Tonight!

At 6:45 & 9:20

Top 5 Top 5 Lists Related To, But Not Including, All About Eve

Top 5 George Sanders Films:

1. Voyage In Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
2. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
3. The Ghost And Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
4. While The City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)
5. A Shot In The Dark, Blake Edwards, 1964)


Top 5 Thelma Ritter Films:

1. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
2. Pickup On South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)
3. A Letter To Three Wives (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949)
4. The Mating Season (Mitchell Leisen, 1951)
5. Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959)


Top 5 Joseph L. Mankiewicz Films:

1. The Ghost And Mrs. Muir (1947)
2. The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
3. A Letter To Three Wives (1949)
4. The Quiet American (1958)
5. Guys And Dolls (1955)


Top 5 Films Set On Broadway:

1. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953)
2. All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
3. Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)
4. Sweet Smell Of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
5. 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)


Top 5 Films Of 1950:

1. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa)
2. In A Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray)
3. Harvey (Henry Koster)
4. Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini)
5. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis)

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!