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Archive for the ‘Low Comedy’ Category

Tangerine

13 May

Tangerine – directed by Sean Baker – comedy – 28 minutes Color 2015.
★★★★★
The Story: A hooker, fresh from the pokey, learns from her best friend that her pimp has two-timed her, so the two of them set forth into mayhem.
~

Tangerine is The Importance Of Being Earnest set in the land of trans-gender prostitution the the streets of L.A. That is to say, it is as witty as Oscar Wilde’s play and has the same subject – which ought to be enough for anyone to leap toward and watch it.

The subject is: Which of us do you love more, her or me?

This mortal matter is pursued by the Cicely and Gwendolyn characters, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, beautifully played by Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor.

To cut through other praises to the one that interests me most, let’s turn to the double-pluses of the camera-acting combo, the one dependent upon the other, so I believe.

The camera is an IPhone. This palm-held camera rids us of the patient awkwardness of a 35mm camera. Less waiting when shooting. Grab performance when it’s hot. The result is brilliant acting, some of which is improvised.

I, who deplore improvisation as a rule, stand corrected before the ability of the director, Sean Baker, to inspire and to capture performance – performance-capture – the denominator common to all great directors, which you find scattered through their films but seldom see pervasive throughout one. But it’s pervasive here.

The IPhone is held by Baker and Radium Cheung. I know nothing of the other work of these two, but I bow before them, palms-down. Scene after scene comes alive, fresh, real, and funny.

The cast is of varying degrees of experience, but it doesn’t matter: the value that holds is authenticity, and it is met by all. For instance, when the Lady Bracknell character – out To Save Society – appears on the screen in the form of the great Armenian actress Alla Tumanian, you immediately sense you are in the presence of someone experienced beyond the ordinary, but you also observe that she is playing in the style common to all the others. She does not stand apart; she simply adds to the brilliance before us. Sean Baker directed the acting, and, as editor, chose it. Good for him.

What lasts?

Story lasts. Yes, even more than performance. Two things matter, but story makes a film lasting, which Tangerine has become. Lasts because a human truth is unfolded along its path. That means that the theme is not merely present but honored through its quirks and faults and splendors. Such is the case here.

The theme is friendship, a great one. Don’t miss Tangerine. It’s funny and true and dear.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, COMEDY OF CHARACTER, DIRECTED BY: Sean Baker, Farce, HUMAN COMEDY, Low Comedy, ODDBALL COMEDY, SCREWBALL COMEDY, Sex Comedy

 

Tyler Perry’s A Medea Christmas

09 Jan

Tyler  Perry’s A Medea Christmas – written, produced, and directed by Tyler Perry. Low Comedy. 100 minutes Color 2013. ★★★★★

The Story: Medea’s bustin’-out-all-over extended whatever gathers at a farm to open the gift nobody wants: The Truth!

I like Tyler Perry’s Medea pieces, because they are like the old Abbot and Costello movies: you know the style of the story will not tax you and will not fail you. The stories are as obvious as a limerick. And as humanly humorous. This is not Cartier’s. This is the Five and Ten Cent Store, and I respect its treats and decorums.

Medea is played by the director, of course, with an unconquerable bosom and the quack of a drake dressed up as a duck. The free-floating mouth of this matron is met fully by the wonderful playing of the domineering mother of the bride of Anna Marie Horsford and by Kathy Najimy as the mother of the groom who takes her on in a brilliant turn. Najimy is a performer not seen often enough in principal roles in principal films. So grab your chance while you can, and catch her here.

But, of course, the great treat is anticipating the mercurially volatile Media’s opening her mouth to blurt out another outrageousness. Perry has a true talent with this character, a human being who knows no bound of race or age or religion or type. She is one of the rare free sprits around.

So his films are not just for black audiences at all.

Go and check it out for yourself, and when you come back I’ll say: “See, I told you so.”

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Kathy Najimy, Low Comedy, Tyler Perry

 

A Dirty Shame

16 Nov

A Dirty Shame – directed by John Waters. Farce. The prudes against the profligates in a war of the sexing. 89 minutes. Color 2004.

★★

And so it is!

For if you are not, as I am not, familiar with the works of John Waters on film (I much admire his writings and his interviews), you would have to scratch your head in dumb wonderment as to how this galumfrey might have issued from his rare mind.

What it looks like is a beautifully paced picture with no consistency of style, which is all right, but its also shows no consistency in the quality of the performing of it.

The main thrust is camp. Or supposed camp – camp being the mockery of emotion by the person to whom it is at that moment happening. Chris Isaak as the priapan Pan does well with the style, as do Selma Blair and Johnny Knoxville.

However, Susan Shepherd and Mink Stole, as raging, raving puritans, play in a vein of positive realism, and are a little bit better at it than are the others are at camp – camp, which takes the physical finesse of a Betty Grable. So that’s two styles.

The third style is that of Tracey Ullman, who is the focal figure of this farce, but who seems to be playing in the vein of silent film gesticulation. She throws herself around. She is never as a loss for a grimace. At this she is not very good. She never seems lodged in either her prude or her profligate. She mugs like a chimpanzee but, oh, I wish she were as funny as a chimpanzee. It’s a case of an actor dancing Swan Lake on one roller skate. It’s too outlandish at bottom to be enjoyable. Your sense of humor is swallowed by your pity for the performer and terror at her failing of invention.

We do have in this piece a custard pie in the face for SAA and other sexual recovery groups. We do have everyone in town running around screwing, but no sense that anyone actually does screw. It is as though the entire film, in its desire to deride and overthrow priggishness, is more sexually repressed than the icecap. To laugh at sex addiction as a treatable condition is, after all, a sacrilege against the robust sexual health 12 Step Sexual Recovery Programs strive for.

One senses a certain monkishness in the director, no?

For the corollary of sex for everyone is sex for no one. Sex meaning in these frames the same as going to the bathroom in any toilet you find. As though sexual need were impartial. If it is, it is therefore zero.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, ACTING STYLE: IMPROV, ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, ACTING STYLE: SILENT GESTURAL, DIRECTED BY: John Waters, Farce, Low Comedy, Slapstick Comedy

 

Red Skelton: America’s Clown Prince

17 Feb

Red Skelton: American’s Clown Prince. TV Shows. Low Comedy. 5 hours Black and White 1961.
★★★★★
I would see that cheese-eating smile, surrounded by the destructive exclamation marks of his sycophantic dimples, I would see his sappy visage of a deranged choirboy, his body swaying constantly as though he needed to go to the bathroom, I would see that fidgeting left hand of his extended at the wrist like a male ballet dancer making a running exit – and I would make a running exit.

He repelled me.

He revolted me.

For I was never taken by the sort of comedian so popular in America of which he was a type: the schlemiel. Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Lou Costello, Danny Kaye – I was drawn to them only insofar as they evinced quick wit. But as dummies, they bored me. I was pitiless.

So I never saw Red Skelton. He made a movie with Fred Astaire, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I found him profoundly unfunny, grating even, a suck-up.

Since I am sometimes interested in challenging my biases, I took this out of the library, and immediately rolled on the floor laughing. For me, now, he is a very funny man. I was mistaken. No, not mistaken about his cheese-eating persona, but about walking away so soon all those years ago. Once he goes into his act, he is titanic.

I never saw him on Television, and these are 10 shows from his TV shows. I don’t know which volume I have here, for there are many and they are not properly numbered, but it is the one with the show in which he, as Freddie The Freeloader and Ed Wynn, adopt a squalling baby. Even funnier is a skit with Jane Russell as a dance-hall hostess-cum-Belle Starr. And funnier still is the one with Marilyn Maxwell where he simply sits on a soldering iron, and we watch his face screw into madnesses of agony.

For as a performer he has a genius with props. And he has a genius with witty sets, grace á the imaginations of his designers. He is a good mime. And his characters work well because they are greedy, mean, overbearing, dumb, and in all ways drolly human.

Red Skelton is a tonic. I love low humor. Sometimes. And sometimes I have to question those “sometimes” and go back and check them out. As here. Thanks, Red Skelton. Sorry. And welcome.

 
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Posted in Ed Wynn, Jane Russell, Low Comedy, Marilyn Maxwell, Red Skelton, Slapstick Comedy, TV COMEDY SERIES

 

California Suite

16 Feb

California Suite – directed by Herbert Ross. Low Comedy. Four sets of married couples find themselves in a series of unmarried stories in a Hollywood hotel. 103 minutes Color 1978.
★★
Unutterably vulgar.

Herbert Ross, despite the fact that he is a choreographer, has no gift for the physical comedy which poor Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby are called upon to enact. Two funny men and Ross finds nothing funny in them. Their episodes are played with pig-bladder depth. Neither actor is qualified to play physical comedy of this banana splat type. It requires tremendous, almost balletic training.

Jane Fonda at 41 is the perfect age to play the fast-talking career woman whose tongue gets the better of her marriage and motherhood. Her character is too quick on the draw to realize marriage is a draw. And Simon is too stupid to realize, even though he knows his gift for the shallows is fatal to his exploration of the possibilities of comedy at all, that the way out of that predicament is not more of the same. To think that her ex-husband Alan Alda can think of Jane Fonda as once attractive, with that mouth on her, places a new priority on our suspension of disbelief either in the sanity of Alda or the attraction of Jane Fonda, who, after all, next to Eve Arden, is one of the least romantically attractive screen personalities ever to breathe. Fonda is superb in the part.

So is Maggie Smith in hers; she won a supporting Oscar for this. She plays a British actress come over to collect a supporting Oscar, accompanied by her bi-sexual husband, to whom she is tragically sexually attracted, or so we are supposed to believe. This person is played in the far rear court by Michael Caine, who does not have a homosexual cell in his body. That’s why he plays it in the far rear court. He finds the casting as funny as I do.

The playwright further misconducts the proceedings by writing an improbable sequence involving Walter Matthau as a man who wakes up in his hotel bed to find himself next to a soporific tart. This unfunny situation is, of course, compounded by the premature entrance of his wife, played by Elaine May. They are all at a loss for what to do with lines that have no foundation in human response or human humor.

The material would work for a comedian of gross exaggeration, such as Sid Caesar, for whom Simon once wrote, where it might look good, but only, at best, on paper. Matthau plays it valiantly with his last nickel.

Neil Simon does not seem to get it that his talent completely embodies the values he himself thinks he is satirizing.

Neil Simon is a playwright whose comedies I am ashamed of.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Alan Alda, Jane Fonda, Low Comedy, Maggie Smith, Michael Caine, Richard Pryor, Walter Matthau

 

The Dictator

15 Jun

The Dictator –  Farce. A Middle East potentate finds himself without a crown or a court in downtown Manahattan and musrt foil a plot for his double to take over his vile dictatorship and turn it into a vile democracy. Color 212.

★★★

It’s funny, but not funny enough, and looking at its star, Sasha Baron Cohen, that may be because he himself is not inherently funny. He does funny things, though, and he says funny things too. He has funny ideas. And his stories are far-fetched enough to make us ripe for a guffaw.  For his purpose is to make us laugh – out of the other side of our faces, to be sure, but still…. Bert Lahr was inherently funny. So was Milton Berle, Fanny Brice, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Martha Raye, Carole Burnett, Billy Crystal, Walter Brennan, Lucille Ball, Donald Duck, John Lithgow, Judy Davis, Judy Garland. They had what is called funny bones. Bert Lahr was inherently funny; Jack Haley, Ray Bolger were not. But they could do funny things. And they could be vastly entertaining entertaining us. With Cohen the humor is mainly physical. It collects us by antics, get-ups, accents, impersonations, and complicated contradictions. All to the good. I will continue to visit his films because there is a natural defiance and an elegance and novelity of wit harbored in him that makes him belong up there dressed in a djellabah and a false beard and a screwy accent, and ignorant of his own folly all the time. I would not care to see him play a comedy by Shaw. But this?  yes. For there is a giddiness in his breast that wants to roughride and that is worth witnessing for its own sake, and that is what really makes him a star. Enthusiasm for what he is doing. It’s not as common as one might suppose. Brad Pitt has it. So does Tom Cruise. To be present with it is just plain good for one’s digestion.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Low Comedy, PENIS COMEDY, Sacha Baron Cohen, SCREWBALL COMEDY

 

Up The River

11 Mar

Up The River — directed by John Ford. Farce. A swaggering con and his moron sidekick bust out of the slammer to help a pal with his goil. 92 minutes Black and White 1930.

★★★

Fox had to make a gangster picture fast, so they sent John Ford to look for a new face in New York, giving him tickets to five Broadway plays. The first one he saw was The Last Mile, and instead of going to the other four, he went back four times to see Spencer Tracy who was the star of it. Ford caught a matinee of another play while he was there, and found his supporting player. So both Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart make their screen debuts in this film — which is not a gangster film at all but a comedy set in and out of a Utopian prison, where all the inmates are gutter roses and weep when reminded of their mothers and whence Spencer Tracy may make a break whenever he likes. The problem with the film is that its director celebrates what is dumb – and this seems to be the basis of Ford’s popularity. Ward Bond, uncredited turns up as a dummy bully, and all the prisoners are witless. Tracy’s sidekick, Dannemora Dan, played by Warren Hymer, is so stupid that when he comes out of an IQ test listed as “moron,” he is proud of the denomination, and we are supposed to think this is funny. This prison has females in it, and one of them falls for Bogie, who is a society boy who accidentally got on the wrong side of the law. Actually Bogie was a society boy, and it’s also interesting to see three other things one was not often to see from him again. One was how tiny he was, short and slight. This feature was adjusted by not shooting him in full in future films, or not shooting him in contrast with much taller people and things. He makes the mistake of chewing gum in his opening scene, but stops it soon. And he walks with that bowed-arms stride of his already. And when he is angry he is really frightening, Duke Mantee in the making. The second thing is that his basket shows, as does that of Hymer. Well, these are pre-code films and the guys hung loose, I guess. The third thing is his sunny smile. It’s radiant – who’d a thunk it? Tracy plays the know-in-all BMOC, smug and deceptive, and honest to his marrow. It fit right in with Ford’s Irishness in all things. Ford talked down to all his characters and to his audiences, just as much as those do-gooder society matrons distributing the benison of their contempt do. Everyone in Ford films is treated as dumb. The least common denominator is Ford’s whole orchestra, both on the screen and in his audience. I am not fooled: I do not mistake it for the common touch. Everything Ford does is backed by the inherent bully in him. The film was a big hit, and Fox signed Tracy to five-year contract, and he was on his way.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, BROAD COMEDY, Directed by John Ford, Gangster Comedy, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Humphrey Bogart, Jane Darwell, Low Comedy, Spencer Tracy, Ward Bond

 

Tobacco Road

18 Feb

Tobacco Road — directed by John Ford. Rural Comedy. Will the old folks be shunted out of their shanty on Tobacco Road? 84 minutes Black and White 1941.

* * *

Does John Ford think we’re all stupid? I have never understood the eminence into which this director fell – or perhaps he always belonged there – as a sub-popular entertainer. His sentimentality, his crude humor, his encouragement of excess in his performers, his delight in the sound ethics of a fistfight. It’s all here, Ward Bond included, playing a love-silly hick whose infant wife has run off to Atlanta. The whole thing is directed as though it were a Warner Brothers cartoon, with violence and improbability at every turn. Charlie Grapewin and Elizabeth Patterson play the old folks, and Grapewin is as supercharged as Paterson is American Gothic. Society-bitch actress Gene Tierney, smeared with hog-dirt, skulks behind the shrubs like Moonbeam McSwine in L’il Abner. William Tracy as a rageaholic nitwit does not bear looking at as he creates mayhem wherever his nasty nature drives him. The Broadway play was the longest running play in the history of the American theatre. The novel on which it is based is a trove of rich humor, funny in and of itself, written by America’s greatest short story writer and the finest novelist of his day, as Faulkner and all the others admitted, Erskine Caldwell. But Ford thinks Caldwell needs improving, as though Mark Twain needed slapstick to entertain. The material was supposed to be salacious. Which meant that these hillbillies got married and unmarried without ceremony, but in Caldwell that is not dirty, it simply a piece of the human comedy. And then…and then…you find Ford taking a picture of Elizabeth Patterson’s sad face as she faces homelessness And then Ford places them on the long walk to the poor farm pressed against a hard sky, two old people who have no place to go but down and a hard walk to get there, and you can forgive much. And then you realize that it is all being shot by Arthur Miller a great cinemaphotographer. And that whatever is being given us is in a very meritorious partnership. And that whatever it is, it is professionally done to the maximum. For essentially Ford is a storyteller’s eye. Then you remember Stagecoach a masterpiece. Then you take a star and you add it to the two you sourly accorded it, and you say no more.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Arthur Miller: MASTER PHOTOGRAPHER, Charley Grapewin, Dana Andrews, Directed by John Ford, Elizabeth Patterson, Gene Tierney, Low Comedy, Marjorie Rambeau, Ward Bond

 

What Planet Are You From?

25 Sep

What Planet Are You From – Directed by Mike Nichols. Penis Comedy. An Alien is sent down to take over Earth by impregnating a woman. 105 minutes Color  2000.

* * *

All the women in this picture are dressed badly, all the men are dressed so beautifully it is as though Fred Astaire had haberdashed them. Why is that? I can understand frump in Annette Bening’s case because her character’s a dither-head. But why would the sensationally sexy Linda Fiorentino stalk into her husband’s bank office in a see-thru skirt is baffling.

Anyhow, it probably fits with the monstrously minute mental elegance of Garry Shandling who wrote this one low joke comedy. Strange that no mature comedy is available for grown-ups, when Irene Dunne and Cary Grant were middle aged when they made their great ones.

Sir Ben Kingsley is present intoning orders from on high, meaning A Star Up There. While it is true that those gifts from the Gods, Camryn Manheim and Richard Jenkins, momentarily beguile us, this does not compensate for the presence before us of Shandling himself looking like a doomed sheep. What are his eyes always appealing for? What is that? Why does anyone find him funny? I mean funny in the sense of amusing, not in the sense of peculiar, which he certainly is.

This leaves us with the sleazy charms of Greg Kinnear, who is a master of them, and wins one’s heart with his vileness and his beautiful suits.

And with the great, the indissoluble, the loveable, the gifted, the sweet, the sexy, the imaginative, the tribute to American womanhood, and marvelous character leading actress, Dame Annette Bening, she who holds the Columbia torch!

One star for Annette Bening, one for Greg Kinnear, and one for John Goodman, who races around magnificently in chase of the answer to it all.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Annette Bening: ACTING GODDESS, Ben Kingsley, Camryn Manheim: ACTING GODDESS, Directed by Mike Nichols, Greg Kinnear, John Goodman, Linda Fiorentino, Low Comedy, PENIS COMEDY, Richard Jenkins ACTING GOD

 

Jitterbugs

11 Aug

Jitterbugs – Directed by Malcolm St. Clair. Low Comedy. Laurel and Hardy indulge in a mission to con some grifters. 75 minutes Black and White. 1943.

* * * * *

Drolleries from beginning to end, many of them depending upon welcome improbabilities. Engaging in multiple disguises, the dignified duo moves from scrape to scrape, and who can deny them a smile? Not me. Vivian Blaine makes her film debut, all of 21 but quite at home in her craft and her medium. An excellent bonus feature accompanies the picture, and you’ll be a lot wiser after it, for Randy Skretvedt knows all there is to know about Laurel and Hardy and so much more – he knows about everyone else involved in the film, and his observations are cogent. For instance, he talks about Bob Baily who was dragged into the film from Radio, for there was a war-time dearth of young leading men in Hollywood. Skretvedt points out that Baily, who was very successful in Radio and went back to it after The War, actually gives a radio actor’s performance, meaning that his entire performance is vocal — and it’s true. I could hear it, once I was  told. In any case, it’s lovely to see these two clown around again, Oliver Hardy this time given the lion’s share of the acting opportunities as he plays a variety of scenes, performing a two-man orchestra, making mad Southern Colonel love to the great Lee Patrick, and dancing about with wild abandon more than once. What a dainty dish to set before a king! Can you resist it? I couldn’t.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Lee Patrick, Low Comedy, MUSICAL NUMBERS, Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel, Vivian Blaine

 

Horrible Bosses

20 Jul

Horrible Bosses – Directed by Seth Gordon. Low Comedy. The Three Stooges take on The Axis Powers. 94 minutes Color 2011.

* * *

What a disappointment! No wait a minute. I went to it because of the stars, and the stars do not disappoint, which is why three stars are allotted to this. The three stars are actually very funny. Colin Farrell plays a drugged-out dauphin with a comb-over to Donald Sutherland, who is an ideal boss, but who dies in his first appearance, so his chief of staff falls under the crazy sway of Emperor Farrell, and misery ensues. Jennifer Aniston plays a nymphomaniacal dentist who longs to have her otherwise engaged dental technical drill her. And Kevin Spacey who slave-drives everyone around him like Simon Legree plays the CEO From Hell with gorgeous relish. Spacey is given and rewards the most film time of the three. His grandmother scene is almost worth playing money for, except that one would have to subject onesself to the rest of the movie to do so. It is the only time I laughed. Or smiled. Or didn’t feel like leaving. For the problem with the film lies not fall with the three stars who play The Axis Powers, but with The Three Stooges who conspire to kill them. It’s a wonderful premise, especially when Jamie Foxx comes along as a professional hit man to fortify their resolve. He is delightful. As is Bob Newhart as a replacement boss. It is the style of playing of the three victims which I find distressing. What they do is actorish, indeed acteroid. You would call it hammy if it aimed at a high style, but since it aims at a low style, you would call it improv. They never shut up and they never stop Rube Goldberging responseses to the situation and to one another that read like the contents of a trash basket. That is, their collective playing is a conglomeration of what any good actor would throw out.  They drain every ounce of humor from the premise by trying to make everything, and I mean everything, funny. And as a result we the audience can find nothing funny. I didn’t laugh. Neither did the other three people in the movie house.  The only three people having fun were those three actors. They found one another infectious. So did I, except in a quite different way.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE, Colin Farrell, Donald Sutherland, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Aniston GODDESS COMEDIENNE, Kevin Spacey, Low Comedy

 

God’s Little Acre

01 Jul

God’s Little Acre – Directed by Anthony Mann. Tragicomic rural drama. A farmer spends fifteen years digging for gold on his farm instead of farming while all his children go to pot and pieces around him. 118 minutes Black And White 1958.

* * * * *

Celeste Holm had seen The Misfits the day before at the Roxy. “You coulda shot moose in there,” she said to me. (Gable and Monroe were dead before it opened; no one wanted to face the ghosts of gods.) “She can’t act,” said Celeste Holm. If you wonder what she meant (she had been in All About Eve with her) take a look at Monroe in the clip in Roy London’s film where it is obvious that what she brings to a simple scene of buying a train ticket has nothing to do with acting but everything to with being. Listen to what London says. She brings something enormous onto the screen, but, no, she cannot act. Robert Ryan really falls into the same category, and one can see why he was cast, in place of Walter Brennan, a much greater actor. Aside from Ryan’s good looks and his ability to foist a certain eccentricity off on us, one sees an actor always pushing his effects, sometimes slightly, sometimes hugely – but one also sees something awkward and helpless in him. Something touching, just as there was in Monroe, and such a quality can carry an entire film, and this Ryan does, whereas Walter Brennan (three-time Oscar winner) might not have been able to. As to the material, Erskine Caldwell is the greatest short story writer this country has ever produced, and Faulkner and Hemingway and Dos Passos, all name him the great novelist. Commercially more successful than all of them combined, his work, scandalous in his day, is not much read nowadays, but modern Southern literature is unthinkable without it. It ought to be read: it’s very very funny. It’s the ashcan school of writing, the Southern poor – and, boy, are they comical sticking their tousled heads out of those ashcans and pursuing their comic obsessions to and beyond the limit! I would never have dreamed of casting Buddy Hackett as Plato, the man-who-would-be sheriff, but he is superb. Aldo Ray, going to fat and perfectly cast as the going-to-fat lecher for Ryan’s tasty daughter, brings lust to the point of tragedy. The scenes between him and Tina Louise are inconsolably sexual and steamy. But Aldo Ray is really lower class; Ryan isn’t. He’s best as a criminal in a business suit. So the whole enterprise would be just slightly off if it were not directed by Anthony Mann (director of Jimmy Stewart’s fine Pie Westerns) and beautifully filmed by Ernest Haller (Mildred Pierce, Gone With The Wind, Rebel Without A Cause), and scored by Elmer Bernstein. And so instead, we have a masterpiece of cotton gin art, one to be seen and, surely Ty Ty, heard!

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Aldo Ray, BROAD COMEDY, Buddy Hackett, Directed by Anthony Mann, FILMED BY Ernest Haller, HUMAN COMEDY, Kitchen Sink Drama, Low Comedy, Robert Ryan, Uncategorized

 

The Groom Wore Spurs

22 Mar

The Groom Wore Spurs —  directed by Richard Whorf. Low Comedy. A cowboy singing star who cannot sing, act, rope, and is afraid of horses gets in dutch with gamblers. 84 minutes Black and White 1951

* * *

Two expert light comedians work a script that is more hole-shot than a balsa tree in a termite colony. You might call it a Thirties musical without the dancing and without the songs. Jack Carson plays a bogus cowboy super-star, and he is plump and droll and haughty. Were there a script to stand on, he would be very funny. Ginger Rogers plays the wife he marries on the fly. Looking at her, in her early forties here, she is a performer in full possession of her powers, a master chef with no ingredient but peanut butter. It is sad to realize how there was no lasting place for her in film. It may have been because she was not willing to play mothers. Or at any rate not willing to play anything other than romantic leads. Or not willing to work in genres opening up in serious drama . Or…. Oh, it is foolish to speculate! She is so likable, such a master of film acting — responsive, ready, expressive. Of course, one wonders what she really was beyond being a film star who loved hard work. On screen, somewhat acerbic, yes, as were many of the female stars of the day, quick witted, good looking, with a splendid figure that looked well in clothes. She wouldn’t be convincing in costume pieces, of course, and she perhaps would not have been able to give herself fully to a part such as Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity, so, although she performed a couple, those heavy women’s roles would have passed her by. Oh, it is foolish to speculate!  I like her a lot. I like her moves and her vocal placement and her face and her way with her lines. I only wish she had been able to go on making movies. But some actors never allow themselves to grow old. Old. I once saw her in Santa Fe at a Festival honoring her. — this was not long before she died. They played Lady In The Dark, one of her Grand Roles, a bore. But still, I was thrilled awaiting her appearance on the stage of the Lensic.  She came out dressed like a Palm Beach cabana — in a massive, baby-blue gown, ornate and wonder-frill and awful — and spoke righteously about the hard work of the old days, as though young folks now did not know what hard work was. Maybe it was true of her by then, as was said when she did Hello, Dolly! on Broadway, that off-stage she was just no fun. But on screen she was a saucy all-American delight. Ah yes, it is foolish to speculate, is it not?

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jack Carson, Joan Davis, Low Comedy

 

The Trouble With Angels

08 Mar

The Trouble With Angels – Directed by Ida Lupino. Low Comedy. The mother superior of a Catholic girls boarding school meets her nemesis in the person of a recalcitrant young miss. 110 minutes Color 1966.

* * * * *

A beautifully directed, conceived, and written film by Ida Lupino. She strikes exactly the right balance throughout. It’s such a treat to see this sort of young adult picture made without stretches of dumb dim sentimentality. Haley Mills is super as the naughty young boarding school student. Marge Redmond is excellent as the chum of the Mother Superior, and the great Mary Wickes is in there pitching for all she’s worth, as usual. What a lot of fun she always was! Of course, as the patient, all-knowing Mother Superior we have Madame Mischief herself, Rosalind Russell. What an inspired piece of casting! We see always beneath her demeanor the possibility of the young rapscallion she herself once was. A treat without treacle. I gave  it a shot thinking it was going to be gooey with goodness, but I was pleasantly surprised. A director’s picture if ever there was one. Lupino knows exactly how not to over-milk a scene. Thanks Ida.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by Ida Lupino, Hayley Mills, Low Comedy, Mary Wickes:CHARACTER ACTOR GODDESS, Rosalind Russell: SCREEN GODDESS and ACTING GODDESS

 

Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows

08 Mar

Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows. Directed by James Neilson. Low Comedy. Conflicts in that girls Catholic Boarding School once again.  93 minutes Color 1968

**

Not a patch on The Trouble With Angels, alas, which was easy, lively, just off-beat enough to work, and boasted the invaluable presence of Hayley Mills.  This one still has Binnie Barnes, Rosalind Russell, and the wonderful Mary Wickes. There is no moment Mary Wickes is given that she does not fill to the full. Her enthusiasm for her craft is unbridled. Rosalind Russell maintains her aplomb and plays her scenes marvelously. But the episodes are forced, trite, and demeaning to females. What a conglomeration of nit-wittery!  What a bore! It needed a script-burning! Or the sure and wise hand of Ida Lupino who directed the first version so ably.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Low Comedy, Mary Wickes:CHARACTER ACTOR GODDESS, Robert Taylor, Rosalind Russell: SCREEN GODDESS and ACTING GODDESS, Van Johnson

 

The Merry Wives Of Windsor

01 Mar

The Merry Wives Of Windsor – Directed by David Hugh Jones – Low Oomedy. A fat old reprobate tries to seduce two wealthy wives. 120 minutes Color 1982

* * * * *

Here we have one of the greatest recordings of a Shakespeare play ever set down. And yet it is of one of WS’s thorniest scripts. Like Henry V it is tortured with a melange of voices in Latin, French, Welsh, and German, making the script monstrously hard to parse! But it wasn’t written to be read, but to be acted, and WS understood the rubric of acting like no one else, so that in the bodies of the actors it comes alive here, understandable here, priceless here. The sixteen shifts of mood in one character’s speech on the page are gibberish, but in the craft of the great Elizabeth Spriggs as Mistress Quickly, we have a masterpiece of human truth and humor, a performance of genius. Each minor character here is enacted, embodied, played to full measure. They are characters with no history, for their history lives in the exact present entirely. The piece is a proving ground for its players, led by Judy Davis’ Mistress Ford and Ben Kingsley as her frenetically jealous hubby Frank Ford. Prunella Scales’ performance as Mistress Page gets lost and monotonized behind its regionalism, but its energy is right on the money. Richard Griffiths we have recently seen in The History Boys plays Falstaff. Now this was made 25 years ago, so our actors are in their twenties (i.e. Alan Bennett) , and perhaps Griffiths is too young for the part in the sense that he wants merriment. TMMOW is a play, unlike Henry IV 1 & 2. In those plays Falstaff is driven by a lust for zest; here he is driven by a lust for money through lust, and it’s not that he is just too old and too fat, which he is, he is also just too ridiculous to score. This complicates the part, and Griffiths makes him a little more downbeat than one wants him to be. A little less of an unmoored balloon. A little less of a roguish liar. Still, when he thinks he has finally achieved the bosom of Mistress Ford, and utters the jubilant line, “Let the sky rain potatoes!” we are in a world of comedy unparalleled. The odd attic setting and the inn and the house of Ford and Caius and all the costumes and wigs and make-up are fabulous. If you love Shakespeare or want to learn to love Shakespeare, dive in.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH FUSTIAN, Alan Bennett, Ben Kingsley, DOCUMENT OF THEATER PERFORMANCE, Elizabeth Spriggs, Farce, Filmed in England, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, JUDY DAVIS: SCREEN GODDESS; ACTING GODDESS, Low Comedy, Richard Griffiths, Sex Comedy, SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA, Tudor Costume Drama, WRITTEN BY: William Shakespeare

 

Steamboat Round The Bend

24 Feb

Steamboat Round The Bend – Directed by John Ford – Comedy Drama. A captain must clear his relative of a base canard. 81 minutes black and white 1935.

* *

In the extras, Scott Eyeman brings us a really terrific commentary, full of interesting information and observation and love of John Ford’s pictures. It is really helpful to hear all about it, and is one of the few commentaries of a picture that brings a critical eye to bear and not just a series of Isn’t It All Terrifics!  Of course he does think it is terrific, and so he should as Ford’s biographer and filmographer. But I can’t stand John Ford. I don’t like his sentimentality. I don’t like his sense of humor. I don’t place the high value he does on fistfights and alcohol as dramatically charming. I don’t care for the sort of scripts he liked — this one by Dudley Nichols, who was also, of all people, Jean Renoir’s favorite screenwriter when Renoir first came to America. (True, Nichols did have a good sense of the vernacular, and also knew the sort of actors Ford was going to surround himself with.) And I usually don’t care for the sort of performances Ford thought were good. (Though I wish they would re-release Ford’s last film, Seven Women, with Mildred Dunnock, Ann Bancroft, Margaret Leighton .) I grew up in the era of Will Rogers, but I don’t believe I ever saw him in a film, this was his last picture, and as an actor he is unforgivable, or, at least, I don’t think much of what Ford lets him get away with: Rogers’ contempt for the craft and for his public. It’s as though Ford is saying, Well, we all know what the vanilla icecream cone of Will Rogers tastes like, so let’s put up a fake, then it won’t melt. Which is a highfalutin attitude, after all. So we are not watching a character in a picture; we are Watching A Tradition Called Will Rogers! Will Rogers was the biggest male film star of the early 30s. He was dreadful. Anyhow, the picture does have a wonderful real Steamboat race at the end, accompanied by Ford’s usual horseplay. It has the delightful Stepin Fetchit, as the moronic whining Negro male of which Butterfly McQueen was the female version, both made entertaining and lovable through their mother wit. It has butterball Eugene Pallette, the goblin Irvin S. Cobb, the windbag Berton Churchill, and lovely Ann Shirley, excellent as the love interest. It’s not so much America as Americana, which is as a portrait of Pawnee Indian chief by George Catlin is to  roadside tourist truck.

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Posted in Directed by John Ford, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Low Comedy

 

The Ghost Breakers

23 Feb

The Ghost Breakers – directed by George Marshall – Comedy Mystery Thriller. That haunted island castle in the Caribbean must be explored! 82 minutes Black and white 1940

* * * * *

Bob Hope plays his usual boastful fool, and it is quite welcome. Here again he is sexually overreaching and heroically underachieving, floundering into shallows over his head. Hope is a master at the lecherous coward, (also played by Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis and Charlie Chaplin and many others). No wonder he appealed so long to so many. In real life, evidently Hope was quite intrepid, going into battles zones to entertain the troops, but intrepidity and cowardice go hand in hand, else one would not know one from the other. I saw this picture as a little kid when it came out and the recollection of a woman side-stroking through swampy misty water holding her clothes over her head to keep them dry never left me as an example of practicality under pressure. Also the spooky castle remained with me and gave me nightmares. So did the zombie, my first in film. All these effects now have lost their power; thus the questionable practice of revisiting the past. Ahh, but the film still has its power to entertain. Its effects are low key and innocent but they give us a chance to recover from each while the next one waits in the wings. The film was re-made many years later with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, with the same director and the same sets, but this is by far the better version. Paulette Goddard, she of the dimples, is excellent here. Male or female, every actor who has dimples is a minx, and she sure is. Goddard was one of the brightest women in Hollywood, highly respected as a person, but everyone agreed that she could not act worth tuppence. I don’t know why. Here she’s good, attentive, game, unapologetic about taking off her clothes a couple of times — a good-time gal with a deep resource of pep and very convincing as a brash lass, up against Anthony Quinn at his most sexually dangerous, and adventuring into the haunted castle against all warnings. Go with her. You will be so pleased to be petrified. .

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Posted in Anthony Quinn, Bob Hope, Comedy-mystery, directed by George Marshall, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Low Comedy, MATING, Paulette Godard, THRILLER

 

S.O.B.

14 Jan

S.O.B. – directed + by Blake Edwards – lowbrow comedy about a Hollywood director frantic to revive his career – 121 minutes color 1981

**

Vulgarity is wonderful – if enforced by the gusto of a grand internal energy – Wallace Beery as Falstaff. But if the internal energy is flaccid, as it is with Blake Edwards, we are served mere coarseness, which is what this director dishes up. Vulgarity without the sauce. This extends to the director in the film asking his wife, a goody-two-shoes superstar like Julie Andrews to expose her bubbies for the camera. In this case, the actual star is Julie Andrews, and the actual director Blake Edwards is her actual husband, and the bubbies are actually hers,  and in the film she actually does deliver them to us, and actually very nice bubbies they are too. The film is meant to be a mockery of Hollywood behind-the-scenes, but it is technically impossible to mock that which is already a mockery, which is to freshen a heifer already with calf. The thing cannot be done. A redundancy so perfect it is indistinguishable from the original and impotent. What Edwards does have to back him up is the very real energy of very real talents – Robert Webber as the franticly fearful press agent, Loretta Swit as an egomaniacal gossip columnist, and the mighty Robert Preston as a feel-good doctor needling everybody in the rump. The picture would have been much better with him in the leading role, for he is splendid, is he not, as a sort of Ur-male, like Burt Lancaster which only the movies could body forth without wrecking every car on the highway. As to the rest: lift up your nose, pinch it, and turn away.

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Posted in BROAD COMEDY, Farce, Includes Some Gay Characters, Julie Andrews, Low Comedy, Robert Preston: acting god, Robert Webber, Showbiz Comedy, William Holden

 

The Little Fockers

11 Jan

The Little Fockers – directed by Paul Weitz – low comedy in which an Irish don hands over his mission in life to his Jewish son-in-law.   120 minutes color 2010.

* * * *

This is Abey’s Irish Rose as a movie. That most long running and now long forgotten of all plays and radio shows was about the Jewish boy who married a Colleen. Same here. In those days, back in the 30s and 40s, the conflict was based on immigrant wars, the Kikes against the Micks, the stubbornness of the territorial and cultural and religious protectorates of the tribes who had just or almost just come here – and intermarried. West Side Story is musical version of it. But here we have as befits the theme a series. This is the third, and there is nothing wrong with it at all. You have a fine cast. Barbra Streisand plays her usual self-pushing self. Laura Dern does the chilling principal of a fancy modern school. Owen Wilson is the clueless sybarite best friend. Dustin Hoffman is the fool Jewish father. Harvey Keitel is a the bellicose earth-mover. Blythe Danner is the elegant mother of the Irish don. What brings the movie down is that Robert de Niro is no more an Irish don than a plate of spaghetti is. He takes off the shelf his generic technique and mugs and moues throughout the piece. And there is some cause, it is true, for we are looking at low comedy here. But it is Ben Stiller who carries the piece. What a marvelous player of comedy he is. Has anyone noticed that yet? How subtle he is? How intricate in his response? How real? Check out the moment when he accepts the honor from de Niro; he has taken on the hero’s fullness; he simply asks his son to eat his food; the child vomits on him. But the vomit is not what’s funny. What’s funny is Stiller’s barely discernible inflation. The piece ends in a branagan at a child’s birthday party, a fight which is unconvincing, since no one seems to notice it, but that is the fault of the crudeness of the script, a script which is sometimes quite witty. I enjoyed myself. But then, in asking for so much, I accept so little.

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Posted in Barbra Streisand, Ben Stiller, Blythe Danner, BROAD COMEDY, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel:ACTING GOD, Laura Dern: ACTING GODDESS, Low Comedy, Robert de Niro

 

The Silencers

06 Dec

The Silencers – directed by Phil Carlson – a parody of Bond. — 102 minutes color 1968

* *

Do you find garage doors fascinating? Like them this film is a gadget, not without its grumbling use and occasional comical breakdown. And it itself is full of gadgets, huger doors, fatter death-rays, wilder amo. If you fire this revolver it will shoot you in the chest, if you press that button you will find a naked tomato in your bathtub. Of course, the hugest garage doors are the false eyelashes of the babes. They come crashing down, dislodging civilizations. Step back from them. Dean Martin certainly does. He is wise and unperturbed by the sexual affront they present and the cavernous décolletage they awn. Ah, for the peace of refusal which seems to be his, as he plays in this, the first of the Matt Helm mock-Bond series. Nowadays we don’t have leading ladies such as Stella Stevens whose hair is dyed Irish Setter and held in place with Gorilla Glue. She’s Helm’s fumbling side-kick, called that, I suppose, because she keeps kicking him in the side. Martin is some kind of easy dish, like spaghetti, pleasant and not without nourishment, easy to take. He never asks to be liked and so is likeable for it. He strolls through bullet-hails with benificent nonchalance. Daliah Lavi presents hair piled on the back of her head as though concealing a rocket launcher. Dozens of ladies, equally coiffed and lashed throw themselves at Martin’s head, but he retains his incredulity as to the animal fervor they advertise, as any normal intact male would. Their ferocious armamentarium promises pornography, that is to say, unearned nudity. And, since the film begins with a series of strip-teases, we are able to sustain no virginal delusions about what is to follow. Even when the miraculous Cyd Charisse performs. Two numbers are given her, miserably choreographed, vilely costumed, but her dignity, her alacritous genius, and the natural placement of her hip-bones conquer the drooling mess.

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Posted in ACTION, Cyd Charisse: screen goddess, Dean Martin, Farce, Low Comedy, Parody, Spy Comedy

 

Marmaduke

12 Oct

Marmaduke — directed by Tom Dey — a comedy in which a young family man finds his doggedness and a young dog finds his manhood. 99 minutes color 2010.

* * * * *

It’s fascinating to watch the great Lee Pace, he of the immemorial eyebrows, play this white bread comedy to the limit of all it’s worth and not one grimace more. This extraordinary actor, the finest actor of his generation for all I know, is completely convincing, moment by moment, in the peanut butter and jelly of the genre, including all the considerable physical comedy the part requires. He is never too much, he is never too little. So much so that it’s virtually impossible to see how really good he is. To taste and compare, watch him in Soldier’s Girl, The Fall, Infamous, in which he plays Hickock the partner of Perry Smith of the Sutter murders, and the passionate romantic lead/pianist opposite Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day. Sit back and be amazed at the art of acting at its best. Pace at 6’4″ towers delightfully over William H. Macy who domineers over him as dog food boss. Macy, of course, looks like a basset, and, wonderful actor that he is, gives the film the bite required. But see how Pace embodies this impossible subjection. It’s parallel to what his own great Dane evinces until the end. The dogs all speak. Marmaduke himself speaks Owen Wilson, while the bully pooch speaks Kiefer Sutherland. Others speak others. It’s all quite nice and mindless. I believe it is a children’s movie. Probably for male children, since the principals principally are males, but I wouldn’t know. I myself am a male child and, therefore, limited in my perspective.

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Posted in ACTORS MALE, ANIMAL LOVERS, FAMILY FILM, FANTASY, Lee Pace: Screen God: Acting God, Low Comedy, Owen WIlson

 

Scared Stiff

29 Jul
Scared Stiff — directed by George Marshall — an heiress to a haunted Cuban castle is threatened on all sides and warned to stay away. Martin and Lewis ride to her rescue — black and white 1953
* * *
A remake of Ghost Breakers of 1940, and directed by the same director, and evidently using the same great sets for the castle, and some of the original takes, this Martin and Lewis version takes a great deal more effort, because, in the original, Bob Hope played both parts  —  and so the film took a good deal less time. In this version there is too much horsing around en route to Cuba. And in the original, we had that game and merry minx Paulette Goddard braving all, whereas here we have Lizabeth Scott left over from a passing noir, and she wants pep. It’s not her fault. She was wired slow. Goodness knows she throws herself into it, and does not shame herself, but it is interesting to see how different a script is required with such a change of leading lady. Goddard strips to a bra and panties at one point, and it’s choice, whereas, while Scott is beautifully appareled by Edith Head, Scott does not show her, actually excellent, figure until the swimming scene — the one where Paulette held her clothes above the water while she side-stroked to the deadly castle. Anyhow, Lewis wears on one. He plays his usual frenetic baby, and. while he is inventive and adept and agile in his awkwardness, we see is range of responses is limited because of the number of times he is asked to repeat them. We have wonderful cobwebs, though, and numerous spooks and suspects. We lack the devastatingly dangerous young Anthony Quinn as the twins — and the presence of Martin and Lewis routines, log-jammed with the already frenetic Carmen Miranda, do not supply the deficiency, despite all we hoped for Lewis’s imitation of her in CM costume. Dean Martin remains a mensch, throughout — easy, attractive, and kind. A great draw.

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17 Comments

Posted in ACTORS MALE, Dean Martin, Farce, FOREIGN LANDS, Jerry Lewis, Low Comedy, MURDER, MYSTERY

 
 
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