We lost Val Kilmer. This week and next week, a couple of his scenes.
The Story: How often I've repeated the line "It all sounds like some bad movie!"
Sometimes even in movie theaters.
Top Secret!, the Z-A-Z (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker) follow-up to their successful parody, Airplane! had a bit of a rocky start and wasn't a huge success at the box-office. It wasn't a send-up of an already existing movie (in the case of Airplane!, it was 1957's Zero Hour!), but a wholly original idea imagining a mash-up of an Elvis Presley movie with a wartime espionage film, with the same exuberance throwing jokes at the film and seeing how much sticks. Quite a lot, it seems.
But, at some point, the film just stops, re-caps the complications and then states the obvious—"it all sounds like some bad movie!" with the actors guiltily breaking the fourth wall and acknowledges that (indeed) it might just be a bad movie.
The surprise of the movie was Val Kilmer, who had previously been known for dating Cher, but made an all-singin', all-dancin' comedic debut as the Elvis imitator, Nick Rivers. This film and the next year's Real Genius established Kilmer as a superb comic actor, but it is his subsequent dramatic roles for which he is best known. This Summer his scene with Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick was a nostalgically emotional highlight.
The Set-Up: Pop-rock phenom' Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer, in his film debut) is on an extensive European tour, when he is swept up in international intrigue in East Germany surrounding the disappearance of a prominent scientist. There are complications...oh, we'll just let him describe them.
Action.
HILLARY FLAMMOND Nick...
HILLARY FLAMMOND I want to explain. -
NICK RIVERSWhat's to explain?
HILLARY FLAMMOND But I just want to say that...
NICK RIVERSLook...
NICK RIVERS I'm not the first guy who fell in love with a girl he met in a restaurant,
NICK RIVERS ...who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist,
NICK RIVERS ...only to lose her to her childhood lover she'd last seen on a deserted island...
NICK RIVERS ...who, years later, is the leader of the French underground.
HILLARY FLAMMOND I know it.
HILLARY FLAMMOND It all sounds like some bad movie.
Director Volker Schlöndorff (The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum, The Tin Drum) was having dinner with his regular screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and writer-director Peter Brook when Brook casually mentioned that he'd done an adaptation of a section of Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" (or as it was published in English "A Remembrance of Things Past") and had sufficiently "cracked it" to make a screenplay in the spirit of the novel, but, owing to a busy schedule, couldn't find the time to direct it (as was his intention) and that the producers were looking for a replacement.
"A terrific excitement gripped me..." the director recalled. "'I am available,' I said half-jokingly without thinking it over." Schlöndorff had read the Proust novel when he was seventeen at his boarding school. "Proust revealed three worlds to me: the French language, the corresponding society and the unknown regions of love and jealousy." And the memory of the book was so vivid, he did not go back and re-read it, merely using Brook's script as a template, to recreate the world of La Belle Époque, with a lushness and luxuriousness that recalled the work of Luchino Visconti (who'd tried to make a version of it in 1969) ably helped by the cinematography of Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist.
Jeremy Ironsplays Charles Swann, a well-to-do bon vivant in Paris, accepted in most social circles despite being Jewish. He is a habitue of the most fashionable salons of Paris and, if looked on with suspicion by most of the husbands, is positively cooed over by their wives, particularly theDuchesse de Guermantes(Fanny Ardant) and Madame Verdurin(Marie-Christine Barrault), the latter of whom has suggested that Swann might have an interest in a courtesan,Odette de Cracy(Ornella Muti), to whom he is introduced by his friend, the Baron de Charlus (Alain Delon, in a role thathe plays floridly and rather heroically—he's the most fun I've ever seen him).
Their meeting does not initially go well, but over the course of lunch Swann becomes smitten and then obsessed with Odette, his thoughts becoming consumed by her. Especially when she doesn't make herself available to him. His days are spent trying to find out details about her—who her male companions might have been, if she's ever slept with women—personal details the knowledge of which might put him off, but having no desire to not possess her completely. This might cost him—prestige, respect, Odette would never be accepted in the society he enjoys—but, although warned, he loses control of his perceived dignity for this one woman.
"Why do I subject myself to such humiliation?" he muses at one point. "I used to think Odette was
ugly! I had to fall in love with her because she reminded me of a
Botticelli. Now I've decided to fall out of love with her and I can't. I
can't. I can't. I can't! Tonight - tonight, I finally understand that
her love for me - which I rejected at first - that the feelings she had
for me will never be revived. But without her I will cease to exist.
It's an illness that could prove fatal. And yet I'm afraid of being
cured." And, later, "My
love for Odette goes beyond physical desire. It is so caught up in my
actions, my thoughts, my sleep, my life, that without it I'd cease to
exist...My love is an illness that has reached the stage where it cannot be
removed without destroying me. As surgeons say, it's inoperable."
Wow. Tough words. A brutal self-assessment. And Swann will risk everything—his friends, his status, his dignity—for her. Even when Madame Verdurin attempts to insert a rival between him and Odette, Swann will not be deterred, going so far as to spend the night in Paris trying to find her, trying to find out out anything about the time away from him—actions that even Swann's lowly carriage driver thinks are beneath him—until he can win her over, something that she already desires. "You fear affection? How odd." she says to him at one point. "That's all I look for. I'd give my soul to find it."
And, in a way, she does. There is compromise for comfort, and Swann certainly provides affection, obsessively so, but she loses her own autonomy in that particular bargain (hardly something that is out of the ordinary in any society, much less 19th Century France). Swann, who spends way too much time in his own head, is left, toward the end of his life, to contemplate the mystery of what has become of him, with his usual brutality: "To think that I wasted years of my life - that I wanted to die - that
the love of my life - was a woman I didn't like - who wasn't my type."
Well, it's not a mystery to me, as I've nattered on about my thoughts on that subject. But, Proust...and Brook and Schlöndorff, in their time...rather bravely dissect the details and peculiarities and humiliations and self-flagellations that an obsessive love can wreak on a rational mind. It's a lovely film with a particularly wicked sensibility towards a too-common subject. We've had scads of rom-comedies. But, seemingly too few...rom-tragedies?...that still have, outside of the mind, anyway, a conventionally happy ending.
Well, the revised plan was to do a "Redux" of the scene from The Graduate about "outside agitators" but as that's been one of the most "hit" articles this week (no doubt from googling the words in search engines), I'm going to fall back on the original plan with this one...
The Story: It was probably a bit ahead of its time (he said charitably), hence the bad box-office when it was released in theaters in 1984.
That would be The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension,* a mouthful of a title for a movie that was chock-a-block with ideas, few of which were serious, but most were not, dealing as it did with an invasion of Earth from the 'Lectroids, beings from the tenth planet in the eighth dimension, the discovery of which is due to a land-speed test to crack the sound barrier, but secretly is to test the perfected Oscillation Overthruster to crack the barrier between dimensions...and maybe...just maybe...come back sane.
Who could accomplish such a feat? Well, that world-famous polyglot, the neurosurgeon/physicist/test-pilot/rock n' roller/style-master Buckaroo Banzai, that's who!
Buckaroo Banzai is a post-modern update of the old "'Doc' Savage" pulp novels about a Renaissance Man of many interests and his "literal" band of experts investigating the secrets and the threats in the Universe (although screenwriter Mac Rauch claimed the inspiration was 1970's kung-fu movies). For me, there are a couple of memorable stand-out scenes from the film—this is one of them, at a point in the film when it was being lit and photographed by the brilliant Jordan Cronenweth, who had provided the distinctive look to the original Blade Runner.
Intended to be a series of films—the end-credits announce a sequel "Buckaroo Banzai Versus the World Crime League"—the film's slack box-office nixed those plans...Mac Rauch put out a subsequent novel versionof the story, published in 2021.
The Set-up: It's been a day for Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller): performing intricate brain-surgery, recruiting a new surgeon (Jeff Goldblum) for Team Banzai, and then heading off to a test-site to set a land-speed record and doing a test on his father's life-research—perfecting the Oscillation Overthruster that could crack the barrier between dimensions. Time to unwind at a gig with his band, the Honk Kong Cavaliers.
But, his past is about to catch up with him.
Action!
PA VOICE:
Ladies and gentlemen...
PA VOICE:Tommy Talented is proud to present for one night only...
PA VOICE: New Brunswick's own. The one, the only, the amazing...
PA VOICE:Buckaroo Banzai and his Hong Kong Cavaliers!
The crowd cheers.
Horns join the drums.
Various shots of Hong Kong
Cavaliers playing instruments.
The music rises to a crescendo,
and
BUCKAROO BANZAI launches into a guitar solo.
Quick shots of people...
...in the
crowd dancing.
BUCKAROO BANZAI finishes guitar solo,
picks up a cornet, and
plays another solo.
BUCKAROO BANZAI kicks a mike stand,
which falls into his
hand. He is just about to sing when he suddenly freezes.
The band abruptly
stops playing.
BUCKAROO BANZAI:
'Scuse me.
BUCKAROO BANZAI: Excuse me.
BUCKAROO BANZAI:Ah, is someone out there not having a
good time?
Cut to crowd. They are mystified.
CROWD:
Noooo! (assorted yells)
BUCKAROO BANZAI:
Is, ahh... is somebody...
BUCKAROO BANZAI:
is somebody crying?... out there in the
darkness? Somebody crying?
PENNY PRIDDY is visible, sitting alone at a table.
PENNY PRIDDY:
(sobs) Me... I'm sorry...
Long shot of stage. Crowd members are looking back at PENNY PRIDDY, wondering
what's going on.
BUCKAROO BANZAI:
Ummm... could we... could we get her a mike? And a spotlight?
BUCKAROO BANZAI:Uh, Tommy,
BUCKAROO BANZAI:could we, uh, could you give her your mike?
PERFECT TOMMY:
Are you serious?
BUCKAROO BANZAI:
Yeah. Give her your mike.
BUCKAROO BANZAI:(to PENNY PRIDDY)
What's your name?
PENNY PRIDDY: Who cares?
The crowd is getting fed up with the delay.
DRUNK:
Right!
BUCKAROO BANZAI:
(sympathetically)
I care. What's your name?
Close up of PENNY PRIDDY. She is wearing a short pink dress and blue gloves.
Her makeup is smeared. She has obviously been crying.
PENNY PRIDDY:
Penny.
BUCKAROO BANZAI:
Did you say "Peggy"?
PENNY PRIDDY:
Nooo...
(sobs)
My name's Penny. Penny Priddy...
PENNY PRIDDY:But it doesn't matter,
PENNY PRIDDY:it's not important.
(She tries to smile.)
PENNY PRIDDY:I just...
PENNY PRIDDY:I just sponged up a little too much Vat 69, that's all.
(laughs, turns into sob)
PENNY PRIDDY:I'm down to my last nickel in this lousy town.
PENNY PRIDDY:And they wouldn't
even take my luggage in hock.
(sobs)
PENNY PRIDDY:And I lost my room at the Y this morning.
CROWD:
Ooooh! Wow! Somebody get her a violin! (etc.)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension is available on DVD from M-G-M Home Video.
Under the Command of Captain Hikaru Sulu, if I remember...
* The script went through many versions and many stories that were ultimately not finished and abandoned, but alternate titles for the film were such things as "Find the Jetcar, Said the President - A Buckaroo Banzai Thriller" and "Lepers from Saturn."
