roger ebert film school

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 4: A Day at the Races (1937)

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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 A Day at the Races (1937) is referenced in Life Itself: In the first edition hardback, A Day at the Races is referenced on page 28. Roger remembers the film as his first trip to the cinema. He says he was so young at the time that he had to stand on his seat to see the screen. He also remembers this occasion as the hardest he’s ever heard his father laugh & mentions that his father was a huge Marx Brothers fan, having seen them on the vaudeville stage before they were in motion pictures.

What Ebert had to say in his review: Roger never had the chance to review the film proper, but he does recount the very same anecdote about watching A Day at the Races as a child in his “Great Movies” review of Duck Soup.

The seventh Marx Brothers feature film, A Day at the Races is par for the course in terms of the impossibly talented comedy crew/family’s brand of sublime silliness & rapidfire insanity. I’ve only ever seen a few Marx Brothers titles, leaning towards indisputable classics like A Night at the Opera & (my personal favorite) Duck Soup, but their comedic style is so instantly comfortable & genuinely funny that familiarity with their work is not necessary for enjoying their material. I have no qualms admitting that of all the comedic acts that spilled over from vaudeville to motion pictures, the Marx Brothers are an easy favorite for me, outshining even names like Charlie Chaplin and Abbott & Costello. I’d like to say that this is due to the quick, oddly sophisticated wit of Marx Brothers poster boy Groucho, but the truth is that it’s Harpo who steals my heart in every picture. Taking physical, slapstick comedy to deeply deranged, yet subtly masterful territory, Harpo is a one of a kind talent. Part of the reason I ended up liking the somewhat minor Marx title A Day at the Races so much is that Harpo is so damn funny in it. I was laughing at his madman antics as the criminal horse jockey Stuffy so hard that almost all of the film’s third act problems (of which there are many) ultimately felt meaningless.

The plot of A Day at the Races concerns a young couple in financial crisis. An entrepreneur owner of a sanitarium (a type of health resort) is struggling to keep her business alive & out of the hands of overeager financial vultures. Her bonehead beau is a musician who foolishly decides to get into the horseracing business without knowing thing one about what he’s doing. Groucho, Harpo, and Chico Marx get caught up in both ends of this struggle. Chico & Harpo help the musician doofus evade the law & prepare his horse to race in competition. Chico & Groucho conspire to keep a wealthy hypochondriac, Mrs. Upjohn, enrolled in the sanitarium’s care, luring her into complacency through seduction & encouragement of her groundless worrying. Long story short, they all fail miserably. Groucho is ludicrously incompetent as Dr. Hackenbush (originally named Dr. Quackenbush, but subsequently changed due to fear that the dozen or so real Dr. Quackenbushes in the country might potentially sue), a veterinarian posing as a medical doctor, an easily recognizable hack/quack (it’s right there in the name, after all). When described as “a doctor with peculiar talents”, he retorts that he has “the most peculiar talents of any doctor around.” Harpo is a silent, deranged jockey who sends far more time running from the sheriff that he does wining races. Chico plays both sides of the coin as an eternal huckster who’s always able to scrape by on a quick buck, but rarely able to pull off any large scale schemes. Their collective incompetence brings the whole story down to the fate of both the sanitarium & the potential marriage of the central couple depending on the outcome of a single horse race. Its a tidy conclusion to a very messy farce that largely exists to support the Marx Brothers’ zany comedy antics, which are all top notch even when the film isn’t trying too hard on a formal level.

As I said, there are some major third act problems with A Day at the Races that keep it from being an entirely perfect product. The fact that it boasts the all-time longest Marx Brothers runtime weighs heavily on the proceedings. There’s a definite point towards the end where the laughter starts to die down & it transitions into time-to-constantly-check-your-watch territory. At first it’s endearing that A Day at the Races fits firmly in the kind of Old Hollywood variety show spectacle that tries to have it all: romance, suspense, comedy, musical numbers, etc. It’s the exact kind of expensive mixed bag that Josh Brolin’s overworked producer struggles to hold together in Hail, Caesar!. By the time it reaches its second song & dance number this variety is a little more trying. It’s time for the movie to wrap up its plot, so a sequence where Harpo plays a demonic pied piper to a poor black community who burst into a rendition of “All God’s Chillun’ Got Rhythm”that might normally be a welcome diversion in another context starts to  feel like wasted time. It also doesn’t help that this sequence is played like a long setup for an unfortunate punchline involving the Marx Brothers evading the law by donning blackface to “blend in”. All of this and a singularly terrible performance by an overacting oaf playing an indignant Dr. Steinberg that goes way too broad to remain endearing, perhaps even watchable, which is saying a lot for a comedy this zany.

With or without that mess of a concluding half hour, though, A Day the the Races is a finely tuned comedic act, one that values spotlighting the talents of its three sibling stars over telling a concise, well-rounded story. It’s no wonder that Ebert remembers his first trip to the cinema so vividly as the hardest he’s ever seen his father laugh. The film really is a laugh riot, especially in its early proceedings. Watching Harpo chew & swallow a thermometer (with a chaser clearly marked “POISON”) when Dr. Hackenbush takes his temperature in one scene & turn around to beautifully pluck the strings of a harp in  another is a treat I’ll never forget. Groucho’s proto-Bugs Bunny one-liners & Chico’s slick, smooth-talking scams are also pricelessly amusing, even if I’m heavily biased toward Harpo’s particular brand of comedic madness. A Day at the Races is widely considered the beginning of the end for the Marx Brothers’ cinematic winning streak, but for me the joke never felt stale in this film, just a little overlong & unfocused in the back end.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (4/5, 80%)

fourstar

Next Lesson: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

-Brandon Ledet

 

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 3: Apocalypse Now (1979)

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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 Apocalypse Now (1979) is referenced in Life Itself: In the first edition hardback, Apocalypse Now is referenced on page 2. Roger mentions that when “The Ride of the Valkyres”plays during a helicopter attack in the film, he got a rare, tingling sensation of “reality realigning itself,” the same feeling he had when he proposed marriage to Chaz & the day his father announced he was dying of cancer. In the film version of Life Itself, Ebert is shown arguing the merits of Apocalypse Now to a nonplussed Gene Siskel on two separate occasions. He seemed especially aggravated that Siskel enjoyed Full Metal Jacket more than Apocalypse Now.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Years and years from now, when Coppola’s budget and his problems have long been forgotten, ‘Apocalypse’ will still stand, I think, as a grand and grave and insanely inspired gesture of filmmaking — of moments that are operatic in their style and scope, and of other moments so silent we can almost hear the director thinking to himself.” – From his 1979 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“Other important films such as ‘Platoon,’ ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Casualties of War’ take their own approaches to Vietnam. Once at the Hawaii Film Festival I saw five North Vietnamese films about the war. (They never mentioned ‘America,’ only ‘the enemy,’ and one director told me, ‘It is all the same–we have been invaded by China, France, the U.S. . . .’) But ‘Apocalypse Now’ is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover.” -From his 1999 review for his “Great Movies” series

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It’s near impossible to tell whether or not I’ve seen Apocalypse Now before. Surely, there are plenty of scenes in the film that are vivid to me out of context, but I might’ve picked those up incidentally by catching them on a Greatest Movies of All Time clip show or playing on television while channel surfing. The reason I’m unsure if I’ve ever watched Apocalypse Now in its entirety before is that I feel like I’d more clearly remember a viewing experience as weighty as the film’s 3+hour runtime. I hate to be the kind of cinematic philistine who knocks a slow-paced “classic” for testing my patience, but Apocalypse Now is too damn long. There is a wealth of individual scenes in the film that carry a forceful impact in isolation, but when they’re broken up by a slow trudge upriver & Batman-gritty narration about “the horror, the horror” of war, Apocalypse Now reveals itself to be a huge commitment of time & effort that might not deliver everything it promises. As a literary adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness I think the film is a fresh, interesting take that reveals new truths about its source material by shifting its setting & narrative detail, but the truth is I found Heart of Darkness to be just as much of a chore as consuming Apocalypse Now in one sitting. This is a great adaptation of a novel I don’t care for & a runtime that spiraled out of control even before its extended “Redux” treatment. There’s no denying that the film is packing several powerful punches, though, and it’s all too easy to see how someone could fall in love with the film as a massive whole.

A lot of Apocalypse Now‘s imagery & one-liners are perhaps a little too over-familiar after years of reverent repetition: the ceiling fan blades fading into helicopter sounds, Martin Sheen’s mud-painted face emerging form the bog, the utterance of “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, etc. However, it’s clear as day with two stretches of the film still play freshest in 2016. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of the film’s war-is-Hell grittiness covered thoroughly in other works. the alcohol-fueled PTSD, overbearing narration, and off-hand soldier quips like, “You’re in the asshole of the world, Captain” all feel like old hat at this point, whether or not they were groundbreaking representation in 1979. What does feel important & unique still is the film’s approach to representing madness among soldiers. Robert Duvall’s colonel might be remembered most for what he likes to smell in the morning, but his emotionally detached obsession with surfing under fire is what stands out most in modern viewings. While dodging bombs & bullets from the Viet Cong, Duvall orders his terrified young men to surf the incoming tide as if they were kicking back beers on a California beach instead of fearing for their lives under fire in Vietnam. It’s a perfect representation of how the war left many men emotionally detached & downright deranged.

Of course, Duvall’s colonel is just a small taste of wartime madness before the main feast: Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. It takes a three hour effort for Martin Sheen’s broken shell of a captain to make it upriver to meet Kurtz & decide whether or not to complete his mission of assassinating the defected madman. A lot of anticipation is built by the time Martin Sheen & Marlon Brando share their infamous face to face in the film’s third act and it’s amazing just how much Brando delivers under that pressure. His intensely weird performance as Kurtz is a tangible, skin-crawling kind of madness that feels inseparable from Brando as an actor, especially in light of the recent documentary Listen to Me Marlon that hits a lot of the same deranged, hypnotic notes. A lot of audiences in 1979 believed that, like Kurtz, Brando “had gone totally insane & that [his] methods were unsound.” However, if his performance were indeed a work of madness, it’s undeniably of the mad genius variety.

As Ebert points out in this review, any movie is lucky to have one or two great scenes & Apocalypse Now has many. The film gets on a particular roll in its final sequence once Kurtz’s mania graces the screen and the imagery & music combine to create a sort of wartime tone poem that just screams “art house darling” in every frame. There was a lot made of the troubled, over-budget production that plagued Apocalypse Now at the time of its release & there was indeed enough snafus during filming to support a feature length documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. The prevailing wisdom of the time is that director Francis Ford Coppola, was in the middle of a winning streak that included titles like The Godfather & The Outsiders might’ve bitten off more than he could chew with Apocalypse Now & the resulting film was somewhat of an untethered mess that couldn’t quite match its ambition with a unifying sense of discipline. Discerning critics like Ebert, who heralded the film like a masterpiece, had a completely different take, lauding the film as an impeccably visualized descent into madness, an entirely new & powerful way of representing war’s savage effect on the fragile human mind.

I think the truth probably lies somewhere between these two takes. The third, Kurtz-focused hour of the film really does feel like it taps into a troubled soldier’s plight in a way that few film scan claim to do, with much of the credit for that accomplishment resting firmly on Marlon Brando’s beyond mad shoulders & Coppola’s eye for haunting visuals. However, the film’s sprawling runtime & three separate versions (including the “Redux” & an infamous bootleg of a workprint) point to a director who may have flew a little too close to the sun to fully realize his vision. I respect Apocalypse Now‘s ambition & find its messy approach to Vietnam War cinema to be a lot more satisfying than more cookie-cutter examples of the genre, but I also find the idea of the film being a masterpiece to be a somewhat flimsy argument. It really does have more truly great scenes than most movies could dream to bring to the screen, but the film itself never feels like more than the sum of its parts. Much like Sheen’s protagonist, Apocalypse Now goes on a dangerous, mind-threatening journey upriver to seek great existential truths, only to discover it’s not sure what to do once it reaches its destination.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating: (3.5/5, 70%)

threehalfstar

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 2: Persona (1966)

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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 Persona (1966) is referenced in Life Itself: In the first edition hardback, Persona is referenced on pages 1, 154, 267, and 270. It is the film most often referenced in Roger’s book. He first likens its opening credits & mid-film “break” to the way life & memory flicker into existence, initially without cohesion. He later describes how as a young critic he met an inability to discuss exactly what happens in the film, which prompted him to write about what happened to him as an audience instead (a technique of critical subjectivity he would return to often). He also describes Bergman’s casting of the film as being surprisingly impulsive in a brief anecdote.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Most movies try to seduce us into forgetting we’re ‘only’ watching a movie. But Bergman keeps reminding us his story isn’t ‘real.’ At a crucial moment in his plot the film seemingly breaks, and after it rips for a dozen frames it seems to catch fire within the projector. We see it melting on the screen. Then blackness, then light and then the old silent comedies again, as Persona starts again at the beginning.” – From his 1967 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“Persona is a film we return to over the years, for the beauty of its images and because we hope to understand its mysteries. It is apparently not a difficult film: Everything that happens is perfectly clear, and even the dream sequences are clear–as dreams. But it suggests buried truths, and we despair of finding them. Persona was one of the first movies I reviewed, in 1967. I did not think I understood it. A third of a century later I know most of what I am ever likely to know about films, and I think I understand that the best approach to Persona is a literal one.” – From his 2001 review in his “Great Movies” series

There are two massive, go for broke moments in Ingmar Bergman’s small cast drama Persona that tend to overwhelm discussion of the film. The first is the film’s opening six minutes. A chaotic montage of loose film strips, whirring projectors, impossibly bright light bulbs, grainy footage of what looks like a silent era horror, spiders, human hands, animal slaughter, exposed organs, an erect penis, and crucifixion imagery overwhelm the film’s first breaths. Even today these fist few minutes of visual chaos are disturbingly vivid, but difficult to pinpoint with any certainty as to what they could mean, exactly. Somewhere in the fog I see a progression of life → art → death, but that personal interpretation is far from concrete in any significant way. As difficult as it is to decipher Persona‘s opening minutes today, it’s even more of a mystery to me what the experience would’ve been like for someone watching the film fifty years ago. As if that opening barrage weren’t enough, Bergman then repeats the trick a second time in the film’s second Go For Broke moment. A little over halfway into the film’s runtime the movie essentially breaks down & returns to the visual chaos of its opening minutes, wiping the slate clean & completely changing the rules of its delicately laid-out narrative. It makes total sense that these two moments would dominate most discussion of Persona & the strange places its story goes in its haunting final minutes, but for the most part the film itself is a rather quiet, intimate drama.

A somewhat mousy nurse is assigned as a caretaker for an actress who has not spoken in three months’ time. After a dreary stay at a hospital, the two women attempt a therapeutic, seaside respite to help cure the actress of her anxieties. To fill the void left by her nonverbal companion, the nurse gabs incessantly, first about seemingly nothing at all and then about deep seated fears & regrets. Take away the two experimental jaunts of rapidfire montage & Persona is mostly a collection of monologues, sometimes delivered directly to the audience in a way of breaking the fourth wall that recalls the grave seriousness of a stage play instead of the winking Ferris Beullers of the world. The topics covered in these speeches are a wide range of concerns from the importance of art in people’s lives to a distant memory of casual sex & subsequent abortion. If it were anyone but Bergman at the helm, the film’s existential crises could possibly play as arthouse self-parody, especially once one character starts pondering about “the hopeless dream of being. Not seeing but being. In every waking moment aware, alert. The tug of war between what you are with others & who you truly are.” The navel-gazing & despair in Persona is so tragically sincere, however, that there’s no way to avoid being arrested by it. Bergman may work with a tone of cinematic obfuscation that’s been copied & parodied endlessly in the last few decades, but he does it with such sincerity & confidence that it still knocks you on your ass, despite familiarity with how his style has been assimilated into cinema at large. In a lot of ways the bare bones monologues of Persona can be just as unsettling as the film’s Big Risk montages of pure light & sound.

Of course, Persona‘s ambitious Big Risk montages & low-key, confessional monologues cannot be considered in total isolation. One plays directly into the other. Shortly before Persona‘s mid-film narrative “break”, the overly-talkative nurse confesses to her silent companion “Somehow I think I could change myself into you if I tried. I mean, inside. You could be me, just like that.” An act or two of betrayal sets in motion the pure light & sound montage “break” that allows that fantasy to become a tangible reality. The two women’s identities shift & meld. Ugly anxieties about fear of motherhood & questions of sexual desire bubble to the surface in such a horrific, unsettling way that you could consider the film a work of avant-garde horror if you view it in the right context. Persona was my first introduction to Bergman as a filmmaker and I’ve heard that entry point likened to jumping into the deep end. This is a messy, languid picture that somehow pulls together a pointed & purposeful tone from the wreckage without ever affording the audience a clear picture of what exactly is transpiring.

It’s no surprise, then, that reviewing Persona was such a daunting task for a young Ebert or that the film resonated with him in such a vivid way throughout his life & career. One thing I picked up while reading over his reviews of the film that I may have missed the first time I watched it was how artificial the whole thing felt. While watching Bergman’s so-called “Silence of God” trilogy during our Movie of the Month discussion of The Seventh Seal last year, I became intensely focused on the way the director called attention to the artificiality of his films by making them feel like staged plays. Returning to Persona (with Ebert’s take in mind) made me realize how much that film in particular pushes that idea to an extreme. In the film, Bergman not only calls into focus the artificial stage of his  narrative, but also the medium through which he delivers it. Literal film strips & projectors appear in the film’s two biggest moments (even breaking down the narrative in the second instance) and the film’s final scene cuts away to show camera crews filming the actors on set. As Ebert puts it, “Most movies try to seduce us into forgetting we’re ‘only’ watching a movie. But Bergman keeps reminding us his story isn’t ‘real.’ […] We have been brutally reminded that the story is being filtered through technical equipment.” Persona‘s ambiguity & existential distress is rewarding enough on its own to demand multiple viewings, but looking for that self-referential artificiality in the film was alone well worth a revisit.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

 Brandon’s Rating: (4.5/5, 90%)

fourhalfstar

Next Lesson: Apocalypse Now (1979)

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 1: Life Itself (2014)

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After viewing & reviewing every feature film in Russ Meyer’s catalog over the last few months, I’ve found myself in need of a new film-watching project to break up the monotony of chasing down every newer release that hits the theaters. I’m getting some fulfillment on that end with the Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. MCU retrospective I’m tackling with Boomer, but I’m in the need of something more ambitious & longerm. Recently, reading the excellent Russ Meyer biography Big Bosoms & Square Jaws a second time finally lead me to tackling Roger Ebert’s autobiography Life Itself, an endeavor that’s been intimidating me for years due to the potential emotional toll. Something I noticed while reading Life Itself was how eclectic & intimidating the list of movies Ebert references in the book is. Among titles I have already seen one hundred times (The Wizard of Oz, Reservoir Dogs, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, etc.), there were a ton of Important Movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years (Citizen Kane, Casa Blanca, Lawrence of Arabia, etc.) & even more films I’ve never heard of (Bwana Devil, French Peep Show, Breakheart Pass and so on).

So, as a means of self education, I plan on visiting all 200+ films referenced in Life Itself, both the book & the documentary of the same name. Unlike the Russ Meyer project, which took just a few months to complete, I expect putting myself (and whoever’s reading) through Roger Ebert Film School will take at least two years to complete. I do believe it is a worthwhile effort, though. Since Ebert naturally referenced these films in his writing instead of assembling a definitive list (like his Great Movies feature), they should be a very interesting overview of cinema’s highest highs & lowest lows. I’m looking forward to both ends. That being said, let’s get started. The class bell has effectively rung.

Where Life Itself (2014) is referenced in Life Itself: On the cover, naturally.

What Ebert had to say in his review: Unfortunately, he died before it completed filming, so he didn’t get a chance to see the final product.

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As I said, I had been avoiding reading Ebert’s autobiography, Life Itself, for years by the time it was adapted into a feature length documentary by Steve James in 2014. James’ movie gave me an excuse to delay the inevitable even longer. I’d be able to digest Ebert’s life story & indulge in some healthy sobbing all within two hours’ time, then walk away from the ordeal. I even made a sort of party out of it, dragging a group of friends to Chalmette Movies to watch it on the week of my 28th birthday. Having since read the book, I can happily report that James’ film is an excellent adaptation, considering the length of its runtime. It touches on nearly all of the topics covered in the print version of Life Itself, but with understandably less depth than the way they’re explored by Roger’s pen (except, of course, the more up to date health problems & eventual death that occurred during filming). James could’ve easily expanded Life Itself to match the massive runtime of his seminal work Hoop Dreams, if not longer, but as is the film is a touching, concise overview of Roger’s life & career from start to end.

Besides expediting the process of reviewing Ebert’s life story, the film version of Life Itself offers something inarguably valuable for the life story of a man who spent so much of his time in cinemas: imagery. Photographs, movie scenes, interview footage, and clips from Ebert’s fellow Chicagoan critic Gene Siskel add a whole layer of depth to Life Itself that the autobiography couldn’t afford due to the limits of its medium. The book version of Life Itself is 100% Roger’s voice, which at times can be overly humble or self-deprecating (especially when discussing his alcoholism) in a matter of fact sort of way. The film, on the other hand, is more concerned with his legacy. Talking head interviews with his loving wife Chaz & filmmaker heavyweights like Scorsese & Herzog make Ebert out to be a perfect angel in a way that would’ve made him blush had he been alive to see the final product. It’s very telling that the film also only lightly skims his relationship with perv auteur Russ Meyer, an area where Roger’s life most likely saw its most salacious lows. What’s most invaluable here, though, is the contentious outtakes of Roger going at it with Siskel. In the book he tends to sugarcoat the nastier side of their rivalry, which is entirely understandable given that his friend & colleague was deceased when he wrote it. The movie paints a much more complicated picture & it’s fascinating to watch the extremes of their brotherly (in a thoroughly competitive way) dynamic play out for the camera.

As a documentary divorced from the instant-likability  of its subject, I’m not sure that Life Itself is necessarily a grand feat in modern filmmaking. James’ camera is fearless in capturing Ebert’s hard-to-stomach bouts with cancer, as was Roger himself for putting those struggles on public display. There’s also the strange detail that passages from the book are read by an eerily accurate Ebert impersonator, so it feels as though you’re being spoken to from beyond the grave (not unlike the digitized Marlon Brando in Listen to Me Marlon). For the most part, though, Life Itself is firmly a Wikipedia-in-motion type of documentary. It adds some new information not included in its source material, especially when discussing how Roger championed small voices in filmmaking & opened doors for names like Martin Scorsese, Ava DuVernay, Werner Herzog, and Steve James himself. Life Itself mostly works as a companion piece, though. Ebert’s autobiography is loaded with priceless ponderings on the nature of cinema and, well, life itself. James’ film matches imagery to those ideas & boils them down to an easily digestible morsel.

A filmmaking feat or not, Life Itself is a very moving portrait of one of America’s all time great writers in any medium. It’s a film that has moved me to tears on all four of my viewings (this time it was DuVernay’s story about meeting Roger as a child that choked me up). It may not be a mold-breaking or technically ambitious film, but is an undeniably indispensable one. Highly recommended for those who’ve yet to have the pleasure.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (4/5, 80%)

fourstar

Next Lesson: Persona (1966)

-Brandon Ledet