Hi, Mom!

Hi, Mom! (Brian De Palma, 1970) Second full-length film (although it seems more a comedy pastiche in final form, like the Zucker Brothers were making at the time) that De  Palma and his producing buddy Charles Hirsch cooked up, seemingly as a sequel of sorts to Greetings (retaining Robert De Niro and his "character" John Rubin), while having absolutely nothing to do with that first film.  

Ostensibly about a young film-maker who wants to make "peep-show art" out of filming the real lives of his neighbors in the co-op across the street—shades (opened, naturally) of Rear Window—it meanders into Rubin's plotting a relationship with one of his subjects (Jennifer Salt), while at the same time becoming involved in an experimental theater group, staging a radical audience participation vehicle called "Be Black, Baby!"

That last segment may actually be one of the first "mockumentaries."

Mean-spirited (but in a smart way), with that stagey kind of improv quality to it that only works 40% of the time, it feels like De Palma taking off the gloves, cracking his knuckles and using his camera like a fist against complacency. It also has that bi-partisan cynicism to it that's very refreshing—for instance, "Be Black, Baby!" is shown being presented (in grainy black and white on a rounded edge square screen) over a parody of NET,* now called NIT—National Intellectual Television. It's a chortling, vicious piece of satire done in multi-parts (with the Rubin segments interrupting and becoming more and more inconsequential, the "peep-art-show" concept having long been abandoned**), starting with citizens being accosted on the street about their failure to know what it means "to be black in America," then more segments that are less cinema verité, but have a good improv feel, and then the actual presentation of the play in which privileged whites are challenged, force-fed "soul" food, beaten, robbed and arrested (with one attempted rape thrown in for good measure), before being released to the outside world again—"Hope you enjoyed the show!"—at which point, they're interviewed about their experience (the best line in the whole thing is "Clive Barnes was right!"). In one swell foop, art, pretentiousness, and "touchy-feely" moccassin-walking are given the mau-mau, and come up wanting.

It's "bad-kid movie-making" with a smart-alecky breeziness ("Hi, Mom!") that beats any number of elaborately formal set-pieces that De Palma has subsequently staged. One misses this "turk" De Palma***—the one that would do things that upset audiences, and sit back, cigar in his teeth, saying "Wait'll you see the next one!" Maybe it's not De Palma's fault. Maybe we've just become insensitive enough that nothing he can produce shocks us anymore.

If that's true, imagine how miserable Hitchcock would be.

* The percursor to PBS.

** The best segment in the Rubin sandwiching sequences is one where he meticulously plans a seduction of Betty Shaefer—Salt's character—in order for him to film it—yes, a sick idea, but quaint in these days of "sex-tapes".  But, things go awry when he arrives at the apartment and she tries to pull him into bed immediately, while he does his best to keep anything from happening, a lovely little turn on sexual roles, expectations, and how much power a director "actually" has. De Niro does his best work here, hemming and hawing and making excuses, constantly glancing at his watch and re-buttoning every shirt-button she's unbuttoned,  and trying to use any of his by-now useless preparations in order to delay, delay, delay (you might say "the worst laid plans")

*** And he might, too.  In an interview, the director has said that the "Be Black, Baby" segments of Hi, Mom! are the best thing he's ever done.  Sad to think that, after all his successes, the elder De Palma looks back and sees this edgy, slap-dash sequence as the epitome of his career. But...if one is dissatisfied with one is doing, with all the compromises and concessions to getting a picture made and marketed, it's easy to look back on the brash days and say "That's when I had the freedom to do anything I wanted!" After the bludgeoning De Palma's films of The Bonfire of the Vanities and Redacted took, one can see that a bit more clearly.  He could make that kind of film today. But, the market...and the critical elite...will bash it down.

Dick Tracy (1990)

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...

Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990) Chester Gould's gangster comic strip, "Dick Tracy," started October 4, 1931 and, because it was so popular, it migrated to radio, movie serials, and even a short-lived television series. Gould's style was flamboyant, violent—bullets passed through bad-guy's bodies—and more than a little serio-comic (the villains had names that matched their physiques, so "Flat-Top" actually had a flat-head, and such). Gould made no mistake whose side Tracy was on, as his jaw was so square, you could slice sandwich meat on it, and sometimes ventured into the techno-exotic with Tracy's "two-way wrist radio" beating the I-watch by some 50 years. About the time I started reading it, Tracy and family was traveling to the moon on a magnetic Space Coupe and Tracy's son fell in love with the daughter of the Moon's Supreme Leader!

So much for the grit of a crime strip.

Tracy was popular, and after the successes of recycled comics on movies and Broadway, movie people started to buy up marketable properties. "Dick Tracy" was picked up in the 1980's for the inevitable film adaptation, and went through "development hell" through the hands of many creatives and studios, starting with United Artists, then a co-production between Universal and Paramount, and stars like Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere and Tom Selleck (the usual suspects in the 80's) were sought out to star as Tracy. And Warren Beatty.

Beatty'd wanted to make a Tracy movie since 1975, when the rights weren't available, and watched from the wings as the film went through script development, director changes, and studio involvement, then purchased the rights in 1985, taking the film to Disney, and directing the film himself when the studio's Jeffrey Katzenberg couldn't interest any other director to take the reins. Beatty had already left the project once when director Walter Hill wanted to make the film more realistic and violent. Beatty had another idea, making a stylized homage to the old-style strip with a limited (just seven, with no gradients), but eye-popping color pallet, supervised by production designer Richard Sylbert.

With Beatty onboard, casting came easily...almost too easily. Glenne Headly played girlfriend Tess Trueheart, Charlie Corsmo played an orphan whom Tracy will eventually adapt, Seymour Cassel as co-hort Sam Catchem, James Keane as Pat Patton, and Charles Durning as Chief Brandon. But, as he did with Reds, Beatty started to hire pals to fill up the film and take on smaller characters, particularly the villains, who—unlike the leads—would be encased in prosthetic make-up (designed by John Caglione and Doug Drexler) to resemble Gould's group of bad-guy uglies.

Entombed in polyurethane are Al Pacino (as main villain "Big Boy" Caprice), James Caan (as a "Godfather"-type), Dustin Hoffman, Paul Sorvino, R.G. Armstrong, Henry Silva, William Forsythe, Ed O'Ross and other character actors who get the make-up, while Kathy Bates, Dick Van Dyke, Alan Garfield, John Schuck, Hamilton Camp, Catherine O'Hara, Estelle Parsons, and Henry Jones get minute screen-time, just enough for recognition.

And then, there's Madonna. The pop-star's role as a "bad-girl" femme fatale was, no doubt, beefed up when "The Material Girl" was cast, and of all the cast-members she seems to get the most screen-time besides Beatty, effectively crowding out the "Tess Trueheart" storyline for vamping in the tried and true Mae West manner. To be sure, she gives the movie a lot of cross-promotional material, releasing an album in support, and doing her best with the Stephen Sondheim songs Beatty acquired for the film. But, the role is slight in importance and its prominence merely there to put posteriors in theater-seats. So, she was indulged.

Which seems to be the over-arching—emphasis on the "arch"—theme of the film. Studio-bound and slightly inert, that limited pallet (which only distracts rather than serves a purpose) makes the enterprise look cheaper than it should, and, overall, Beatty's Tracy is an over-indulgent mess, flabby with excess, and uneven in pace, when the model of the thing should have been the tight, break-away austerity of film-noir. The thing went so far over-budget and the results still look dodgy and stagey. In fact, the film reminds of something that achieved the same results with greater success but hemmed in with a bargain basement budget in the 1960's.

And that was the "Batman" TV-show. It, too, had stars as villains, with a lot of make-up and a lot of scenery-chewing, the comic aspect of the characters were played up, the fights were unbelievably choreographed and tongues were placed firmly in cheeks. However, the "Batman" TV series had a "camp" sensibility, deliberately over-staging the drama and acting styles to achieve comic effect. It knew it was over-the-top and aimed high to achieve it. It knew it was deliberately jumping the shark (before "jumping the shark" was a "thing") Dick Tracy has very little of that intentionally self-deprecating humor, and plods along like it knows it's funny...even when it isn't. And although Adam West's deliberately haughty Batman persona wouldn't play for Tracy, give West his due in finding a way to effectively tight-rope the material; Beatty plays the character fairly straight...which is a bit dull. Pacino knows that he's going for comedy, but he doesn't have the timing or comic discipline to make it work. Sure, he gives it the energy (he always does), but that doesn't make it funny.

My memory of Dick Tracy was that it was elephantine in the way the film version of Annie was, but with none of the charm, or the ability to project something genuine without hedging its bets, lest it be thought unhip. Everything is encased in artifice, even in its rooting for "the good guys" with their sense of right and wrong. If they can't even do that with a straight face, then they just don't know Dick. 

Olde Review: Sisters (1973)

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the snarky, clueless kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This is a companion piece to the Olde Review of Purple Noon.

This Saturday's films in 130 Kane at 7:30 pm are thrillers: one sophisticated; the other unsophisticated, but God, it's neat, and they are Rene Clement's Purple Noon and Brian DePalma's Sisters

Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973) 1976 was a banner year for Brian DePalma. Two of his films, Obsession and Carrie were released (within five months of each other) and were critically acclaimed. Not only that, they made a lot of bucks. And so, Brian DePalma has achieved financial success. More power to him. I've been a DePalma fan since way back, and from Sisters to Phantom of the Paradise to Obsession and Carrie, my respect and admiration for his film-making skills has only grown. Last quarter, DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise was shown. And from reports of the attendance too many of you blew the chance to see it. Don't miss the chance to see Sisters—his first feature film.* I'm not even going to hint at the plot because one of its joys is that the plot turns and twists into a maze of incidents in which the protagonists are lead. **

Sisters, like Obsession, borrows very liberally from the films of Alfred Hitchcock in themes and incidents. In fact, DePalma even borrows Hitchcock's long-time musical accomplice, Bernard Herrmann,*** for the energetic film score. The ironies, the quirky characters, the quality of the grotesque in humor and incidents make Sisters thoroughly entertaining, as is Hitchcock's films, but DePalma leads them on to his own bizarre sense of humor and film-making. 

(Sisters) is very much DePalma's film, no matter how many ideas he may have borrowed. And just as Hitchcock holds a fascination with special effects, so, too, does DePalma who has as much love for the devices of split-screen and the like (which he uses brilliantly) as he does in making blood spurt from a murder victim (something he does like no other director—a fact which has led one newspaper reviewer to give it the special category of "DePalmaesque Violence"). 

This violence, though it has a horrible humor, may upset the more sensitive in the audience. But DePalma gives you all the hints and time in the world to cover your eyes. So I hope you don't miss the brilliance of the film for the violence. At such a low budget, it is such a great movie.

Broadcast February 12, 1977

It is a good movie—but it's not a great one, as the Nervous Nellie I was in college wrote. DePalma would surpass it, and eventually lose the Hitchcock fetish he had going for a long while, and be more of his own cine-man for good or ill. But Sisters has a demented sense of humor that is just as sick as a ruptured (or deliberately severed) artery that even Hitchcock would try to staunch. 

Combined with Herrmann's mad bell-clanging, theremin-stabbing score***—which seems to convey the soul of madness—it is one of the loopiest horror movies to shuffle spasmodically down the mausoleum corridor, with its mad scientist (William Finley), its homicidal maniac (Margot Kidder), as well as a mother-harassed girl detective (Jennifer Salt) with a dogged assistant (the wonderful Charles Durning). 

DePalma calmed down quite a bit in his style, and his social conscience (which he displayed in some of the features I neglected to mention he made before Sisters*) has come back, when he's not making fetishistic erotic thrillers with a "hook." Sisters was the initial stab at the movie-market outside of art films, the lowest common denominator to make a name for its film-maker in the mainstream—the same route that so many film-makers, both auspicious and inauspicious, have taken to "break in." Sisters is among the most ingeniously devilish of those freshman horrors and one film-maker's affectionate tribute to another.

* I was wrong here. He had made small budgeted independent films before this. Those being Murder à la Mod, Greetings, The Wedding Party, Dionysus, Hi, Mom!, and Get to Know Your Rabbit.

** Well, I'm pretty much spoiling it in my later comments.

***

An Enemy of the People

An Enemy of the People (George Shaefer, 1978) An oddity in the career of Terence Steven "Steve" McQueen. For years the "King of Cool" and a favorite action star, at some point he felt that he wasn't being taken seriously as an actor. McQueen, in his slow-burning way, dominated the screen, even when appearing with an attention-magnet like Dustin Hoffman (Papillon). But, there are times when scripts coming across the desk begin to take on a familiarity and staleness that can make any actor dissatisfied. 

At the time, McQueen had finished a lucrative starring role in Irwin Allen's The Towering Inferno, and he began to set his sights a little higher. Perhaps it was his marriage to Ali MacGraw, or perhaps his age that might have made action parts a bit more risky and feel less authentic, but whatever it was, McQueen used his star clout to have produced this adaptation (by Arthur Miller, no less, based on his 1950's version written during the McCarthy era) of Henrik Ibsen's play, short on action but featuring McQueen in very much the "rebel" role. But unlike any he had played before.

Dr. Thomas Stockmann (McQueen) and his wife Katherine (Bibi Andersson) host a dinner party for the Mayor of the town, who happens to be his brother Peter (Charles Durning) and Hovstad (Michael Cristofer), editor of the town paper, The People's Messenger. Although it's a social occasion, everyone has an agenda. Mayor Peter wants Thomas to not support the rumor going around town about the town baths being contaminated even though he is the Kirsten Springs Municipal Baths chief medical officer. Thomas is having the water tested as he feels the health of the town is his responsibility, whatever impact it may have on the town's economy, which is dependent on the popular attraction remaining in operation. During dinner, Stockmann receives a post showing that the suspicions are correct—the baths are a health risk and should be shut down, pending an investigation. The editor is excited to print the news in his latest edition. The Mayor, Stockmann's brother, is not pleased.

The next day, it is all excitement. Stockmann is visited by the editor and publisher of the Messenger, who pledge their paper's support with extensive coverage and even more investigation as to how the location for the Baths allowed it to be taking in polluted water from a local tannery. They want to expose the corruption of the government system. And, as if on cue, the Mayor pays a visit on his brother. He tells Stockmann that if he pursues his investigations, he will bring about the ruin of the town for the sake of his own self-righteousness, and that he will do everything in his power to stop him, even if it involves his family. He is, after all, the one who got him the position on the board in the first place.

Stockmann is adamant, however, and will do the right thing for the sake of the community. How much good will it do the people to be poisoned by the health baths—what will that do to the economy? But, he is surprised that, when he pays a visit to the offices of the Messenger, that the editor and publisher (Richard Dysart) are now suddenly reluctant to report the doctor's findings, and in fact, will be running an article by the Mayor trumpeting the safety of the Baths and emphasizing their importance to the economy of the town. Undeterred, Stockmann decides to hold a public meeting at which he'll personally give his report and inform the citizenry that for their own good, the Baths must be shut down.

Public meetings always go so well.

But then this was fifty years before the phrase was coined "no good deed goes unpunished." 

Ibsen's play is extraordinarily contemporary, with its theme of the whistle-blower going up against "the system," that "system" being implacable and turning on them before you can say "As you know, Amity means friendship," and the steadfastness of allies when they're only tangentially involved without self-interest. The fidelity of the press to the truth is far too often based on its profit margins and who's in charge of that newspaper. The people's right to know is outweighed by their right to stay in business. Or be allowed "access." We can argue all day about the efficacy of that term "rights," but the individual interpretation of them extends to how far one's own rights are interfered with. No matter who thinks that doesn't apply to them.

Ibsen was ahead of his time in his cynicism. Not only in his doubts about institutions like government, business, and the press, as here, but also in people, singularly and collectively. All of the individuals in "An Enemy of the People" act in their own self-interest, even Stockmann, whose idealism masks an arrogant and naive hubris. He thinks he can turn things around by merely being right about his suspicions and is equally guilty of "stonewalling" as his brother and the publisher.

But Ibsen's harshest criticism is for "the wisdom of the tribe," or (to put it less kindly) "mob rule." As Winston Churchill put it "democracy is the worst form of government...except for all the others." As Lincoln put it "you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time" and that foolishness comes in waves of rumor and gossip and superstition and greedy self-interest (and "fad" diets, don't forget "fad" diets). If, every election cycle, democracy shows America at its best, it also shows it at its most cretinous—even "loon" candidates get support...for whatever unfathomable reason. "The mob" just can't be trusted to make the right decision at the right time, especially when the information it's being fed is biased and self-interested, the very definition of any candidate.

Ibsen had been stung by the reaction of his previous play, "Ghosts" and his answer to that criticism (and his reflection on his position in the controversy), "An Enemy of the People" was a stepping-stone to his condemnation of idealism in his next play "The Wild Duck." As he wrote to his publisher, he didn't know if "An Enemy of the People" was a comedy or a drama. In its time, it was at least better received than "Ghosts."

The same cannot be said in the time of McQueen. Even though two competing films were made of Ibsen's "The Doll House" in 1973 (one starring Jane Fonda and the other Claire Bloom), "mob rule" played its own hand in the distribution of this film. It was filmed in August of 1976, but was not released until late 1978 and even then in only two key cities for awards-consideration. Despite an ad campaign from Warner Brothers emphasizing McQueen and his role in it, the movie went virtually unreleased throughout the rest of the country. It was not released to home video until 2009, twenty-nine years after the actor's death.