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Performance Art [TORCH SONG TRILOGY & TALK RADIO]

From the Chicago Reader (December 23, 1988). — J.R.

TORCH SONG TRILOGY

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Paul Bogart

Written by Harvey Fierstein

With Harvey Fierstein, Anne Bancroft, Matthew Broderick, Brian Kerwin, Karen Young, Ken Page, and Eddie Castrodad.

TALK RADIO

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Oliver Stone

Written by Eric Bogosian and Stone

With Bogosian, Alec Baldwin, Ellen Greene, Leslie Hope, John C. McGinley, and John Pankow.

As different as they are, Torch Song Trilogy and Talk Radio, both movie adaptations of plays, have several striking things in common. Each was written by and stars the author of the original play — Harvey Fierstein and Eric Bogosian, respectively. Both deal with marginal aspects of American life that seldom find their way into the commercial mainstream, which makes them new and vital in ways that most other recent releases are not. Both are effectively (if not literally) one-man shows whose auteurs are more their Jewish writer-stars than their directors, and the impact of each is directly tied to the uncommon theatrical skills of these individuals. And perhaps most significantly, both are a good deal more professional, entertaining, intense, and compelling than any other new Hollywood releases around, even if their commercial fates are substantially more precarious than those of most of their competitors.

I haven’t seen a stage version of either play, but both works have apparently undergone substantial changes in their translations to the screen. Torch Song Trilogy began as three separately staged one-act plays dealing with the life of an outspoken professional female impersonator who hails from Brooklyn and works in a Manhattan club. It opened off-Broadway in 1981 and started a successful Broadway run the following year. The film has reportedly reduced the original material by about a third and pointedly relocated all of its action to the decade between 1971 and 1981, a period that predates the public awareness of AIDS.

Talk Radio, about a caustic radio talk-show host, started life as a performance piece staged by Eric Bogosian in Portland, Oregon, in 1985, with back-projected slides provided by artist Tad Savinar. It opened in an expanded version as a play in New York last year, with Savinar’s slides used simply as a scenic element. The movie drops the slides, shifts the action from Cleveland to Dallas, expands the play with material from Stephen Singular’s book Talked to Death: The Life and Death of Alan Berg, and adds a lengthy flashback.

While I can’t weigh the movie of Torch Song Trilogy against the play, it certainly works effectively on its own terms, even when it betrays its theatrical origins. After a brief prologue that shows the hero, Arnold Beckoff, as a child in Brooklyn in 1952, the movie leaps forward in time to the dressing room of the Manhattan club where Arnold (Harvey Fierstein) works. Arnold directly addresses the camera as he makes himself up for a musical number, and Fierstein’s command as a performer immediately takes hold. While his tete-a-tete with the spectator may initially suggest Cabaret’s Joel Grey, Fierstein’s animated clownlike features and tragicomic show-biz persona actually hark back to an older tradition: the Jewish vaudeville associated with Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor (as well as Barbra Streisand) — a mixture of wisecracking irreverence and charismatic pathos that cuts into the material (”There are easier things in life than being a drag queen”) like a stiletto.

In its first two sections, the movie charts Arnold’s extended affairs with Ed (Brian Kerwin), a bisexual school teacher, and Alan (Matthew Broderick), a young model. In the third section, Arnold is single but living with a 15-year-old adopted son named David (Eddie Castrodad) who is also gay, and the main dramatic event is a visit from Arnold’s mother (Anne Bancroft), now living in Florida. This leads to a climactic confrontation in which Fierstein the performer finally meets his match in Bancroft; Jewish tradition, as well as sexual life-style, becomes the basis for the conflict.

Although Arnold is a fairly didactic character when it comes to defending his life, the movie itself is far from preachy, and part of its power derives from its portrayal of its major characters, especially Arnold and his mother, as complex individuals rather than as ideological mouthpieces. The question of how tolerant or intolerant Arnold’s mother is about her son’s homosexuality, for instance, is posed so intricately that viewers are likely to have a variety of opinions about it. Bancroft’s remarkable performance as a Jewish mother certainly has its caricatural side — it seems to derive in part from her wonderful role in Garbo Talks but it takes on layers and shadings that place it well beyond the realm of easy cliche. Ed and Alan’s ambivalent feelings about their own gayness are similarly endowed with a lifelike density, and if these characters finally register less fully than Arnold and his mother do, this appears to be only because the story’s theatrical structure deprives us of the opportunity to view them independently of Arnold.

Simply viewed as a movie about people, Torch Song Trilogy has the kind of wit, grace, and intense feeling that Woody Allen tried for unsuccessfully in Interiors, September, and Another Woman – a comparison that seems called for not only by the New York Jewish sensibility of both Allen and Fierstein, but because of the romantic, nostalgic taste for jazz and popular music that they share. (The dynamic use of popular songs in Torch Song Trilogy — ranging from Arnold’s indelible renditions of “Dames” and “Love for Sale” to Ella Fitzgerald’s version of “This Time the Dream’s on Me” — could be profitably studied by Allen.) If there’s any justice in the world, Fierstein’s high-powered entertainment will capture an audience much larger than Allen’s, for it actually delivers the emotional voltage and moral seriousness that Allen’s family dramas only aspire to before drowning in their own mannerisms. Whether there is any justice in the world is, of course, another matter.

The compelling aspects of Talk Radio are much less warm and humanistic, though no less theatrical. They depend on a nightmarish view of an underside of American life that is associated with call-in radio talk shows and the rage and delirium that they can both uncover and elicit. The hero in this case, or more precisely the antihero, is a glib talk-show host named Barry Champlain (Eric Bogosian), an aggressive radio personality who appears nightly on a Dallas station. Champlain’s popularity depends largely on his capacity to abuse most of the listeners who call in. He cuts them off in midstream and showers them with wisecracks and insults, regardless of whether they’re friendly or hostile.

Most of the movie is set in the studio while Champlaign is on the air, and Bogosian’s mesmerizing delivery and director Oliver Stone’s inventive mise en scene are perfectly matched in making these sections alive and electric. Though constrained by a subject that’s visually static, the film is far from still. Often Champlain paces around the studio; at other times it’s the camera or the set itself that’s in motion; but either way, the effect is invariably hypnotic.

Taken as a whole, the movie is a kind of morbid meditation on the sickness of both Champlain and his audience. Its strength derives not from any fresh sociological or psychological insight, but from the questions that it poses to a movie audience about the appeal of such sickness. Through its own fascination with Champlain and his listeners the audience is directly implicated.

Although Champlain is based in part on murdered Denver talk-show host Alan Berg, as well as such similar broadcasters as Morton Downey Jr., Barry Farber, David Gold, Bob Grant, Joe Pyne, Howard Stern, and Ed Tyll, he is not so much a character as a brilliant theatrical conceit, and the movie’s biggest mistake — damaging if not fatal — is to try to make sense of him as a character. This is clearly the rationale behind a flashback (reportedly added by Stone) that deals with the failure of Champlain’s marriage, his earlier work as a clothes salesman, and his gradual rise to fame as a radio host — a self-consciously overlit sequence that winds up rasing more questions than it can satisfactorily answer. For instance, Barry changes his last name from Golden to Champlain, which sits rather oddly with his aggressive assertions of his Jewishness on the air (which are apparently derived from Berg), but this isn’t a contradiction that the film chooses to acknowledge or deal with. (In the play, the character isn’t Jewish and his original surname is Paleologus.)

An unfortunate bias of conventional American movie taste is its preference for bogus psychology and perfunctory motivation over no psychology or motivation at all, under the assumption that everything in a fictional world has to be explained and accounted for. Yet the strength of certain fictional worlds rests in their refusal to offer the bromides of easy explanations. The tortured letters included in Nathanael West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts and the blighted lives in his later novel The Day of the Locust are terrifying precisely because they suggest that certain human miseries have no solution or explanation. A similar terror is conveyed in some of the crank calls in Talk Radio — as well as in Champlain’s brutal responses, which are essentially cut from the same cloth.

This is the mysterious, provocative strength of Bogosian’s original material, and it forms the core of his driving, staccato performance. The best that can be said for Talk Radio’s embroidery of Champlain’s personality is that it doesn’t dilute, or invalidate the movie’s power — it merely adds a surplus of detachable meaning for the sake of some spectators who couldn’t cope with Champlaign without some gesture towards explaining what makes him tick. (One such spectator, alas, is Larry King in the December issue of Premiere, who argues that the movie’s best scenes are the flashbacks, and chides the remainder of the film for not offering us chestnuts of wisdom.) But the film’s truly disquieting message isn’t the secret of Champlain’s personality or the psychology of lunatics and racists; it’s the seductiveness of Champlain’s sadomasochistic style of radio, which the film asks us to both experience directly and worry about from a certain reflective distance.

While reviewing Stone’s Wall Street last Christmas, I detected certain echoes of Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s two collaborations, On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd, in that movie’s overheated, Manichaean dramaturgy. In the course of stretching out a play and trying to give it more of a plot, Talk Radio borrows again from A Face in the Crowd — particularly from its ruthless and exploitative media-star antihero, Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes — but not very much is clarified in the process. Giving Champlain a former wife who comes to visit (well played by Ellen Greene), in addition to the girlfriend (Lesley Hope) who was in the original, adds some interesting dramatic situations but some contrivances as well; and certain details from the life of Alan Berg that are superimposed on Champlain provide a comparably mixed blessing. But the meat of the material remains Champlain conversing with disembodied voices in a dimly lit studio, and Bogosian and Stone work wonders with it.

A Year at the Movies

The Puttnam Problem

Some of the year’s most ominous film-industry developments followed directly from the forced departure of David Puttnam as head of Columbia Pictures. During his brief and controversial tenure at Columbia, Puttnam–the outspoken Englishman who produced Chariots of Fire and other “quality” films–had attempted to reverse the overall trend in Hollywood of assigning more power and artistic control to stars and less to directors and writers by developing low-budget projects that weren’t completely subject to the whims of stars and their agents.

After Puttnam’s departure, the desire to discredit his strategies at Columbia was so pronounced that most of his projects were deliberately sabotaged through a flagrant lack of promotion–demonstrating once again that the major alms of Hollywood are often not so much the making of money as the fulfillment of various personal forms of vanity. (Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping is a good example of the sort of serious Puttnam project that was virtually foredoomed at the box office by the pressure of anti-Puttnam sentiments.) Adding insult to injury, a series of anti-Puttnam articles appeared in the trade magazine Variety, which attempted to appease Puttnam’s enemies by demonstrating that his films were commercially unsuccessful, conveniently overlooking the fact that very few of them were given even a sporting chance to succeed.

Hooray for Broadway

It seems grimly significant that the two most accomplished “serious” commercial films to have emerged so far at year’s end, both scheduled to open this week, are adaptations of New York stage productions, Torch Song Trilogy and Talk Radio, whose true auteurs are their playwrights/screenwriters/lead actors–Harvey Fierstein and Eric Bogosian, respectively–rather than their directors, Paul Bogart and Oliver Stone. Last Christmas season we had such personal and ambitious movies as The Last Emperor, Broadcast News, Housekeeping, Wall Street, and Empire of the Sun; this year, their only apparent equivalents are Broadway or off-Broadway imports.

Empty Spaces

By and large, it was a year characterized by technological achievements and refinements, particularly the elaborate doubling techniques that yielded two Lily Tomlins and two Bette Midlers on screen at once in Big Business, Jeremy Irons playing a pair of twins in Dead Ringers, Eddie Murphy impersonating a whole group of barbershop regulars in Coming to America, and Bob Hoskins interacting with animated characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. These roles obliged each actor to speak to empty space before the special effects were added, and the results were decidedly mixed. In the cases of Tomlin, Midler, and Murphy (the latter in multiple disguises), it seemed too often to be empty space that was speaking to the actors rather than the other way around. Irons, on the other hand, offered the year’s most astounding actorly tour de force by interacting with himself so seamlessly that, by around the halfway point in Dead Ringers, it was possible to tell which twin was which in a matter of seconds. And Bob Hoskins did a very persuasive job on his own in convincing us that Roger Rabbit was more than just a gleam in animator Richard Williams’s eye.

Political Messages

Politically speaking, it was a year of confusion at the movies, as it was elsewhere. The best ethnic movie, School Daze, as well as the worst, Coming to America, both bristled with contradictions–neither had the clarity of last year’s Born in East L.A., for instance–and the overt political concerns that last year yielded a live-action cartoon of the left (Walker) this year gave us a live-action cartoon from the right (Patty Hearst).

Insofar as the confusion of certain movies reflected the mixed messages of diverse politicians, one could tick off a number of them as emblematic of various candidates’ images. Scrooged offered the best case for George Bush by summoning up a thousand points of glitzy neon light, and a view of the homeless and powerless that reeks of show-biz piety. Big–the last and only successful entry in an extended cycle about teenage boys swapping bodies with their family elders–anticipated Dan Quayle by wistfully imagining what it would be like if grown-ups behaved more like kids. Running on Empty, which dealt with 60s values in hiding, suggested some of the muddled cross-purposes of Michael Dukakis, while Tucker’s old-fashioned humanist brand of capitalism suggested Lloyd Bentsen. They Live was so split between anti-Reagan yuppie bashing and xenophobic gook exterminating that it appeared to be arguing for something like a Dukakis/Quayle ticket. If Jesse Jackson’s values were visible anywhere in movies, it was in the Rainbow coalition of John Waters’s Hairspray. The superiority of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Soviet cop over Jim Belushi as an American cop in Red Heat represented Hollywood’s response to glasnost and an opening thaw in Cold War attitudes, but if any film represented radical subversion from the heart and soul of the mainstream, it was the rerelease of 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate. And following the lead of Cahiers du Cinema’s Bill Kroh, if any film this year told us something important about the roots of contemporary fascism, it was George Romero’s brilliant and neglected Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear.

Perhaps the most interesting exercise in political futility was the holding up of the distribution of Julian Temple’s explicitly anti-Bush disco musical comedy Earth Girls Are Easy–shown to much acclaim at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in September–until some unspecified date after the presidential election and inauguration, a decision that was apparently due in part to legal disputes over distribution rights. Fortunately, the corrosive anti-Bush and anti-Reagan documentary Coverup: Behind the Iron Contra Affair was shown before the election, and in general the most lucid political statements in film this year took a documentary form: Jon Jost’s Uncommon Senses and Marcel Ophuls’s Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie are two more outstanding examples. By contrast, docudramas such as Betrayed and Mississippi Burning probably wound up confusing more issues than they clarified; and perhaps nothing was more muddled than Clint Eastwood’s efforts in The Dead Pool to use his Dirty Harry to decry the public appetite for movie violence, in between his own bouts of mayhem.

Jesus Sells

One of the year’s most striking anomalies was Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ becoming an unwitting fund-raiser for the religious right. The irony of this turn of events was that the nationwide clamor of certain conservative religious groups, including picket lines and other demonstrations, only helped to boost the box office sales for the first few weeks of the film’s run. But if the hysteria helped to make some coin for both fundamentalists and Universal Pictures, it also probably created the worst possible critical climate for judging the film on its own merits.

Foreign Affairs

One of the most hopeful signs of the year was the commercial success of Wim Wenders’s trilingual Wings of Desire, if only because the popularity of subtitled films in the U.S. has never been lower. According to Rob Medich in the December issue of Premiere, the grosses for foreign-language films in 1987 “accounted for less than one-half of 1 percent of the $4 billion in movie ticket sales in the United States.” Medich went on to quote film school teacher Arnie Baskim: “Americans are only interested in themselves. So they’re only interested in foreign films if there’s an American lead in the foreground and a foreign locale in the background.”

This profound lack of curiosity about the rest of the world has probably been exacerbated by the growth of the so-called American “art” movie since the 70s, which has generally crowded out the foreign market by offering the derivative artiness of an Allen, Spielberg, or Cimino over the works of their overseas masters.

One interesting offshoot of this problem is that foreign spectators have more choices than we do about what to see, even when it comes to American movies. (This has been true for some time in France, where Hollywood classics are revived with much more frequency and seriousness than over here.) An interesting case in point is the very successful career of Fatal Attraction in Japan. While the version of the movie that American audiences saw has already racked up 1.7 billion yen, the original version with a different ending–Glenn Close stabbing herself to death, and Michael Douglas being arrested for her murder–which displeased U.S. preview audiences, is also currently showing in Tokyo, and has so far made 12 million yen.

Voices in the Wilderness

American independents are currently experiencing a serious crunch for pretty much the same reason that foreign films are becoming more scarce: the studio majors are forcing them off the market. The media, of course, play a complicitous (and wholly undemocratic) role in this process. The sort of hoopla that routinely accompanies even many of the worst studio releases–including junkets for the press, guest appearances on Today, Carson, Letterman, etc, promotional shows on cable, and up-front treatment by TV and newspaper reviewers–is almost never given to low-budget independent efforts, no matter how good or important. Compare the minuscule amount of attention paid to a Jon Jost film or Coverup or Patti Rocks next to the monolithic fanfare that greets a piece of tripe like Arthur 2: On the Rocks. Instead of free and equal products competing in the marketplace, we have the sound of a mosquito struggling to be heard over the electronic amplification of the takeoff of a super-jet.

In response to this impossible situation; a group of independents from Spokane, Washington, are currentIy trying to hawk their low-budget comedy Only a Buck by driving cross-country in a brick mobile home and selling their feature on tape to video stores. I haven’t seen the film (although I have looked at the slick promotional preview, which recently turned up at the Reader inside a pizza box), but I note for what it’s worth that the group is in Chicago for the remainder of the year, and interested readers can contact them on their cellular phone by dialing 659-7626 (pause) 509-994-1469; producer-writer-director Gerry Cook, star and art director Charlie Schmidt, actor-writer Don Moulton, and/or actor-composer Peter Hunricks will be there to tell you more.

Little Dorrit

Conceivably the best and most serious Dickens adaptation ever filmed, Christine Edzard’s two-part, six-hour English movie tells the story as the novel does, from two consecutive points of view. Perhaps the greatest strength of the picture is its remarkably dense rendering of 19th-century England; no single art director or production designer is credited, but the use of sets is especially fine. Derek Jacobi, Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Roshan Seth, Cyril Cusack, and Sarah Pickering in the title role head a uniformly distinguished cast. This is a far cry from the polished competence of Masterpiece Theatre; Edzard’s Dickensian universe is one that sweats as well as breathes. (Fine Arts)

A Perversion of the Past [MISSISSIPPI BURNING]

From the Chicago Reader (December 16, 1988). — J.R.

MISSISSIPPI BURNING

no stars (Worthless)

Directed by Alan Parker

Written by Chris Gerolmo

With Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand, Brad Dourif, R. Lee Ermey, and Gailard Sartain.

This whole country is full of lies. — Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”

The time in my youth when I was most physically afraid was a period of six weeks, during the summer of 1961, when I was 18. I was attending an interracial, coed camp at Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee — the place where the Montgomery bus boycott, the proper beginning of the civil rights movement, was planned by Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in the mid-50s. As a white native of Alabama, I had never before experienced the everyday dangers faced by southern blacks, much less those faced by activists who participated in Freedom Rides and similar demonstrations. But that summer, my coed camp was beset by people armed with rocks and guns.

I believe that we were the first group of people who ever sang an old hymn called “We Shall Overcome” as a civil rights anthem, thanks to the efforts of the camp’s musical director, Guy Carawan. But the songs, powerful as they were, weren’t the main thing that kept us together; it was the fear of dying. When a local white cracker turned up on the grounds and fired a shotgun at campers who were swimming in a lake; or, on a drive back from Chattanooga, when a group of kids threw bricks and bottles at our cars; or when a midnight raid by several carloads of local rednecks who were ready to beat us up (or worse) was called off only because of a rainstorm, the question that always came up was whom we could turn to in a pinch for protection.

The answer was no one. Certainly not the local police or the FBI, as I quickly learned from the more experienced campers and counselors; the most we could expect from them was that they’d look the other way — or laugh in our faces. (I had already been warned by several white friends in Alabama that the FBI considered Highlander a Communist training school, which meant that if I went there I’d never be able to get a job in government — or so they claimed.) In fact, the best that one could hope for in a tight situation in the deep south was the presence of a New York Times reporter, and this was only because a white racist was less likely to bash in your skull if he thought it might get written up in a big Yankee paper.

Three summers after my stay at Highlander, three activists working to register black voters were killed by the Ku Klux Klan. With the complicity of a local sheriff and deputy, James Chaney, who was black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were white, were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Luckily, I was safe at home that summer; but my uncle, Arthur Lelyveld, a rabbi from Cleveland involved in the civil rights struggle, was bashed in the head with a piece of heavy pipe in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a month later; and he delivered Goodman’s funeral eulogy two months after that, when the bodies were finally found by the FBI. (His son Joseph — a New York Times reporter, as it happens — wound up interviewing former deputy Cecil Ray Price, who participated in the coverups, in 1977.) My own limited civil rights activities in Tennessee and Alabama never took me to Mississippi, an even more fearful place. As Nina Simone put it in her song, “Alabama’s got me so upset, / Tennessee made me lose my rest, / But everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.”

Given this background, it would be foolish to claim that I can approach Mississippi Burning, which deals with those three killings, impartially. But it would be equally foolish to claim that the movie elicits impartiality from anyone, or that impartiality of any kind informs its contents. It is, after all, a movie by Alan Parker, a stylish English director who got his start in TV commercials, and whose most popular features (Midnight Express, Fame, Shoot the Moon, Pink Floyd — The Wall, and Angel Heart) all reek of advertising’s overheated style, where, regardless of truth or meaning, anything goes if it produces the desired hyped-up effect.

It’s emblematic of the entire approach of Parker and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo that the movie focuses almost exclusively on the investigation of the murders by two FBI agents, fictional characters named Ward (Willem Dafoe) and Anderson (Gene Hackman), and that they’re the only good guys in sight. Much of the drama, in fact, concentrates on the conflict between them: prim, moralistic, and zealous Ward, who antagonizes the local white community, and loose, ambling Anderson, who prefers to mingle with the locals, objecting that Ward’s blunt methods might attract the northern press. Both are represented as moral spokesmen without a trace of prejudice — unlike every other white person in town — although the movie clearly favors Anderson’s methods over Ward’s. Broadly speaking, their positions might be called federal (Ward) and local (Anderson) ways of handling civil rights problems in the south, although needless to say the blacks themselves are given no voice at all in the debate; they’re essentially treated like children, and emotionally speaking Ward and Anderson are the parents who have to decide what’s best for them.

For most of its history, including the 60s, the FBI has been a racist organization. This isn’t simply a matter of hearsay or folk wisdom; it’s amply demonstrated in such places as I.F. Stone’s 1961 article, “The Negro, the FBI and Police Brutality,” James Farmer’s Lay Bare the Heart, and any Martin Luther King biography you care to pick. (The protracted persecution of King by J. Edgar Hoover is now part of the public record.) It’s even come to light recently, when a black FBI agent brought charges of racial harassment against his colleagues. In 1964, of course, there was no such thing as a black FBI agent anywhere in the U.S.

Unfortunately, the central narrative premise of Mississippi Burning sets up the FBI as the sole heroic defender of the victims of southern racism in 1964, which is more than a little disgusting. Embracing the premise unconditionally — unless one counts a single fleeting remark from a redneck, to a journalist, that “J. Edgar Hoover said Martin Luther King was a Communist,” which the film neither confirms nor privileges — the film tampers more than a little with historical facts: it subverts the history of the civil rights movement itself.

It’s true that the FBI did conduct a detailed and extensive investigation, file name “Mississippi Burning,” in the summer of 1964, before the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were finally found under more than ten tons of earth. But a look at the context of this investigation, which the movie can’t be bothered with, tells us a lot more. Two of the three missing civil rights workers came from well-to-do white families. After the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy the FBI’s prestige was conceivably at an all-time low; Lyndon Johnson had signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law on the same day that Hoover finally announced his intention to open an FBI office in Jackson, Mississippi; and apparently Johnson had to twist Hoover’s arm in the bargain. (As I.F. Stone wrote in 1961, “Mr. Hoover has made it clear that the FBI acts in civil rights cases only because ordered to.”)

“1964 . . . Not Forgotten” is the final message of the movie — the words appear on the chipped, defaced tombstone of one of the slain activists — but it’s hard to forget something that isn’t known in the first place, much less remembered. The movie purports to re-create the past and to tell us what it meant, but the ignorance of Mississippi Burning is so studied that it only can be accounted for as a bulwark against knowledge, a denial of history for the sake of striking a glib and simple and easily digestible attitude against injustice.

It’s not enough to counter that any Hollywood movie entails a certain amount of distortion. When Phil Karlson brought his actors and camera crew to Alabama in the 50s to shoot his low-budget “exploitation” docudrama The Phenix City Story (1955), which dealt with crime and racism in a similarly corrupt and terrorized community, he showed an attentiveness to the sound and look of his milieu, and the facts of his story, that even his own taste for lurid melodrama didn’t falsify. Although it’s shot on location in Mississippi and Alabama, Mississippi Burning doesn’t try for even a fraction of the same authenticity; an undistorted depiction couldn’t be further from its agenda. Parker’s Midnight Express contrived to horrify audiences with the experience of an American teenager in a Turkish prison, while blithely ignoring what happened to Turks in the same place. Mississippi Burning shows a comparable indifference to the inhabitants and everyday life of its small southern town.

The film’s two major characters are fictional, but both are analogous to real agents who worked on “Mississippi Burning” in 1964. Anderson is partially based on John Proctor, an agent from Alabama who worked in the north before he was assigned to Meridian, Mississippi, and who was friendly with two of the conspirators, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price. But the differences between the real agent and the character are glaring. In the film, Anderson is a Mississippian who has worked both in the north and as a sheriff in Mississippi; he is untarnished by his friendly relations with the murderous villains. Joseph Sullivan — Proctor’s superior, and the partial model for Ward (Dafoe) — hailed from the midwest. In their recent book We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi, Seth Cagin and Philip Dray describe him as follows: “A rugged six-two and known for his thoroughness and efficiency, Sullivan was the very personification of the qualities that epitomized the public image of Hoover’s FBI.”

Given the script that they have to work with, Dafoe and Hackman can’t be blamed if their characters come across as dedicated liberals surrounded by evil rednecks. The only exception to this polarity is the deputy’s wife (Frances McDormand), with whom Anderson flirts until she reveals the location of the activists’ bodies. (In real life, the location of the bodies was found by bribing an undisclosed Neshoba citizen with $30,000.) But properly speaking, Ward, Anderson, and the deputy’s wife are the only figures with any density in the plot. The nameless murder victims, seen only in the opening sequence, are never allowed to exist as characters, and the local blacks — noble, suffering icons without any depth or personality — hardly fare better.

In fact, Ward and Anderson are practically the only people in the movie, apart from a barber or two, who are ever shown working. Their 98 coworkers are mainly shown shuffling papers; the sheriff (Gailard Sartain), deputy, and other local racists seem to devote their hours exclusively to holding Klan or White Citizens’ Council meetings, firebombing black homes and churches, and beating up blacks. (Even more improbably, despite placing the local blacks throughout the film in small, ramshackle, easy-to-burn houses and churches, Parker sets a black funeral near the end in a palatial sanctuary that’s the film’s biggest and most expensive interior — a good example of his preference for splashy effect over logic or continuity.)

I wouldn’t expect a docudrama of this sort to deal with the literal truth. Even Parker admits in his production notes that “Our film cannot be the definitive film of the black Civil Rights struggle. Our heroes are still white. And in truth, the film would probably never have been made if they weren’t. This is a reflection of our society not the Film Industry.” But Parker has stuck so exclusively to his white heroes that he has drained all complexity out of everyone else, blacks and racists alike, and he passes over many real-life details that would have made even his simple melodramatic approach stronger.

Cagin and Dray cite five local whites in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who stood against the community’s conspiracy of silence, “all of whom were threatened and ostracized” and none of whom seems to bear any resemblance to the deputy’s wife in the movie. Apparently, Parker and Gerolmo don’t want to complicate their scenario with such people, or any other southern whites who showed courage, such as James W. Silver (whose remarkable and chilling Mississippi: The Closed Society was published the same year) or William Bradford Huie, a Philadelphia journalist who compared the race murders in Mississippi and Alabama with those of Auschwitz. They could have gotten a lot of mileage out of Buford Pusey, one of the local white dissidents, who joined the Mississippi NAACP in 1946 at age 21 because he thought that black World War II veterans had a right to vote, challenged the local newspaper editor (who repeatedly called him a Communist) to a duel in the late 50s, and as a consequence was himself denied the right to vote. (He also proved to be one of the few locals who assisted the FBI.)

Alternatively, if Parker and Gerolmo didn’t want to deal with local eccentrics — which would have complicated their premise that the community consisted entirely of ignorant, bigoted, and interchangeable poor white trash — they could have dealt with certain aspects of the FBI investigation that are even more horrifying than anything they show. To cite Cagin and Dray again: “To the horror and disgust of southern blacks and movement people, several black corpses were found in Mississippi by authorities searching for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. They were the routine victims of the Mississippi police/Klan juggernaut — found and identified this particular summer only as an unintended consequence of the national attention drawn to the state.”

But fires are more photogenic than decomposing corpses. Since more than 20 black churches were firebombed in Mississippi that summer, Mississippi Burning opts for an endless spectacle of fires and beatings instead, taking care not to individuate too many of the black victims for fear of alienating “our society” (as opposed to the “Film Industry”). And what about the civil rights movement? What about the visits of King, James Farmer, John Lewis, Dick Gregory, relatives of the slain victims, and countless others to that part of Mississippi while the investigations were taking place? The movie can’t begin to acknowledge any of these people as presences or voices, because, in terms of its own deranged emotional/ideological agenda, the FBI is the civil rights movement.

Parker’s basic procedure is to stage as many dramatic confrontations as possible — between Ward and Anderson, between either or both of them and the townspeople, between the Klan and the blacks, or between an imaginary black FBI agent (Badja Djola) and the racist mayor (R. Lee Ermey) — without regard for the basic historical facts. One of the first confrontations between Ward and Anderson occurs when they enter a luncheonette and Ward insists on joining the black men seated at a segregated counter (all of whom fearfully refuse to speak to him) despite Anderson’s objections that this will cause an unnecessary commotion.

In order to stage such a scene, the filmmakers had to ignore the fact that, thanks to jim crow laws, no such seating arrangement was possible in Mississippi in 1964, even after the signing of the civil rights bill. Blacks were simply not allowed as customers in white restaurants; at best they could order take-out food from the back of some establishments, waiting outside near the kitchen. The film’s indifference to the truth of the situation is indicative of where its real interest lies: with the good or evil intentions of whites, not with the everyday experiences of blacks.

But the movie’s distortions go even further than that. Seth Cagin’s article about the film in the December Vogue suggests that the movie’s defamation (through neglect) of the civil rights movement is matched by its cockeyed distortion of the FBI’s methods. An honest depiction might have pointed out, for instance, that their infiltration of the Klan was facilitated by agents who were themselves southern segregationists. But Parker’s integrationist FBI, which even includes a couple of black agents whimsically known as Bird and Monk, opts instead for abduction and threats of violence (which, Cagin argues, fits directly into the Klan’s cherished paranoid fantasies about the FBI).

This leads to one of the movie’s most ludicrous scenes, when agent Monk, initially garbed in a Klan outfit, abducts the mayor to extract information. Threatening him with a razor, Monk proceeds to tell the (true) story of Judge Edward Aaron (called Homer Wilkes in the film), a black man selected at random, who was castrated with a razor by a white Alabama Klansman in 1957. That the movie occasionally makes use of actual historical occurrences — such as the horrifying crime against Aaron — can’t really excuse its compulsion to use them to erect its own lurid fantasy scenarios.

I believe it was James Agee who remarked that some of the best art can grow out of moral simplification. It’s a point that has some merit, but I would defy anyone who knows or cares about the civil rights struggle in any way to find much merit or art in the pile-driver simplifications of Mississippi Burning or the feast for the self-righteous that it makes possible. Ward makes a fancy speech (written by Parker himself) near the end of the movie, after the mayor has hanged himself (another clumsy invention), that argues that even though he wasn’t a member of the Klan and didn’t participate in the killings, the mayor is guilty — “maybe we all are” — because he stood by and allowed the murders and cover-ups to happen.

If Ward has a point, it’s one that could also be made about this movie. The extravagant praise that’s already been heaped on it by several national critics is apparently motivated by the sentiment that any treatment of the subject that is unsympathetic to the Klan has got to be an important step forward for mankind, regardless of how much obfuscation is perpetrated. Or perhaps some of these critics are too far removed from the historical facts to realize just how far the movie’s distortions go.

But whether or not they realize what they’re endorsing, critics and other spectators who celebrate this perversion of the past, this racism posing as humanism, this murder and cover-up of the historical record, this insult to the memory and legacy of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, are as guilty in a way as Parker and Gerolmo, because they stand by and allow it to happen. Or maybe, better yet, we’re all guilty — a nifty little formula that lets everyone off the hook.

Anything for a Laugh [THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD!]

From the Chicago Reader (December 9, 1988). — J.R.

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD!

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by David Zucker

Written by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Pat Proft.

With Leslie Nielsen, George Kennedy, Priscilla Presley, Ricardo Montalban, O.J. Simpson, and Nancy Marchand.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I find the latest comedy by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (the ZAZ team) a notch below their previous Airplane! (1980) and Top Secret! (1984). This shouldn’t matter much to anyone looking for an irreverent, anything-goes farce with a fair number of laughs; The Naked Gun is certainly that, and I don’t intend for the following to scare anyone away from it. But I do want to consider what’s been happening to the ZAZ team’s distinctive brand of satire over the past eight years.

All three ZAZ movies use as their point of departure the crystallized form of some bad formula movie. The lead characters wear deadpan expressions through their cliche roles, and the laughs derive largely from non sequiturs in their dialogue and from lunatic gags that surround them as they trudge through their routine plots, impervious to the silliness.

Airplane! stuck to this pattern pretty consistently, lampooning the disaster blockbusters of the 70s like Earthquake, the Airport sequels, and The Towering Inferno. An early (1957) and mainly forgotten version of the genre known as Zero Hour served as the filmmakers’ model, and an effective use of familiar noncomic stock actors — Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, and Leslie Nielsen — helped spike the satire.

In 1982, the ZAZ team created an ill-fated TV series, Police Squad!, which I haven’t seen and which was taken off the air after four episodes. (Elements from this show, including its lead actor Leslie Nielsen, were later recycled in The Naked Gun.) Then came Top Secret!, which complicated the approach of Airplane! by anachronistically merging two dissimilar and outdated movie formulas — the Elvis Presley rock musical and the World War II epic — and adding elements from cold war thrillers like Torn Curtain for good measure. This second feature also mined a vein of visual and verbal non sequiturs that bore no particular relation to either of the lampooned genres (for example, a painting of a landscape seen from a moving train was rendered as a blur). This vein, which already existed embryonically in Airplane!, developed into a zone of surreal whimsy and sheer weirdness that was often indulged in simply for its own sake.

Some of the funniest conceits in Top Secret! are in effect combinations of familiar movie conventions with weird, off-kilter variations. A phone looming gigantically in the foreground of one shot proves to be in fact a giant phone (rather than a visual trick of perspective) when a character approaches the camera to answer it; the offscreen sound of a German song over a shot of a horse-drawn carriage turns out to be coming from the horse; in the midst of a German torture session, one hears the following exchange: “Do you want me to bring out the Leroy Neiman paintings?” “No. We cannot risk violating the Geneva Convention.” Unfortunately, Top Secret!, which is more daring and adventuresome than Airplane, proved to be much less successful at the box office. (The relative absence of familiar, old-time Hollywood faces in the cast, apart from Omar Sharif and Peter Cushing, probably contributed to the audience’s disorientation.)

The disappointing performance of Top Secret! undoubtedly led to a certain retrenchment, the first sign of which was Ruthless People (1986). A relatively successful kidnapping farce, produced and directed by the ZAZ team but written by Dale Launer, Ruthless People had at most only a cursory relation to Airplane! and Top Secret! The second sign of retrenchment is The Naked Gun, which resumes the lampoon cycle in a somewhat more diluted form. The new movie, which restricts its exclamation point to its subtitle, also restricts its satire in relation to its predecessors. Roughly half the movie lampoons the routine made-for-TV cop film or its movie-house equivalent; the other half lunges randomly after every laugh-getting device the filmmakers can think of — most of them more slapstick than satire. Weird ideas are kept to a minimum.

The principal satiric device in The Naked Gun is Leslie Nielsen going through his standard inventory of stolid responses — a kind of wood-block acting that has been his stock-in-trade ever since he starred in Forbidden Planet 32 years ago. Here he plays LA cop Frank Drebin, thickheadedly matching his wits against wealthy villain Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban) — who, for reasons that remain obscure to me, is plotting the assassination of Queen Elizabeth II (played by look-alike Jeannette Charles) at a California Angels baseball game. On the side Drebin suavely romances Ludwig’s secretary Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley).

Although The Naked Gun is every bit as irreverent as Airplane! and Top Secret!, there are moments when its irreverence shades off into mere crudity and/or cruelty, although viewers will have different thresholds determining where these moments are. I was a little put off by the pre-credit sequence set in Beirut, where stand-ins for Khomeini, Khadafy, Amin, Nasser (known as Yasser), Gorbachev, and Arafat meet to plot anti-American acts of terrorism. Drebin (whom we later learn is in Beirut on vacation) emerges from a disguise to punch them all out and declare, “Don’t ever let me catch you guys in America!” As slapstick nonsense, this isn’t as bad as it sounds, but I can’t quite share the sentiment of Variety’s reviewer, who remarks that the “scene ends so ludicrously, one only wishes it could come true.”

This is followed, after the credits, by a funnier sequence in which Drebin’s fellow police detective, Norburg (O.J. Simpson), intercepts a shipment of heroin in Los Angeles Harbor. Sneaking aboard a ship called I Luv You (the basis for some future gags), he attempts to kick open a door, and his foot goes straight through it. Inside the cabin he’s greeted by a horde of lowlifes, one of whom shoots him. Staggering from the impact, he bumps into a wall, falls against wet paint, gets injured by a falling window, collides with a wedding cake, steps into a bear trap, and finally falls overboard — a kind of protracted cruelty joke that sets the pace for much of what’s to come. (Cruelty jokes appear to be unusually fashionable this holiday season; the evocation of stapled mice ears in Scrooged gets one of that film’s biggest laughs.)

The fact that Nielsen is 62, George Kennedy (who plays the police captain) is 63, and Montalban is 68 contributes to their inadequacy as “serious” male leads, but not in ways that I find invariably funny. (For cruel humor, I much prefer Nielsen and Presley’s joint admission that they both practice safe sex, followed by a shot of them groping at one another in full-size body condoms.) My favorite moment occurs at the climactic baseball game — a very funny sequence, most of which has nothing to do with bad cop movies — when Nielsen executes a manic two-step on the field worthy of some of the better spastic choreography of Jerry Lewis; it’s a pure flight of fancy that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, executed with elation.

My quarrel with the rest of the movie has more to do with the script than with its execution. (David Zucker’s solo flight as director is by and large as polished as his previous directorial collaborations with Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker.) One of the central plot devices borrows the notion of the hypnotized zombie killer from the recently rereleased The Manchurian Candidate (1962) — another example of the movie’s tendency to grab at everything in sight rather than limit its focus to one (or even two or three) genres. On the other hand, there are plenty of guest-star cameos to take up the slack created by this scattershot approach; perhaps the best of these is offered by the late John Houseman (he also crops up in Another Woman and Scrooged), whose bit here as a driving instructor shouldn’t be missed.

For the next ZAZ lampoon, I’d like to see a takeoff on the “serious” Woody Allen art picture. Here’s a form of bad movie that is certainly long overdue for a dry cleaning, and as long as Allen refuses to make any more comedies himself, the field is wide open.