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Four Books on the Hollywood Musical

From the Summer 1982 issue of Film Quarterly. — J.R.

Four Books on the Hollywood Musical

THE HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL, by Clive Hirschhorn. New York: Crown.

HOLLYWOOD MUSICALS, by Ted Sennett. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

THE HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL, by Ethan Mordden. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

GENRE: THE MUSICAL, edited by Rick Altman. London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul (BFI Readers in Film Studies).

If the musical has nearly been vanquished as a popular form by the increasing subdivision of its audience into separate classes, age groups, and ethnic interests, these four books on the subject which nostalgically chart its heyday are similarly compartmentalized and exclusive. It seems inevitable that each of these four elegant receptacles for the most libidinal of American movie genres should address a different portion of our psyches: after all, if our society and minds are splintered, why shouldn’t our integral genres be as well?

The glib marketing strategies that aim each book at a somewhat different audience create the odd social effect of four high-rises, each constructed inside a separate ghetto — although the attractive coffee table books of Clive Hirschhorn and Ted Sennett might also be regarded with some justice as adjacent towers on somewhere like Sutton Place. The former — by describing in detail 1,344 musicals (a longish paragraph devoted to each) that are listed year by year, then cross-indexed by titles, songs, performers, composers, lyricists, and other creative personnel — is an indispensable reference tool, and, as far as I know, the best of its kind. The latter is of interest chiefly for its beautifully reproduced stills and frame enlargements, many of them in full color—making this book the only pure luxury item in the bunch. Sennett’s critical-survey text, while serviceable and pleasant enough, can’t really compete with the  dazzling illustrations, which can only be gaped at or mooned over. (Beneath a big color image of the climax of Carmen Miranda’s “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” number in the 1943 THE GANG’S ALL HERE — with the star wedged under an expanding thirty-foot cascade of bananas and flanked on each side by an army of gigantic, Magritte-like strawberries — is a caption that can only rationalize delirium with production anecdotes, amusing yet secondary.)

It’s hard to think of two better books about the musical than Ethan Morden’s and Rick Altman’s; why, then, are they so completely at loggerheads with one another? Mordden’s fund of facts about the musical is encyclopedic, vast, intelligent, and usually on display like an Afghan hound; he doesn’t mind letting you know that he knows such things as how they say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in the German-dubbed versions of MARY POPPINS. Much more important, a sensitivity for and technical grasp of the music in musicals virtually place him in a class by himself. His overall command of information is awesome, yet on a stylistic level of aspiration he often seems to aim at the consistency of chatter rather than of sustained thought—a journalistic trait shared at times by writers such as Stephen Harvey and Vito Russo, predicated on the assumption that, existentially speaking, nothing is important enough to be extended beyond the boundaries of a wisecrack or pithy paragraph. “A string of pearls without a string” is how Eisenstein once described the great Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, but a single page of Mordden is often little more than a sack of brightly colored jelly beans: “Lawrence Tibbett invaded a song, John Boles comforted it. Chevalier attended it as if it were a party in his honor.”

At its best, in the short run, this is like the celebrated form of one-shot skeet-shooting practiced by writers like James Agee and Arlene Croce in their reviews and essays. At its worst, particularly over the long haul, it can trivialize its own claims for seriousness with its virtual enslavement to a bantering tone that places everything on the same level of nonimportance. (”How is HALLELUJAH patronizing? True, it doesn’t show us any white oppressors. But you can’t have everything.” Apparently you can’t in prose, either.) The culmination of both strains in Mordden’s writing can be found in the Ethan Mordden Hall of Fame and Disrepute that comes at the end, after a useful discography and bibliography — a jokey, self-indulgent, and campier version of Andrew Sarris’s Pantheon exercises that offers us such gold-plated prizes as “Most Daring Studio” (Paramount), “Least Faithful Adaptation from Broadway” (the 1938 SALLY, IRENE AND MARY), “Best Editing” (ALL THAT JAZZ), “Best Argument from the Right” (THE WIZARD OF OZ), and “Fernando Lamas Award for Best Male Singer Born in Argentina Who Appeared in FOUR JILLS AND A JEEP” (Dick Haymes).

If Mordden singles out THE BAND WAGON as the “Worst Celebrated Film,” his short paragraph on the film in the main text begins to explain why:

A back-stager without the slightest taste of the theatre, it was fashioned by Minnelli, Comden and Green, all stage veterans who should know better, using Schwartz and Dietz standards. The score is great and “The Girl Hunt Ballet,” a Mickey Spillane takeoff for Astaire and Cyd Charisse, amusing. But the story is tired, the attempted burlesque of “serious” musicals rude, Oscar Levant atrocious, and Jack Buchanan as uncharming as when he marred MONTE CARLO back in 1930.

But apart from telling us why Ethan Mordden doesn’t like THE BAND WAGON — which may or may not be meaningful in a separate context — the actual information or insight conveyed in such a summary is surprisingly meager.

Among the references to THE BAND WAGON in the index to the Altman anthology are some insightful remarks about the film by Thomas Elsaesser (in a first-rate 1970 postauteurist study of Minnelli drawn from the Brighton Film Review ), a passing but pointed observation by Alain Masson about the film’s functional uses of nonrealism (in the midst of a brilliant, perverse, and semipersuasive defense of George Sidney translated from Positif ), some brief reflections on the validation of entertainment versus art from Robin Wood in Film Comment, and some detailed psychoanalytical annotations from Dennis Giles in Movie. There’s also a fascinating and original argument by Alan Williams, written expressly for this volume, about the functions of sound recording in the illusionism of musicals, with Fred Astaire’s delivery of the film’s opening number used as a central example; Jane Feuer, in a Quarterly Review of Film Studies article, uses the film to illustrate myths about entertainment (involving spontaneity, integration, and the audience) that crop up in self-reflective musicals; and Martin Sutton, in another original essay, reflects on the movie’s narrative patterns involving isolation (e.g., “By Myself,” Astaire’s opening number) and group acceptance (e.g., “That’s Entertainment”).

“That’s entertainment?” I can hear some of my anti-intellectual, musical-buff colleagues skeptically declaring, on being faced with the diverse investigations of the Altman anthology. All I can say is, I was entertained much of the time—believing, as I firmly do, that entertainment and enlightenment are ideally (if often deviously) interconnected. (As bathtub reading, I would argue that the Mordden and Altman score about equally.) As Alan Williams notes, “Some of the pleasure given by musical numbers might actually be something closer to pseudo-bliss, since the effect, so subtle as to pass generally unperceived, is an implicit loss of coherence of the sustained spectator.” One could almost say that the critical prose of Mordden, Croce, and Kael also implies a loss of coherence through its absence of sustained theory or argument; in this respect, it seems that the musical and this kind of prose are both predicated on the puritanical assumption that pleasure and intelligence (or analysis) are incompatible bedfellows.

Consequently, in the world of these latter writers, the diverse achievements of the authors of the Altman anthology don’t even deserve to be dismissed; instead they are systematically ignored. Thus it seems only logical that in a recent roundup review in The New Yorker, Arlene Croce decried the relative absence of intelligent writing about the musical — rightly pointing to the Mordden as a prize catch — while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the existence of the Altman book, or any related academic endeavors. It may not be irrelevant to add that Altman’s book takes a swipe at Croce in turn, in its generally useful bibliography by Jane Feuer, when it refers to her classic book on Astaire and Rogers as “a witty and elegant though superficial analysis.” (Alas, the respective professional armor of the journalist and the academic is stronger in both these cases than any sense of allegiance to the unaffiliated reader looking for a good intelligent text on a subject. Croce and Feuer are both witty writers, as it happens, who happen to be answerable to what amounts to rival cults.)

The best so far of the BFI Readers in Film Studies, Genre: The Musical is full of interesting ideas about its subject, and fully deserves a place on my shelf right next to Mordden’s book. Especially helpful are the remarks by Williams and Feuer about the manner in which musicals, to paraphrase Rick Altman, mobilize radical techniques for conservative purposes. When Richard Dyer remarks, in one of the best essays, that entertainment presents what utopia feels like rather than how it would be organized, he’s merely touching on the existence of a social and ideological structure that most journalists would rather adopt (or adapt) than acknowledge, analyze, or contest. Characteristic of this mode is Mordden’s show-bizzy gloss on W. Franklyn Moshier’s The Alice Faye Book in his own bibliography:

Faye and her films are basic to the musical both historically and today on television, and serious students should put some time in here. A good start: turn to page 98 for a still of what Moshier captions as the “distinctive Faye pose.” Try striking this pose yourself, if possible in one of Faye’s costumes. How do you feel?

If Mordden’s bibliography and Feuer’s went out on a blind date, it is difficult to imagine all the comic complications that might ensue. Set those collisions and accommodations to music, and you might even have a hit on your hands. In the meantime, within the mutually exclusive environments fostered by these four books, there is plenty of value to be found in each one. It all depends on what you’re looking for, how you feel, and who you are.

— Film Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Summer 1982)

Pryor Commitments [upgraded, 11/14/11]

The current [2013] Richard Pryor retrospective being held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which runs through February 21, has made me think that it’s worth reposting this ancient article of mine, which I regard as one of my better pieces about comedy.

It would obviously be hyperbolic for me to claim that the editorial evisceration originally suffered by this article was comparable to some of the curtailments experienced by Richard Pryor when he appeared on TV or in the Hollywood mainstream, but that’s more or less what it felt like to me at the time. I recently and very belatedly uncovered all but the last paragraph or so of my original version (after posting mainly the published version several months earlier), which I’ve just reinstated here [on November 14, 2011]. The fact that the editor who placed this article in a lead section of Film Comment’s July-August 1982 issue entitled “The Coarsening of Movie Comedy” also changed my title to “The Man in the Great Flammable Suit” may give some notion of what his evisceration felt like at the time.

My working assumption in restoring original drafts on this site, or some approximation thereof, isn’t that my editors were always or invariably wrong, or that my editorial decisions today are necessarily superior, but, rather, an attempt to historicize and bear witness to my original intentions. It was a similar impulse that led me to undo some of the editorial changes made in the submitted manuscript of my first book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980), when I was afforded the opportunity to reconsider them for the book’s second edition 15 years later (now out of print, but available online here) — not to revise or rethink my decisions in relation to my subsequent taste but to bring the book closer to what I originally had in mind in 1980.

Richard Pryor Live in Concert (1979) remains for me a key work; when I curated a month-long program for the Austrian Filmmuseum in October 2009, The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S., this was the only significant selection of mine that had to be omitted, simply because of the obtuseness of the film’s distributor when it came to sending any print out of the country. I also recall that when Manny Farber, during the q and a session after his legendary lecture at Museum of Modern Art in 1979, was asked what interested him the most in contemporary movies, this was the single item that he cited. –- J.R.

1. R.P. & Charlie C.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquor anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile, black man, white….To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair. The hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people will return to the people….In the name of democracy, let us unite!

– Jewish barber (Chaplin) in THE GREAT DICTATOR

At the center of Richard Pryor’s comedy is his grasp of poverty and weakness, pain and defeat — the very reverse of that strength and self-confidence which he can project so powerfully on a stage. Within the taut dynamics of his performance art, complex attitudes about success and failure, pride and shame, wealth and poverty, love and self-interest are constantly being formulated in relation to one another — guaranteeing the authenticity of his popular appeal, and the beauty and honesty of his self-scrutiny.

To get some measure of the imaginative empathy that Pryor can invest in his creations, his capacity to examine the reverse side of every coin, one need only compare his deer hunt in RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT (1979) with Michael Cimino’s, in an Oscar-winner released only a few months earlier. For a big-time auteur like Cimino, intent on filling out a grand mythic design, the question of how a frightened deer drinks water never gets posed. R.P. does more than pose it; he becomes a frightened deer drinking water   — along with himself as a kid and his father watching — in order to find out.

This has a lot to do with the art of a Chaplin as well. LIMELIGHT, for instance, set in London’s East End around the turn of the century, was made the very same year that the father of the film’s star, director, writer, producer, and composer — a music-hall performer and alcoholic, also named Charlie Chaplin — died in abject poverty. Thus Chaplin’s speculative portrait of himself in 1952 as a has-been and failure is possibly based on what he might have become had he remained in English music halls, and clearly reflects the fate of his own father, whom he barely knew.

The way that, even at his most egotistical and self-indulgent, Chaplin was able to construct an auto-critique founded on the antithesis of his fame and fortune, helps to define what makes him a great filmmaker, and Richard Pryor a great performer. Theirs is an art of rigorous dialectics shared with a mass audience, a game that few comics are capable of sustaining. Correspondingly, it is the absence of such dialectics in the work of Woody Allen -– the literal absence of non-whites on the streets of his classy travel-poster MANHATTAN, or marginal working-class types in the Gothic recesses of his STARDUST MEMORIES -– that prevents him from becoming major.

As it happens, Chaplin and Pryor also take in Woody Allen’s key subject, the spectacle of middle-class consumption. Think of Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, a close cousin of Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann as model bourgeois; or consider Pryor’s side-splitting rendition of paranoid whites returning after intermission in RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT (“I love this part where the white people come back and see that the niggers have stolen their seats”) –- a routine regarded as reverse racism by such middle-class beacons as Vincent Canby and Andrew Sarris. But Pryor and Chaplin never make the mistake that Allen does, of confusing the part with the whole, or middle-class Manhattan with the universe.

One might argue, in fact, that all three comics can be defined by their separate constituencies, and judged by their individual relationships to them, which amount to political mandates. Woody Allen betrayed his own middle-class mandate in STARDUST MEMORIES by insulting his supporters; at the end of RICHARD PRYOR LIVE ON THE SUNSET STRIP, Pryor thanks his audience for supporting him through his near-brush with death -– “You gave me a lotta love when I wasn’t feeling well” -– and then gently chides them for telling nasty jokes, like the sight gag equating a moving lit match with R.P. in flight.

According to Pauline Kael, the new Pryor concert movie “goes thud” when Pryor, in response to requests from the audience, sits down on a stool and goes into his Mudbone routine, because this section “doesn’t have the crackle of a performer interacting with an audience.” I strongly suspect that Kael would fault Chaplin’s speech at the end of THE GREAT DICTATOR -– that unnerving moment when the Jewish barber changes imperceptibly into Chaplin himself -– on similar grounds, and it’s easy to see why. But it must be acknowledged that these are the parts of both films that matter the most politically, as testaments and acts of witness: Chaplin’s collapse of his own fiction and direct address to the spectator, quoted above; Pryor’s presentation of his own gaudy success seen through the eyes of a poor rural black from Mississippi, uneducated yet skeptical. (“I know that boy, he fucked up….Fried what little brains he had. Don’t let him get any of that powder in his nose; that’s like tryin’ to talk to a baboon’s ass.”) In both cases, the comic finds he has to step outside his customary persona in order to speak the truth. For Pryor, this logically precedes his account of his near-fatal accident from freebasing cocaine.

What is it that makes us squirm through Chaplin’s speech and, to a lesser extent, Pryor’s Mudbone monologue? It’s not so much the comedy as the withdrawal of comedy at strategic junctures of THE GREAT DICTATOR, MONSIEUR VERDOUX, LIMELIGHT and A KING IN NEW YORK that makes us nervous. Pryor, on the other hand, doesn’t so much sidestep comedy as bypass the easy route to belly-laughs that he pursues later, focusing here on the dialectics of self-confrontation. In both cases, a partial retreat of the comic from his audience imposes a certain Brechtian distance. In a way, these are moments that crack open the precarious artifice supporting the respective fantasies of each film, and declare that the comic has to step outside his customary persona in order to speak the truth. In Pryor’s case, this becomes the necessary prerequisite to his near-fatal accident from freebasing cocaine.

What are Chaplin and Pryor each doing in these sequences but reminding us who they are, and where they’re from? In at least one respect, the total inadequacy of Chaplin’s speech as a response to Hitler in 1940 — as art, as thought, as action, as anything — becomes the key truth that the film has to offer. Annihilating the tramp before our eyes in order to speak as himself, Chaplin simultaneously resurrects the Tramp existentially, in a much more profound way, through the exposure (however unwitting) of the brutal fact of his own helplessness. He’s revealing, in short, that even the famous Charlie Chaplin can’t save the world, just as Pryor is revealing candidly that on one level, even a powerless nitwit like Mudbone from Tupelo has more smarts than he does when it comes to sheer common sense and self-preservation.

Let’s bring a final self-witness into ther act. Leonard Maltin has pointed out that Jerry Lewis, while playing an unemployed circus clown in HARDLY WORKING, still wears his Cartier wristwatch and other expensive jewelry to signal to his audience that he’s hotshot celebrity Jerry Lewis as well as a funnyman out of work — a rather grotesque (or, at the very least, mannerist) dialectic that remains operative throughout Lewis’s last feature (which largely became a hit because of its working-class audience).

Pryor is essentially caught in the same dilemma now, and the interest of his latest work often consists of seeing how he deals, from moment to moment, with this problematical impasse. Living (as Chaplin did) in a country where success can constitute no less deadly a trap than failure, he walks a very narrow tightrope that can snap at any moment, inviting us to watch his progess. Like any jazz musician, he depends vitally on this sexy form of suspense that keeps everyone off-balance.

***

2: R.P. and Charlie P.

I don’t like movies when they don’t have niggers in them. I went to see LOGAN’S RUN, right? They had a movie of the future called LOGAN’S RUN. There ain’t no niggers in it! I said, “Well, white folks ain’t plannin’ for us to be here!” That’s why we gotta make movies….

– Pryor in Bicentennial Nigger (1976)

Unfortunately, unlike Charlie C., Woody A., and Jerry L., Richard P. doesn’t make movies; he gives performances. And apart from his two concert films, where the performance more closely equals the movies, his performances are taken by other people, who make their own movies out of them.

Frankly, I don’t harbor too many extreme hopes for Pryor’s performance as Charlie Parker in a movie currently being planned by Joel Oliansky, any more than I can sustain many memories of his performance in LADY SINGS THE BLUES as Piano Man (an amalgamation of gloss and nervous talent, based on a confused part squeezed out of little pieces of Lester Young scrambled by Hollywood, and served up with tasty sugar-cured ham). Pryor always “does his best” in such circumstances; in SOME KIND OF HERO, he provides us with our only reason for seeing the movie. But even if he seeks out these formats or at least willingly submits to them, he always has to relinquish most of his power as a performer -– the capacity to create a world of his own -– in the process. The results are sometimes as lamentable (if also as tunefully poignant) as Charlie Parker’s celebrated sessions with strings, which has always made me think of a plaintive swan  drowning in bubble bath.

I anticipate, in other words, that whatever truths are to be found in Pryor’s performance as Parker (assuming that it ever materializes), they won’t necessarily be congruent with those of Joel Oliansky, or with Ross Russell’s Bird Lives! The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker -– the best jazz biography that I know, and probably the least suited for absent-minded Hollwood hagiography. (Written by the white producer of Parker’s celebrated Dial sessions in the Forties — which includes everything from the disastrous 1946 west coast “The Gypsy” and “Lover Man,” when C.P. was wasted on phenobarbital, to the sublime 1947 east coast “Embraceable You” and “Bird of Paradise,” when he was sailing on smack — Russell’s book has plenty of high-powered dialectics of its own. At their last meeting, around Christmas 1954, Parker threatened the author/producer with a gun for having released “Lover Man”.)

Despite the resemblance between Pryor’s career and Parker’s in many salient respects –- from humble Midwestern origins to crippling drug dependencies, suicidal behavior, and countless domestic crises (one can even compare Pryor’s intricate employments of obscenity with Parker’s uses of sixteenth notes),  I don’t see much possibility of Pryor using Parker — or being allowed to use Parker– as the chord structure for his own free-flowing solos, which are too uncontainable and volatile in Hollywood terms. That Pryor keeps getting roped into these aesthetically doomed enterprises seems a central aspect of his popular role as victim. Like Orson Welles, he seems capable of winding up in anything for fast money, and then doggedly assuming the niche of the frustrated artist -– contributing a Niagara of creativity to the work of mainly untalented plumbers, rather than being entrusted with the responsibility of creating and directing a flood of his own.

The prodigal waste that ensues can be awesome. My cousin Joseph Lelyveld, a New York Times reporter, once described to me watching Pryor tape a TV show with a live audience — delivering a brilliant and obscene tour de force that everyone knew in advance would be completely unusable (apparently less than 90 seconds wound up getting broadcast), yet continuing undeterred with endless quantities of anger, wit, and energy. One could argue, of course, that such behavior is “wasteful” only in business terms. (I’m sure that many members of Pryor’s studio audience, Lelyveld included, considered their own time well-spent.) There are equivalent stories, of course, about “Bird” playing with hillbilly groups and polka bands, which I suppose is part of the same sort of populist tradition.

Out of the twenty-seven fiction features that Pryor has played in, I’ve seen eleven. Only two of these, for my money, make fruitful and satisfying use of Pryor’s dialectical gifts in any concerted way, by placing him at an oblique angle to the rest of the movie — letting his part and presence constitute a critique of everything else that’s going on. They’re respectively one of his least and one of his best known films, SOME CALL IT LOVING (James B. Harris, 1973) and CAR WASH (Michael Schultz, 1976) — and interestingly enough, each explores the opposite side of Pryor’s public persona, the CITY LIGHTS duality of tramp and wealthy dude.

In the first movie, R.P. logically winds up in a coffin under an R.I.P.; he is such a total loser that there is nowhere else for him to go. His character is Jeff, a derelict dying of drink and drugs, whose life and devotion seemingly revolve around Troy (Zalman King), a white millionaire and dreamy vacuum with a sour expression who plays a mean baritone sax in a slick nightclub. The vision, of course, is a hallucinated one — conjured up by former Kubrick producer James B. Harris, out of John Collier’s wry story, “Sleeping Beauty”. It’s a haunting, bittersweet fable about the fatal temptation of Hollywood dreams and the capacity to buy them — and consequently a movie that many of my more defensive and less disenchanted colleagues tended to dismiss.

Into this solipsistic and absurdist framework commanded by Troy (who purchases a Sleeping Beauty [Tisa Farrow] from a carnival and dutifully waits for her to awake) — which parodies the moviegoer’s own isolation and passivity — staggers the disheveled and battered Jeff. Barely able to speak or walk, he drools on the floor of the men’s room at the nightclub, coughs horribly, stutters and stammers and laughs raucously, finds he can’t piss, scrawls something incomprehensible on the wall with a red Magic Marker (and hoots with manic joy,  “Day-Glo!”, after he insistently gets Troy to turn off the lights), and worships Troy’s sax playing without qualification. (Try to imagine a rocket ship carrying Pryor at his grungiest into LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, if you want some faint sense of the uncanny incongruity he creates in this sleepwalking ballet.) He also figures as the hero’s best and only friend, whose lack of freedom Troy perversely envies; and when Jeff inevitably kicks off, Troy makes the lush funeral arrangements, for an elaborate ceremony that practically no one attends. Throughout the movie, Jeff’s freaky, unbridled presence is allowed to function as the only directly expressive human element in Harris’s grimly beautiful tapestry –- ironically, the only character who’s not pointedly governed by obsessive rituals.

By contrast, Pryor plays the only wealthy black character in a gem called CAR WASH -– a gracefully stylish populist musical that made certain middle-class critics flinch and blanch at gags involving, shit, piss, and vomit. As if in response to an earlier car-wash disco anthen, “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is,” the infamous Daddy Rich arrives on the scene in his endlessly protracted gold limousine (a vivid Tex Avery nightmare, a veritable dachshund of a car) — mythically heralded and greeted, cheered as he emerges in a sleek white suit, surrounded by a fawning court of singing soul sisters (also black, and dressed in white). Happily spreading the word about the Church of Divine Economic Spirituality, in which “money talks and bullshit walks,” Daddy Rich comes across like a Father Divine in hipper threads who preaches the cause of black capitalism to underpaid car washers.

Clinching the bitter irony of his appearance (a much more lethal weapon in the movie than a would-be black revolutionary called Duane [Bill Duke], who tells Daddy Rich, “You’re talkin just like a pimp”), an elderly shoeshine “boy” with white hair begs for the privilege of shining his shoes, amidst general delight from workers and acolytes. “I take what is given unto me,” Rich replies preacher-style, piously framed against portraits of JFK and Martin Luther King. As reported in these pages five summers ago, when I saw this film with a mainly black audience in Philadelphia, the mean satirical thrust of this sequence provoked some spiteful walkouts; I don’t imagine they would have liked Mudbone from Tupelo, either. Yet seen today, there’s a certain way that Daddy Rich anticipates -– and even parodies in advance -– the triumphant R.P. in LIVE ON THE SUNSET STRIP, with his red suit, his Billy Dee Williams strut, and his gab about expensive lawyers.

Both of these memorable fiction performances are based on an economical eyedropper principle –- like Jackie Gleason’s carefully measured presence as Minnesota Fats in THE HUSTLER, or Charlie P.’s inspired single choruses in some of his fleet competitions/collaborations with the Woody Herman band. Given more rope as well as more (or less) slack, Pryor usually bebops his way through other parts with the intermittent resourcefulness (and much of the throwaway off-handedness) of Parker in his prime -– like the uneven virtuoso parts in the next two movies directed by Michael Schultz after CAR WASH, WHICH WAY IS UP? and GREASED LIGHTNING (both 1977), or the rare verbal and kinetic energy he contributes to the opening moments of BLUE COLLAR (1978), before Paul Schrader’s duller dynamics and proto-fascist platitudes take over.

In the explosive meeting-place between physicality and language (where many of our most optimistic contemporary masterpieces have taken root, from Ulysees to PLAYTIME), Pryor’s body functions as one of the most supple and varied instruments for human expression to have existed since Parker’s chops intersected with a blues. When a puritannical friend and avant-garde filmmaker recently told me that he stayed away from Pryor because he preferred language humor to body humor, I argued that sometimes R.P. made the two categories indistinguishable. (”Language is the house that man lives in,” says the heroine in Godard’s 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER, echoing Tati’s equation in PLAYTIME of architecture and communication.)

Consider R.P.’s astonishing re-enactment of being beaten by his grandmother in LIVE IN CONCERT (”Don’t-you-run-from-me — not as long as you black!“) — one word per stroke, as he sculpts a staccato, crab-like chain of blows given and received across the stage, oppressor and victim maniacally encased inside the same voice and body. Then he discovers that he can’t reply to the verbal charges without having his words repeated precisely by his grandmother, to the tune of further blows. As a musical/physical experience, this is as rich with overlapping rhythms and textures as the switcharound breaks featuring sustained flurries of notes taken by Charlie P. on “A Night in Tunisia” –- and, miraculously enough, just as funny.

***

3. R.P. & Mister Charlie

At a time when race relations in America have degenerated from unspoken resentment to mutually acknowledged hostility, when school integration programs have ground to a near halt, when the Reagan administration is working overtime to undo all that the 1954 Supreme Court decision made possible, when unemployment among blacks is more than twice that of whites, Richard Pryor is a star….A black man stands on a stage and ticks off the foibles of “white folks” and “niggers”. It is as if absolution were being granted…

…The fact that American society is desperately in need of satire at this particular moment partially accounts for the perception of Pryor in such a fashion, but something else is going on. A black man who barks but doesn’t bite is irresistibly appealing to a nation torn apart by racial strife.

– David Ehrenstein, “Beginning of the End of Richard Pryor,” Los Angeles Reader, April 9, 1982

Beginning with this provocative charge by a black critic that Pryor is currently being used -– with or without his own awareness or control -– as a vehicle for political containment, even in his latest concert film, we might as well stress that whatever his comic/dialectical gifts and/or his limitations, Pryor is not about to be reducible to the needs and dictates of anybody’s particular political program. (Neither was Chaplin or Parker, nonjoiners both, although both were hounded and harassed by bluenoses and official law-abiding bodies as if they were -– the first out of America, the second to his death.)

In their recent non-book on Pryor called This Cat’s Got 9 Lives! (Delilah), Fred Robbins and David Ragan recall, among other notorious events, Pryor’s diatribe at a Gay Lib benefit at the Hollywood Bowl in 1977 -– apparently provoked, according to Michael Schultz, by Pryor having observed racist behavior backstage just before he appeared. Lambasting an audience of 17,000, most of them white, for “cruising” on Hollywood Boulevard “when the niggers was burning down Watts,” he reportedly went on for fifteen minutes of abuse before exiting with an invitation to “kiss my happy rich black ass” –- a sassy sign-off that sounds a bit like smooth Daddy Rich and crazy Jeff rolled into one.

The ads for the unrated LIVE IN CONCERT showed us a realistic drawing of R.P.’s face and torso -– pained, piqued and angry, practically crucified in his jacket and tie, but life-size. Three years later, ads for the R-rated LIVE ON THE SUNSET STRIP –- released in a noticeably smaller country shrunk by Reaganomics and the devaluation created by hyperbole —  show him considerably larger than life, a Gulliver on the Strip with cheering crowds below, holding one foot and yammering in agony as if a car has just run over it. In this passage from life-size equal to oversized icon, Pryor may indeed be, as Ehrenstein fears, embarked on the beginning of his end. In America, this is called “success”.

LIVE IN CONCERT –- an act of boundless courage, generosity, beauty, imagination, and wit -– presented us with a lot of heavy-duty shit: R.P.’s heart attack (expressed collectively by a chorus of different characters and voices, some of them white); R.P. shooting his wife’s car with a Magnum (the sounds of perishing tires and motor both lovingly recreated); his father’s death; whites and blacks crying differently at funerals; women R.P. has sex with who can’t come; R.P. getting beaten (with switches and fists, by grandmother and father), or finding roaches in his grandmother’s cooking. By contrast, LIVE ON THE SUNSET STRIP is a piece of cake, and he knows it. He also knows what he can do now, and that’s the major disappointment; in the earlier film, he was still discovering his capacities, finding his strength, and luxuriating in the power of that knowledge.

The new movie, much less funny and Shakespearean (and structured with all the apparent “spontaneity” of a fireside chat), is largely concerned with Pryor’s simple fears — of a black mass-murderer encountered at Arizona State Penitentiary, of whites who give rebel yells at night, of the chummy Mafia gangster he worked for at a nightclub in Youngstown, Ohio, when he was nineteen — and his simple day-to-day preoccupations (e.g., problems with money and lawyers, marital fidelity, memories of learning how to masturbate). His degree of candor remains admirable and touching; he even comments on his own nervousness about doing well, knowing how much is expected of him. Yet he mainly seems interested in keeping himself protected, under wraps -– like most of Susan Sontag’s writing since her own close brush with death. (“Canetti’s thought is conservative in the most literal sense,”she writes in her most recent collection of essays [Under the Sign of Saturn]. “It -– he -– does not want to die.”)

There are times when one can speak of Pryor as one spoke of Charles Mingus -– or as film theorist Raymond Bellour once wrote of Fritz Lang’s two Indian films, when he alluded to “an inability to lie carried to the point of tragedy”. Just as Lang’s refusal to gloss over the artificial joins in his sumptuous 1959 adventure spectacle foregrounds the simplicity of his childlike generic structure, Pryor’s aversion to slickness and predictability can sometimes keep him interesting and truthful in the most threadbare projects, even when it works against his material.

Up to a point, one can applaud his honesty in admitting that he’s grateful for prisons. But I’d much rather honor the primal directness of the following, from LIVE IN CONCERT, which tells me a lot more, with a touch of poetry besides: “If I’m walkin down the street, and I see a motherfucker laid out with slobber and shit hanging outa their mouth, they ain’t gonna make it….Cause you could be givin somebody mouth-to-mouth, and death could ease into your lungs.” There are no sentiments or images quite as stark as that in the newer film, which has more to do with simply laying low. Significantly, R.P. starts off by observing that “There’s not enough fuckin goin on in America” –- less under Reagan than under Carter -– and then goes on to talk about masturbation. (Reagan, alas, gets dropped.)

A trip to Africa provides Pryor with some of his best notions and routines; his physical and vocal embodiments of the “bad smells” that he and an African hitchhiker inflict on one another in a rented car is a masterpiece of insight and inflection. But when he describes his “magical experience” of deciding, upon leaving Africa, that “there were no niggers”-– realizing he hadn’t thought or spoken the word in three weeks, and promising that he’ll never use that word again –-his Born Again context puts me in mind of Malcolm X, in his great autobiography, dramatically and expediently staging his own enlightenment about racial harmony in Mecca some time after it actually took place. The feelings are both warranted and affecting, yet they’re too self-consciously and willfully “placed” here to convince entirely. Vowing never to say “nigger” (or to play Mudbone) again sounds suspiciously like a program for Pryor — and a trap. One feels that he’s trying to rise to the insuperable, quasi-religious demands that are being placed on him, and failing honorably.

His recounted tryst with a Playboy bunny, who makes him talk like a little boy while she undresses, perfectly illustrates the kind of infantile regression and retreat that were mastered earlier by Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis. “She gave birth to me about 9:30,” Pryor concludes. In LIVE IN CONCERT, he sketched out his metaphysics even more poetically: “My father died fucking. He did, man. He was fifty-seven and the woman was eighteen. He came and went at the same time. Didn’t nobody cry at his funeral.” Because in the one-man cinema of Richard Pryor, he who isn’t busy dying isn’t being born, either. And at his best, R.P. is always doing both.

On Location with John Carpenter’s THE THING

From the July 1982 issue of Omni. As with all the other commissioned pieces I wrote for the Arts section of that magazine, this originally ran without a title; I’ve also done a light edit on this version. Another version of this article appeared in Cahiers du Cinema, with a different title (if memory serves, this was “Beware of Imitations”).

While I was living in Europe in the 70s, I managed to watch portions of the shooting of films by Robert Bresson (Four Nights of a Dreamer), Alain Resnais (Stavisky…), and Jacques Rivette (Duelle and Noroit), but my trip to Alaska and British Columbia in December 1981 to watch a little bit of the shooting of John Carpenter’s The Thing was surely my most elaborate on-location visit, even though what I actually saw was much briefer in this case — hardly any more than an hour or two at most. And I didn’t even get to speak to Carpenter during my visit; absurdly enough, by arrangement with the film’s publicist, the interview in this piece was conducted over the phone several days later, with Carpenter calling me from Hollywood, after I returned to Hoboken, making the cassette recorder I had carried on my trip completely unnecessary and some portions of this piece necessarily deceitful. I received this assignment almost immediately after I was fired from my only steady source of income at the time — a weekly stint of reviewing movies and books for the Soho New — which somehow added to my overall sense of incongruity about the entire experience. — J.R.

We all know what the Klondike is: a remote frontier, raging with blizzards, where W.C. Fields can look out the door of his log cabin, dryly remark, “T’ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast,” and then get a fistful of snow dutifully thrown at his kisser. Such, at any rate, was the image conjured up in my own mind when I discovered that I was flying all the way up to Hyder, Alaska last December, to watch one of the final days of exterior location shooting on John Carpenter’s The Thing — a remake of a 1951 science fiction chiller — set somewhere in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle and budgeted at $11.5 million.

Simply in order to get to this spot, I had to fly from New York City to Seattle for a night’s stopover, continue on Alaskan Airlines up to Katchikan, and then proceed in a private, amphibian, four-seater plane — 6,000 feet over narrow, forbidding valleys edged with snowy peaks, for an hour of spectacular vertigo — which eventually docked in Hyder. From there, it was another hour up a twisting, one-way mountain road to the ultrascenic location — an Air Force compound where Carpenter, his all-male cast, and his crew had set up camp.

For all those familiar with the scary, low-budget original — produced and supervised by the late Howard Hawks and directed by his sometime editor Christian Nyby — the movie is a model of talky, fast-paced, macho group interaction, bearing all the earmarks of Hawks’s own films as a director, such as Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday. Critic Manny Farber described it at the time as a “well-cast story, as raw and ferocious as Hawk’s Scarface, about a battle of wits near the North Pole between a screaming banshee of a vegetable and an air-force crew that jabbers away as sharply and sporadically as Jimmy Cagney moves.”  Carpenter is a devoted Hawks fan in his own right. He included clips of the original film version of The Thing (shown on a TV screen) in his hit Halloween, and he was already featuring lengthy tributes to Hawks’s Rio Bravo in his earlier Assault on Precinct 13. It would seem you’d have a faithful adaptation on your hands. (The script is by Bill Lancaster, son of Burt, whose principal previous credit is The Bad News Bears.) Yet the funny thing about Carpenter’s remake is that it is faithful, but not to Hawks. Carpenter’s object of fidelity is the 1938 story that the Hawks movie was loosely based on — “Who Goes There?”, by John W. Campbell, Jr. — which Hawks, Nyby, and veteran scriptwriter Charles Lederer overhauled without any compunction.

“The original movie has always been one of my favorites,” Carpenter confessed to me at one point. For a lot of reasons, like its mood and style. And at the time it came out, it was very powerful — at least for me, as a young kid — and very frightening. In Halloween, I felt that the way the shape was portrayed was somewhat like the way the monster from outer space in The Thing was portrayed. You don’t really see it too clearly.

“In terms of remaking the film, that’s a different issue,” Carpenter continued. “In addition, I’ve always admired the story that The Thing came from. It’s an entirely different animal, and I’ve always wanted to remake — or, actually, make – that short story basically the way it was written.” Unlike the Frankenstein monsterlike, self-regenerating, eight-foot-tall vegetable in the 1951 movie, played by James Arness, the monster in Campbell’s version sports three eyes, “four tentaclelike arms” (each of which has a “seven- tentacled hand”), blazing blue hair “crawling like worms,” and rubbery flesh, and it’s only four feet tall. Its true horror, though, is less its appearance than its endless capacity to consume and duplicate living matter of all kinds, thereby threatening to conquer the whole planet.

A “problem” story of the sort that John Campbell was famous for developing (as an editor of Astounding Stories), “Who Goes There?” shares with the Hawks film a strong sense of human interaction. According to another celebrated science-fiction writer, the late C.M. Kornbluth, it isn’t a “monster story” at all, but “a story about maintaining integrity, working together, using brains and courage to solve the problems of survival in an indifferent world.”

“That’s somewhat right,” Carpenter said to me when I read him this quotation. “We emphasize another aspect of it: A group of people are confronted with this problem –that one, or more, or all of them could be the same, that is, be taken over by the Thing — and we concentrate on the amount of paranoia this produces between them. It’s about losing your identity.”

Losing your identity in the snowy wilds of Alaska seems like a simple matter as soon as you realize what you have to wear in order to get around in it, which tends to make you resemble everyone else — an insulated, bulky snowperson. (My own badge was a briefcase holding my cassette recorder, which made me feel almost as doltish as Scotty, the hapless journalist who tags along with the Air Force in the 1951 movie.) Such elaborate apparel becomes necessary, though, only when you’re up on the remote mountain where Carpenter is shooting about 4,000 feet above sea level, not far from copper and gold mines and right next to a big glacier.

Back down the mountain, in the small border town of Hyder, one proves one’s mettle otherwise, in more interior pursuits. At the Glacier Inn, you can get yourself Hyderized with Everclear, 190-proof corn liquor — free if you can down it in one gulp, the cost of staking everyone in the house to a drink if you can’t. Rather than elect for either option, I content myself with coffee laced with 100-proof Yukon Jack. “A taste born of hoary nights, when lonely men struggled to keep their fires lit and cabins warm,” says the label, although the stuff is bottled in Connecticut.

Right across the border from Hyder is the town of Stewart, in British Columbia, where I’m staying along with a goodly portion of the cast and crew. A town of about 2,500 inhabitants that was much larger during the gold-rush days, Stewart had other traffic with film units before Carpenter’s entourage arrived. Back in the early Twenties newsreel producer R.J. Surratt filmed an old-time dance at the schoolhouse and local mining activity, and much more recently Donald Sutherland, Vanessa Redgrave, and Richard Widmark came to town for location shooting on Bear Island (1979).

Now the stars are less plentiful. Only Kurt Russell, a veteran of the Disney studios who also played Snake, the lead in Carpenter’s Escape from New York, is likely to be familiar to many filmgoers. A considerable portion of The Thing’s budget is being given over instead to elaborate special effects. Most of these have been created at Universal City Studios by an impressive team headed by Roy Arbogast (who did special mechanical effects on Close Encounters of the Third Kind), including Rob Bottin (designer of the special makeup effects in The Howling) and Oscar-winner Albert Whitlock (of Earthquake fame).

On location between takes, the publicist describes such fancy effects created there as a fireball racing down a corridor and a spinning floor inside the same snowbound compound. Here in Alaska, the main order of the day is getting Macready (Russell) to use a blowtorch to set fire to an apparently mad biologist named Blair (Wilford Brimley), then blow up Blair’s shack and a storage hut with TNT.

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“I prefer working on a soundstage,” Carpenter admits, standing standing outside the compound exterior, a facade lined with glittering icicles, under a string of eerie blue lights. He also confesses that he misses some of the challenges inherent in low-budget shooting, where there’s less of a “tyranny of money,” and it’s clear that effects work isn’t his favorite part of filmmaking: “I didn’t like it on Dark Star, when I had sixty thousand dollars, and this is just as difficult.”

Location shooting has its worries, too. In June 1981, while doing second-unit work on the Juneau ice field, he and his crew briefly found themselves snowbound; again, while en route down the mountains in a helicopter, he got caught in a snowstorm and experienced a white-out. “I’m not enjoying myself on this location; it’s probably the hardest shoot I ever had. But so far the results have been really astonishing. They open the film up.”

In the night sequences that are filmed next, which understandably have to be done in single takes, stuntman Tony Cecere, ignited by a blowtorch, crashes through a compound wall and window and into the snow, where he staggers for several feet before dropping. Cecere is a specialist in getting roasted under see-through insulation for different movies, and this is his twenty-eighth burn in half as many months, but there’s still a nurse from Stewart on hand just in case something goes wrong. Then Macready blows Blair’s shack to bits with some dynamite — a blast loud enough to make me and much of the crew jump.

Finally the set gets cleared for the explosion of the storage hut — filmed by two cameras at 30 frames per second — which we watch from a distance, blossoming like a livid smear against the dark sky. It’s a calm evening otherwise, but you’d never know it in the scenes being shot, which are all equipped with Ritter wind machines and plastic snowflakes spilled in front of them, to ensure proper blizzard ambience.

Somewhat later Carpenter will respond to one of my queries — “Is this version of The Thing pro-science  like Campbell’s story, or anti-science like Hawks’s movie?” — by asserting that he’s trying to make his version “pro-human”. “It’s better to be a human being than an imitation, or let ourselves be taken over by this creature who’s not necessarily evil, but whose nature it is to simply imitate, like a chameleon.” But as I reflect on my icy ride back down the mountain, if the characters inside the compound are experiencing an identity crisis, the same might be said of the snowflakes outside.

On William Pechter

From Film Comment, July-August 1982. — J.R.

Movies Plus One by William S. Pechter, 246 pp., index, Horizon Press, $14.95.

Ever since certain American film critics have taken to collecting their own reviews and/or commanding their own screenings, the solipsistic nature of their profession has tended to grow. It is a tendency that crosses cult boundaries, characterizing the Neros of the profession as well as the Babbitts, the scarlet empresses as well as the Sylvia Scarletts. In her celebrated and lengthy attack on Pauline Kael in the New York Review of Books two summers ago, Renata Adler indirectly broached this problem by singling out the distressing evidence of one very gifted intelligence having run amok — a charge largely made on stylistic and rhetorical grounds, and persuasively shaped around the assumption that what was really at stake was not movies at all, but prose and the relation between writers and readers. The greatest, lasting value of Adler’s remarkable piece was its illumination of this sticky problem as a general tendency — not its ostensible project of bringing the reader the head of Pauline Kael, which gave it all its publicity.

For a wider application of what Adler was talking about, one need only turn to Kael’s arch-rival Andrew Sarris — a critic so adroit at exposing his own solipsistic stances that he’s never needed an Adler to point them out. In Sarris’ introduction to his last book, Politics and Cinema, he’s all too willing to do the debunking himself: “I have had to assign readings [to my students] in Eisenstein and Pudovkin and Rotha and Kracauer and Spottiswoode and Reisz and Lindgren and Balasz and Manvell and Sadoul and Grierson and Wright and Arnheim so that all these forgotten Marxist film historians and aestheticians could provide a frame of reference for my own revisionist theories on the cinema.” The message is unmistakable: All roads lead to Sarris, and the buck stops here.

None of this is to suggest that only such Cold-War antagonists as Kael and Sarris are mesmerized by mirrors. With no difficulty at all, I could run through the rest of the profession whose columns have made it into hardcovers, from Adler herself to Stanley Kauffmann, Dwight Macdonald, John Simon, and the results would invariably be the same. (”I know something about cinema after forty years,” Macdonald boasts in On Movies, but twenty pages later he’s freely admitting that it’s taken him “forty years to realize” that “lap-dissolve” doesn’t mean holding a camera in your lap.)

The problem amounts to an occupational hazard, and one thing that can be said in William Pechter’s favor at the outset is that he’s well aware of it himself. “Of course, there’s always a danger that an emphasis on one’s own individual response can degenerate into mere exhibitionism,” he points out in his foreword, “but it nevertheless seemed to me important to admit to the various instances of predisposition and prejudice with which I went to certain films.” Subtitled Seven Years of Film Reviewing, Movies Plus One mainly consists of Pechter’s film columns for Commentary (most of them revised), and more or less picks up from where his first and last collection, Twenty-Four Times a Second: Films and Film-Makers (Harper & Row, 1971), which covered a decade, left off.

Like all the aforementioned critics, Pechter often has to establish his own former responses on which to hang his more recent ones. Indulging in this solipsistic practice myself, I can see that my last recorded response to Pechter was in this magazine nine years ago, in an article about Raymond Durgnat (May-June 1973). I divided several critics, all male, into the macho categories of Big Game Hunters (”disciplined, academic, and generally traditional in their aesthetic values,” and ostensibly looking for masterpieces), including Kauffmann, Macdonald, James Agee, Georges Sadoul, Jean Mitry, Lewis Jacobs, Robin Wood, and Pechter; and Explorers (all “relatively cranky, kinky, and eclectic”), including Durgnat, Manny Färber, Jean-Luc Godard, and Robert Warshow. (Wood, I might add, took such exception to my category for himself - omitting all the other critics, in classic solipsistic fashion — that he entided the first chapter of his own collection Personal Views, “Big Game: Confessions of an Unconstructed Humanist.”)

Now that I’m reconsidering those categories, I’m wondering if Pechter (and more recent Wood for that matter, too) doesn’t belong, with just as much justice, in the second category. Even if Pechter exhibits the relative sternness of a Kauffmann, Macdonald, or Simon in admitting relatively few masterpieces into his canon (”One might say of film criticism what one can say of so many things: that one gets the kind one wants; and many, it seems, want not criticism so much as public relations”), what one remembers most from his writing isn’t so much the conclusions as the processes leading to them. Gilberto Perez essentially made this point while reviewing Pechter’s first book for Sight and Sound: “Everywhere in his work we sense him grappling with his subject, working out his argument rather than giving us answers that he knew beforehand.”

This continues to be true in Movies Plus One, even if Pechter’s search often has to rub shoulders with the glibber journalistic assumptions and wisecracks that pepper his prose like bright comets arriving from outer space: “Leonard Cohen has always struck me as the Rod McKuen of the semiliterate”; That’s Entertainment “might be described alternatively as M-G-M’s going-out-of-business sale and the first coffee-table movie”; “I think I can do without twanging guitars as deceptively sunny accompaniment to somber drama, and I know I can do without Kris Kristofferson’s groaning, for the rest of my life.” More characteristically, he’s running through a gamut of ideas on a given subject that are likely to swerve in unexpected directions: Two pages after he’s entertaining the (to me) rather incredible notion that “Carnal Knowledge presents a feminist or at least antimale-chauvinist view of the relations between the sexes,” he’s rightly pointing out that Jack Nicholson’s rapport with the audience is such that “in the scene in which he brutally berates Ann-Margret, even though his is the unsympathetic character, his appeal as a screen personality has the audience in his hands.”

Sometimes Pechter can be counted on to be the only prominent critic around who’s right when the bulk of his colleagues are wrong. As far as I know, he’s the only American reviewer who seems to know what’s happening conceptually at the end of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, and he is comparably insightful about such diverse phenomena as the extraordinary eroticism of Walkabout, the hole in the screen generally made by Woody Allen as a dramatic presence, and the exciting ambivalence of Antonioni towards the activity of the Alain Delon character in the stock-market sequences of Eclipse, which reminds Pechter of Yeats’ “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” (To be more solipsistically precise about this, what I mean by “right” and “insightful” is that he agrees with me.) The only factual errors I noticed were a confusion of Porky Pig with Bugs Bunny in Jack Nicholson’s imitation near the end of Carnal Knowledge and of Claude Chabrol’s Que la bête meure or This Man Must Die with Jules Dassin’s He Who Must Die.

On other occasions, Pechter’s own solipsistic attributes seem to get the better of him, crowding out what I regard as simple common sense. When he complains, in Kael-like fashion, that “going to a movie like Little Murders or Carnal Knowledge . . . has become as dull and ‘worthwhile’ an experience as going to a concert or the theater,” he leaves me distinctly puzzled as to how his writing about these movies in Commentary is supposed to counteract this trend. In order to play a game of macho one-upmanship regarding Robert Altman, he reaches for a stupid racist epithet gleaned from a joke told by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, apparently unaware of what it sounds like to say, “Altman may now have emerged as the foremost directorial stylist in the contemporary American film, but he makes movies like a Chinaman.” (It’s the facileness of such phrasemaking that I largely object to. Later, in a footnote, Pechter congratulates himself on his “rare bit of prescience” in predicting the failure of 1900, as if this required the services of a soothsayer. For comparable unconscious solipsism, I can only think of the following remark, encountered in Budd Schulberg’s 1972 The Four Seasons of Success: “I have always found writers even more sensitive than women to the milestones of age.”)

Then there are Pechter’s curious judgments that Bobby Darin in Too Late Blues offers “probably the only truly memorable performance” in all of John Cassavetes’ films, and that the poolroom brawl in the same film is “probably the single best-directed sequence in any Cassavetes film” — plausible only if one identifies with Darin and the crazed macho of that scene, incomprehensible if one doesn’t. (Personally, I find Everett Chambers in the same film a good deal more memorable — which probably brands me equally.)

Striking exceptions to this stance are Pechter’s regrets that certain films by Marco Bellocchio (notably, Victory March, the subject of “1976 Minus One”) and Satyajit Ray (in 1971, Days and Nights in the Forest) are undistributed in the U.S., his enjoyable retrospective digressions on the musical and James Cagney, and his periodic, rueful complaint that no great film has wended its way in his direction in this or that year. The latter fact may be irrelevant to my filmgoing life, but it’s central to his — a recurring problem in books of this kind.

In the course of expressing his respect for the formal conservatism of Eric Rohmer’s work — while admitting to some understandable qualms about the philistine uses to which this conservatism is sometimes put by other reviewers — Pechter hits on an ambivalence that approximates my own divided response to his criticism. Unlike the conservatism of a Manny Farber or a Donald Phelps, Pechter’s approach generally has more to do with how to think about films than with how to look at or listen to them. And in his choices of what to write about — in spite of an overall symmetrical shapeliness in the book that engagingly links first chapter to last, and such title chapter headings as “One Plus One,” “Movies Minus One,” and “1976 Minus One” — he’s usually so passive and uncritical about the whims of the marketplace and middlebrow chic that his book often reads like a record of his victimization. So many bad movies and sour stomachs: Rio Lobo, Bed and Board, The Boy Friend, Little Murders, A Clockwork Orange, What’s Up, Doc?, Deep Throat, Sleeper, Love and Anarchy, The Killer Elite, Buffalo Bill and the Indians. So many dead, crappy movies this book brings back to memory: To what avail?

I find all this a genuine pity. For during the same seven years that Pechter was training his intelligence on Allen, Altman, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Cassavetes, Coppola, Fosse, Kubrick, Malick, and Peckinpah, he was also consigning to oblivion such movies as Au Hasard Balthazar, La Camion, Celine and Julie Go Boating, History Lessons, Jeanne Dielman, Numéro Deux, Out 1: Spectre, Playtime, Scenes from Under Childhood, and Michael Snow’s trilogy of camera movement — none of which is even cited in his index. Admittedly, Commentary readers might not have sat still through columns about such films — all of which strike me as more enduring, intelligent, and interesting (a favorite Pechter word) than most of the items in his lackluster hit parade — but there’s no evidence that Pechter misses them at all, either. Indeed, defined by his genre of hardcover, collected criticism as a self-sufficient majority of one, there’s no reason why he necessarily should. But if he’s supposed to be writing about the state of the art in the early Seventies, his pickings are depressingly slim.

The Cutting Edge

From The Movie, Chapter 108, 1982. -– J.R.

The earliest principles of editing shots together were perhaps no more simple or complex than those of bricklaying; they served, at any rate, to perform the same sort of basic architectural function. In an early narrative film by Georges Méliès, Le Voyage dans la lune (1902, A Trip to the Moon), elaborately staged tableaux in front of a stationary camera — the filmmaker himself called them ‘artificially arranged scenes’ — succeed one another through the medium of dissolves. A bevy of chorus girls waves goodbye to a rocket ship fired from a cannon (one tableau), the moon is seen approaching (another tableau, effected through a moving, artificial moon rather than a moving camera), and the rocket ship lands splat in the eye of the Man in the Moon (still another tableau). By the time Méliès was making Le Tunnel sous la Manche ou le Cauchemar Franco-Anglais (l907, Tunneling the English Channel), five years later, his visual structures were more complex, so that an entire narrative could proceed in the form of individual split-screen diptychs. In each of them, an Englishman and Frenchman attempt to cross the channel towards each other from opposite sides of the screen. Yet even here, the complexity is entirely a matter of what is contained within the shots, not what happens between them.

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, Edwin S. Porter, a cameraman working for Thomas Edison, was experimenting with a quite different principle of telling a story in two films he directed. The Great Train Robbery and Life of an American Fireman (both 1903). The latter film begins with a somewhat fanciful tableau; a fire-chief asleep in his chair is seen dreaming of a woman and a child inside a burning house, the latter appears as a vignette or ‘dream balloon’ over his head. Then, in quick succession, we see the fire alarm being sounded, firemen getting out of their dormitory beds and sliding down a pole into the engine house, the fire engines starting up, the doors of the fire station opening, the fire engines leaving. Then, after an already classic ‘to the rescue’ chase sequence of the horse-drawn fire trucks rushing to the scene of the fire — put together from stock shots culled from previous Edison films — Porter took two radically unprecedented steps. First, he cut to a studio set of the burning house’s interior, where the woman calls from the window for help before collapsing on a bed; a ladder and subsequently a fireman arrive at the window to save her and her child; then the fire is extinguished. Secondly, he cut to an exterior of a burning house that proceeded to show the same sequence of events already seen in the previous shot.

Audiences were confused, perhaps because the thread of the story was broken by the repetition of events — which could imply that the second sequence must, in narrative time, follow on from the first. As audiences could not accept this form of instant replay, a differently edited version of Life of an American Fireman was also made. The second version cuts freely between the inside and outside of the burning house to render the whole sequence of events only once, but from alternating viewpoints. This solution offers an early example of the capacity of editing to create an imaginary unity of place and event (significantly, Porter filmed the interior and exterior sequences in separate locations, many miles apart) -– an approach that is perceived by audiences as analytical, or breaking a single event into smaller units.

The development, expansion and elaboration of this principle in the films of D. W. Griffith began only five years later, when he embarked on his prolific career as a film director for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1908 -– making no less than 136 films during his first year at the job. Cross-cutting can indeed be discerned in both his eleventh film, The Fatal Hour, and his thirty-fourth, After Many Years [see above photos], but it was while shooting his twelfth film, For Love of Gold, that he asked for a second shot of a particular scene to be taken from a new position which was closer to the actors, and asked that the two shots be spliced together in the finished film. (In The Squaw’s Love, made in 1911, he extended this notion by filming an almost unrepeatable stunt with three cameras at once.)

All in the head

To understand the importance of Griffith’s contribution to the art of editing as we know it today, it is important to appreciate that the work was essentially all done in his head, at least during the formative stages of his career. The film historian and Griffith biographer Seymour Stern emphasizes the significance of Griffith’s ‘directorial editing’ — how he shot such films as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and lntolerance (7916) without the benefit of scripts or even notes in the ordinary sense. In fact, Griffith largely edited films as he directed them. John Ford, a Griffith disciple, made films in a similar manner, so that they could be edited essentially only one way afterwards.

The fact that Griffith employed two cutters for many years, James and Rose Smith, did not mean they effectively edited any of his films. Their job was the mechanical one of assembling each day’s rushes, using numbered shots or takes for easy reference, sparing Griffith the routine labor of preparing them — a job which still persists in film-making to the present day. Griffith’s own contribution as editor was a good deal more complex and various. It could involve such expressive techniques as using a lap dissolve (where one shot gradually merges into another — a device introduced by Méliès) to bring a historical facsimile to life as, for example, in the transition from the empty chamber of the House of Representatives in Columbus, South Carolina in The Birth of a Nation to the appearance in 1868 of the legislators and gallery visitors in the same seating. On a more advanced level, it involved the careful rhythmic orchestration of an entire sequence, such as the climactic ride of the vengeful Ku Klux Klansmen in that film, which the poet Vachel Lindsay described as the spectacle of an ‘Anglo-Saxon Niagara,’ erupting on the screen in all its cumulative force.

This depended, of course, upon an overall musical sense of tempo and movement that Griffith was to experiment with even more recklessly and excitingly in Intolerance, his most ambitious film, where he fashioned a filmic ‘fugue’ out of four separate stories taking place in four separate historical periods. As Griffith explained his method:

‘The purpose of the production is to trace a universal theme through various episodes of the race’s history. Ancient, sacred, medieval and modern times are considered. Events are not set forth in their historical sequence or according to the accepted forms of dramatic construction, but as they might flash across a mind seeking to parallel the life of the different ages. The stories will begin like four currents looked at from a hilltop. At first the four currents will flow apart, slowly and quietly. But as they flow, they grow nearer and nearer together, and faster and faster, until in the end, in the last act, they mingle in one mighty river of expressed emotion.’

Interestingly enough, Griffith’s emphasis on the primacy of the imagination over the strict chronology of events themselves — a factor which would be taken up and expanded upon by a whole generation of Soviet film-makers, and a whole tradition of filmmaking that succeeded them — hearkens back to the implications of cutting between an interior and an exterior shot of separate buildings in Life of an American Fireman. In both cases, film time (and narrative time) is already becoming something that is distinct from real time, just as film space (in the example of the Porter film) is already becoming distinguished from real space.

As a basis for his construction of Intolerance, Griffith started with a film with a contemporary setting which he had already completed, The Mother and the Law (1919). To this tale of a poor couple’s struggle against social, economic and legal injustice he added three more stories: in ancient Babylon, a mountain girl rushing to warn her king, Belshazzar, of his betrayal by his judges and the onrush of Cyrus’ Persian army; Christ struggling towards Calvary; and French mercenaries massacring a crowd on St Bartholomew’s Day (and a Huguenot hero fighting his way through a crowd to rescue his sweetheart). Finally, the four stories were linked thematically by a recurring refrain shot of Lillian Gish rocking a cradle, introduced and followed by intertitles adapted from lines by Walt Whitman: ‘Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,’ ‘Today as yesterday, endlessly rocking, ever bringing the same joys and sorrows’.

Perhaps the boldest of all of Griffith’s grand editing schemes was the combining of these interacting elements to make up Intolerance; but the scheme and idea failed with the general public almost as dramatically as The Birth of a Nation had succeeded. The grand design neither registered nor brought the sort of audience involvement and identification of its blockbuster predecessor. For Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the flaw came not in the execution but in the very conception:

‘The four episodes chosen by Griffith are actually uncollatable. The formal failure of their mingling in a single image of Intolerance is only a reflection of a thematic and ideological error . . . The secret of this is not professional-technical, but ideological-intellectual.’

The core of the fault, Eisenstein went on to say, is that Griffith ‘made no attempt at a genuinely thoughtful abstraction of phenomena — at an extraction of generalized conclusions on historical phenomena from a wide variety of historical data . . .’

Yet even if it failed as a whole, on its own terms Intolerance can still be regarded in many ways as a compendium of the expressive and formal possibilities of narrative editing at the time. Critic Raymond Durgnat, for one, has written persuasively of the organization of separate movements at the film’s climax, which provides an excellent example of editing and mise en scène working hand in glove to form an indissoluble whole:

‘Griffith contrasts the steady, sweeping, winding curve of the train with the car’s bullet-like movement on a twisting, switch-back-like road — meanwhile the three prison officials bob up the little staircase to the scaffold with a petty, jagged, insistent movement, like the meticulous ticking of a watch. The surging train, the yo-yoing car, the brisk little movements in the condemned cell, all form a choreographic “whirlpool” of movements.’

Soviet experiments

The central importance of Griffith for many Soviet film-makers was that he raised the possibility of editing as a ruling aesthetic principle to supersede all others. More scientifically and theoretically minded, Lev Kuleshov, V. I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov and Eisenstein all turned this possibility into the starting point for a dazzling workshop of experiments that made montage the key word in cinema. Kuleshov discovered that juxtapositions of shots of actors with other shots could fundamentally change their meaning. A shot of a smiling actor, a close-up of a gun and then a shot of the same actor frightened demonstrated that he was a coward, yet the same shots seen in reverse order demonstrated that he was courageous. Three separate audiences saw the same close-up of the actor Mosjukhin joined to a different shot: a bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin, a little girl playing. The first audience found him pensive, the second thought he was sorrowful, the third believed him happy and light-hearted.

On the basis of these and related discoveries, Pudovkin fashioned a theory of what British filmmaker Karel Reisz has called ‘constructive editing’, while Eisenstein developed an intricate theory of intellectual montage. That Pudovkin’s theory has found more favor and usage among mainstream commercial directors (such as Stanley Kubrick) than Eisenstein’s is not very surprising, for the former is mainly devoted to the construction of narratives, the latter more interested in the construction of ideas.

The role of the editor in most documentaries is, of course, much more crucial and necessarily creative than the role of the editor in ordinary features (which are tied to narrative continuities, and are therefore more dependent on pre-existing structures that are already present at the script level). While the way in which a documentary is shot obviously already represents a whole chain of choices, the leeway accorded to the documentary film editor, even with relatively limited material, is nonetheless more substantial — for it is she or he who ultirnately shapes that material. Thus the editing of most features is a matter of clarification or (in some cases) transformation, as when an. editor such as Ralph Rosenblum radically reshapes The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1958 ) — a process described at considerable length in his controversial book When the Shooting Stops. The editing of most documentaries, however, is more nearly a matter of creation. And in the case of complete documentary film-makers such as Robert Flaherty and Jean Rouch — as with Griffith and the climactic sequence of Intolerance – shooting and editing become two sides of the same coin (that is, integral parts of a singular process).

Credit where credit is due

The assembly-line methods of Hollywood production has tended to work against this unity of purpose, and the separate whims and desires of producers and preview audiences have also to be taken into account in the course of achieving the film’s final form. It is probably here that the professional film editor parts company with the professional film critic, who usually ascribes final responsibility to the director or scriptwriter, most often without actually knowing what other forces may or may not have intervened to shape the final product. Interestingly, if paradoxically, Ralph Rosenblum’s book about his work as a film editor has been regarded by some of his colleagues as a betrayal of his profession, because the work of an editor is generally meant to be invisible and unnoticed. (When, a few years ago, leading American, English and French editors were polled by a film magazine about the work they were proudest of, a significant number of them refused to cite those cases of disasters that they had salvaged or transformed.) By forcing certain issues out into the open, Rosenblum has only dramatized the extent to which Hollywood ‘likes to mask and simplify the complexities that lurk behind its own ‘creative’ profile (which criticism, through such vehicles as the auteur theory, has been all too willing to comply with).

Despite this limitation, many long-term working relationships between editors and directors have been mutually enhancing and productive., The rapport between Anne Bauchens, and Cecil B. De Mille, Dede Allen and Arthur Penn, Jacques Gaillard and Claude Chabrol. Mlchael Luciano and Robert Aldrich, or Peter Przygodda and Wim Wenders have all undoubtedly had something significant to do with the unique pulse and heartbeat of each directorial style as we perceive it, although it is doubtful if many non-professionals (or perhaps even professionals) could identify the styles of these editors without this context.

To speak of the considerable influence of supervising editors at the major studios — including such figures as Barbara McLean at 20th Century-Fox, Margaret Booth [see above] at MGM (who advised on the structures of every company release between 1939 and 1968), and Darryl F. Zanuck (a producer at 20th Century-Fox, but one who closely monitored the editing of all his pictures, as did the independent David O. Selznick) — is to speak of the forging of a corporate signature rather than a personal vision. But the prominence of this signature in determining the rhythm and feel of those movies is not to be overlooked. Surely the most respected and admired of all these figures is the legendary William Hornbeck [see below], roughly contemporary with the century, who started out as a film rewinder for Mack Sennett at the age of nine, and progressed from there to Keystone cutting-room chief in his twenties; supervising editor for Alexander and Zoltan Korda in his thirties; supervising editor, between 1942 and 1945, for Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak’s Why We Fight propaganda documentaries (and, later, editor of several Capra features) in his forties: and editor for George Stevens (A Place in the Sun, 1951; Giant, I956); and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (The Barefoot Contessa, 1954, Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959) in his fifties.

According to Verna Fields [see above, with Spielberg], the editor of What’s Up Doc? (1972) and Jaws (1975), comedy need not be cut any differently from drama (’You have to reach for emotion and that is done the same way regardless of the emotion’), although other editors have insisted that the art of editing comedy can be an especially delicate matter. Anthony Gibbs, an English editor who has done interesting and important work for Tony Richardson (A Taste of Honey, 196l: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 1962\, Richard Lester (Petulia, 1968; Juggernaut, 1974) and Nicolas Roeg (Performance, 1970, co-directed by Donald Cammell; Walkabout, 1971), has cited among his own best work the famous eating scene in Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), ‘which I assembled one Sunday morning and never touched again except to remove three feet of tricky one-frame intercuts at the very end’. In his book The Total Film-Maker, Jerry Lewis describes the crucial difference made by removing only two frames from the end of a gag sequence from The Bellboy (1960), the first of his features as a director.

Ignoring the rules

Most mainstream directors conform to common editing practices which exist until challenged by the ideas of a new generation that sees the world in a different way. Most editors of story films today would agree that the single most important phenomenon to have changed the practices of their profession has been the French nouvelle vague — in particular, the early innovations of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. It was the former who first adopted the practice of removing continuity shots and, in some cases, eliminating certain passages in the middle of smooth, continuous takes to establish the ‘jump cut’ and staccato, elliptically discontinuous editing style of A Bout de Souffle (1960, Breathless), which took the film world by storm. Resnais’ somewhat more cerebral contribution initially had more to do with the instantaneous leap taken by the subjective mind moving backward in time (or forward into an imagined future, or even sideways, into the conditional tense of the imagination), heralded by the almost subliminal flashbacks of Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), his first feature. This was expanded considerably by the ambiguous leaps between relative degrees of subjectivity and objectivity in L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961, Last Year at Marienbad), perhaps the most controversial of his efforts to establish a rhythm and landscape of the mind at an editing table.

In the case of Michelangelo Antonioni, who tends to shoot extended takes which involve intricate camera movements, shot transitions often become dramatic moments of rupture or change — the sudden transition from a camera moving gradually into a deserted town to a couple (Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti) laughing gleefully on a nearby hillside in L’Avventura (1960) is a particularly strong example. Yet at the climax of one of Antonioni’s greatest films, L’Eclisse (1962, The Eclipse) a seven-minute sequence consisting of 58 shots takes leave of both the central characters, played by Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, to create an abstract poem about their persistent absence from a building site where they promised to meet. This example of careful building-block construction shares with Griflith an effort to make direction and editing speak the same purposeful language, whereby each becomes an integral facet of the other and the resulting synthesis expresses an irreducible (if complex) thought. It is through such uses of an editor’s prerogatives that filmmaking and editing become indistinguishable.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM