Codes and silences

At the very least, The Town (2010) settles the issue: Ben Affleck is a real movie director, not just an actor who takes an occasional flyer behind the lens. Gone, Baby Gone was extremely accomplished, but whether because of its modest scale and star (Affleck's brother Casey) or its downbeat and somewhat ambiguous tone, it did not make a big impression in the film business community. Still, every talented actor probably has one pretty good film in them. Affleck came roaring back with another entry in the evolving sub-genre of films set in Eastern Massachusetts, wrapping his drama of growth, loyalty and betrayal in a hard boiled heist-move coating.

Frankly, the coating is more convincing than the gooey center of the film, which tries to suggest that a career criminal can win the love and loyalty of a Good Woman and then completely quit being a thief. But although that premise is hard to take, Affleck's depiction of what FBI man Jon Hamm's character calls "Irish omerta" is utterly persuasive, especially the strong ties between Affleck's character and that of Jeremy Remmer (Hurt Locker) a probable sociopath who is nonetheless fiercely loyal and, in his own way, trustworthy.

Most impressive is Affleck's handling of an urban car chase midway through the film reminiscent of the best aspects of John Frankenheimer's Ronin. Shot and edited with an economy, lightness and realistic scale that make it more convincing than many more hyperbolic sequences (e.g. The Matrix Reloaded). The light, swift style in which all the crime-action scenes are put together heighten their plausibility, even though the premise of the climactic sequence, an attempted heist of Fenway is prima facie ridiculous.

The economy of the shooting is mirrored in the elliptical dialogue (Affleck is also co-writer of the final shooting script with Aaron Stockard). Here's how we learn of the loyalty of Remmer's character (James) to Affleck's character (Doug):

Doug MacRay: I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.
[Beat]
James Coughlin: Whose car are we gonna take?

And later they discuss the big job that could set them for life, either as wealthy men or permanent prisoners:

Doug MacRay: You know if this thing goes right, could be your turn to step away, too.
James Coughlin: Yeah. Sure. What am I gonna do? Dougy, huh? Go down to Margaritaville, drink half a yard and fall off the [bleep]in' bar stools?
Doug MacRay: Do me a favor, the weight of this thing...pack a parachute at least.
James Coughlin: You know the funniest thing about being in prison guys pretending they wanna get out. I can't do any more time, Dougy. So if we get jammed up, we're holding court on the street.

The criminal mastermind in The Town runs a flower shop as a front, as does one of the rival gang leaders in what is often cited as the film that kicked off the gangster film cycle of the early '30s, the romantic Underworld (1927).

Journalist and future screenwriter Ben Hecht concocted a hard-boiled story, is first for the movies, of a gangster's rise coupled with a bit of romantic rivalry, trying to be as true as he could be to the real Chicago gangsters he new personally. Paramount assigned the story to the struggling young Josef von Sternberg, who had established two reputations, one as an efficient technician and "movie doctor" and the other as a visual poet with less interest in narrative than in pictures. Luckily, this was a perfect qualification for a director of silent film, in which the best stories were the simplest ones which could be explored in purely pictorial terms.

Von Sternberg took Hecht's gritty story and made it an operatic love triangle, a competition between two spiritual brothers, one "Rolls Royce", representing Mind, and the other, "Bull" representing Body, for the possession of the sensual yet ethereal woman, evocatively called "Feathers" (and covered in them most of the time). Von Sternberg's reputation rests on his exploration and exploitation of actor's faces, of subtle details of eyes and corners of mouths. But he is also the master of light and shadow and the moving camera. The sequence below begins with what is quite clearly an attempted rape, without showing anything which could seriously disturb a censor.



If you don't want to take the time for this entire clip, start at about 4:00 and see how von Sternberg absorbs the lessons of German cinema in staging and lighting, and how he allows his audience thrill to grotesque violence without showing it directly (yet without cutting away). Then von Sternberg exercises a superb economy, cutting straight from the murder of Buck in his flower ship (just like The Town) to Bull's sentencing; from one kind of justice to another.

One of the toughest things about watching dramatic silent films today can be the long focus on faces which seem to be barely changing. In sound film, a silent reflective moment can be effective, but when all the action is silent, long close-ups can seem really languorous. But von Sternberg keeps the story alive even as we see thought flicker over the characters' faces. I don't know of a silent feature which is so consistently engaging and absorbing, even with its simple characters and symbols. (Look, for instance, at the confetti which covers the floor of the Criminal's Ball like a thick soup of moral squalor.)

But powerful as it is, Underworld doesn't really feel like a true ancestor of those rise-to-the-top gangster films like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and the original Scarface. (And incidentally, every fan of The Godfather, Wiseguys, the Scarface remake and The Sopranos owe it to themselves to see those primitive antecedents, many sequences of which are still blood-chilling.) Bull Weed is a well-established success at the beginning of the film, and Underworld has more to do with choices and loyalty than about the role of the gangster in society and the manner in which he gathers power, which is at the heart of the 30s cycle.

That trope is, however, central to the latest remake of The Public Enemy, the South African crime epic Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema (released theatrically here in 2010). Although it incorporates real-life story elements such as the collapse of apertheid and the use of rent strike law to acquire title to real estate, the film still feels like a long-distance echo of the old Warner Bros. classics, for which black skin stands in for Irish heritage and cocaine substitutes for illegal booze. The central character even dies of a fatal gun show surrounded by cops exactly like Jimmy Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. All that is needed was for Kunene to gasp out, "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Lucky?" Jerusalema is even directly derivative of Michael Mann's Heat, as Joburg gangsters imitate one of the key MOs in that film, plowing tractor-trailers into armored trucks.

The one truly original. element is the first half-hour of the film, depicting the future gangsters as clueless and inept youngsters, stealing trucks they don't even know how to drive, and planning to hijack drivers while standing under a sign warning drivers that they are likely to be hijacked in this area. The mix of English, Zulu, Afrikaans and pidgin is also quite interesting and illustrates the slippery social distinctions of the South African criminal world (specifically, the depredations of the refugees from Ghana).

But for all the trappings, the elements of gangster films remain the same: poverty, lack of opportunity, violence, family, loyalty and betrayal. I don't think any of this is going away soon.

It doesn't take a prophet

A Prophet (2009) takes a mere 135 minutes to cover the story material found in the first 15 or 20 minutes of the average James Cagney movie in the 1930s; namely, the rise of a young, tough but naive outsider to become the top of a dangerous gang. At least with Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, it was fun. A Prophet is just slow and weary and heavy and self-aware.

So what's new? The story takes place mainly in prison. While that seems novel at first, in the long run it doesn't change anything about the dynamic of the story. The young gangster waxes, the old gangster wanes, and it is Little Caesar all over again.

The main character is Muslim, which turns out to make no real difference. Sure, he's part of an emerging minority, but so were the Irish and Italian characters of the films of 70 and 80 years ago. There is nothing unique about his religious affiliation--no objection to alcohol or drugs, no special provision for prayer, no specifically Muslim worldview.

The whole movie is French. Well, that just means that there's a lot of chatter, the actual events in the story are spaced far apart, and the "run and gun" method of filming becomes numbing rather than exciting.

Cineastes around the world are raving about this film. It has won many awards and high ratings from critics. I'll confess: I don't get it.

The limits of professionalism

The Helen Morgan Story (1957) demonstrates what happens when the machinery of the studio system is in place without the inspiration, artistry or audience that made the work of the Classical Era powerful. Directed by echt-studio-craftsman-director Michael Curtiz, photographed by Ted McCord (who began with cheap Westerns in the 20s, working himself up to Treasure of the Sierra Madre and East of Eden, and such other studio-era hands as Ray Heindorf for music and actors Richard Karlson, Walter Woolf King, Torben Meyer, Leonid Kinsky and Joe Besser, it moves with a brisk pace recalling early 30s gangster classics directed by people like William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, Lloyd Bacon and Mervyn Leroy.

But though the shell looks perfect, the spark has gone. Paul Newman as the bad-guy boyfriend does his best (remarkable in light of stories that he hated the script and the director), but he is too naturally believable and ambiguous to have the hard-edge snap of a Cagney or a Robinson. And Ann Blyth as Helen Morgan only really comes alive when she is lip-synching Gogi Grant's voice--a rich, stylish contralto in complete contrast to Morgan's wobbly mezzo-soprano. (Blyth was a good singer herself, but with an ingenue voice unsuitable to this story.) And without being able to depict the depth of Morgan's despair and degradation, there is no story. A confused girl has some success, is done in by men who want to exploit her, succumbs to alcoholism. A simple downward spiral, with no second texture or complexities.

One sign of the final gasp of studio filmmaking is the tacked-on happy ending. Morgan died of cirrhosis of the liver without a career revival or personal happiness. But it didn't matter. The audience for show-biz bios of characters of 25 years before had left, seeking historic epics, cheap monster pics, and teen-age hot rod and rock and roll flicks. The Helen Morgan Story tanked and took Ann Blyth's career with it. The craftsmanship meant nothing without artistry.

There's a lot of good tunes, though.

Maybe too true

This is how respected Mark Ruffalo is among actors: Ethan Hawke, who is an actual movie star, gracefully plays second banana to Ruffalo in What Doesn't Kill You (2008). (I am reminded of Jude Law content to play straightman to Robert Downey, Jr. in Sherlock Holmes.) What Doesn't Kill You (2008) is as much of a showcase for Ruffalo as it is for its first-time director and co-writer, Brian Goodman. It rises and travels on Ruffalo's performance, but that work cannot overcome the story's basic lack of true drama.

The story is reportedly based on the events of Goodman's life, which is both the film's strength and its fatal flaw. Strength, because of the exciting events and difficult choices of the protagonist's life. Fatal, because Goodman does not have the craft or the distance to shape those events into a truly dramatic shape. It is all bits and pieces, incidents and scraps. It begins with a hold-up scene reminiscent of Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, then turns into a Boston-tough-guy movie like Gone, Baby, Gone; both of which are superior to the present film.

The use of the opening scene followed by flashbacks almost disguises the fact that the film has no real structure. Ruffalo and Hawke are errand boys for some gangsters, Ruffalo has a wife and a family--Hawke does not, they take on some "projects" of their own, they excite the enmity of their bosses, they get arrested, they go to jail, they come out. Hawke wants to rob an armored truck, and--here is the dramatic crux; after Ruffalo talks with his son and realizes he doesn't want to risk jail, he decides not to go.

That's right, the central dramatic event of the movie is a guy who decides not to do a risky thing. Now that's laudable, it's praiseworthy, but it's not story-telling. Quick--name a classical dramatic narrative which turns on the hero's decision not to act. No, Bogart not leaving with Bergman in Casablanca doesn't count, because he then shoots the Nazi captain and goes on the run. And Hamlet doesn't count just because it takes him 4 out of 5 acts to do something. He does, at last, take action against his sea of troubles.

I'm not saying this couldn't be dramatized, but I don't think novice writer-director Brian Goodman has the skill or experience to do it. Having the work based on his own experience, which I'm sure made him reluctant to over-dramatize the events didn't help either. The dramatist must be ruthless with facts to create narrative pull.

One minor note--the film doesn't make criminal life look any better than being a working stiff (good) but doesn't make prison look worse than a time-out for adults (bad). Yeah, your room is a little small, but you get to walk around and talk with your friends, and you don't have to decide what to wear in the morning. Prison looks like no big deal, which I am sure was not the intention.

One thing's sure, though: Mark Ruffalo is one of our master actors, in a class with Kevin Spacey, Robert Downey, Jr. , Liev Schreiber and Johnny Depp, and let's hope he gets a chance to demonstrate his powers in a mainstream film which gains him the recognition among the general public that he already has with his peers.

Half off

The only explanation for a bifurcated hodgepodge like The Purchase Price (1932) is that director William Wellman started shooting one of his typical gangster-and-moll movies, took the script home, lost it under the sofa, and the next morning, on his way to the set, picked up some kind of corny city-girl-goes-to-the-farm script from 1922 and began shooting that.

Luckily, Barbara Stanwyck was just as much at home in Westerns (check out Forty Guns) as she was playing broads off the street. She simply applied the same approach to both genres: she was tougher than anything or anyone you could throw at her. So the genre switch is hardly more of an impediment to her than is having lumpy George Brent as her leading man. But it sure makes the viewer's head spin. What happened to slick gangster Lyle Talbot? What happened to the sexy evening gowns? (In one of which Stanwyck sings the only complete song from beginning to end in her own, undubbed voice that I can ever remember.)

Interesting, strange highlight: she visits a destitute, fatherless farm family, helps the 12-year-old girl there to deliver her mother's baby, sets up a few meals and generally gets these poor folks squared away. It's a terrific sequence, but it begs the question: when did she learn all this country-type know-how while she was being a nightclub chantoozie?

The film is being revived as one of those produced between 1929 and July 1934, when the Production Code was effective, but unenforced, and Hollywood films boasted more sex, violence, adult themes and frank talk (conveyed by innuendo rather than blunt language) than was the case afterward. Divorce, adultery, out-of-wedlock pregnancy were part of the storyline and even abortion was alluded to. Purchase Price, for all you fans of old-time salaciousness, has barely a whisper of this sort of material, unless you consider it racy that Stanwyck keeps her mail-order farmer husband out of her marriage bed until she falls for him, or you're excited about some chatter from other mail-order brides about their prospective husband's big noses or bushy eyebrows (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

In any event, both Stanwyck and Wellman did much better in other outings of this era.

Warming up in the bullpen

Lee Daniels has two great assets as a director, a poetic, at times spellbinding visual sense and an awe-inspiring rolodex. Daniels is famous today (and deserves to be) for Precious. Shadowboxer (2006), his first feature release has a marvelous assurance for such a strange film, beginning with its completely odd cast.

Daniels first made his mark as a producer, most notably of Monster's Ball, which leads one to wonder if his knack for offbeat casting is not opportunistic. One would not ordinarily think of Helen Mirren as a hitman as she plays in Shadowboxer, but would think of her for the role for which she was cast in Precious, an acid-tongued social worker. Except that Mirren wasn't available, so Daniels cast Mariah Carey. He seems to have a crazy, fling-it-against-the-wall attitude toward casting which so far has paid off.

Mirren's consort is Cuba Gooding, Jr. Their doctor (to patch them up from assassination-related injuries) is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and his girl friend, called "Precious" is played by Mo'Nique. The ease with which these actors, who presumably all share Daniels as a mutual friend belies the awkwardness of the gathering. The whole thing is bound with a dream-like visual style, linked by close-ups of eyes and bound together with an eclectic score by Mario Grigorov (although I also detected some Piazzolla tangos as well).

The story is preposterous, but has a truth of a fable. I don't know about anyone else, but seeing Shadowboxer, I would have given him the money to make Precious. IMDb lists his future projects as including something called Selma as well as Miss Saigon. I'd like to see those.

Why doesn't The Godfather: Part III work?

There is little debate that The Godfather: Part III (1990) is not of equal stature with its predecessors, and many contend that it is not worthy to be considered part of a trilogy, but merely a commercially-drive appendage to a brilliant diptych consisting of the first film and Part II. But looking at it again for the first time in 20 years, it would have been considered a pretty fine film if it had not borne the same name as two undisputed classics.

The conception is fine, and a logical complement to what has gone before, especially when one considers Coppola's original intended title, The Death of Michael Corleone. The film concerns Michael's desire to atone and bring peace to his life. He is trying to shift his business into legitimate pursuits and reconcile with his family, and particularly to make peace with his ex-wife, Kay. To that end, he bestows his blessing on his son's career choice as an opera singer, although he considers it odd and risky. That thread pays off beautifully with the final sequence being intercut with a performance of Cavelleria Rusticana, which not only provides an internal counterpoint with its Sicilian-set story of betrayal and vendetta, but an outer echo with the baptism scene which concluded The Godfather.

What works less well is the idea of moving up via using connections through the Vatican Bank. Clearly the notion was that Michael moves away from organized crime in the higher reaches of finance, and find they have the same morality and modus operandi as the Mob. And it was logical that Michael would have such connections, plus Puzo and Coppola had some real-life scandals connected to the Vatican to base the story on, just as the first two films echoed real-life legends and events.

Problem is--who cares about the Vatican bank? They're all foreign and mysterious and weird and they don't seem respectable to Americans under the best of circumstances. So the whole "Credit Immobilier" plot seemed confusing, murky and pointless. Now that we are all a little smarter about international finance and credit, it makes a little more sense, but it still has no emotional impact. European businessmen are corrupt? Pass me another Cinzano.

Of course--there's the problem. At what institution would we be shocked to find corruption? Cynicism, borne of real events, has drowned our capacity to be shocked.

The most common criticism of Part III is the casting and the acting of Sofia Coppola. Actually Francis Coppola puts his finger on the problem in his commentary track--it's her flat California accent. Young people in California seem to speak with no resonance and their vowels spread and adenoidal. Sofia's face, however, is perfect. Beautiful, but flawed in that mysterious Mediterranean way. If she had cultivated a deeper tone and covered her vowels, she might have pulled it off. As it is, her scenes with Andy Garcia (as contrasted with those with Pacino) are really very good, leading one to wonder if Garcia did not pull her aside on his own and rehearse scenes with her. She is remarkably more at ease and fluid with Garcia than anywhere else in the film.

And of course, the finale is perfect. Coppola credits Murch with removing the sound of Pacino's scream from the soundtrack, and there should be a special Oscar just for that. In fact, the restoration of production sound seems like a mistake. Pacino's actual scream is much smaller, more specific to a person from a particular place, and thus loses the power of the silent scream, which is the scream of all fathers everywhere in the world that ever lost a beloved daughter. For a moment the universality and expressive power of the silent film is rediscovered and celebrated, and I for one regret the clunky return to earth that follows.

Was the final shot of Michael dying (and dropping the obligatory orange) put in to try and dissuade Paramount from making any more Godfather movies? How much you want to bet that they make a deal for the next one on the trip back from Coppola's funeral?

Nurse raises temperatures

Growing up as I did in the age of Roger Corman, a title like Night Nurse suggests one kind of movie. But the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Night Nurse (1931) is both more and less racy than a Corman product would have been. There is an exploitative angle, for sure--there are two or three scenes of Stanwyck and Joan Blondell standing around in their lingerie--I was going to say for no good reason, but seeing these ladies in their scanties is reason enough in itself.

But this is exactly the kind of nurse movie you would expect from a guy who was about to direct one of the toughest gangster pictures ever, The Public Enemy. It's fast, it's direct. (The dipsomaniac literally says, "I'm a dipsomaniac and proud of it," in case you hadn't worked that out yourself.) Clark Gable glowers and snarls in order to promote his plan to kill two little heirs so he and his girlfriend can get their money. (I know, it doesn't make any sense to me, either.) But the problem is "fixed" by having Stanwyck's gangster boyfriend kill Gable off, which he does offscreen and without any comment or moral resolution. Maybe that's why Gable decided to be a gangster himself later that year in A Free Soul.

There's a lot of slapping and heaving crockery around in this movie and the odd notion that a starving child can be treated by soaking it in milk. I should have thought opening the kid's trap and putting food in it would be effective. And Stanwyck is sort of a good girl in this one, in contrast to Baby Face (see Sept. 12) and The Miracle Woman, albeit a pretty tough good girl. I suppose that's Joan Blondell's influence. Hotcha!

Crime does not pay off

The reason people are still looking at those gangster movies of the 1930's such as Public Enemy and Little Caesar and Scarface, despite the primitive qualities of the early talkies, is the sheer joy and brio brought to them by James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni and all those other exciting gangster actors of the era. Yes, of course the cops (or rival gangsters) were going to gun them down in a hail of bullets, but they would go down swinging, or laughing or in some way expressing the excitement of living outside the land of decent, law-abiding people. We could enjoy such a feeling in all its full-throated glory and then go back to our jobs or schoolwork or taking care of our families relishing the frisson of watching unrepentant evil.

But in Public Enemies (2009), not only doesn't crime pay, it doesn't pay off, at least in terms of fun. It's bad enough for us regular people to hate our jobs (I don't, but I have in the past), but this film's John Dillinger, as portrayed by Johnny Depp treats bank robbery as the worst sort of mindless drudgery. I don't know why the poor fellow should have to go through this sort of thing.

Michael Mann is a director of surfaces. When those surfaces are exciting, as in Miami Vice (the television show, not the film) and Thief, the film is exciting. Public Enemies is all gray. No one seems very interested in what they're doing, not Depp, not Christian Bale as the G-Man, not the cinematographer, not the composer. The whole film gives an impression of being dark grey.

You want to see a fun film about Dillinger, check out this B-picture from the 40's (requires Adobe Flash):