Tonight!

At 6:45 & 9:20

All About Bette

So, I've been watching a lot of Bette Davis movies lately. Until a few months ago, All About Eve was the only one of her classic films I'd actually seen all the way through. Since then, I've seen ten more films, all from the years 1938-1946, when she was at the peak of her stardom working at Warner Brothers. She seems to me a wholly unique kind of star, one who was more at home playing nasty villains or pathetic victims than effervescent heroines. Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn, stars of Charade, on the other hand, are much more typical movie stars in that they never played unsympathetic characters. She is instead a darker, more extreme, less charming version of Katherine Hepburn, another star who specialized in strong, independent women (though this Hepburn, too, never played a villain).


What then, made her so popular? In these films, Davis plays a killer (The Letter, Deception, The Little Foxes, In This Our Life) a liar (Deception, The Letter, The Old Maid), a spoiled and selfish rich girl (Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex) and a pathetic wallflower (Now, Voyager, The Old Maid). This raises the complex issue of audience identification. Did the people who flocked to Davis's films in the 30s and 40s identify with her characters? Did they see themselves as the strong, independent-minded woman on the screen? Or did they despise her as the other characters in the films do: was she they star they loved to hate? Is this why the punishments the Davis characters must endure were so satisfying? In The Old Maid, she gives up her daughter to her pretty, blonde sister because she thinks that'll make the daughter happy. In Now, Voyager, she decides she'd rather raise Paul Henreid's daughter for him, rather than get him to divorce the wife he doesn't love. In Jezebel (as punishment for her horrible crime of wearing a red dress to a society ball) she's publicly humiliated (in one of the most gloriously demented scenes of the 1930s) and rejected by her fiancée, but still risks catching yellow fever to take care of him when he falls ill. We enjoy Davis's intelligence and willfulness, but we also enjoy seeing her punished for daring to have such outstanding qualities.


How many other movie stars provoke such a complex reaction? Certainly John Wayne in a few films when Howard Hawks and John Ford played him against type in Red River and The Searchers, respectively, but in those cases it's questionable that Wayne even knew to what end he was being used. James Stewart in his 1950s films with Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann started exploring the dark side of his All-American persona, but still was never truly as villainous as Davis in The Little Foxes or The Letter. Bogart or Cagney might be closer, but they seem more limited than Davis, whether through lack of skill or opportunity, I can't say, and regardless of whether their gangster characters were morally upright, there was never any question that audiences wouldn't sympathize with them once they became stars.


This week we're playing Davis's crowning achievement, All About Eve. It's the most sympathetic character I've seen her play: as quick-witted and short-tempered as ever, but with a raw core of vulnerability that few actors would allow to be shown, dependent as it is on her own advancing age and declining good looks. It's a brilliant performance, one that earned her the ninth of her eleven Best Actress Oscar nominations (and of course she should have won).

Here's a ranked list of the thirteen Bette Davis films I've seen:

1. All About Eve
2. The Letter
3. Now, Voyager
4. Jezebel
5. Deception
6. The Little Foxes
7. The Old Maid
8. The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex
9. Dark Victory
10. Death On The Nile
11. In This Our Life
12. The Petrified Forest
13. Watch On The Rhine

And thirteen more I still need to see:

1. All That Heaven Allows
2. Mr. Skeffington
3. Pocketful Of Miracles
4. Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?
5. Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte
6. The Man Who Came To Dinner
7. Beyond The Forest
8. Dangerous
9. Of Human Bondage
10. Juarez
11. Three On A Match
12. The Star
13. The Great Lie

Links: All About Eve

Turner Classic Movies details the creation of All About Eve.

The always-awesome A.O. Scott has a video essay on the film at the New York Times.

The reliably radical Roger Ebert praises the film in his Great Movies series.

Dig it.

Aaron Campeau: In Defense (Kind Of) Of Showgirls

Aaron Campeau is a founding member of the Thursday Matinee Debate Team, a defunct cabal of cinematic criticism that despite its demise, continues to inflict wounds upon my fragile psyche.  He currently manages the Fremont location of Rain City Video, one of our fantastic weekly sponsors.  Aaron also plays guitar in the best band in Seattle and as of this week he is engaged to his sweetheart of many years, Emily, she too a battle-scarred Metro veteran.  Awww....

Showgirls is one of my favorite movies of all time. When I tell people this they tend to think that I am being deadpan in an attempt at humor (which, given my general demeanor, is not necessarily an unfair assumption) or insane (likewise.) Most people think of Showgirls as gratuitous, big-budget soft porn, a desperate attempt by a child star to break free of her wholesome image. Perhaps most resoundingly, it is seen as a monumental flop, Caligula for a new generation but somehow worse.

Film buffs tend to share the popular opinion of Showgirls, with the additional view that it marks the biggest (and perhaps only) dissapointment of Paul Verhoeven's career; thatShowgirls might be somewhat enjoyable for its camp value, but that the degree of unintentional humor is not nearly great enough to redeem such an enormous failing on the director's part. As you might have expected, I could not disagree more vehemently with this viewpoint. In fact, I believe that the humor in Showgirls is in no way unintentional, that it is Paul Verhoeven's most fully realized work of satire, and that it is perhaps the most hilarious practical joke ever played on Hollywood and the American viewing public.

I first encountered Showgirls at the age of 14. It was 3:00 A.M. on a Friday night, and it had just begun playing on Showtime. I'd heard about it, of course; Jessie Spano took her clothes off, for heaven's sake! I will admit that there was a part of me that wished it had been Kelly Kapowski, but the intrigue was too much to resist. What I witnessed was one of the worst pieces of garbage ever made. The story was beyond implausible, Elizabeth Berkley could not act her way out of a paper bag, and when a movie that has eroticism as its biggest selling point is incapable of being sexually exciting to a 14 year old boy, clearly something has gone wrong somewhere along the line. How was the man that gave the world Total Recall and RoboCopcapable of making such utter crap? How did a major studio give him a $45 million budget and allow it to make it through production? I knew very little about the manner in which Hollywood operated at the time, but I was fairly certain that NC-17 rated soft-porn was unlikely have much commercial success, especially considering that it was worse in every possible way than most straight-to-cable, zero-budget sexploitation.

I didn't really think about Showgirls again for a few years, until I heard that David Schmader was going to be doing his increasingly renowned live narration of the movie at the Capitol Theatre in Olympia. I liked David Schmader, I liked the Capitol Theatre, and I didn't have anything else better to do, so my girlfriend and I made a night of it. Schmader's ability to somehow make watching this abomination of cinema caused me to view things in a different light. In the years that followed, Showgirls became a staple of late-night camp movie marathons, a sick-day diversion and a surefire cure for a case of the blahs. Somewhere along the way, as I became more film literate, developed something approaching an adult sense of humor, and watched All About Eve a time or two, it clicked; Showgirls was exactly the movie that Paul Verhoeven set out to make.

Since he began making films for American audiences (and, to a certain extent, since he began making films at all) Paul Verhoeven has been attempting to produce the most deadpan, intensely biting satire imaginable. RoboCop was social commentary about our infatuation with graphic violence. It was a satire of mainstream film's obsession with assigning strictly delineated boundaries between right-and-wrong/good-and-evil and the justification of extreme measures to assure the triumph of "good." Total Recall was similar in its aims, with the added criticism of our fear of the foreign and unknown, as well as our irrational attempts to control the world around us. Basic Instinct was somewhat less bluntly satirical than Verhoeven's previous two efforts, but the "message" of the film, that infidelity and sexual exploration lead not only to personal loss but unimagined horror was clearly tongue-in-cheek.I do not believe that it would be unfair to say that the social commentary and satirical humor of Verhoeven's films were lost on large portions of the viewing audiences. Many people liked Verhoeven's films, but they liked them for reasons that were different than he perhaps intended. Luckily, this would not be much of an issue with Showgirls; no one liked it. In truth, it is easy to understand why -- taken in the abstract, Showgirls is a disaster.

If you would be so kind as to humor me, however, ask yourself this; what if the film's complete and total failure is the entire reason it exists? This is what I have come to believe. Elizabeth Berkley wasn't cast in the lead role because she was a fresh-faced beauty with the talent and desire to take her career in a completely different direction and shake the foundations of Hollywood in the process; she was cast because she was terrible. Kyle McLachlan's over-the-top smarminess wasn't a by-product of incompetent direction, it was necessary to complete the illusion that this film was not a total farce. I am convinced that the only reason Gina Gershon was given a role in this movie is because Paul Verhoeven needed someone else on the set smart enough to realize how funny all of this was.

Like many practical jokes, Showgirls is successful at least in part due to an element of schadenfreude; I honestly believe that Elizabeth Berkley thought taking the role of Nomi Malone would vault her to super-stardom, and the complete and total destruction of her career, writ large for the whole world to see, is paramount to the success of the ruse. That her career collapsed after Showgirls is, on a human level, unfortunate; if we are being honest, however, we must admit that it was going to happen sooner or later. That Joe Ezterhas was allowed to feel for a fleeting moment that anyone in the world took him at all seriously is to a certain degree quite sad, but then you remember that he is Joe Ezterhas, and you don't really feel all that bad anymore. Kyle McLachlan was made to look like a fool, but he is in no way capable of realizing this, so in this case no harm was done. (As an aside, I have great affection for Kyle McLachlan, but I also believe that this affection is largely due to McLachlan's willingness to make such an easy target of himself.)

The point of all of this is not to try and convince anyone that Showgirls is some sort of cinematic masterpiece, because clearly it is not. Nor is it an attempt to convince myself that a movie I enjoy so much is more noteworthy than it actually is as an attempt to save face; I freely admit to enjoying a great deal of total crap. I own a copy of Hustle & Flow on DVD. Maximum Overdrive shares space with Young Mr. Lincoln and F for Fake on my Staff Picks shelf at work. Sometimes a fellow feels like sipping a cup of tea and listening to Mozart, and other times he feels like imbibing something slightly more spirituous and jamming out to Beyonce. There is no shame in populist escapism.

There's something more to Showgirls, though; for most people the distinction might seem meaningless. If I do not disagree that the end result is a terrible film, do the director's intentions actually matter? In terms of entertainment value, perhaps they do not (although I would argue that watching the film with the belief that the results were intentional makes it a more enjoyable experience.) If, on the other hand, the goal is to honestly critique the film's artistic merits, I believe that they do.

Showgirls is not for everyone; this much should be obvious. It is gratuitously sexual throughout, shockingly violent in parts and ironically misogynistic. The success of the satire rests in large part upon the humiliation of the cast as a whole and Berkley in particular. Sensibilities and thresholds for prurient content are entirely subjective, and so it is understandable that many people will never enjoy this film. To dismiss its artistic value and assume that it is not worthy of discussion and recognition, however, would be a mistake.

Coming Attractions: All About Eve

Wednesday, August 19th at 6:45 & 9:20.

Giveaways: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir DVD and a gift certificate for Rain City Video, respectively.

See you there!

Tonight!

At 7:00 & 9:00

Links: F for Fake

Criterion has Jonathan Rosenbaum's critical essay on F for Fake used in the DVD release.

A lengthy review of the film appears on Slant.com

And finally, for those of you that are into that sort of thing, a post-modern take on the film by Robert Castle, courtesy of Bright Lights Film Journal.

Have fun.

"There is a man, a certain man..."

Jack White is a man of prodigious talent. He is a uniquely gifted songwriter, an amazingly skilled guitarist and, as was recently discovered, a kick-ass drummer. In his many bands, particularly the White Stripes, White manages to craft simple, catchy, quirky and deeply personal songs that continually succeed in an increasingly fractured music world. He is easily the greatest and most universally respected rock star to come down the pipeline in over a decade.

Looking beyond the wide range of the above-mentioned qualities, Mr. White's greatest gift is his impeccable good taste. His knowledge and admiration for the blues has served his songwriting well throughout his career, his unflinching devotion to analog equipment makes his recordings stand out amongst the glut, and most importantly his heroes are by and large visionary artists who pushed the envelope of their given field while maintaining a deep respect for the past. No man is more influential on the work of Jack White than Orson Welles.

The evidence is incontrovertible. The White Stripes song "The Union Forever", off of the album White Blood Cells, takes its entire lyric from lines from Welles's screenplay for Citizen Kane, co-written with Herman J. Mankiewicz (screw you Pauline Kael!).

White's record label and recently-opened Nashville record store are both called Third Man, after the Carol Reed masterpiece starring Welles as the enigmatic Harry Lime.

The song "Take, Take, Take" on the White Stripes album Get Behind Me Satan, details the fictitious encounter a star-struck fan has with actress Rita Hayworth, Welles's wife of five years in the 40's. About a year after the album's release, White married model Karen Elson, a redhead like Rita.

It is difficult to say which of the myriad qualities Welles possessed affected Jack White the most. Could it be Welles's ability to juggle multiple functions on any given project, sometimes being the writer, star, director, producer and editor, much like the multiple roles White puts upon himself in the music world? Or perhaps how Welles, post-the Magnificent Ambersons debacle, managed to work wonders within the confines of a limited budget and a dearth of materials? What about the way Welles seemed a man from a different era, displaced in his own time?

Personally I think the idea Jack White took most to heart from Orson Welles was his embellishment on his own past. The lies Welles made up about his upbringing, his artistic career and personal life, influenced White's public persona and the perception he feeds his audience. After his father passed away, an underage Welles travelled to Europe. One day he found himself outside the door to the Gate Theatre in Dublin. He weaseled himself into an acting gig there by telling the manager that he was a Broadway star. This lie opened the door for his subsequent career, starting with his acclaim on the stage, which led to his creation of the Mercury Theatre, which produced the legendary War of the Worlds broadcast and made Welles famous.

It is obvious that Jack White learned a lesson from this. From the outset Jack insisted that he and White Stripes drummer extraordinaire Meg were brother and sister, instead of a divorced couple. When the truth came to light sometime later, White ignored it, maintaining the illusion he had created. He knew that the idea of a two-piece rock band comprised of siblings made for much better copy than the truth. As with another hero, Bob Dylan, White acts as a man from a bygone era, a blues-man from the crossroads, a drifter and a loner, instead of a blue-collar carpenter from Detroit.

In perpetuating blatant falsehoods about who they were Orson Welles and Jack White managed to create much more than impeccable artistic bodies of work; they created themselves.

F For Fake Warm-Up: Errol Morris Talks To Ricky Jay About Lying

Documentarian Errol Morris (The Fog Of War, Fast Cheap and Out Of Control), who himself famously blurred the lines between fiction and non-fiction film through the extensive use of recreations in his great The Thin Blue Line, has a conversation on his New York Times blog with actor/magician Ricky Jay (Boogie Nights, The Spanish Prisoner) that serves as a perfect appetizer for this week's Metro Classic, Orson Welles's documentary about fakery, forgery and film.

In Part One, they discuss PT Barnum, sleight of hand and the difference between lying and deception. In Part Two, Morris dissects some paintings, picks a fight with Immanuel Kant and tells us why we wouldn't want to live in a world without lying. It all starts with Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –

Coming Attractions: F for Fake

Wednesday, August 12th at 7:00 & 9:00.

Giveaways: Touch of Evil DVD and gift certificate for Rain City Video, respectively.

See you there!

Tonight!

At 7:00 & 9:15

Top 5 Top 5 Lists Related To, But Not Including, Charade

With a tip of the hat to the Filmspotting podcast, which features a Top 5 list with every episode, and which is itself inspired by Nick Hornby's book High Fidelity, which anyone with an unhealthy attachment to pop culture and/or lists should read, here are five Top 5 lists inspired by this week's Metro Classic.


Top 5 Audrey Hepburn Films:

1. Funny Face (Stanley Donen)
2. Breakfast At Tiffany's (Blake Edwards)
3. Sabrina (Billy Wilder)
4. My Fair Lady (George Cukor)
5. Two For The Road (Stanley Donen)


Top 5 Cary Grant Films:

1. North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks)
3. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor)
4. His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)
5. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock)


Top 5 Stanley Donen Films:

1. Singin' In The Rain
2. Funny Face
3. It's Always Fair Weather
4. Two For The Road
5. On The Town


Top 5 Films of 1963:

1. 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini)
2. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)
3. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard)
4. High And Low (Akira Kurosawa)
5. The Great Escape (John Sturges)


Top 5 Non-Hitchcock Hitchcockian Films:

1. Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)
2. La jetée (Chris Marker)
3. Marathon Man (John Schlesinger)
4. Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon)
5. Dead Again (Kenneth Branagh)

Links: Charade

Turner Classic Movies has a fantastic history on the making of Charade.

Over at the Criterion website you can read a nice essay by Bruce Eder detailing Charade's uniqueness amongst 1960's thrillers.

Lastly, on Salon.com there is a lengthy summary that puts Charade in context with its most often used adjective, "Hitchcockian".

Enjoy.

Others (Pre-Game Double Feature)

Coming Attractions: Charade

Wednesday, August 5th at 7:00 & 9:15

Giveaways: Singin' in the Rain DVD and a gift certificate for Rain City Video, respectively.

See you there!

Pre-Game Warm-Up: Mad Men

OK, it's not a movie like the stuff Mike's been watching, but it's at least as good and probably better. Besides, if Chris Connelly is right in his thought (expressed a little while ago on The Sports Guy's podcast, which is a must-listen for any fan of sports and pop culture) that the defining films of the first decade of this century have not been movies at all, but rather television shows (The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire), then talking about Mad Men in the context of a film series on Liars, Thieves and Cheats should be perfectly appropriate.

Mad Men is set in the early 1960s and stars Jon Hamm as the creative director of a Manhattan advertising agency. The show is famous for its fastidious attention to period-detail, not just in wardrobe (though the costumes, by Deadwood costume designer Jane Bryant are stunning) and cultural references, but in its commitment to showing just how politically incorrect that time was. Often the casual drinking, sexual harassment and chain smoking the characters engage in is played for laughs (sometimes very dark ones), and this gives the show a much needed sense of humor, considering how serious the show is about exploring the psyches of profoundly damaged and depressed people (mostly Draper and his wife Betty, played by January Jones).

The show's relation to our upcoming series should be obvious enough. It's Season One tagline was "Where the truth lies" a simple statement with a dizzying array of possible meanings in the context of the show (advertising is often lies, Draper lies constantly to his wife and co-workers and himself. Yet Draper's so good at his job because his ads don't lie: his schtick is to connect emotionally to the product in question (often relating it to a crisis in his home life) and then give a powerful monologue that conveys the truth of his experience to everyone in the room. He uses advertising to connect people to universal truths about the human condition. Or, conversely, he's so good at his job that his lies are indistinguishable from his truths: he uses emotional appeals to tell profound lies about the human condition, helping to build the edifice of the society that allows people like him to lie and cheat their way to the top.

In addition to being a professional liar, Draper is also a cheat, carrying on a number of affairs with women who are very different from his wife (a Greenwich Village artist, a Jewish businesswoman, etc). Adultery is common at his workplace, and most of his married co-workers are or have been engaged in some kind of extra-marital relationship. As his wife becomes more aware of Draper's cheating, her life begins to fall apart. From the beginning of the series, we see she is suffering from some serious psychological issues, and we guess long before she does that her husband's philandering is a primary cause of it. Draper is like North By Northwest's Roger O. Thornhill (a great looking suit with nothing in the middle). In fact, Cary Grant's Thornhill, which he plays a slight variation on in the upcoming Charade, was a major inspiration for the character's style. The first two seasons of the show revolve around first Don's, then Betty's realization of this void and their attempts to fill it with something more satisfying than adultery and lies.

The show has some Thievery in it too, but I won't go into that here for fear of spoiling anything. The first two seasons are on DVD now (the show looks fantastic on Blu-Ray) and Season Three starts in the middle of August.

Ryland Walker Knight on Charade: Sparking Your Brain Cells to the Utmost

Earlier this week I noticed that our good pal Ryland Walker Knight had queued up Charade, the Ricky Henderson* of our imminent Liars, Thieves & Cheats series. Finding out that this home viewing would be his inaugural experience of the film, I tasked Ryland (as he has done so many times with me) with writing down his thoughts on the picture. He most graciously took on the assignment and turned the whole thing around in about 24 hours (very much unlike me).

Read his impressions over at his homestead Vinyl Is Heavy.

*Two things: First, I had to drop the A's reference for us Bay Area heads (Ryland and me) and secondly how is it that I make the first baseball reference on the blog? Baseball for me is frozen in 1989 when I last cared a whit, whilst Sean sleeps in Mariners bedsheets.

Pre-Game Warm-Up: The Fallen Idol

I don't know which Invisible Hands of Fate have been guiding my movie choices as of late but, considering the themes of the impending series, they have been incredibly apt. Last night I managed to finally watch Carol Reed's superlative The Fallen Idol from 1948. The film deals directly with lies, in particular the differences between one lie and another. Whenever a lie is told it is generally thought to be in the interest of the teller but how do we really know which lies are beneficial rather than a hindrance? This question is played out as a young boy, Phillipe, who hasn't yet learned how to differentiate between individual falsehoods, manages to unintentionally implicate his hero, a butler named Baines (played beautifully by Ralph Richardson), in a murder investigation.

Like the immortal Third Man released a year later, this too is a collaboration between Reed and the novelist Graham Greene and deals with many of the themes found within the writer's other work. It is a film that is much less ballyhooed than its successor but is ultimately just as stunning.



Post-script: If you're feeling particularly adventurous, this would be a great double feature with the only Best Picture winner in Alfred Hitchcock's supreme body of work, 1940's Rebecca. Both feature frightening villains in the role of the home's head housekeeper.

Pre-Game Warm-Up: Almodovar's Bad Education

Had we been unable to secure any of our first choices for the upcoming series, Sean and I certainly would have had dozens of great films with which to choose a replacement. I'm sure many of you who see this upcoming schedule are aggrieved by our failure to include any number of films. After all, cinema loves its scoundrels. Last night though I serendipitously stumbled upon what is possibly the most egregious omission from the calendar. Not only does Pedro Almodovar's superb Bad Education fit snugly under the Liars banner (in fact an argument could be made for its inclusion in the other two sub-genres as well), it also manages to concern itself with the three traits that uniquely define our selections for the first third.

The film centers around a love interest that may or may not be what he seems, echoing Audrey Hepburn's suitor played by Cary Grant in Charade.

The story within a story of Bad Education unfolds courtesy of a most unreliable narrator, which is just one of the many manners of subterfuge employed by Orson Welles in the documentary F for Fake.

And finally, Bad Education features an aspiring star who through ruthless deceit works his way up the ladder of professional acting a la the immortal Eve Harrington, played by Anne Baxter, in All About Eve.

I could go on into the many merits of this complex, fascinating film but I fear that I may have already given away too much. Suffice to say, if you're jonesing for a film fix before our series kicks off on August 5th (or before Almodovar's new film Broken Embraces premieres in November), you could do a turn worse than watching Bad Education.