roger ebert film school

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 14: Cool Hand Luke (1967)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Cool Hand Luke (1967) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 93 of the first edition hardback, Ebert recalls eating 26 raw eggs in order to win a contest during his college fraternity’s Hell Week, likening it to the egg-eating binge in Cool Hand Luke. His prize was a night of sleep.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “The movie hero used to be an inspiration, but recently he has become a substitute. We no longer want to be heroes ourselves, but we want to know that heroes are on the job in case we ever need one. This has resulted in an interesting flip-flop of stereotypes. Used to be the anti-hero was a bad guy we secretly liked. Then, with Brando, we got a bad guy we didn’t like. An now, in ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ we get a good guy who becomes a bad guy because he doesn’t like us. Luke is the first Newman character to understand himself well enough to tell us to shove off. He’s through risking his neck to make us happy.” -from his 1967 review for the Chicago Sun-Times

“Luke calls out to God at the end: ‘It’s beginnin’ to look like you got things fixed so I can’t never win out. Inside, outside, all them rules and regulations and bosses. You made me like I am. Just where am I supposed to fit in? Ol’ Man, I gotta tell ya. I started out pretty strong and fast. But it’s beginnin’ to get to me. When does it end?’ He gets his answer quickly enough, but what other answer could he have expected? The problem between Luke and God is nothing more than a failure to communicate. Having seen this powerful, punishing movie again freshly, I reflect than in 1967 I didn’t approach it with the proper pessimism. Today, it seems to be God does a fairly good job of getting his message across.” -from his 2008 review for his Great Movies series

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There’s a stubborn, tough as nails brand of masculinity that drips from every frame in Cool Hand Luke (sometimes literally, in the form of sweat) that I have a tough time connecting with. Paul Newman’s performance as the titular Luke injects young Brando bravado into a grown man’s physique (instead of whatever bizarre monster Brando himself evolved to become). Luke’s life imprisoned on a chain gang knows little tenderness as he struggles to stay strong in the face of knee-buckling manual labor & abusive authority. Just about the only thing I can relate to in Luke’s life is the oppressive sweat & dehydration leveled on him by the hellish Southern heat. The cigar chomping, shower fighting, smack talking, backyard boxing, poker game bluffing world that contains Luke’s prison sentence (imposed on him for robbing parking meters while blind drunk) are about as foreign to me as a Martian landscape or the lost city of Atlantis. Still, there’s a few touches of religious epiphany, delirious absurdism, pitch black nihilism, and political rebellion that manage to break through this chiseled veneer of braggadocio to reveal the the film has a lot more on its mind than just being the toughest guy in the room.

It’s easy to point out the moments when Cool Hand Luke reveals its hand & lets down the hyper-masculine guard to reveal something vulnerable underneath. A scene where Luke beautifully plays “Plastic Jesus” on a banjo to mourn his mother’s death comes to mind, as does a sequence where the chain gang feverishly digs a ditch while ogling a woman in a sundress who makes a show out of washing her car. That latter moment in particular reaches some bizarre, Russ Meyer-esque territory that plays onscreen like a live action cartoon. What really stands out as the film’s centerpiece, though, is a sequence in which Luke settles a bet by eating 50 hard-boiled eggs in a single sitting (50!). So much time & care goes into the egg-eating sequence that it completely shifts the course of the prison-life drama that precedes it. It initially amuses, then disgusts, then reaches some kind of transcendent religious sanctity that’s difficult to describe in words. After settling his egg-eating bet, Luke is laid out shirtless, bloated, and mimicking the stretched-out pose of Christ’s crucifixion. He is near death in his egg-stuffed state, but he emerges as a makeshift messiah in the eyes of the other prisoners (including a baby faced Dennis Hopper & Harry Dean Stanton among them) once he resurrects. It’s amazing that the film can turn something so seemingly trivial into something so essentially pivotal.

So much changes after the egg feast that Cool Hand Luke starts to feel like an entirely different movie. Instead of sizing each other up & jockeying for dominance, the prisoners form a tight camaraderie centered around their new, egg-chomping christ. Luke’s biggest bully (played with gusto by old-timer George Kennedy) in particular falls deeply, madly in love with him, calling him things like “my baby” and a “wild, beautiful thing.” They also rally around Luke when he’s unfairly locked in solitary confinement & subsequently makes several failed attempts to escape chain gang imprisonment. The strange thing about Luke’s deification is that he is far from messiah material. There’s no real rhyme or reason to his crimes or his stubborn defiance. He was arrested for getting drunk & destroying property. He takes delight in being a “crazy handful of nothing”, declaring that during a poker game, “Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.” There’s an emptiness & a nihilism to Luke’s refusal to genuinely engage with life in any significant way & when his fellow prisoners find a religious epiphany & devotion in that idea it plays as remarkably sad. It’s all over something as meaningless as a few dozen eggs.

There’s enough religious imagery & visual symbolism (including focus on signs that read things like “STOP” & “VIOLATION”) in Cool Hand Luke that it’s really tempting to read into its overall metaphor. You can can see Ebert’s struggle to nail down its exact meaning himself over the course of his two reviews, flipflopping between how Luke’s attitude & the film’s overall brutality are meant to be read. I think Ebert got closest when he called the film an “anti-establishment” work of rebellion. I don’t think reading any specific metaphors into its stance on the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement of the time would reveal anything more than a general disgust for authority & abuse of power, though. It’s “anti-establishment” in the same way that its contemporary Bonnie & Clyde was, except with a crucial difference in philosophy. Bonnie & Clyde felt wildly, dangerously celebratory in its displays of open rebellion, but Cool Hand Luke is decidedly empty, meaningless, a monument to nothing. You can see its cold, nihilistic view of the world reflected in the aviators of “The Man With No Eyes,” an especially cruel prison guard who serves as the film’s de facto Grim Reaper. You can see it in the way Luke lets down the prisoners who gave him all of their love & religious devotion in exchange for a big fat nothing. Perhaps the reason I “had a failure to communicate” with Cool Hand Luke‘s hyper macho posturing in the early scenes is that I read it as a glorification, a tribute to something to believe in. Once I realized the film believes in nothing at all –religion, masculinity, or otherwise– I was fully on board. Fifty hard-boiled eggs & a frivolous bet was all it took me to get there.

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Roger’s Rating : (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating (4/5, 80%)

fourstar

Next Lesson: Citizen Kane (1941)

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 13: 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1968)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is referenced in Life Itself: On pages 88 & 395 of the first edition hardback, Ebert mentions that the film’s infamous, evil A.I. robot was built at his alma mater, writing “Chills ran down my spine when I first heard the voice of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey announce that it had been born in the computer lab at the University of Illinois in Urbana.” He also mentions on page 153 that 2001 was one of the biggest “event” films of his early, formative years as a professional film critic.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Kubrick’s universe, and the space ships he constructed to explore it, are simply out of scale with human concerns. The ships are perfect, impersonal machines which venture from one planet to another, and if men are tucked away somewhere inside them, then they get there too. But the achievement belongs to the machine. And Kubrick’s actors seem to sense this; they are lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum. Yet the machines are necessary because man himself is so helpless in the face of the universe.” -from his 1968 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn’t include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, ‘2001’ is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.” -from his 1997 review for his “Great Movies” series

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“Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” – Ancient proverb

The arthouse space opera 2001: A Space Odyssey is madman auteur Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus. Or, wait, maybe that’s The Shining. Or maybe Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick boasts too many crowning achievements to definitively rank any particular one as king beast, but 2001 certainly inspires that kind of lofty thinking, just in mere acknowledgement of its grand scale ambition. It’s a film that attempts to encapsulate the totality of time– past, present, and future– and does a fairly successful job of it. Its iconic scenes of space epic obfuscation have in time become so seminal that they now almost feel cliché, considering the one million and ten times they’ve been referenced & parodied in later, lesser works. This film is an unimaginable technical achievement for 1968, however, and I’m still scratching my head over the practicality of how some of it was accomplished through practical effects. Because each scene in the film is so overly-familiar to the public lexicon at this point, it’s near impossible to tell if I’ve actually watched it from front to end before. I do distinctly remember falling asleep to it once or twice in high school at the very least. As majestic & awe-inspiring as any particular achievement in 2001 can be, the film is also a slow, plodding, dialogue-light downstream drift that dares you at nearly every turn to lose focus & nod off. This is more or less the definition of challenging cinema. It takes a determined effort to stay on board for the journey, but the destination’s rewards are bountiful.

The funny thing for me on this most recent watch was that the movie I always think of as being 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie where a crew of astronauts are murdered by an evil A.I. named HAL 9000, is just one segment of many in the film’s cinematic patchwork. 2001 functions almost like a horror anthology, with each of its four separate segments providing only a small window into its larger narrative. Each section of the film is dominated by the throughline talisman of the monolith, but they each stand as rigidly divided works of art, just in the same way Kubrick allows nearly every shot of the film to hang in the air like an isolated, precious object worth examination. 2001 is an art gallery just as much as it is a narrative motion picture.

In the first segment the film takes poetic license with evolution & the Dawn of Man and depicts the all-important monolith teaching humanity’s primate ancestors how to use tools, a development that immediately leads to the world’s first coldblooded murder. In the second segment a second monolith is discovered by astronauts on the moon and its effect is largely shrouded in mystery, other than the signal it projects that points to Jupiter. As this film was released just one year before the real moonlanding (an event some eccentrics believe Kubrick himself had a part in “faking”), the mysterious terror of this piece points to modern anxiety about what comes next on the frontier of scientific discovery. The third segment answers that question loud & clear, proposing that our near future will be dominated by pompous A.I. robots with murderous intent. The closing segment, beautifully titled “Jupiter & Beyond the Infinite” is a somewhat-open-to-interpretation trip though religious transcendence, a gateway into the next step in our evolution. The lucky astronaut who endures that final chapter’s monolith as a test subject emerges on the other end as some sort of unknowable space fetus. The future of humanity is left open-ended here, but given that all previous monoliths in the film were directly followed by murder, the outlook is just as chilling as it is majestic.

Much like how the monoliths transformed the state of humanity at several points throughout the film, 2001 transformed the state of sci-fi adventure media. Long gone are the days of Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers, although they would later return with 2001-esque special effects in George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise. The HAL 9000 segment of 2001 functions somewhat like a genre film if you squint at it the right way, but the other 3/4s of the picture are so gloriously obscured & open-ended that Kubrick’s version of a space adventure is a much stranger, more artful beast than the examples that preceded it. There is a clear narrative progression here in the evolution of humanity, but the source, nature, and purpose of that evolution is so immense & mysterious that the “odyssey” of the title is more figurative than it is literal. I’m sure Arthur C. Clarke’s novelized version of this story (which he wrote for the film as a collaborator) is much clearer than what’s onscreen, but I feel like any concrete, extraterrestrial explanation of what transpires would cheapen the movie’s poetry. The aliens in this film may as well be an all-knowing god or The Will of the Universe, considering the immensity of what’s onscreen. I left the film with few solid answers and took delight in that ambiguity.

Not everyone feels that way. Ebert noted in his “Great Movies” review of the film that there were several walkouts during the 1968 Los Angeles premiere he attended. Most notably among the miffed was an especially exasperated Rock Hudson, who was visibly livid that the couldn’t pin down the film’s exact plot. Indeed, 2001 feels determined at every turn to spurn its audience, like an ornery mechanical bull in a dive bar (except one bucking in spectacular slow motion). This is a film that will either bore or terrorize you depending on how game you are for its journey. As much as I loved it as an immersive cinematic experience I’ll even admit that a couple dialogueless shots where the soundtrack was dominated by heavy breathing & mechanical whirs tested my patience a great deal. I’d even go as far as to say it got on my nerves. That’s not to say this is  humorless, highbrow work without a touch of pedestrian entertainment value, though. I think the shock of starting the film among the unevolved primates was something of a sly joke, maybe even serving as Kubrick’s way of poking fun at human folly & hubris. Hal 9000, however creepy, is subtly funny in its own cold, biting way, even downright bitchy in intonations of phrases like “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Frank.” There’s even an honest-to-God, outright gag in the film where a character perplexedly reads a long list of instructions for a zero gravity toilet.

Of course, humor & genre thrills are not likely to be anyone’s biggest takeaway from 2001. For those who can stay on board for its demanding runtime, glacial pace, and deliberate obfuscation, the film delivers a perfectly crafted, near-flawless glimpse into the unknown, which is a rare treat for any kind of art, much less a cinematic space adventure. The violence on display here ranges from blind rage to cold calculation, but never for a minute feels exploitative. The visual effects & smooth, spinning camerawork are dizzying achievements of technical prowess, but feel more purposeful than showy. An old-fashioned overture & intermission feel entirely earned given the scope of the film’s ambition. I’m not sure if 2001 is Kubrick delivering a passionate work of narrative art so much as a perfectly calibrated machine that begs to be gawked at as it functions with divine precision. Either way, it’s a real beaut.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating: (4.5/5, 90%)

fourhalfstar

Next Lesson: Cool Hand Luke (1967)

-Brandon Ledet

 

 

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 12: Mean Streets (1973)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Mean Streets (1973) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 73 of the first edition hardback, Ebert likens losing his Catholic faith to the internal struggle of Harvey Keitel’s character in the film. He writes, “When I saw Harvey Keitel placing his hand in the flame in Mean Streets, I identified with him. The difference between us was that long before I reached the age of Charlie in the film, I had lost my faith. It didn’t make sense to me any longer. There was no crisis of conscience. It simply all fell away.” He also mentions on page 276 that Scorsese, who he affectionately refers to as “Marty”, sent him early screenplays that would eventually blossom into Mean Streets and that critic Pauline Kael was another major supporter of the film.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’ isn’t so much a gangster movie as a perceptive, sympathetic, finally tragic story about how it is to grow up in a gangster environment. Its characters (like Scorsese himself) have grown up in New York’s Little Italy, and they understand everything about that small slice of human society except how to survive in it.” – from his 1973 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’ is not primarily about punk gangsters at all, but about living in a state of sin. For Catholics raised before Vatican II, it has a resonance that it may lack for other audiences. The film recalls days when there was a greater emphasis on sin–and rigid ground rules, inspiring dread of eternal suffering if a sinner died without absolution.” -from his 2003 review for his Great Movies series

I’m going to get this disclosure out of the way early: Goodfellas is probably my favorite movie. At the very least it shares the top spot with Boogie Nights, which is a film that was heavily influenced by Goodfellas. I know this is a sort of bland, generic selection for personal favorite film that doesn’t shed much light on my cinematic tastes (Would it help if I also made it clear that John Waters is my favorite director?), but that doesn’t make it any less true. Goodfellas is a fun, gorgeous, devastating work of pop cinema that pulls off my favorite formula in the art of filmmaking: combining highbrow finery with lowbrow trash. It constructs one of the most perfectly balanced & lush cinematic journeys I’m likely to ever see before I die. I cannot say enough good things about it, so I should probably just cut myself off now before the gushing becomes unbearable.

It took a long time for Scorsese, or Uncle Marty if you will, to perfect his Italian-American crime life aesthetic for what would eventually be, by my measurement, his magnum opus. Indeed, a lot of his highly-lauded work came before Goodfellas‘s release:Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ. Even before these hallmarks in the director’s career, however, he had given Goodfellas something of a dry run in his early work Mean Streets. Scorsese’s third feature film is impossible to discuss in without mentioning the shadow of Goodfellas that looms over it. Praising the film’s innovation or artistic specificity now would feel like exalting the brilliance of the match after the invention of the blowtorch or the flamethrower or the nuclear bomb. Mean Streets is a germ of an idea that Uncle Marty would later hatch & perfect. As someone who wasn’t around to catch the original version of Goodfellas in isolation, it’s difficult for me to judge it too fairly or afford it much patience. For so much of Mean Streets‘s runtime I find myself wishing I were watching its superior incarnation instead.

As much as I’m downplaying Mean Streets here as Goodfellas‘s older loser brother who still sleeps on Mom’s couch “between jobs”, the two films are actually quite different plot-wise. Goodfellas depicts an organized crime ring of Italian-Americans who are on top of the world in their villainy (for a time). Mean Streets follows the same ethnic group through the same streets of NYC, except it depicts them at the bottom of the food chain. Harvey Keitel navigates the ratty New York City of the early 1970s (hard drugs, gang activity, and all) as a low level numbers-runner going through a personal, spiritual crisis. His inner monologues about losing his religious faith & struggling with the then-taboo of interracial lust have lost a lot of potency in a modern context. Most of what makes his conflict worthwhile to the audience as entertainment is in his Achilles heel of affection for a baby-faced Robert DeNiro, who plays the unconscionable brat bastard Johnny Boy. Johnny Boy is essentially an Italian-American version of Johnny Rotten, forecasting the punk rocker stereotype long before the “mean streets” of NYC gave it a name. It’s this loudmouthed, shit-stirring catalyst that gets Keitel’s protagonist mixed up in a level of do-or-die mob violence that’s way over his head and drives the film to the inevitable bloodbath catharsis that would eventually serve as a Scorsese calling card.

Mean Streets is mostly charming if you think of it as a punk rock version of Goodfellas. Its risks, successes, and failures work on a much smaller scale than its descendant’s eventual pinnacle, but there’s something inherently cool about its absence of pressure to deliver big time thrills & awe at every turn. The film was born of the same New Hollywood adrenaline rush that brought on new kinds of crime films like The French Connection and Bonnie & Clyde and although it didn’t quite match the artistry of those works, it’s easy to see how its influence could’ve reached far beyond Goodfellas. The film was made even before Coppola’s The Godfather, for instance, so this version of the modern gangster genre was truly embryonic at best. However, it’s difficult to discuss Mean Streets as a seminal work without obsessively narrowing in on the Scorsese films to follow (as you can likely tell). Almost all of the film’s pop music, pan shots, street brawls, and home video charm is repeated in Goodfellas to the point where the only scene that stands out as distinctly its own is one where two rival crews fight over someone being called a “mook”, despite no one involved knowing exactly what that means. It’s a great moment, but I’m willing to bet it would’ve played even better in Goodfellas. (And, yes, even I’m tired of hearing me say that.)

Ebert loved Scorsese as a filmmaker & as a friend. He supported the director’s career since his debut film Guess Who’s Knocking? and did his best to make his name the modern behemoth that it is. Scorsese even sent Ebert an early copy of the screenplay for Mean Streets before the film went into production. I’m not saying that the reason why Ebert gave the film such a glowing review was that he had established a personal relationship with the director. I just think that their personal connection may have put the critic more in tune with what Uncle Marty was trying to do & say in his work. When Ebert watched Mean Streets he saw an ambitious film about the loss of Catholic faith that had shaped his own life in his youth and all other sorts of early 70s spiritual crises that wouldn’t affect me as much in a modern context (despite ditching my own Catholic faith as a youth), the jaded brat that I am. When I look at Mean Streets, all I see is a misshapen embryo of a better film to follow. Maybe when I get to Ebert’s chapter of Life Itself on Scorsese I’ll even get to review that masterpiece properly instead of cramming my thoughts on it into a different film’s territory.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating: (3.5/5, 70%)

threehalfstar

Next Lesson: 2001 – A Space Oddyssey (1968)

-Brandon Ledet

 

 

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 11: Shiloh (1997)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Shiloh (1997) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 64 of the first edition hardback, Ebert reminisces about his childhood dog Blackie & all of the cinematic dogs he’s fallen in love with over the years. He writes, “Every time I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can’t even think about the movie’s plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me. I have an empty space inside myself that can only be filled by a dog.”

What Ebert had to say in his review: “Adults may have the power to take away a kid’s dog and tell him a story about it, but they do not have the right. Some of those feelings came into play when I saw ‘Shiloh,’ which is a remarkably mature and complex story about a boy who loves a dog and cannot bear to see it mistreated. It isn’t some dumb kiddie picture. It’s about deep emotions, and represents the real world with all of its terrors and responsibilities.” -from his 1997 review for the Chicago Sun-Times

If My Dog Skip was proof that fluff films about dogs can easily escape criticism by relying on the cuteness of their puppy protagonists and Wendy & Lucy proved that the human-dog relationship could actually be put to a higher dramatic purpose, where does that leave Shiloh, the third film in the dog-centric trio Ebert narrowed in on as exemplifiers of canine cinema? The answer is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Much like My Dog Skip, Shiloh has a cheap, oddly nostalgic schmaltz to it that makes you wonder how it ever escaped straight-to-VHS purgatory in the first place. However, its central story carries a striking brutality that feels way out of place with its generic kids’ movie trappings, aligning it more with Wendy & Lucy‘s emotional harshness on a thematic level. Shiloh is a difficult film to pigeonhole due to the clash of its Hallmark Channel cheese with its the-hard-facts-of-life coldness and the resulting tone is deeply off-putting at times due to this internal struggle. It’s at times exactly what you’d expect from a film about a boy & his beagle and at times the darkest, furthest thing from it.

Shiloh opens with a heartless hunter beating a young beagle due to its stubborn inability to perform simple commands. He eventually kicks the poor pup so hard that it runs away & seeks a new owner in a young boy. In a simpler film the boy’s family would’ve helped him keep the dog away from the evil, abusive hunter. Shiloh surprises by instead raising moral crises about responsibility, honesty, and ownership. The boy’s father insists that he return the dog to the dark-souled hunter, as the dog is legally his property. The hunter treats the dog as a worker or an appliance, not even assigning it a name. The boy loves the animal as a pet, but that doesn’t necessarily give him the right to keep it. He spends his entire summer trying to earn the ownership, attempting to win the dog back both through above-the-board means like money earned from physical labor and through shady practices like theft & dishonesty. The drunken hunter’s villainy is just as much of a grey area as the means through which the boy tries to earn “his” dog back. His coldness is a result of a lifetime suffering through the cycles of abuse & the boy can’t quite fully bring himself to hating the brute, despite his constant threats to kill & maim the dog he loves.

I’m not entirely on board with Shiloh‘s central man-up message that values a very rigid, old-fashioned version of masculinity that honestly is losing its relevance in the modern world. There’s a small amount of criticism of this attitude in the film, like when the hunter explains “It’s just like the Bible says, animals are put here for us. They ain’t got no other purpose or feelings.” This is obviously untrue & is meant to play as a despicable attitude, but there’s still plenty of “A man is only as good as his word” & other toughen-up cliches that rub me the wrong way here. Still, I give the film a lot of credit for raising the stakes so high in its central conflict and making a very real, very terrifying threat of abuse the centerpiece of a children’s movie about a cute beagle. I can see why Ebert was so impressed with how willing the film was to grapple with hefty moral issues. It probably also struck a particular chord with the critic because his own childhood dog, Blackie, was part beagle, a bias he has no problem openly admitting at length in his review. Still, I can only see the film as a very minor work that’s a little overlong for its message & probably undeserving of its two (!!!!) sequels. Although it’s more serious-minded than the suffocating cheese of My Dog Skip I think they’re about on the same level in terms of overall quality. The only film in this makeshift doggy trilogy that deserves to be treated as a work of art is Wendy & Lucy, which is truly fantastic & touching in a way the other two films don’t even approach.

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Roger’s Rating: (3.5/4, 88%)

threehalfstar

Brandon’s Rating (3/5, 60%)

three star

Next Lesson: Mean Streets (1973)

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 10: Wendy and Lucy (2008)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Wendy and Lucy (2008) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 64 of the first edition hardback, Ebert reminisces about his childhood dog Blackie & all of the cinematic dogs he’s fallen in love with over the years. He writes, “Every time I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can’t even think about the movie’s plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me. I have an empty space inside myself that can only be filled by a dog.”

What Ebert had to say in his review: “The people in [Wendy and Lucy] haven’t dropped out of life; they’ve been dropped by life. It has no real use for them, and not much interest. They’re on hold. At least searching for your lost dog is a consuming passion; it gives Wendy a purpose and the hope of joy at the end. That’s what this movie has to observe, and it’s more than enough.” -from his 2008 review for the Chicago Sun-Times

“You can’t get an address without an address. You can’t get a job without a job. It’s all fixed.”

Ebert was onto something when he mentioned in his review of My Dog Skip that certain movies, particularly movies about dogs, exist outside of critical language. The pathos of a pet owner’s relationship with their dog is strong enough in its sentimentality that a movie doesn’t have to do much to get by on that emotion/nostalgia alone. My Dog Skip skated by in this way as a passably okay movie. It’s not particularly well made or interesting, but its sappy love for canines was sufficient enough on its own to escape any pointed criticism. Shooting the movie down would be like criticizing a birthday card from your grandmother for its lack of literary ambition.

Wend and Lucy has no such tendency to rely on that dog owner sentimentality for easy drama/emotional provocation. A dirt cheap drama starring Michelle Williams years before she was a recognizable name, Wendy and Lucy tells the story of a down-on-her-luck migrant worker traveling to Alaska in hopes of landing a seasonal gig at a cannery. While on her way the titular Wendy finds herself near broke, friendless, and without a vehicle in small town Oregon. Worst yet, her only companion, a dog named Lucy, goes missing. Instead of the broad, overly sentimental strokes My Dog Skip paints with, Wendy and Lucy finds tonal devastation in subtle details. The film’s tendency for narrative understatement threatens to alienate the audience from caring about or fully understanding Wendy’s plight, but the feeling of having lost your dog/your entire world is such a universally recognizable gut punch that her predicament is all too relatable from the outside looking in.

Besides employing the universality of human-dog companionship to clue the audience in on where Wendy is in life, the movie also relies on recognizable hallmarks of an economy in shambles to introduce us to her struggle. She’s plundering pocket change for dog food, sifting through highway litter for recyclable aluminum cans, shoplifting, and relying on word of mouth from train-hopping crusties (including Will Oldham among them of all people), who are dog magnets in case you were unaware, just to scrape by. Wendy is recognizable to the audience because she’s every poor soul who’s been left behind by a cutthroat economy that has no room for them. This is the kind of character for whom $50 could make or break their entire life. Wendy’s background & motivation don’t need to be any more specific for the film’s emotional stakes to land. We know who she is & we’re invested in her success.

A lesser film might’ve crafted some kind of explicit metaphor out of Wendy’s lost dog/lost place in the world, but, again, this is not the same kind of drama as the on-the-nose (er, snout?) emotional manipulation as that of My Dog Skip (or, more recently, White God). Wendy and Lucy’s overbearing sense of dread & imminent danger is more of a tone than a blatant provocation. The vulnerability of Wendy being alone in a strange place, not having a place to sleep, and resorting to the nerve-racking tactic of tying Lucy up when entering places of business (Lucy is a good girl, but that always makes me nervous) all combine to make for a terrifying atmosphere. The stakes are relatively small here compared to a summer blockbuster where a CGI threat from another dimension might crush an entire city, but that small scale specificity only helps the emotional weight feel significant. One of the saddest shots in this film is a dialogueless pan across all the jailed dogs’ cells at a local pound. One of the biggest offenses committed is a character coldly spitting, “If a person can’t afford a dog they shouldn’t have a dog.” I’ll admit that some of the drama here is dependent upon the audience’s sentimental affection for dogs in general (this particularly hit home for me when Wendy refers to Lucy as “Lou”, which was the name of my first pet, a cat), but that sentiment was a starting point, not an end goal. Wendy and Lucy moves in small, calculated stabs at heartbreaking drama that makes that jumping point necessary, but the tenderly sad payoff of the end more than justifies the means.

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Roger’s Ranking: (3.5/4, 88%)

threehalfstar

Brandon’s Ranking: (4/5, 80%)

fourstar

Next Lesson: Shiloh (1996)

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 9: My Dog Skip (2000)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where My Dog Skip (2000) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 64 of the first edition hardback, Ebert reminisces about his childhood dog Blackie & all of the cinematic dogs he’s fallen in love with over the years. He writes, “Every time I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can’t even think about the movie’s plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me. I have an empty space inside myself that can only be filled by a dog.”

What Ebert had to say in his review: “The sweet thing about ‘My Dog Skip’ is the way it understands the friendship between a kid and a dog. Dogs accomplish amazing things in the movies, but the best thing Skip does is look up at his master, eager to find out what they’re gonna do next.” -from his 2000 review for The Chicago Sun Times

I remember seeing My Dog Skip in the theaters as an angsty teen in 2000 & being insulted by the film’s relentlessly overly-sentimental melodrama. The movie downright offended me in the way it tried to illicit gooey, genuine feelings in its maudlin, Hallmarkish story about a boy & his dog. The years have softened me around the edges, though, and when revisiting the film now it’s difficult to muster up the same kind of anger I felt in the theater that day. My Dog Skip is a maudlin, half-hearted picture about the special connection an awkward child develops with his first pet, but I was totally okay with that lack of ambition or nuance this time around. This isn’t a particularly memorable or exceptional movie in any particular way, but it’s also not an especially bad one either. As far as kids’ movies about Jack Russell terriers go, it’s a much more tender, nostalgic picture than, say, the mixed-species pro wrestling action comedy Russell Madness, but that’s okay. There’s more than enough room in this world for mostly decent movies about really good dogs to justify their own existence.

In the film, a very young Frankie Muniz (at the very beginning of his career-defining run on Malcolm in the Middle) struggles with the daunting task of making friends in a town of young bullies determined to break his spirit & label him a “sissy” in World War II-era Mississippi. To help him combat this loneliness, the boy’s mother buys him a Jack Russell terrier for his 9th birthday, a dog he names Skip. His father (an overly-surly Kevin Bacon) is at first against this development, complaining that “He’s a little boy & a dog is a big responsibility” and that because dogs eventually die or run away Skip is “just a heartbreak waiting to happen.” Fair enough, but heartbreak is a part of growing up & Skip eventually proves his worth in the family by bringing his pint-sized owner out of his shell & allowing him to grow as a young man with goals, confidence, and a social life. There’s a few gags here or there about Skip playing baseball & football, driving a car, enlisting in the army, and going to the movies, but for the most part My Dog Skip is a pretty straight-forward coming of age story about how much a little boy loves his dog. It’s simple & maybe even a little bit mawkish, but it’s fairly effective stuff.

Ebert himself mentions in his own review that it’s difficult to be too hard on this film critically, given that it was seemingly made with a very young audience in mind. He writes, “A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don’t have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes.” After reading Life Itself‘s depiction of Ebert’s childhood, it’s easy to see how My Dog Skip could trigger a critic-proof sense of nostalgia for Roger & the film almost takes on the function of an illustration of that phase in his life. Ebert owned a different breed of dog as a child & his home state of Illinois was a far cry from My Dog Skip‘s Mississippi setting, but it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine him looking back fondly on his childhood & the “simpler times” long gone while watching the movie.

I don’t have that same connection to this version of the past as Ebert did & I found myself frustrated with the way the movie brought up hefty issues like segregation-era race relations & wartime corruption of youthful exuberance (represented here in a Luke Wilson role that feels half-baked at best) only to leave them almost wholly unaddressed. It’s difficult to watch the film without thinking of movies that have tackled this kind of coming-of-age period comedy much more sincerely: Matinee, The Sandlot, and Stand By Me all immediately come to mind. Again, all of this is rather inconsequential, though, as the film’s limited ambitions in terms of its craft & the simplicity of its target audience shield it from most critical scrutiny. If you have any affection for emotional bonds with dogs & the emotional frailty of friendless children, the film is bound to strike a chord with you that overrides almost all complaints you could muster about its lack of attention to craft. I didn’t have that sentimentality in me at 13, but I have an excess of it now that I’m nearing 30 & I ended up finding the film very sweet at a second glance despite its hokey simplicity.

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Roger’s Ranking: (3/4, 75%)

three star

Brandon’s Ranking (3/5, 60%)

three star

Next Lesson: Wendy and Lucy (2008)

-Brandon Ledet

 

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 8: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 51 of the first edition hardback, Ebert reminisces about a theater called The Princess where he used to watch movies as a child. He describes tickets as costing 9¢, popcorn 5¢. Shows started at noon & lasted hours as newsreels, serials, and double features (often a pairing of a Western and a comedy) lit up the screen. One of the comedies mentioned in this anecdote is Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. 

What Ebert had to say in his review: Ebert never reviewed the film, but he did expand on his memories of The Princess, including the memory of watching this feature, in his essay “Hooray! Hooray! The First of May!“.  Roger writes, “When Bud & Lou met Frankenstein, it scared the shit out of us.”

By the time Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein reached cinemas, Universal Studios had more or less discontinued their “Famous Monsters” brand & decided to retire the loose franchise on a remarkably silly note. Bela Lugosi returned to his role as Dracula for the second & final time in the film (though he would continuously play various other vampires throughout his career). Lon Chaney Jr. returned as the Wolf Man (despite being cured of his lycanthropy in The House of Dracula three years earlier). Sadly, Boris Karloff didn’t return as the Frankenstein monster (possibly due to his longtime rivalry with Lugosi), but Glenn Strange serves as a suitable replacement. All three actors had been sufficiently terrifying before in previous horror pictures, but that’s not their exact purpose here. Instead of scaring the audience, they’re meant to scare skittish funnyman Lou Costello, who delivers the film’s true bread & butter: broad, child-friendly yuck-em-ups. The film’s horror context is merely a backdrop, a stage for Costello to play on. Horror comedy is one of my all-time favorite movie genres, but I don’t think it’s a format that really came into its own until the 1980s. Old Hollywood horror comedies struggled to homogenize both of their respective formulas & the results often feel like a standard vaudeville routine that happens to feature scary monsters. Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein offers no exception.

In light of recently watching the Marx Brothers’ comedy A Day at the Races for this project, it’s difficult not to compare Abbott & Costello’s vaudevillian humor to that of the Marxs’. The comparison is not flattering. Bud Abbott is an uninteresting straight man archetype, which leaves Lou Costello to carry all of the film’s humor on his own two shoulders. His banter is never quite as impressively complex as Groucho’s. His physical humor never even approaches the high standard of Harpo’s. Lou Costello is, in essence, adequate as a comedic force in this picture. I can pick out a couple moments here or there when he got a really good laugh out of me: I particularly enjoyed the gag where he attempts to match the Wolf Man’s beastly howling over the telephone & the self-deprecating humor of him answering the suggestion “Go look at yourself in the mirror sometime” with the response “Why should I hurt my own feelings?”. For the most part, though, he’s entertaining, but far from the height of hilarity. It might be an issue of Costello himself not being especially into the production. Before filming, he was quoted as saying “No way I’ll do that crap. My little girl could write something better than this.” He eventually warmed up to the film & had fun during filming, but it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that his heart wasn’t fully into it.

The plot of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is fairly bare bones. The titular comedic duo are a pair of dock workers charged with delivering crates that contain the corpses of none other than Dracula & the Frankenstein monster (despite what the title implies, Dr. Frankenstein is not involved) to a sort of House of Horrors wax museum/cabinet of curiosities. The monsters come to life & scare Costello stupid. Laughs ensue. You get the picture. What really surprised me about this story line, though, was how familiar it felt. About halfway into Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein I had to ask myself whether or not my childhood favorites, The Monster Squad, was in fact a remake of the comedy classic, at least in terms of their shared central conflict. In both films Dracula serves as a criminal mastermind hell-bent on taking over the world by controlling the Frankenstein monster through a magical talisman. The only real difference is that in the Abbott & Costello version the Wolf Man is determined to stop the dastardly Dracula instead of blindly joining his ranks (and getting punched in “the nards” by young children). If you have any personal affection for The Monster Squad, I think Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is worth a look as a possible starting point for its source material.

I’m slightly diminishing the significance of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein here. The film is effortlessly charming as an old school horror comedy & has been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” enough to be selected for preservation by the US Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. I think the picture had a lot of significance among younger viewers who grew up to hold it in high regard. Just like my generation latched onto the similarly-minded The Monster Squad, Ebert’s generation connected with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein on a personal level. Not only was the humor of both films skewered towards younger crowds, both Ebert & I most remember being scared by the relatively tame horror end of our respective childhood favorites. If nothing else, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein captured the terrified imaginations of its pint-sized audiences during its theatrical release & also served as the final major studio production for future legend Bela Lugosi, who desperately needed the money. That’s all the significance a broad comedy really needs to justify its place in the world.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (3/5, 60%)

three star

Next lesson: My Dog Skip (2000)

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 7: 8½ (1963)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where 8½ (1963) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 47 of the first edition hardback, Ebert refers to 8½ in the discussion of his devout Catholicism as a youth. In particular, he mentions that a photograph of the saint from whom he took his confirmation name, Dominic Savio, appears on the wall of the grade school in the film’s childhood flashbacks.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “‘La Dolce Vita’ remains, for my money, the best of Fellini’s films; it’s a sad, shocking, exuberant portrait of a Roman gossip columnist having a crisis of the spirit. But ‘8 1/2’ is a great film in its own way, and despite the efforts of several other filmmakers to make their own versions of the same story, it remains the definitive film about director’s block.” -From his 1993 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“‘8 1/2’ is the best film ever made about filmmaking. […] It does what is almost impossible: Fellini is a magician who discusses, reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us with them. He claims he doesn’t know what he wants or how to achieve it, and the film proves he knows exactly, and rejoices in his knowledge.” -From his 2000 review in his “Great Movies” series

One surefire way to get past writer’s block is to write about the writer’s block itself. It worked for Charlie Kaufman when he penned the loopy, meta philosophical crisis Adaptation and it worked for Federico Fellini when he created the art house classic 8½. Ebert called 8½ “the best film ever made about filmmaking”, but I don’t think that’s what 8½ is about at all. More accurately, I think 8½ is a film about filmmakers. It captures the conflicting mess of oversized ego, patience (and at times impatience) for criticism, and constant self-doubt required to make a big budget feature film come together. With 8½ Fellini paints himself as the ultimate control freak. No longer content to merely direct films, he yearns to direct his life, all the people who populate it (especially the women, who include B-movie goddess Barbara Steele among them), and the fabric of reality itself. When I watched 8½ I got the distinct feeling of watching Dewey Cox going through his Bryan Wilson/Pet Sounds phase in Walk Hard. Fellini (and his fictional surrogate Guido) are reaching for such a transcendent elevation beyond the limits of film as a medium that what ends up being made is a total mess that accomplishes nothing at all except as a document of that far-reaching ambition.

I’ll admit that I find much of 8½‘s early proceedings to be largely frustrating. The film has a way of mixing the “reality” of a stressed-out filmmaker avoiding progress on a grand scale production with the surreality of his own self-indulgent navel-gazing that’s fascinating stuff, but rarely full committed. Often, 8½ will pull back from its dream logic self-reflection & ego-stroking to voice criticism about that impulse. It’s the same have your cake & eat it too attitude that frustrated me with (forgive me for the horrifically crass comparison) Deadpool: the film is content to exploit the basic tropes of its genre (obscured art house self-absorption in this case), but also over-eager to step back & mock itself for that indulgence at every turn. I also found many of the film’s early stretches to be noisy & chaotic in away that was undoubtedly intentional, but also difficult to focus on. In the long run, though, the parts of 8½ I found to be frustrating proved themselves to be entirely necessary groundwork for the film’s masterful concluding 40 minutes. Like a lot of art house cinema that tackles “great truths” about life & art, the film requires a lot of effort on the audience’s end, but the rewards are plenty for those who make it through.

8½ doesn’t truly come alive until the walls separating “reality” & fantasy fully collapse in its final hour. Guido spends the first couple acts stressing over his own creative process, his critics, his producers, and the tension between his wife & mistresses. It isn’t until this fictional stop & start film production lets go if its self-examination & sardonic self-deprecation and devolves into a literal circus that I was fully engaged with what Fellini was reaching for here. There are three major sequences in 8½’s concluding hour that really floored me. In the first, Guido’s wife sits in on a painfully awkward producers’ meeting in which the director must choose actresses to portray his wife & mistress from various screen tests. In the second, Guido fantasizes that his wife is suddenly agreeable with his philandering & all the women in his life come together to live in a harem under his command to please his every whim (marking the break where the film finally abandons all pretense of keeping its dream logic quarantined). The third sequence, of course, is the film’s infamous beach setting conclusion in which Fellini/Guido finally gets his wish and begins to direct all the players in his life in a literal circus.

It’s difficult to grasp whether or not these three sequences (or three ring circus, if you will) completely make up for the frustrating groundwork required to make them work in a narrative sense. 8½ doesn’t transcend into something truly special until it lets go of its own self-doubt & criticism, but it seems Fellini knew exactly what he was doing with that structural choice. In the all-important harem sequence when “reality” & fantasy truly homogenize for the first time, a woman asks Guido, “Is this how the film ends?” and he ominously responds, “No, this is how it starts.” The film leading up to that break felt almost like doing my cinematic homework, but I’m glad I pushed through. Those last 40 minutes or so were a rewarding glimpse into the self-absorbed psyche of a filmmaker seeking total control beyond the confines of a movie set. I believe 8½ has far more to say about the filmmaker’s mental disposition than it does about the transcendence of cinema itself, but that’s honestly a much more rarely-covered topic, whether or not it’s a self-indulgent one. I couldn’t quite match the general enthusiasm that has lauded this film as a complete masterwork, but I still enjoyed it a great deal.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating: (3.5/5, 70%)

threehalfstar

Next lesson: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 6: Bwana Devil (1952)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Bwana Devil (1952) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 28 of the first edition hardback, Ebert recounts a small list of films he remembers seeing at the cinema with his parents. The titles included A Day at the Races, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the world’s first 3D feature, Bwana Devil. He explains that the list is so short because his Aunt Martha was more often the one who would take him to see movies as a child.

What Ebert had to say in his review: Roger never reviewed the film officially, but he does recount seeing it in a blog post in which he slams the resurgence of 3D, a format he generally found distasteful. He said, “Faithful readers will know about my disenchantment with 3-D. My dad took me to see the first 3-D movie, Arch Oboler’s ‘Bwana Devil,’ in 1952. Lots of spears thrown at the audience. Since then I have been attacked by arrows, fists, eels, human livers, and naked legs. I have seen one 3-D process that works, the IMAX process that uses $200 wrap-around glasses with built-in stereo. Apparently that process has been shelved, and we are back to disposable stereoscopic lenses, essentially the same method used in 1952.”

Some films are interesting only in their historical, cultural relevance. Think, for instance, of James Cameron’s lucrative, yet oddly forgettable eco-minded blockbuster Avatar. When Avatar was released it was a wildly successful film, mostly because it was sold as the first major advancement in the IMAX 3D format. That relevant-today-forgotten-tomorrow aspect of Avatar actually has a rich history in 3D’s storied past, apparently. For instance, the first full-length feature film ever released in 3D (and in color no less!) is a forgotten trifle named Bwana Devil, a film only significant for its “Natural Vision” visual gimmick. In a time when there was a palpable fear that television was going to destroy movie ticket sales, gimmicks like 3D were thought to be cinema’s potential savior. Cheaper than formats like Cinerama & Cinemascope that required curved screens & multiple projectors, 3D promised to be the most viable option for keeping movie ticket sales alive & thriving. It seems that in the rush to be the first film to deliver that medium historically, Bwana Devil forgot to put together anything resembling basic filmmaking competence. “Shameless cash grab” is an accusation that gets thrown around fairly often in film criticism, but Bwana Devil wears that distinction proudly on its sleeve.

Reportedly filmed in the Belgian Congo, Kenya, Uganda, and California, Bwana Devil is a pitiful mishmash of stock footage & shoddy narrative connective tissue that makes Ed Wood look like an editing room genius. Depicting the construction of Africa’s first cross-continental railroad, Bwana Devil mimics the grand scale of Africa-set Hollywood epics, but without the funding or talent required to match its oversized ambitions. The main conflict of its plot concerns a series of man-eating lion attacks that delay the railroad’s construction. The story that surrounds the attacks & the hunters determined to stop “these infernal devils” is, honestly, too dull to bother describing here.The visual effect of these attacks is achieved through a mix of trained lion footage & quick shots of lion puppets, which might be the only technique in the film that sorta works. All other non-lion nature footage is achieved by projecting actors filmed in California on top of director/producer Arch Oboler’s vacation footage shot while on safari with his wife in Africa. The safari footage is so poorly lit & grainy that the mix is more of an abomination than a mere distraction. Although the disparity in film quality is laughable, it’s not laughable enough to make Bwana Devil recommendable as so-bad-it’s good camp fest. It is, in every way, a forgettable picture.

Roger Ebert was very vocal about his distaste for 3D cinema as a medium. His biggest gripe was that the format often darkened colors in projections to a distracting degree. Bwana Devil is often cited as a critical failure & an audience favorite, but I think audiences who enjoyed the film more likely enjoyed its novelty more than its content. The most common complaint about Bwana Devil at the time of its release, from audiences & critics alike, echoed Ebert’s exact concerns: that the process rendered the film too dark when viewed through the specialty glasses required to created the 3D effect. Bwana Devil’s advertising famously promised “A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!”, but the most visually striking image the film produced was the look of its 1950s audience watching it in the theaters. Consider the iconic LIFE Magazine image of the Bwana Devil audience donning their 3D glasses & enjoying the film’s novelty. There’s far more historical significance & interesting visual composition in that single still image than there is in the entirety of Bwana Devil‘s entire 79 minute runtime.

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I don’t fully agree with Ebert’s assessment that 3D is an entirely empty gimmick, a needless distraction. I’ve had plenty of fun experiences watching loud, vibrant action movies in 3D that have made pretty great use of the format. Bwana Devil, however, is a clear example of 3D done wrong. It’s an empty exercise that relies entirely on its own novelty for entertainment value. It’s a little sad that Ebert’s first 3D experience was one of the last ones he remembered somewhat fondly (if not only because he experienced the novelty with his father), but it’s also a little funny that a film so shoddily slapped together provided that positive memory.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (1.5/5, 30%)

onehalfstar

Next Lesson: 8½ (1963)

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 5: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 28 of the first edition hardback, Ebert lists films he recalls seeing in the theater with his parents. In that passage he remembers preparing to clap his hands over his eyes during a screening of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes because the local church paper reported that the film was “racy”.

What Ebert had to say in his review:Ebert never officially reviewed the film, but he mentioned in his memorial blog post for director Howard Hawks that “Marilyn Monroe was never more sexy or more vulnerable than she was in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

From what I gather, the common wisdom at the time when Marilyn Monroe was on top of the world was that the actress wasn’t necessarily super-talented, just beautiful enough to get by on looks & charm alone. There’s no denying that the camera loved Monroe. She was a gorgeous woman & it showed in every vivacious frame of celluloid. However, the idea that she was all bosom & no brains is selling her talents insultingly short. Monroe was not an airheaded bimbo of an actress; she was just remarkably adept at playing airheaded bimbos on screen. If she had been offered any other kind of role we might’ve seen a completely different side of her personality, but throughout her career she seemed to be eternally typecast.

In a lot of ways Gentlemen Prefer Blondes‘s gold-digging showgirl Lorelei Lee is the ultimate Marilyn Monroe character. The Howard Hawks musical often positions Lee’s intelligence vs. her breathtaking beauty as the butt of a joke. However, under that airheaded blonde surface lurks a cunning schemer, shrewd in her dealings with men of various levels of wealth. As Lee puts it, “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it.” The breathy, aggressively delicate performance Monroe brings to he screen as Lee suggests that the character is a pushover for any “gentleman” with a sizeable wallet, but that stereotype couldn’t be further from the truth. Lorelei Lee might be in desperate search of a sugar daddy throughout Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but that search is a keenly orchestrated attempt at obtaining lifelong financial stability, a goal she’s willing to manipulate, drug, and seduce an endless procession of male suitors to achieve if necessary (or convenient). Much like Monroe, Lee is a severely underestimated talent with the brains to take full advantage of every opportunity her bosom affords her. They’re a perfect match in terms of Old Hollywood typecasting, whether or not Monroe had been asked to play Lee’s exact role in countless other works.

With all of this talk about Monroe’s particular screen presence,  you’d think that she were the protagonist in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, hut the truth is that she’s the protagonist’s scene-stealing best friend. From the opening scene were Monroe & Jane Russell enter the film as a Vegas-style showgirl act decked out in Technicolor sequins, it’s all too apparent who the real star is here. Even Monroe knew she as far more than a supporting actress in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, responding to an interviewer who asked her how she felt not being the film’s star with the retort, “Well, whatever I am I’m still the blonde.” She’s not wrong. If there’s any question who’s in charge in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, just look to the painfully unfunny scene in which Russell bleaches her hair & impersonates Monroe on the witness stand of a larceny trial. Without Monroe’s inherent magnetism, Lee’s eccentricity is downright annoying. It’s also telling that nearly every scene featuring Russell’s “protagonist” concerns Lorelei Lee’s search for a rich husband. This movie is 100% The Marilyn Monroe Show.

One of my favorite things about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is that it completely avoids committing the morally bankrupt atrocity I just indulged in all last paragraph: pitting its two female leads against each other. Despite what the film’s title (or even more so the title of its novelized sequel But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes) suggests, the plot of this film does not concern women in competition. One woman chases lust & a good time. The other chases money. They both find true love at the end of their journeys (as all characters in comedy musicals inevitably do) without ever once conspiring against each other. They consistently have each other’s backs in a world where men are looking to take advantage of them at every turn. Plot-wise, its depiction of showgirls scheming to marry rich might not seem like the end-all-be-all of cinematic feminism, but the two leads’ friendly love & support is surprisingly refreshing within that framework.

In his memorial piece for Howard Hawks, Ebert mentions that the writer/director/producer, who had a hand in iconic works as varied as The Thing from Another World & Bringing Up Baby, never consciously aimed for Art in his films & was often surprised when people found it there. The songs aren’t particularly great in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (which was adapted from the stage musical). The sets can be downright laughably cheap. Characters often fall into pathetic caricature, such as a wealthy diamond mine owner with a monocle who exclaims “By George!” constantly & refers to himself as “Piggy”. Still, despite Hawks’s no frills approach to crowd pleasing cinema, there’s plenty of Art lurking in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes if you know where to look for it. An early musical number featuring a men’s Olympic gymnastics team is like a classic beefcake photo shoot come to vivid life. I appreciated a shot where Lorelei mentally replaces Piggy’s head with a gigantic diamond. Most impressive all is an the film’s centerpiece: Monroe’s iconic rendition of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”. This musical number is stunning with or without narrative context. Its stark red backdrop, BDSM-themed chandeliers, suicide humor, and diamond fetishization all amount to a singularly memorable aesthetic that puts the rest of the film’s relatively flat visual representation to shame. Whether or not Hawks was looking for “Art” in his Gentlemen Prefer Blondes adaptation, he found a bottomless wealth of it in that scene alone.

In case you couldn’t tell by now, it’s Monroe’s performance that elevates Gentlemen Prefer Blondes above by-the-numbers musical comedy mundanity. Ebert’s not wrong when he says that she was at her sexiest & most vulnerable in the film. There’s a whole lot of Monroe reflected in Lorelei Lee (both physically & personality wise). Whenever she drops the gold-digging bimbo pretense to reveal her true, shrewd self, there’s something truly personal that plays out on the screen. Lines like “It’s men like you who have made me the way I am. If you loved me at all you’d feel sorry for the terrible trouble I’ve been through instead of holding it against me” cut through her faux airheaded persona like a hot knife through butter. This probably isn’t Monroe’s best picture (for my money, that would be Some Like It Hot), but it very well might be her most personal & that dynamic makes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes much more than the empty trifle it could’ve been without her.

EPSON MFP image

Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (3.5/5, 70%)

threehalfstar

Next Lesson: Bwana Devil (1952)

-Brandon Ledet