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NICKELODEON (1977 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1977 (Vol. 44, No. 517). Over 30 years later, in my DVD column for Cinema Scope, I wrote, “Is it possible to find a picture acceptable only with its director’s commentary? Yes, if it’s Peter Bogdanovich’s clunky but interesting comedy about American moviemaking during the patent wars (1910-1915), prior to The Birth of a Nation, now that he’s finally had a chance to release it in black and white, as he originally intended, and recut it as well. Reviewing this when it came out…, I found its slapstick mainly irksome — not offensive, as it was to me in What’s Up, Doc?, where so many of the pratfalls, collisions, and smashups seemed to be about fatuous, narcissistic yuppies humiliating servants and carpenters, but pretty academic none the less…. It still looks academic, but hearing Bogdanovich explain where all the stories come from (mostly from Dwan, Ford, McCarey, and Walsh, with a curtain-closer from James Stewart) makes it somewhat more absorbing.” — J.R.

Nickelodeon

U.S.A./Great Britain, 1976                             Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Chicago, July 30, 1910. Fleeing from a divorce court when he

discovers that his client has an indefensible case, lawyer Leo Harrigan

stumbles into H. H. Cobb, head of the independent Kinegraph

Studios — fighting for survival against the Patents Company — who

pays Leo for some of his story ideas and sends him to California

to look after his business interests. Buck Greenway, a small-time

performer from Florida, meanwhile arrives in New York to deliver

a saddle, and after being hired to ride a horse in a stage show, is

taken on by the Patents Company and also sent to California.

Leo arrives in Cucamonga, where he finds that Cobb’s director

has abandoned the crew — including cameraman Franklin Frank,

actress Marty Reeves and all-round assistant and driver Alice –-

and Leo is enlisted as his replacement. While Leo prepares to shoot,

Buck arrives and an extended fight ensues, after which Buck agrees

to act in Leo’s movies. Kathleen Cooke — a dancer who has

previously crossed the paths of Leo and Buck, accidentally

exchanging her suitcase with each of theirs in the process — also

joins the group as an actress. Buck proposes to her, and Leo is

despondent when she accepts. Still in flight from the Patents

Company, the crew take refuge at an ostrich farm where Buck and

Kathleen are ‘married’ by an actor impersonating a priest. At a

nickelodeon on Christmas Eve, 1913, they are shocked to discover

that their short films have been intercut by Cobb into a mélange

called Tuttle’s Muddle. Absconding with the print, they confront

Cobb in Chicago and he fires all of them; they are then hired by

Atlantic Pictures in Hollywood (except for Marty, who returns to

Cobb). Six months later, after Leo is fired and the others quit, they

begin to shoot a Western independently, but the Patents Company

burns down their house, with all their films and equipment inside.

At the premiere of The Clansman in 1915 — where they meet Cobb,

now married to Marty and talking of the birth of a new industry –

Leo, Buck, Kathleen and Alice decide to resume filmmaking on

their own.

Just after the world premiere of The Clansman (later retitled

The Birth of a Nation), producer H. H. Cobb offers a short speech

to his former employees that is clearly the ‘pay-off’ of Nickelodeon;

the camera even tracks in closer during the scene, as it does during

Sam the Lion’s climactic recollection in The Last Picture Show:

“Think of it. All those people going to see the pictures. And a lot

of them can’t even talk American. They don’t have to because

pictures are a language that everyone understands. . . And if you’re

good, if you’re really good, then maybe what you’re doin’ is you’re

giving ‘em little tiny pieces of time . . . that they never forget”.

The fact that the last sentence in this declaration comes from a

statement by James Stewart which serves as the epigraph for

Bogdanovich’s collection of movie articles, Pieces of Time, only

helps to emphasize how much of Nickelodeon — and Bogdanovich’s

work as a whole — can be viewed as a continual recycling operation.

A considerable part of the commentary of Directed by John Ford,

for instance, stems directly from the introduction to Bogdanovich’s

interview book with Ford; and quite apart from all the studied

pastiches which comprise the bulk of everything from Targets to

At Long Last Love (nostalgic film references which differ radically

from those of Godard, Rivette or even Truffaut by offering no

critical distance or personal reading of film history, merely an

attempt at simple regurgitation), the dearth of fresh material in

Bogdanovich’s repertoire inevitably incurs the law of diminishing

returns. Consequently, Nickelodeon — an obvious labor of love which

by rights should have been Bogdanovich’s La Nuit Américaine --

lumbers across the screen with a leaden gait that makes even

something like The Sting seem a triumph of personal expression.

The material in itself is scarcely in question: the final credits include a

special acknowledgment to Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh, and an

appreciable amount of the film’s plot and details can be traced back

to Bogdanovich’s interview book with Dwan — the whole manner in

which Leo inadvertently becomes a director, his ‘initiation’ with the

crew via a practical joke involving a rattlesnake and whisky, the

skirmishes with the Patents Company, the ostrich farm, and a great

deal more. Unfortunately, Bogdanovich has paid less heed to Dwan’s

reiterated advice about directing in the same book: “Make the public

work, If you do all the work for them, they sit there bored to death.

Their imagination must be stimulated”. Borrowing directly from his

own What’s Up, Doc?, Bogdanovich moves his three principals about

like chess pieces (so that they improbably cross paths and accidentally

switch suitcases), overdirects slapstick in a manner that ‘correctly’

dots every ‘i’ and crosses every ‘t’ (making the protracted fight between

Leo and Buck more like an academic parody of Ford at his most tiresome

than an hommage), and develops the ‘love interest’ as a set of

mechanical ploys that makes it impossible for one to care who

winds up with whom. Everything, in short, is reduced to a series of

agile exercises which prevent any of his automatons from coming

to life (including Jane Hitchcock, a charming newcomer whom one

hopes to see again). The over-busy surface activity might seem so

desperately willed because of its tendency always to gravitate

towards ‘film history’, with history itself invariably taking a back

seat — an attitude which helps to give cinephilia a bad name by

appearing to imply that The Birth of a Nation is vastly more

important than (say) the Civil War. One of the many consequences

of this is a treatment of film history that seems weirdly ahistorical,

so that the ‘wild man’ who supplies Cobb with outlandish story

ideas is dressed in a way that suggests Keaton, and a stuttering crew

member –- a perfect example of a running gag used mechanically –

comes across more like a refugee from a Fifties Ford Western than

a character identifiable with the period. This tendency culminates

in the disquieting flatness of the climactic Clansman premiere, which

makes it difficult for an uninformed spectator to understand how

or why Griffith’s film had the impact it did in 1915. Once again, the

sources appear to be impeccable, and some of this sequence (including

an effectively Fordian long shot of Griffith appearing on stage to

waves of applause) seems indebted to Karl Brown’s memorable

account of it in Adventures with D. W. Griffith; yet overall, the

period detail registers as stilted and obligatory. An engaging notion

in the script — that movie-making begins with thinking up wild ideas,

for which one then has to dream up narrative excuses — ultimately

tends to backfire, perhaps because the ‘narrative excuses’ are often

more noticeable in Nickelodeon than the ‘wild ideas’ (which

themselves usually come across more like ghoulish transplants than

inspirations). Indeed, the virtually total rejection by Bogdanovich

of anything that exists beyond the boundaries of certified (and

ossified) movie myth may help to explain the curious sterility of

Nickelodeon in relation to its fascinating subject and sources.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

King Kong (review of remake, 1977)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1977. — J.R.

King Kong

U.S.A., 1976

Director: John Guillermin

The Petrox Oil Company sends an expedition by ship into Micronesia, hoping to find petroleum deposits on uncharted Skull Island. Group leader Fred Wilson and scientist Bagley believe that the vapor surrounding the island may come from oil, but Princeton University paleethnologist Jack Prescott — a stowaway — suggests animal respiration, and talks of ancient accounts of Kong, a prehistoric monster. Dwan, a prospective starlet and sole survivor of an explosion that destroyed a film producer’s boat en route to Hong Kong, is picked up before the ship reaches the island. Ashore, Wilson, Bagley, Jack and Dwan come upon an enormous wall and a native ritual in which a girl is about to be sacrificed. That night, as Dwan is about to keep a sexual rendezvous with Jack, she is kidnapped by natives and offered as an altar gift to Kong, a forty-foot ape who arrives and carries her away. While Jack penetrates the jungle with a rescue team, Wilson learns from Bagley that the island’s oil deposits won’t be usable for another 10,000 years, and begins to think of capturing Kong for use in Petrox publicity. Kong kills nearly everyone on the rescue team, but while he is fighting a giant snake, Jack manages to rescue Dwan — with whom the ape has become quite enamored. Kong is subsequently trapped in a pit, drugged into submission and put in the hull of a supertanker. On the way back, Wilson persuades Dwan and Jack to get married and appear with Kong in New York, but Jack subsequently refuses to co-operate on moral grounds. At South Ferry, Kong is enraged by the photographers crowding round Dwan and breaks loose, crushing Wilson and others and wreaking havoc. Jack and Dwan flee across a river and enter an abandoned bar, but Kong finds and retrieves Dwan. Jack has meanwhile observed that the World Trade Center resembles a rock formation on Skull Island and urges citv officials to let Kong proceed there, receiving their promise that he won’t be injured. But the ape is attacked on top of the Center by flamethrowers and army helicopters; trying to protect Dwan, he is seriously wounded and topples to his death. In front of the giant corpse, Dwan plaintively calls out for Jack while a crowd of photographers and spectators keeps the couple apart.

Adapted from one of the greatest of all Hollywood films, the second edition of King Kong moves along reasonably well as a half-jokey, half-serious contemporary ‘reading’ of its predecessor; as an accomplishment in horror and fantasy adventure, it does not measure up to even the small toe of the original. Three years ago (in The Free Paper, February 6, 1974), Elliott Stein commented that young audiences today see the first Kong “as black, beautiful and bound in chains by a white master, or as any simple creature destroyed by cities, machines or the United States Air Force. For some of them, Denham [the filmmaker/ explorer of the original, whose role is taken over in the new version by Wilson] is the Yankee hustler run amok, the bomber of Hanoi”. This is the basis of the revision, although a good deal more contemporary angst is also thrown into the stew. With a hero (well played by Jeff Bridges) clearly patterned after Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, a villain (quite unlike the sympathetic Denham) representing the collective evils of big business, advertising, Watergate and imperialism (so that the capture of Kong is made to resemble a defoliation manoeuver), and the poor ape himself transmogrified into an unlikely ecology symbol, Dino De Laurentiis’ expensive piece of mischief is visibly designed to obliterate the past with a tidal wave of arch modishness. Its value as an expression of liberal morality can easily be gauged by noting that the film’s most glaringly racist statement is uttered by the hero, an erudite bearded hippy with a credit card who, after remarking Kong’s importance for the natives (”He was the terror and the mystery of their life, their magic”), goes on to say that, without him, they are bound to turn into alcoholics — a notion that appears to add redskins to an already crowded melting pot. The silliest lines, however, are accorded to Jessica Lange, a likeable Tuesday Weldish ing6nue whose range is regrettably not broad enough to encompass fear (the speciality of Fay Wray, whose non-stop screams and writhings — brilliantly anticipated in the original’s ‘screen-test’ scene on ship — are usually replaced here by languid expressions). “You goddam chauvinist pig ape !” she remarks to Kong at one point, before inquiring about his birth sign; earlier, after explaining how she inadvertently escaped death by refusing to watch a movie on a ship before it exploded, she asks excitedly, “Did you ever meet someone before whose life was saved by Deep Throat?” Considering how often Kong’s facial expressions are humanized into lascivious grins and leers, one might suppose that the true symbolic counterpart of this remade monkey is indeed the collective male audience of Deep Throat, similarly imprisoned in a conundrum of sexual pathos by the act of looking. (”Come on, Kong, forget about me”, Dwan urges him in the jungle, “this thing is never gonna work”.) Given such an absurd blend of significations, it is scarcely surprising that the new Kong (thirty-six minutes longer than its predecessor) omits four of the five secondary prehistoric beasts on Skull Island — retaining only the giant snake, which looks like a risible piece of cardboard beside its remarkable forerunner. The extraordinary thing about the original’s special effects is that one seldom notices them; even their more ‘dated’ aspects mesh perfectly with the dreamlike textures and rhythms, the awesome hallucinatory sense of size and scale, in a narrative that moves too quickly and relentlessly to give the spectator much time to raise questions about theme, logic or technique. The prosaic new version, more concerned with spectacle than narrative, gives one little opportunity to think about anything else.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM