my cinematic a to zed: r - t

The Race for the Double Helix: (1987. dir: Mick Jackson) For me, the BBC was always an argument in favor of socialism. What proud American network would ever fund a film whose climactic suspense depends on our interest in postwar boffins seeking the shape of DNA? And they pull it off, without all this "microscope-gazing-as-extreme-sport" absurdity-in-editing one finds now in the 1001 forensics shows one wades through every night en route to the soccer channel. Race is drawn from James Watson's memoir about his time in Cambridge, on his way to the Nobel Prize for uncovering the elusive helix. The first hour or so suffers for it, dragged down by a priapic and celebrity-hungry Watson who seems to have stumbled into science not due to any particular interest in it but because he hadn't got the looks to be a movie star or the social grace to be anything else. Jeff Goldblum brings his usual Jeff Goldblum to the role, working hard every moment to steal focus from anyone else onscreen, a performance that only works because it seems a fair delineation of the equally smart but self-obsessed Watson.

Luckily, it's not a one-man show. Tim Piggott-Smith has a lovely, light touch as Watson's cheerful partner Francis Crick (I love Tim Piggott-Smith. Have you ever seen his Hotspur, or Jewel in the Crown?). Alan Howard is affecting as the bemused, gentle Maurice Wilkins, in whose "province" DNA research ostensibly lies at King's, and who just wants everyone to get along and work as a team. He ends up with a share in the prize but having been shut out of the joy of the discovery, first by the solitary Rosalind Franklin, then by the glory-hunting Watson and Crick. It is a young and baby-faced Juliet Stevenson who really steals the day as Franklin, the woman who did the painstaking physical research and photography on which Watson and Crick based their model. She was dead from cancer by the time they picked up their Nobel, and Stevenson gives us a frank, clearsighted character who is caught in a bleak old-boys'-club of not ill-intentioned men who have no experience dealing with an unconventional woman on equal footing and so tend to avoid her and mock her behind her back. Stevenson's Franklin is no victim, seeing her situation clearly ("They're making me hard... In the end you become the kind of person people expect you to be,") and finding solace in the process of exploration.

It all snaps into focus once the famous Linus Pauling has a go for the prize, and suddenly Watson and Crick are up against a deadline. After that, things move at a run and it's all about the science, which is when it's at its most engaging, even to a scientific illiterate like me. The moment when they find the proper base-pairings puts a chill up my spine, and I've never given a thought to base-pairings in my life.





Safe Men: (1998. dir: John Hamburg) This movie ought to have been awful, but it borders instead on the sublime. First, the actors: Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn are a brilliant comic team, backed up by a second brilliant comic team in the shape of Mark Ruffalo and Josh Pais. It took me a long time to trust Ruffalo, possibly because he emerged full-fledged into the zeitgeist on a wave of hype that roused my suspicious nature. This is the one that sold me, baby. His sad-sack, lovelorn safecracker is about as perfect as it can be, but that's par for the course in this film. Even cameo players exude easy brilliance. Early on there's a scene in a fast-food taco place with Michael Showalter as an overachieving micromanager. It's a tiny scene, maybe half a minute long, and if you picture the words written on a page, there's nothing there, no humor to speak of. He made it up from scratch, created a very funny bit and did it all with delivery. Then there's Paul Giamatti. There's a protracted scene, probably my favorite in the movie, in which he (as a gangster-in-training called Veal Chop) tries to talk Zahn and Rockwell (failed musicians Eddie and Sam, whom he's mistaken for a genius safecracking team) into breaking into a particular house. It's not just Giamatti's flawlessly funny delivery, not just the great reactions by Zahn and Rockwell... it's everything. It's the outrageous backlighting, and the smooth, ambling Al Green song tumbling easily beneath it, and it's the big space they have to work in, the space allowed them by the editors (Suzanne Pillsbury and M. Scott Smith). It's no easy task editing comedy. If you cut off the pause a half second early, it doesn't matter how funny the actors are; the joke's not going to play. I give as much credit to these guys as to director John Hamburg, who was in his twenties when he wrote and shot this with such a firm hand and strong personal style that he may be some kind of freaky comic genius.

The script veers wildly between the inspired and the halt and lame, hovering a lot of the time right over the abyss of near-suckage without falling entirely in. There are certain scenes I fast-forward through when I watch it, but only three or four, and there are others I rewind to watch repeatedly. The thing about Shelly Hack. The scene in the sundry goods store. When Christina Kirk (underplaying beautifully as the straight-man love interest Hannah) and Sam fall in love across the table at Rosh Hashannah, another scene that succeeds beyond its material because the editing is so good.

But I don't want to underemphasize the comic genius(es) of Sam Rockwell and Steve Zahn. Rockwell has a bit when he's standing at Hannah's door, rehearsing what he'll say to her, that bears the subtle hallmarks of comic mastery (the pats on his own butt are the coup de grace), and a few of Zahn's many virtuoso moments that come first to mind are his explanation of the term "fence" (again, nothing much as written; it's all in the unique way he says it), and his inability to stop himself from questioning a fearsome gangster's use of metaphor.





The Twelve Chairs: (1970. dir: Mel Brooks) Mel Brooks is in it, and Dom Deluise, so you know the kind of movie it is, right? Neanderthally lowbrow humor, so awful sometimes you laugh at the sheer shamelessness of it. Only this time, somehow, Brooks has managed to create the most convincing snapshot of just-post-revolutionary Russia I've ever seen. Ron Moody is an ex-aristocrat chasing the family jewels, which got sewed into a chair before the government absconded with the furniture. Moody has a physical comedy like Peter Sellers', with a wonderfully expressive face. Frank Langella (as the trickster-beggar who helps him) flows through the movie like a long drink of water, the very personification of grace, beauty, and charisma, handling both the corniest jokes and truly poignant moments (yes! true poignancy in a Mel Brooks film!) with equal aplomb. He was just beginning his film career after a good, strong training onstage, and busted right out of the gate with this and, in the same year, Diary of a Mad Housewife, a darkly humorous classic which has inexplicably never seen the inside of a video store.

my a to zed of cinema: n-q

Night of the Generals: (1967. dir: Anatole Litvak) It's a failure, this movie, but a wonderful one. Its ambitions exceed its grasp, as it gamely tries to encompass the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler and post-war reconstruction, reaching across a span of some 23 years, all within the framework of an ongoing murder investigation. A prostitute has been viciously murdered, and the field of suspects quickly narrowed to three: all of them generals in the Fuhrer's wehrmacht. In one of Hollywood's unlikelier casting choices, Omar Shariff plays Major Grau, the intelligence officer responsible for bringing the butcher to justice. He is remarkably convincing in the role, avoiding the allurement of settling his character into "the Good Nazi", a snare ready-made for him in the script, in which he is described as a friend to the resistance and a man dogging the generals out of pure love of justice. In fact, largely through nonverbal subtleties, Shariff clearly communicates that Grau is more amorally pragmatic than anything, disregarding right and wrong on the larger scale almost entirely, and that his obsession with the murder has more to do with the gleeful prospect of hanging a general than in justice for the murdered woman. When the Valkyrie plot intrudes on his investigation, he ignores it entirely, not only refusing to choose sides but refusing to address the issue at all until it becomes useful for him in his pursuit.

It becomes apparent early on who the guilty party is, but that's just a piece of the sprawling puzzle, which includes Tom Courtenay as a reluctant soldier in love with a general's daughter and an awkward expository device in which Phillip Noiret's Interpol policeman continues the investigation in post-war years. The most wonderful thing, of course, is Peter O'Toole as General Tanz, a man so ruthless in his warmongering that Grau nearly eliminates him as a suspect, naively reasoning that a "maniac" who daily destroys whole neighborhoods and villages need hardly commit additional murders in his leisure time. O'Toole has always been electrifying in his stillness, and never more than as Tanz. The segment in which he must step maladroitly into civilian clothes and take a few days off is unforgettable: Courtenay's Hartmann drives him around Paris to point out the sights while Tanz sits in the back, pale and rigid in a bowler hat, drinking and chain-smoking. When his face starts twitching, it is truly ominous. His silent communion with a Van Gogh painting is fascinating, both to Hartmann and to us, but it's when the man regains his composure that the real sense of dark menace sets in. And it's not just his face. Even in a long shot O'Toole communicates the grotesque: whether it's a crooked but taut stance by a window after shooting a man, or his Christ-at-the-Last-Supper pose at the table of the Niebelungen, he compels the eye through sheer muscle control.

The movie's biggest flaw, its ungainly length and breadth, is the window which allows its greatness entry: in any reasonable cut of the film, all the great parts would have been pared away and only the more pedestrian skeleton would remain. 1967 was the year of mass onscreen revolution -- Bonnie and Clyde, the Graduate -- and this massive, bloated epic would have looked like a dinosaur at the picnic. Free from its chronological context, it can take its rightful place among the fascinating oddities of cinema.




Odd Man Out: (1947. dir: Carol Reed) In college I was in a production of Pinter's Old Times, a wicked little claustrophobic one-act about three points of a "love" triangle stuck in a room together, in which this movie is repeatedly referenced. At the time there was no way to get ahold of a copy, and it wasn't until years later on AMC that I finally saw it, late at night, which is the best way to watch it, sleep-deprived and half-dreaming. It provides the template for Jarmusch's Dead Man: cast the most darkly beautiful man in the world, give him a slow but fatal wound early on, then follow him through his encounters and hallucinations as he fades. It's an ongoing amazement to me how inventive these old British movies from Gong-and-Certificate days are: not just the Carol Reed pictures, but it never hurts to have a genius at the helm. On the most superficial level, it's an examination of character. We watch as people react to the wounded Johnny McQueen (James Mason), an escaped prisoner and most-wanted in the IRA, some struggling with conscience more than others. Many try and save him for their own selfish purposes, but only the girl who loves him throws her back into it. Even she acts with an obsession that might be construed as selfish, since he's never given her much encouragement and getting him safely on the boat is her only hope of having him to herself. In fact, as Kathleen (played by Kathleen Ryan) moves stoically through the story to its inevitable end, she reminds me of no one so much as Kim Hunter in the Seventh Victim, that strange, proto-Goth Val Lewton tale of (among other things) young girls and fascination with suicide.




Persuasion: (1995. dir: Roger Michell) Every ten years or so, Hollywood remakes Pride and Prejudice, and that's as it should be. Each generation deserves its own. The other Jane Austen books get the treatment now and then, and this is my favorite. It's my favorite of the books to start with, as the heroine is older (27) and sadder than the others, and its concern is whether or not there are second chances in love. Anne Elliot made a mistake the first time round and said no; Frederick Wentworth went to sea, brokenhearted. She's long since seen the error of her ways, and now he's back. Is reconciliation possible? As in life, it's harder than it ought to be to say what is in one's heart, and the story follows the two through a torturous labyrinth of evasion and tentative forays and finally into the marriage that ought to have been, eight years before.

At first I was annoyed with this movie and its lack of glitter. It has a muddy look because it was filmed with true lighting, or near true. Night time scenes glow orange with firelight, and everyone is pale and washed out in the chilly sunlight of Lyme Regis and under the dismal skies of Bath (it always rains in Bath). Nobody wears makeup except as they would in life, and when they dress, the ladies' hair looks like it was done by each other and not by a Hollywood stylist. It's a far cry from the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility (which has its own, different yet undeniable charm), for which director Ang Lee had the sheep permed to make them more picturesque.

On top of this feeling of authenticity that I've never seen replicated quite as fully even in BBC productions, there's the script, which is lovely, and the actors, who are great. They OWN these characters; they ought to be granted patents. There will never be another Mary Musgrove; Sophie Thompson has created the epitome, the absolute acme of Mary Musgroves to which all others will owe obeisance for all of time. Simon Russell Beale knows the very soul of her husband Charles, and Fiona Shaw and John Woodvine are the most wonderful Crofts possible, embodying the possibility of true love lasting over long years amidst humor and mutual devotion. Corin Redgrave and Phoebe Nicholls are perfect and awful as Anne's appearance-obsessed father and sister; Susan Fleetwood makes Lady Russell believably sympathetic without sacrificing her character as set forward in the book. As for Anne, Amanda Root will always be Anne Elliot for me. It is true that Rupert Penry-Jones, in last year's BBC remake, is the sexiest Captain Wentworth you'll ever see, but he comes across as romantic fantasy, whereas this version has Ciaran Hinds as the more believable, conflicted lover, vascillating between hope and disenchanted abdication.




The Quick and the Dead: (1995. dir: Sam Raimi) Q is hard. Does one write about Quick Change, the funniest of all clown-heist films? or Quadrophenia, a brilliant movie I watched over and over in youth that was weirdly formative for me? I decided on Raimi's joyfully violent homage to spaghetti westerns because it gets overlooked. It's not perfect. It's glib and overly clever sometimes, many characters are two-dimensional, the violence is absurdist. You might call it the Evil Dead of spaghetti westerns. But big joy it's got. Gene Hackman, as always, is scarily compelling as the bad-ass, and Sharon Stone commits absolutely as a tough she-gunslinger haunted by horrors from a past which she's come to avenge. It took me ten years to forgive her for Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold (don't, for the love of God, see it), but this is the performance that won me. It's the first time I saw Russell Crowe; not only was he gorgeous but he still cared back then, hadn't been poisoned yet by his fast-approaching mondo-fame. The bottom line is that everyone's having so much damn fun making this film, including Raimi and the crew behind the camera, that you can't help but have fun watching it.

my cinematic a to zed: l-m

the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: (1962. dir: Tony Richardson) That wonderful British road between Kitchen Sink and Carnaby Street is studded with lovely pieces, and this is one, arguably Tony Richardson's best work. Its great flaw is in his use of the "comic techniques" (ie: "it's very funny to see people moving in fast-motion". It's really not). In the following year, this same taint would proliferate and spread its eldritch tentacles all through his Tom Jones so that, highly lauded as it was at the time, it's faintly embarrassing and almost unwatchable in retrospect. With that exception, though, his instincts are right on in Loneliness and he carries us dynamically through a largely introspective story which might have stagnated in cravener hands. Equal credit goes to Tom Courtenay, one of the greats of the time. Although only twenty-five while filming, he seems like an old man playing a young one and doing it extraordinarily well, with the distance and wisdom of age but without sacrificing the raw emotion of youth.





Montenegro: (1981. dir: Dusan Makavejev) I've seen this strange film exactly twice: once in the theatre in my youth, where I fell in love with it, and again some twenty years on. I was clenching my teeth the second time through, expecting it to have lost its appeal since I'd long ago well squashed my salad-days' passion for allegory, but I was pleasantly surprised with its lingering charms. Makavejev strikes just the right balance between absurdity and dark satire, and never lets his lead character, easily and unpretentiously played by Susan Anspach, flatten into less than three dimensions. There are plot twists and surprises around each corner, and although it flirts heavily with cynicism, the humor keeps its touch light enough for enjoyment. It's a sentimental favorite, too, because it reintroduced me to Marianne Faithfull, with her gravelly, post-apocalyptic voice.