbors are allowed to entertain at the rally, an unexplained choice that makes little sense. Rheinhardt is finally about to speak against WUSA when gunshots ring out. Later, Laurence Harvey's preacher advises Rheinhardt that the WUSA group is finished and that they'd all best leave town. In reality, it would make more sense that the publicity from the attempted assassination would actually strengthen Bingamton's circle of power.  

Critics of the time acknowledged WUSA's parallels to earlier political films like Frank Capra's Meet John Doe but blamed its failure on an aimless script and Rosenberg's limp direction. The film's passive-apocalyptic tone has more in common with Nathanael West's novella The Day of the Locust. A committed anti-war protester, Paul Newman was added to President Nixon's "unfriendly" list. Newman and Woodward did their best to promote WUSA and were complaining about Paramount's limited support for the film. In at least one interview Newman hinted at political interference, explaining that Rosenberg had been forced by the studio to cut over 20 minutes. But a decade later, Newman's final verdict was that WUSA was "a film of incredible potential which the production loused up. We tried to make it political, and it really wasn't." The DVD offers no subtitles and no extras. This is a shame, as several critics hinted that Robert Stone's Bingamton character was based on oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, who in the 1950s backed a syndicated conservative political TV show called Facts Forum. Hunt is also frequently named in several conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Source: parallax-view.org

"Hud: Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood"

Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood:

As a schoolgirl, my suspiciousness about those who attack American “materialism” was first aroused by the refugees from Nazi Germany who so often contrasted their “culture” with our “vulgar materialism” when I discovered that their “culture” consisted of their having had servants in Europe, and a swooning acquaintance with the poems of Rilke, the novels of Stefan Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger, the music of Mahler and Bruckner. And as the cultural treasures they brought over with them were likely to be Meissen porcelain, Biedermeier furniture, oriental carpets, wax fruit, and bookcases with glass doors, it wasn’t too difficult to reconstruct their “culture” and discover that it was a stuffier middle-class materialism and sentimentality, than they could find in the new world. These suspicions were intensified by later experience: the most grasping Europeans were, almost inevitably, the ones who leveled the charge of American materialism. Just recently, at a film festival, a behind-the-iron-curtain movie director, who interrupted my interview with him to fawn over every Hollywood dignitary who came in sight, concluded the interview with, “You Americans won’t understand this, but I don’t make movies just for money.” Americans are so vulnerable, so confused and defensive about prosperity—those who live by making movies showing a luxurious way of life worry over the American “image” abroad. But, the economics of moviemaking being what they are, usually all the producers do about it is worry—which is probably just as well because films made out of social conscience have generally given an even more distorted view of America than those made out of business sense, and are much less amusing. The most conspicuous recent example is Hud—just possibly the most completely schizoid movie produced anywhere anytime. 

Hud is a commercial Hollywood movie that is ostensibly an indictment of materialism, and it has been accepted as that by most of the critics. But those who made it protected their material interest in the film so well that they turned it into the opposite: a celebration and glorification of materialism—of the man who looks out for himself. The writers’ and director’s “anti-materialism” turns out to be a lot like the refugees’ anti-materialism: they had their Stefan Zweig side—young, tender Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde) and Melvyn Douglas’s Homer, a representative of the “good” as pious as Polonius; and they had their protection, their solid salable property of Meissen and Biedermeier, in Paul Newman. You can almost hear them say: “It’s a modern western, see, with this hell-raising man who doesn’t respect any of the virtues, and, at the end, we’ll fool them, he doesn’t get the girl and he doesn’t change!” “But who’ll want to see that?” “Oh, that’s all fixed—we’ve got Paul Newman for the part.” They could cast him as a mean man and know that the audience would never believe in his meanness. For there are certain actors who have such extraordinary audience rapport that the audience would not believe in their villainy, as with James Dean. 

Hud’s shouted last remark, his poor credo, “The world’s so full of crap a man’s going to get into it sooner or later, whether he’s careful or not,” has, at least, the ring of his truth. And it seems to me that perhaps the audience at large didn’t take all this very seriously, that we enjoyed it for its obvious hokum and factor of Western nostalgia, and for the wisecracking and slick style. Oddly, often more of American spirit and life came through thrillers and domestic comedies than through important, “serious” films like Marty or A Place in the Sun, which seemed like paralyzed, self-conscious imitations of European art, or films like Gentleman’s Agreement, with the indigenous paralysis of the Hollywood “problem” picture. And when the commercial filmmakers had some leeway, as well as some talent, an extraordinary amount came through—the rhythm of American life that gives films like She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, You Can't Take It with You, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train, Singin’ in the Rain, The Big Sleep, Pat and Mike, The Manchurian Candidate and Charade a freshness and spirit that makes them unlike the films of any other country. These movies were no Lillian Hellman's melodramas with good and evil clay pigeons. Our movies are the best proof that Americans are liveliest and freest when we don’t take ourselves too seriously. 

Hud doesn’t really have a dramatic adversary; his adversaries were out of Lillian Hellman-land. The setting wasn’t too melodramatic, it was not the legendary West of myth-making movies like Shane but the modern West I grew up in, the ludicrous real West. The comedy in Hud was in the incongruities of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios, jukeboxes, Dr. Pepper, paperback books—all emphasizing the standardization of culture within the loneliness of vast spaces. My West wasn’t Texas; it was northern California, but our Sonoma County ranch was very much like this one—with the frame house, and the housekeeper’s cabin, and the hired hands’ bunkhouse, and my father and older brothers charging over dirt roads, not in Cadillacs but in Studebakers, and the Saturday nights in the dead little town with its movie house and ice cream parlor. This was the small-town West I and many friends came out of. In the back of my mind, Hud began to stand for the people who would vote for Goldwater, while Homer was clearly an upstanding Stevensonian. And it seemed rather typical of the weakness of the whole message picture idea that the good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a fuddy-duddy—except for the brief sequence when Homer follows the bouncing ball and sings “Clementine” at the movies. I was even more bewildered when the reviews started coming out; what were the critics talking about? Unlike the laughing audience, they were taking Hud at serious message value as a work of integrity, and, even in some cases, as a tragedy. In the New York Herald Tribune, Judith Crist panned the film. 

In the Saturday Review, Arthur Knight said that “it is the kind of creative collaboration too long absent from our screen . . . by the end of the film, there can be no two thoughts about Hud: he’s purely and simply a bastard. And by the end of the film, for all his charm, he has succeeded in alienating everyone, including the audience.” According to Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: “Hud is a rancher who is fully and foully diseased with all the germs of materialism that are infecting and sickening modern man . . . And the place where he lives is not just Texas. It is the whole country today. It is the soil in which grows a gimcrack culture that nurtures indulgence and greed. Hud is as profound a contemplation of the human condition as one of the plays of Eugene O’Neill”. The director carefully builds up the emotion that Crowther and probably audiences in general feel when the cattle, confused and trying to escape, are forced into the mass grave that has been dug by a bulldozer, and are there systematically shot down, covered with lime, and buried. This is the movie’s big scene, and it can be no accident that the scene derives some of its emotional power from the Nazis’ final solution of the Jewish problem; it’s inconceivable that these overtones would not have occurred to the group—predominantly Jewish—who made the film. Within the terms of the story, this emotion that is worked up is wrong, because it is manipulative. But I guess that they couldn’t resist the opportunity for a big emotional scene, a scene with impact. They got their big scene: it didn’t matter what it meant. So it’s pretty hard to figure out the critical congratulations for clarity and integrity, or such statements as Penelope Gilliatt’s in the Observer, “Hud is the most sober and powerful film from America for a long time. The scene when Melvyn Douglas’s diseased cattle have to be shot arrives like the descent of a Greek plague.” Whose error are the gods punishing? Was Homer, in buying Mexican cattle, merely taking a risk, or committing hubris? One of the things you learn on a ranch is that nobody is responsible for natural catastrophes; one of the things you learn in movies and other dramatic forms is the symbolic use of catastrophe. The locusts descended on Paul Muni in The Good Earth because he had gotten rich and bad: a farmer in the movies who neglects his wife and goes in for high living is sure to lose his crops. 

Hud plays it both ways: the texture of the film is wisecracking naturalism, but when a powerful sequence is needed to jack up the action values, a disaster is used for all the symbolic overtones that can be hit—and without any significant story meaning. The English critics got even more out of it: Derek Prouse experienced a “catharsis” in The Sunday Times, “It is a drama of moral corruption—of the debilitating disease of avaricious self-seeking—that is creeping across the land and infecting the minds of young people in this complex, materialistic age. It is forged in the smoldering confrontation of an aging cattleman and his corrupted son.” John Dyer in Sight and Sound seemed to react to cues from his experience at other movies; his review worth a little examination. “From the ominous discovery of the first dead heifer, to the massacre of the diseased herd, to Homer’s own end and Hud’s empty inheritance of a land he passively stood by and watched die, the story methodically unwinds like a python lying sated in the sun.” 

Hud certainly couldn’t be held responsible for the cattle becoming infected—unless Dyer wants to go so far as to view that infection as a symbol of or a punishment for Hud’s sickness. Even Homer, who blamed Hud for just about everything else, didn’t accuse him of infecting the cattle. Dyer would perhaps go that far, because somehow “the aridity of the cattle-less landscape mirrors his own barren future.” Writing of the “terse and elemental polarity of the film,” Dyer says, “The earth is livelihood, freedom and death to Homer; an implacably hostile prison to Hud”. The scriptwriters give Homer principles; but they’re careful to show that Hud is rejected when he makes overtures to his father. Homer was generous and kind, and democratic in the Western way that Easterners still don’t understand: it was not out of guilty condescension that mealtimes were communal affairs with the Mexican ranchhands joining the family, it was the way Westerners lived. No doubt we’re really supposed to believe that Alma is, as Stanley Kauffmann says, “driven off by his Hud’s vicious physical assault.” 

But in terms of the modernity of the settings and the characters, as well as the age of the protagonists (they’re at least in their middle thirties), it was more probable that Alma left the ranch because she was looking for new opportunities. Alma obviously wanted to go to bed with Hud, but she has been rejecting his propositions because she doesn’t want to be just another casual dame to him. Despite his limitations, Paul Newman is good at playing blowhards who reveal the needs behind their transparent lies. The scriptwriters for Hud, who, I daresay, are as familiar as critics with theories of melodrama, know that heroes and villains mostly want the same things and that it is their way of trying to get them that separates one from the other. They impart this knowledge to Alma, who tells Hud that she desired him and he could have had her if he’d gone about it differently. Dyer expresses his personal view when he says it’s “on a level of sophistication totally unexpected from their scripts for two of Martin Ritt’s previous Faulkner-inspired films.” This has some special irony because not only is their technique in Hud a continuation of the episodic method they used in combining disparate Faulkner stories into The Long Hot Summer, but the dialogue quoted most appreciatively (Alma’s rebuff of Hud, “No thanks, I’ve had one cold-hearted bastard in my life, I don’t want another”) is lifted almost verbatim from that earlier script—when it was Joanne Woodward telling off Paul Newman. 

They didn’t get acclaim for their integrity and honesty that time because, although The Long Hot Summer was a box-office hit, the material was resolved as a jolly comedy, the actor and actress were paired off, and Newman as Ben Quick the barn burner turned out not really to be a barn burner after all. They hadn’t yet found the “courage” that keeps Hud what Time magazine called him, “an unregenerate heel, a cad to the end.” In neither film do the stories hold together, but Ritt, in the interim having made Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man and failed to find an appropriate style—with the aid of James Wong Howe’s crisp cinematography—found something more European at last. Visually Hud is so unadorned, so skeletonic, that we may admire the bones without being quite sure of the name of the beast. This Westerner drama is part Rebel Without A Cause, part East of Eden, part Champion, with hints of the cynic anti-hero who is damaged and pretends not to care. Hud doesn't achieve a defined vision, except it's an anti-Western and somehow an anti-American film. 

In the New Yorker Brendan Gill writes, “It’s an attractive irony of the situation that, despite the integrity of its makers, Hud is bound to prove a box-office smash. I find this coincidence gratifying.” Believing in this kind of coincidence is like believing in Santa Claus. Hud is so astutely made and yet such a mess that it's only redeemed by its fundamental dishonesty. It is perhaps outwardly an archetypal Hollywood movie, but split in so many revealing ways that, like On the Waterfront or From Here to Eternity, it is the movie of its year (even though it’s shallow unlike those classics). The creators of Hud are probably the type of folks who want government's centralized power when it just works for their libertarian aims. They may hate cops but call them at the first hint of a prowler: they feel split and confused, and it shows in a million ways. I imagine they’re very like Hud. —{Film Quarterly, Summer 1964} by Pauline Kael

"It's So Easy to Fall in Love" with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (video)

A video dedicated to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, featuring stills of their films and candids of the legendary couple. Soundtrack: "Crazy for my baby" by Randy Newman, "It's So Easy to Fall in Love" and "Tell Him" by Linda Ronstadt, "Bring It on Home to Me" by Sam Cooke, and "Cry to Me" by Solomon Burke.