Greatness Revisited

Showtime (alas!) has come through. First, Oliver Stone's two-hour version. Then in March 2022, a four-hour release. Later in '22, the Blu-ray completion.

 

Eternal

"I'm afraid we were misled. All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort microanalyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy. Don't you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: 'We are in control and no one -- not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official -- no one can do anything about it.' It was a message to the people that their government was powerless. And the people eventually got the message. Consider what has happened since the Kennedy assassination. People see government today as unresponsive to their needs, yet the budget and power of the military and intelligence establishment have increased tremendously.

"The tyranny of power is here. Current events tell us that those who killed Kennedy can only perpetuate their power by promoting social upheaval both at home and abroad. And that will lead not to revolution but to repression. I suggest to you, my friend, that the interests of those who killed Kennedy now transcend national boundaries and national priorities. No doubt we are dealing now with an international conspiracy. We must face that fact -- and not waste any more time microanalyzing the evidence. That's exactly what they want us to do. They have kept us busy for so long. And I will bet, buddy, that is what will happen to you. They'll keep you very, very busy and, eventually, they'll wear you down."

-- Vince Salandria to Gaeton Fonzi, late-1975

Peace

A United States Information Agency documentary on the most extraordinary Presidential speech of the 20th-century.

And Then Home. . .

"Why are you running?"

"Don't you know?

"No."

"Because I am longing. . . ."

-- Day of Wrath

It was born during Assassination Autumn, and no other American TV series has ever been as drenched in sorrow and loss -- largely due to Pete Rugolo's music -- as this one. There's an ominous death rattle on the soundtrack, the death rattle of its time: a world of gasoline and bus stations, diners, local motels, drive-ins, stone cities, asphalt palaces, mechanic shops, coal trucks, great warehouses and amusement parks, factories and pool halls -- a world where the air still smelled of the earth. And a power-saturated universe seething with conspiracies, all focused on the wrongly-accused of a famous murder, while the real murderer runs free. The mournful eyes of the star -- the eyes of a mountaineer -- and the voice -- like a wound in the throat -- match the eyes and timbre of the fallen leader.

It is hard to think of The Fugitive apart from the confusion and hurt the country must have felt as it began to realize the center of American life was passing the age where it could still look forward; now people looked back into memory, into the past of the nation. . .

"Landscape with Running Figures," Parts I and II.

Mort

 

R.I.P. -- The bravest and most important comedian of his time.

 

Bill Davy with a heartfelt tribute.

The Girl We Left Behind

There were more than two Rosemary Clooneys. This lovely and emotionally complicated woman had many rooms to her mansion, creatively and otherwise. Yet there's a dividing line in the forward movement of her life that most people can agree upon -- her 1968 breakdown, coming after years of a Catholic holding-together of a marriage to the brutal and ever-cheating Jose Ferrer (a marriage and remarriage, resulting in five children) while falling ever deeper in love with arranger Nelson Riddle -- the final breaking point her presence at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, June 5th, 1968, witnessing the National Security State execution of her close personal friend Robert F. Kennedy.

For years after she did not perform. In '77 she came back - dramatically different look, dramatically different sound. Most jazz fans seem to prefer the post-breakdown, slatternly, husky, wearied Rose. Not a chance.

The young Rose was a blue ribbon for blonde ladies in black. Her eyes were blue with a pannier of diamonds, wistful, looking out with tenderness, offering up, timidly, a little love. And they would glow. It is not common for blue eyes to glow in the dark of modestly-lit bars or clubs or recording studios, but Rose's light came from within. Her sound back then was full of red cheeks and Christmas, the color of it on most songs as startling as a view of wild red berries in a field of snow. And something more, a warning: with each song she seems to be burning a piece of the distant past, ash deep within her purity thickening from a membrane to a shroud. If love is a state of grace and must be protected by sacramental walls, then Rose did all she could to do the protecting.

Prelude and Opening

"When you love someone, you don't abandon them, no matter how they treat you."

-- Anthony Perkins in Psycho

The strobing, bristling, fractured malignancy of a black-and-white TV image. Music with no rest, an aching loop of driving hysteria. And the star, the nominal star, with her name at the end of the acting titles. . .

A drift across the landscape of a seasonless hotbox:  Phoenix, Arizona -- one of many urban weeds sprouted in the postwar explosion of Western cowboy economies. This is the middle of December? Friday ~ Crucifixion day. Move toward a gargoyle of a building, beyond it, to the left. Now toward what appears to be the Texas School Book Depository. We enter it, the window. Is Lee Harvey Oswald waiting for us on the other side, as he was not on that other day of Crucifixion? Indeed he is.

I can think of no other previous piece of American popular culture containing a character such as the one we're about to meet: a young sexually-frustrated male loner who takes his frustrations out in mad violence. The 1960s (and beyond) begin here: Oswald, Bremer, Hinckley, Speck, Whitman, Raymond Shaw, Sirhan, Ray, Manson. Most of them much more than lone killers, most with deep and sinister intelligence connections. But the myth is born here. How did Hitchcock know?

The divorced, debt-ridden poonhound looms over his latest catch, a girl so lathered up she never ate her egg salad sandwich or drank her bottle of pop, although it is already quarter-to-three, a lengthy lunchbreak. They entangle again, and we notice the mole on the girl's upper back and the stiffness of the man's Brylcreemed hair ('though not as stiff as is John Gavin). She breaks away from his touch and his glibness, to dress and to leave. Each act and word of longing from her is met with lounge-lizard glibness, or self-pity, from the man. "Will you lick the stamps?" he asks her, referring to the alimony he must mail to his run-away, far-away ex-wife. "I'll lick the stamps" she answers -- a moment always getting hoots from film students and revival crowds. Actually, a cause for one of the most heartbreaking zooms in movie history. When he asks her if she wants to leave him, she says "I'm thinking of it" -- a lie, for she winds up destroying her job, reputation, family, and her life, by stealing $40,000 for him, for their marriage. When he mentions marriage, he says she'll swing. What does he mean? Open marriage? The sorrow of it; and the blinds -- draped over the world she imagines, one she will never have.

One thinks of the final shot of the work, of the white car being pulled from the black muck. The terror of it is obvious: Herrmann's music, the cut to it from Bates in his padded cell and the dissolve to the skeleton beneath his face. But something more. We have just listened to Simon Oakland's demystifications, his social psychology babble "explaining" Norman. Where is Marion's story here? Where is her pain and confusion and sadness and loneliness? Why is this attractive woman so desperate to marry? Why has she stayed in that nothing job for 10 years? Why does she still live with her ice-cold sister Lila? (Both the boyfriend and Lila remain affectless at the end, when told of Marion's murder.)

Marion's story is buried with her. That is the real terror. A story Hitchcock tells in a chain of masterpieces embracing female suffering, but not here. Bergman in Notorious. Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Vera Miles in The Wrong Man. Novak and Bel Geddes in Vertigo. Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Tippi Hedren and Suzanne Pleshette in The Birds. Hedren in Marnie. Far from being a cold manipulator of movie audiences, Alfred Hitchcock was one of the deepest feeling (and greatest) artists of the 20th Century. . .

Boo

The Greatest Dissolve in Movie History?

Over at Jaime Weinman's fine website "Something Old, Nothing New," there's a discussion about the scarcity of dissolves in US movies post-1968. Weinman et al. seem a bit off the mark in terms of timing. (MTV and its all-encompassing 80s stupidity would eventually drive the last nail into that coffin). In the work of 70s American New Wave directors (Coppola, DePalma, Scorsese, Altman, Cimino, Penn, Malick, Robert Benton) there are frequent and sometimes astonishing uses of the effect. (Altman's Thieves Likes Us from '74 seems like one long emerald-toned dissolve.)

In fact, did the 1970s, in terms of thematic and emotional power, give us the greatest dissolve in movie history?

Michael Corleone has lost his father and eldest brother, and is now haunted by memories and images of an imagined past. He has moved his family out of its New York sanctuary to the open mountains of Nevada. His older sister hates and shuns him, because of the murder of her husband, ordered by Michael. He has renounced his older brother Fredo. And he blames his wife for the recent loss of their child.

Michael comes to his own mother, to ask what it's all about.

Nothing But the Marvelous