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Declarations of Independents: A Dozen Art Movies

From The Soho News (March 25, 1981). — J.R.

March 10: Permanent Vacation — a punk art film by Jim Jarmusch, with Chris Parker, visible in the Bleecker Street Cinema’s James Agee Room every weekend this month. A semi-promising beginning offers alternately deserted and busy city streets (crisply shot by Tom DiCillo), and a skinny existential drifter reflecting on the “newness” of rooms in his travels that fades away, replaced each time by dread: “The story is how I got from there to here — or maybe I should say here to here.”

The problem is, while trekking dutifully through enough architectural (and cultural) rubble to furnish at least a dozen other art movies, the movie mainly gets from there to nowhere, at a fairly leisurely crawl. Along the way are a few good ideas and jokes, most of them literary and underdeveloped (like affectless Beckett/beat conceits which evoke Wurlitzer’s Nog), one of them actorly (Frankie Faison), some of them musical (John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards). Chances are, if this is the sort of thing you like, you’ve already found your way there.

March 11: Marta Meszaros’ Nine Months, a Hungarian feature made in color five years ago, now on at the Cinema Studio 2.  If yesterday’s art film suggested the more content-laden, Woody Allen side of Antonioni, this beautifully shot love story has an extraordinary amount of placeness that helps to compensate for the tinny drone of the theme music. (Why do so many sensitive Eastern European films have scores that remind one of ski lifts?) The camera takes possession of unexceptional industrial landscapes in a way that ensures we remember them like places we know (cf. the courtyard in Tree of the Wooden Clogs.)

The characters also tend to improve with familiarity. Juli (Lili Monori), the strong-willed independent heroine, starts out fairly unattractive — a bit bovine, her face a frozen, freckled sneer (though without the mashed-potato expression of an Isabelle Huppert) — and then, thanks to an inventive performance, steadily grows in character. The fucking and eating in this movie (which turns beds and dishes into memorable places, too, and are sometimes mixed à la Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses) are as attractively tactile as the natural light and the climactic childbirth.

March 12: I finally catch up with Polanski’s Tess, at the Little Carnegie. Another persecuted unwed mother like yesterday’s Juli; more lushly felt landscapes, decked out in this case with Dolby environmental trimmings. Why do the reproduction and amplification of old Hollywood literary-adaptation techniques (with additional pages from Lean and Kubrick) conspire to make an art film of the late 70s? The delayed American release seems characteristic of a period in which most art films identified with prestige and money — Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Elephant Man, Kagemusha, late Woody Allen, and Raging Bull – are Pyramid-like monuments to masculine self-pity, while the European releases are mainly restricted to movies that make the middle class look chic.

March 13: A movement from the sublime to the ridiculous today: showing Antonioni’s remarkable Eclipse (1962) in my Contemporary Cinema course at NYU, then rushing uptown to attend a press show of Bob Rafelson’s silly male-weepie remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice….What a pity that the literary defenders of Antonioni in the early 60s — presumably Woody Allen’s mentors — took to the alienation cliches and literary metaphors of Eclipse like kittens to milk, even while they were criticizing them (”Macdonald’s taste for kitsch is largely negative, but it is genuine,” wrote Harold Rosenberg), and ignored the richer exuberance of the better parts (like the Stock Market scenes, which deftly juggle documentary and choreography in the mise en scène).

Postman, the only genuinely ludicrous art movie I see for this column, is the one that most people are likely to rush off to; I know a media blitz when I see one, and what fools we mortals be. Yet despite some respect for the hard, serious work of Jessica Lange — who seems to bear the same talented relation to Tuesday Weld that Paul Newman once had to Brando — I can’t take more than a minute or two of Rafelson’s rich-boy macho fantasies about how the sweaty lower classes are supposed to behave (already painfully evident in Five Easy Pieces and Stay Hungry) without starting to snicker at all those carefully applied grease stains and creases in Jack Nicholson’s monkey suits. (In the grip of boredom, to paraphrase the ad campaign, two things can happen — the second is laughter.)

Apart from offering an insult to everyone in America who’s ever worked in a filling station, Postman lacks any coherent sense of character or place. What one gets instead is a glitzy post-Kazan melodramatic score and a pushy use of period detail, from Nicholson’s gaudy duds (he dunks, too) to oil signs to magazine covers. Describing the supposedly steamy “kitchen fuck,” which boldly offers flour to rival the butter of Last Tango and the jam of The Night Porter, a critic in the current Film Comment notes that “a very explicit move to her groin, with her hand ordering his, seems to indicate the paramount urgency of her orgasm”; if he’d spelt that “Paramount,” I’d have understood in a flash. Otherwise, Postman hasn’t much point beyond the dumb-brute arrogance of its money, which unfortunately has more clout in this world than taste, intelligence, or talent.

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March 17: One very agreeable way of obliterating all recollection of Postman might be to catch the dynamite double-bill at the Public that’s on through the 29th, and then from the 31st through April 5. Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) and Antonioni’s The Lady Without Camelias (1953) are both neglected movies which satirize popular Italian filmmaking, and each is a flawed yet fascinating “early” work by a master who started late. (Antonioni’s third feature was made when he was 41, Visconti’s when he was 45.) They are probably the closest that either director has come to comedy.

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Another thing that makes these films complementary is the somewhat naive “insider’s” stance — the somewhat “insider’s” stance of the Antonioni and the somewhat artificial “outsider’s” stance of the Visconti — like the difference between The Last Tycoon and The Day of the Locust. (Neither, however, has the elegant, hard-bite accuracy of What Makes Sammy Run?) Both are fitfully ravishing concerti — the former for Antonioni’s deep-focus mise en scène and deep-dish use of architecture, the latter for the volcanic eruptions of the great Anna Magnani as a starstruck stage mother,  who mutters a kind of populist stream-of-consciousness that hilariously deconstructs the madness of cinema.

The Lady Without Camelias was initially planned, in turn, for Gina Lollabrigida and Sophia Loren, as shopgirl-turned-starlet and producer’s wife. The part went to Lucia Bose, a beautifully vacant cipher-goddess who has subsequently worked for Bunuel, Cocteau, Fellini, and Duras; here she figures grandly and mysteriously as both the pivotal point and the troubled center of a densely created universe. Bellissima is didactically structured by a Cseare Zavattini script about a mother and small daughter which echoes The Bicycle Thief in more ways than one. (Part of the accuracy of What Makes Sammy Run? is the degree to which films imitate other films — and, indeed, Budd Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd scripts borrows mightily from his own Sammy novel.)

March 18: I pay a brief, enjoyable visit to the Animators’ Gallery at 484 Broome St., which is open 11 to 6 Wednesday through Saturday, 1 to 6 on Sunday. (It’s in the same building as the Kitchen, but a few doors east, toward Wooster.) It’s been open since January, is reportedly the only gallery in the world specifically designed for the showing of animated films, and there’s currently a show of drawings and films by the gifted Jane Aaron through April 5. (Another show, devoted to the work of Richard Protovins, starts on April 8.)

Aaron’s charming work generally involves filming animated drawings in real environments. Like her all-animated A Brand New Day (1974), this invariably suggests the artist performing graceful dance-duets with nature. In Plain Sight (1977), which I reviewed favorably in these pages nine months ago, as part of a Film Forum animation show, is being shown with Interior Designs (1980), which also juxtaposes the pixillated pleasures of time-lapse photography with the wiggles and struts of another animator’s hand — culminating in a circus-like climax in which studio workroom figures (some of them on display in the gallery) become animated, too. One can watch all three shorts in succession in back of the gallery; in front, along withe the drawings, In Plain Sight and Interior Designs are shown in a video format.

March 19: In order to round off this spring clearance of art movies, I make it all four of the black-and-white Ken Russell TV films about artists being shown today in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Salute to the BBC”. In order of appearance, these are Delius: A Song of Summer (1968), Elgar (1962), Isadora Duncan (1966), and Dante’s Inferno (1967) — the latter about poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On reflection, this order proves ideal, starting with the last (and best) film and then proceeding chronologically.

All four, as films, put much of the rest of TV to shame by proving that you can grab an audience with a lot more than talking heads in close-ups and medium-shots: I’ll never forget how riveted I was to Isadora Duncan on the tube (in Manhattan) roughly a decade ago. Like the others, it’s a film that riotously and triumphantly runs the gamut of size scales, from spectacular landscape vistas to sensual, fleshy nooks — a trait Russell shares with Leni Riefenstahl, whose Olympian footage he is witty enough to quote and integrate into Duncan’s Greek pilgrimage.

One problem with seeing TV films on a big screen is a hyped-up effect to certain moments that wouldn’t be excessive in a small frame. When the narrator of Song of Summer says “My mind was now full of anxieties” while the camera pulls back from a reproduction of Munch’s The Cry beside his bed, it’s like putting a footnote in neon, and some people titter. (It can’t be the sophistication of a MOMA crowd; a few hours later, people are milling out after the death of Isadora while the film’s still in progress, like leaving a football game before it’s over.)

All these movies are about the difficult alliances between art and life — specifically, the hassle artists have to endure and the pills they can be to live with; the same subject as Savage Messiah, Russell’s best theatrical film. The direct participation and collaboration of Delius’s amanuensis Eric Fenby on the script of the legendary Song of Summer clearly places it apart from the others, for it is a film about collaboration in art on the most basic levels. Near the opening, when Fenby (played by Christopher Gable) is musically notating sheep bleats and ocean waves, I’m reminded of the collaborations of Jane Aaron seen yesterday. And when, after five years of torturous work with syphilitic, paralytic composer, Fenby has a nervous breakdown and briefly loses control of his own legs, this information is made all the more powerful by being conveyed (and disposed of) in one throwaway offscreen line.

Elgar, the most conventional of the four, is no less or more a “critical essay” (with its use of newsreel and archive footage) than Dante’s Inferno, which has a  naturally lit neorealist shooting style, or Isadora Duncan, which revels in  Wellesian deep focus and fast editing. As efficient mass-market cultural packages and eclectic personal investigations, as curious in a way about their subjects as Rossellini’s, these fascinating, finely wrought works of the 60s are among the best things Russell has done, leagues ahead of the dull Valentino, and have yet to receive their proper due.

Putting Back the Ritz

The following was written at some point in the early 1980s, as a kind of postscript or pendant to my first book, the autobiographical Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1980; 2nd ed.,  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). I was living in Hoboken at the time, and secretly in love with another writer whose first name was Veronica. A slightly altered and doctored version of this piece eventually turned up in Ian Breakwell and Paul Hammond’s English anthology Seeing in the Dark: A Compendium of Cinemagoing (London: Serpant’s Tail, 1990). The version here has also been altered and doctored a little, and I’ve added all the photos, including those of the Ritz before and after its 1985 restoration. –J.R.

Putting Back the Ritz

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Between about 1947 and 1951, when the Ritz Theater in Sheffield, Alabama was still open (it was built in 1928 and received an Art Deco upgrade for talkies about five years later), my main encounters with the place, between the ages of four and eight, were on trips with my father across the river to pick up the final reports on the daily receipts on all four of the Rosenbaum theaters our family owned in Sheffield and Tuscumbia. (There were three more theaters in Florence at the end of his route, and two more in Athens, where he drove twice a month.) As soon as we left Florence and crossed the Tennessee River we passed from Lauderdale, a dry county, to Colbert, a wet one, and the difference was plainly visible: a sudden array of beer stands and gaudy neon nightclubs flickering past made Sheffield a sort of Baghdad next to the more prim outposts of  Florence, the birthplace of W.C. Handy and a bastion of respectability. Sheffield was the smaller town, but it had a bigger train station, more industrial soot, more prostitutes, and an all-black movie house, the Carver, all in close proximity to one another. Across the tracks was Jack’s Chicken Shack, a Negro hangout that sold bootleg liquor after the county went dry around 1952, and Sheffield began to grow more ashen and dusty, shriveling into a near semblance of a ghost town.

Today the town shows some signs of coming back to life. Colbert went wet again  in 1982, there’s an active local theater group, and some people in the area are in the process of restoring and reopening the Ritz—which had survived mainly as a warehouse, and briefly as a recording studio in 1957—to put on plays. It hasn’t shown a movie for over thirty years, but the pink seashell murals, the stage, and the “white” and “colored” balconies are still intact, fossils of another culture.

My father’s nightly trips across the river five times a week were usually to the Colbert in Sheffield (built around the time of Pearl Harbor, half a block from the Ritz, and today a parking lot) and the Tuscumbian (built in 1950, a block from the Strand, and today part of a bank). But if the daily figures hadn’t yet been brought over from the Ritz and Strand, we would stop off there too. Sometimes my brothers and I were allowed to get out of the car with him and peek at the movie in progress while he spoke to the manager or cashier. In a way this functioned for us like window shopping: a random five-minute slice of a feature would enable us to decide whether to see the whole thing at the Shoals, Princess, or Majestic in Florence, when it resurfaced there.

But sometimes a double bill would show at the Ritz and nowhere else. One such occasion was Labor Day 1949, when my parents went off on a holiday barbecue or picnic and deposited the three oldest boys—David (eight), Jonny (six), and Alvin (four)—with a teenage black babysitter named Earl at the Ritz to see Li’l Abner (the early black and white version, with Buster Keaton in a small part) and I Married a Witch. It was Alvin’s first time at the movies, but the other two of us were seasoned veterans by this time. Jim Crow laws dictated that we all sit up in the colored balcony, so we followed Earl up the stairs of the separate entrance, located to the right of the box office, and found ourselves in the highest tier of the auditorium. Down below were the pink seashell murals lit by fluorescent lights, and distant black and white movies on the screen. Li’l Abner—without the color of the comic strip in the Sunday paper—seemed bogus, and bogus hillbilly at that, but David and Earl, both schooled in the macho preference for raucous art, liked nothing better than a bogus barnyard. For Alvin and me, bogus mansions and graveyards were the thing, and I Married a Witch a sweeter brew.

The principal moment I’m left with is a shot of two smoky essences in bottles, the sound of dry autumn leaves rustling through a chill night wind, and the voices of Cecil Kellaway and Veronica Lake, father and daughter, conversing from their adjacent bottles. Most of this has to do with Veronica Lake’s deep, husky voice: a smoky spirit whose name and form collectively conjured up a feminine aura of water, vapor, air, smoke, and flesh at the same time—a floating dreamboat that any boy of six would be proud to be married to. Having just seen Topper at the Princess the week before, I had all I needed to complete my erotic evaporation fantasies and crawl into the diaphanous lap of Lady Veronica. Indeed, by the time the credits of René Clair’s supernatural comedy came on, the ads had already done their work, and I was already invisibly inside her bottle too, ready to share in her throaty vibrato.

Declarations of Independents: The Past Recycled

This appeared in The Soho News on March 11, 1981. A month earlier, I had launched a kind of weekly column there called “Declarations of Independents” that was in diary form — a bit like some of my Paris Journals and London Journals for Film Comment during the 70s –- and this was the third of these. — J.R. – J.R.

Feb. 24: Why go all the way to the Thalia tonight to see five Screen Directors Playhouse episodes, all half-hour TV shows from the mid-50s?  Two professional reasons spring to mind, both essentially recycling operations. As often happens in such cases, I feel myself split between the two — processes that honor my asocial aesthetics on the one hand, my social politics on the other.

Auteurist Retrieval technology (we’ll call it ART for short) — cultivated by me and a lot of other film freaks in the late 60s — is predicated on the pleasure of recognizing the taletale signs of favorite directors in all sorts of unlikely material. And what better excuse to put ART to work than patriarchal episodes by John Ford, Leo McCarey, Frank Borzage, Tay Garnett, and William Seiter? Indeed, to narrow the focus down to the evening’s main event, what better specimen could one hope to find but a crisp 35mm print of Ford’s Rookie of the Year,  made immediately before his masterpiece The Searchers, with the same scriptwriter (Frank Nugent) and no less than four of the same actors — John Wayne, Pat Wayne, Vera Miles and Ward Bond — playing central roles?

Professional reason No. 2 has more to do with my relationship to the period when these shows were made (all of them at the Hal Roach Studio, sponsored by Eastman Kodak — “with all the scope and realism that only motion picture techniques make possible,” and with each week’s preview offering a glimpse of next week’s director at work at work in a canvas chair bearing his name). The process here, based on personal and historical research — which in my case evolves directly out of work on a book called Moving Places (Harper & Row/Colophon) in the late 70s — might be called Identity/Ideology Retrieval Systems, or IRS for short. By and large, it regards the cinephilia of ART therapeutically, as a disease to be cured, and chiefly addresses itself to the world outside cinema. In other words, ART, like most ordinary moviegoing, aims at obliterating or at least concealing one’s own identity and that of the world outside the theater; IRS aims at constructing and/or restoring them both.

Reasons No. 1 and No. 2 are a quarrelsome marriage of convenience, to say the least, especially when they decide to attend a movie together. In support of ART is a useful, mimeographed “weekly guide to the writers and directors of TV movies and episodes” that I find in the Thalia lobby, available from Barry Gilliam, 4283 Katonah Av., Bronx 10470 ($5 for 15 weeks, $15 for a year) — a nifty little newsletter that can allow you to waste oodles of time engaged in supposedly Scholarly Pursuits  (see Feb. 25), while investing the mundane with vast amounts of potential stylistic significance.

In support of IRS are the motley, fascinating trailers that are nowadays a Thalia specialty, many of them quite functional and revealing as time machines. Among tonight’s highlights are previews for Sepia Cinderella, La Dolce Vita, High Noon, The Rainmaker and Harold and Maude — the latter less than 10 years old yet substantially more dated than the rest, because the color deterioration is so pronounced that everything on the screen has become a different shade of blue.

ART could probably devote a day or so to tracing all the Fordian internal and cross-references in Rookie of the Year, e.g., John Wayne’s son Pat in both films used in filial relation to Ward Bond as well as his own dad, or the deliberate suppression of a news story which sets history straight, anticipating The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by seven years. But this pedantic formalism invariably misses the perverse sexual undertones in the myths involved — a factor that IRS could help to supply.

Rookie of the Year (1955) tells the tale of Mike (John Wayne), a small town sports reporter who flies to the World Series so he can get a good look at Lyn Goodhue (Pat Wayne), a rookie who’s just appeared on the cover of Time. Noticing that Lyn plays just like Buck Garrison (Ward Bond) — a rookie kicked out of baseball for taking a bribe 20 years ago — Mike proceeds to the kid’s hometown. There he substantiates his hunch that Lyn is Buck’s son — a fact that Ruth (Vera Miles), who’s in love with Lyn, persuades him to suppress.

All in all, it’s a plot about as convincing as Eyewitness (featuring William Hurt as a janitor who owns a Betamax). What gives it a particular life of its own is the powerful, flirtatious erotic tension between Mike and Lyn in a locker room, when the latter remarks, “For a man your age, you look okay.” It’s every bit as intense as the explicitly incestuous undercurrents in Wayne’s relationships to Jeffrey Hunter and Natalie Wood in The Searchers — which the prudish, conservative ART critics shy away from, ignoring even the suggestions that both these characters are the hero’s illegitimate offspring. It has all the eroticism missing from the scenes with Vera Miles in the two films, where she invariably gets wedged in between the men (the Duke and Bond in Rookie, the Duke and Hunter in Searchers) and then ignored, like a soft whoopie cushion that periodically emits comic punctuation when squeezed.

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Feb. 25: Delayed over half an hour by a basketball game, Robert Altman’s made-for-TV thriller Nightmare in Chicago (1964), at once efficient and interminable — expanded with outtakes from a “Kraft Suspense Theater” episode, according to Gilliam’s informative guide — finally gets started on Channel 9. Apart from offering more routine ART fodder, like a protracted nightclub striptease that could easily be cross-indexed with Gwen Welles’ in Nashville, the only striking directorial touches I notice in this formula killer-manhunt story are subjective renderings of the lunatic’s mind: his mother’s whispered admonishments to him as a tot and the painfully piercing brightness of lights, both magnified in a neoexpressionist manner.

It’s just one more example of Altman’s free-floating cleverness before he was unlucky enough to be turned into an auteur by overeager ART enthusiasts, yieldeng such tin-plated testimonials to middle-brow seriousness as Images, Three Women, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians. As someone who regards Altman’s mature work as a reflection of teamwork and certain utopian hopes about collectivity during the 70s, from the ramshackle frontier town of First Presbyterian Church in McCabe and Mrs. Miller to the comparably makeshift and jerrybuilt port town of Sweethaven in Popeye — hopes that were born, took shape, became problematic, and then either died or redefined themselves in order to survive — I can only lament the crass process in American criticism that foisted the role of Lone Independent Thinker and Arthouse Sage on Altman and then penalized him for not living up to it. (Where are these fairweather friends now, when he can’t even get his latest film Health released?)

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Feb. 26: At thre Art to see a stereo print of Guys and Dolls (1955), near the end of their poorly attended Sam Goodwyn season, I fortuitously get to see the trailer of Northern Lights, which automatically puts some dramatic IRS into effect. This is because First Run Features has just finished showing me Northern Lights in its entirely in their office screening room less than an hour ago, on a much smaller screen, and the differences in meaning and impact brought about by a different size and context are truly startling.

Partially because I’m also seeing a trailer, the same pictorial black-and-white shots of North Dakota farmers organizing in the winter of 1915-16 have become less naked and more Hollywoodish, bolder and less ambiguous, all dressed up with some place to go. This drives straight into the heart of the contradiction of this film and the 3 1/2-month season of American Independent Films that it spearheads — hat it doesn’t want to go Hollywood, yet given the present media setup (which ultimately stipulates only one game in town, win or lose) it essentially has to in order to get anywhere at all.

Guys and Dolls, on the other hand, which I last saw on BBC-TV in London five years ago, doesn’t really gain much byfilling up a sizable screen — despite a city-as-set conceit that might have worked (but doesn’t) as a primitive Manhattan forerunner to the Paris of Playtime. The problem is, Joseph Mankiewicz can’t shoot a musical, gets confused on issues of time and space — accounting for the all-around antipathy of most critics for this cramped, overlong Runyon and Loesser revue.

But Guys and Dolls has something else going for it. Part of the time, this is a fiercely disassociated competition between Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra in separate parts of the movie that recalls Jazz at Massey Hall, a concert album in which Dizzy and Bird studiously and disinterestedly try to nail each other to the wall. Yet as soon as Brando and Jean Simmons share the screen, the heavy calisthenics stop, the movie starts, and something much more interesting takes shape — a sexy rapport between two consummate pros (as actors) and amateurs (as singers), worming their way into privileged pockets of the movie, crooning perfect;y balanced duets that melt my socks off. (This is their second movie together, by the way; they became chums while doing Desiree in ‘54.)

To hell with those boring Joe Palooka (and Palookaville) erotics that dictate that the best Brando performances are always the most violent ones, the Streetcar Waterfront One-Eyed Tango struts that have already encouraged a generation of slobs to become louts, too. The sheer delicacy of the Big B’s two tours de force in 1955 are scoffed at as sissy work, yet his extraordinary Japanese choral figure in Teahouse of the August Moon (revisted at the Regency about a month ago, and more recently visible on TV) and his Damon Runyon dandy here are often wonders to behold — especially, here, when he has Simmons’ sinuous rhythms to play against. Chemistry? Yeah, chemistry.

Ad Hominem [review of DIXIANA MOON]

From The Soho News, March 4, 1981. — J.R.

Dixiana Moon

By William Price Fox

Viking Press, $11.95

Any kind of sales talk, no matter how witty or effervescent, eventually goes stale or rancid in your head — until it is replaced by a new slogan. This is what Dixiana Moon is all about, and, just as unavoidably, what it’s like: drifts of euphoria that gradually work their way up to nausea, peaking in a blissful forgetfulness that efficaciously clears the way for bright new ideas to come along. It is also what journalism — a quaint subcategory of advertising — is about and like, this review included: a laxative for the imagination intended to move goods as quickly as possible, straight through the digestive tract.

Dixiana Moon is a quick and agreeable read, no doubt about that. One way or another, the whole novel is about packaging. The narrator hero, young movie freak Joe Mahaffey, has a lovable dreamer of a father in rural Pennsylvania, who keeps repackaging a nightclub in different décor — French, Spanish, Irish, Italian, and so on — while Joe Jr., hoping to win the affection of Monica Murphy (an “executive dancer” whom he crosses profesional paths with in Manhattan’s Danceland), signs on as a salesman for a packaging outfits, and peddles polyethylene bags in diverse spots east of Pittsburgh. Eventually he runs into Buck Brody, a  middle-aged Southern “mush-mouth” (I’d cast Ned Beatty) who quickly becomes a substitute father, yanking Joe into one outrageous get-rich scheme after another.

The culminating package takes shape in Georgia — a circus combined with a fundamentalist revival called The Great Mozingo-Arlo Waters Jubilee Crusade and Famous Life of Christ Show. Mozingo is merely one of Buck’s aliases, but Arlo Waters — a terrifying, noncomic portrait etched in grease and acid, a Hazel Motes without laughs — turns out to be the genuine article, a lunatic and fanatic who ushers in an apocalyptic climax. Like Joe Jr.’s triumphant arrival on the lion-flanked steps of the New York Public Library in Chapter 1, it is a public event described in terms of camera placement, this time TV coverage; and there’s a solid indication that it is media exposure that finally pushes Waters over the edge.

On the jacket blurb, Pauline Kael affectionately celebrates the novel’s Southern “boozing grunginess” — the sort of thing she sometimes swoons over in minor Peckinpah — and indeed, flashes of Fox’s talented gonzo patter actually suggest what a stream-of-consciousness novel by Kael or one of her disciples might be like: “It was probably beautiful up around Syracuse. The snow would be six feet deep and cut away like angel-food cake. In the north country they have sharp seasons. And the people match the seasons: they make sharp decisions. Down here nothing was straight. Everything was laid back and fuzzy. They’d grin and shuffle and ‘aw shit’ and ‘aw shucks’ you to the wall. No one would give you a straight answer on anything.”

This is charming travel-poster stuff, even to a Southern expatriate like me, that starts to lose conviction only when it becomes too serious, and loses interest only when it becomes too light. Its easy rhythms — which largely depend on matching phrases of roughly equal length — are heard more than seen, and felt more than thought. It’s white Southern jive, ad-copy style, in love with its own philistinism and body odor, and Fox writes it better than most.

Here’s part of an ad quoted in an earlier (and somewhat lesser) Fox novel, Ruby Red: “I want all you folks out there in radio land to know we’ve got us a policy down at Renfro Motors that no other car lot in the country can stand up to. We don’t have any bathing girls sashaying or brass bands or plastic doolollies spinning in the breeze. We don’t feature none of that nonsense. All we have is a simple, cold-biscuit down-to-earth policy of Truth. That’s it folks, capital T.R.U.T.H….”

You said it. And even if this truth should break down when you’re driving it home, what the hell — we’re all supposed to be marks and losers anyway. The jacket flap on Ruby Red, published 10 years ago, wistfully reports that Fox has been bellhop, short-order cook, salesman, coach at a boys’ school, Air Force pilot, and lookout for a moonshiner — not to mention a teacher of creative writing in Iowa City. But as Dixiana Moon proves, right down to its own dreamy jacket and press kit, it’s the packaging that makes all the difference.

– The Soho News, March 4, 1981