Joe's View

In our culture, actresses come with a “sell-by” date somewhere around 35 or 40, but overseas, female thespians age like fine wine and there is no lack of good work for stars such as Isabelle Huppert or her fellow Frenchwoman Catherine Deneuve.
The Brits respect ladies of the stage young and old and every age in between, but they’ve got a strong theater culture where great stars such as Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg have been able to gain, rather than lose, creative momentum in their 40s, 50s and 60s.
Those three stars have even been recognized with female knighthood in the form of each being named a “Dame.”
If Elizabeth Ashley was English, she would be alongside Smith, Redgrave, Rigg and Judi Dench in terms of both respect and work opportunities.
Saturday night in Hartford, I caught Ashley’s next to last performance in the American premiere production of “Zerline’s Tale,” Jeremy Sams’ English adaptation of a French play based on a story by Hermann Broch.
The actress shared the stage with a fine listening performer in the form of Jon David Casey as the tenant who hears the long and rather scandalous story the old maid Zerline tells of the wealthy and decadent people she has worked for all her life.
The piece is a tour de force for “an actress of a certain age.” Jeanne Moreau starred in the world premiere production in Paris and Ashley tore into the role of Zerline with everything she has (which is more talent and intelligence than the average half-dozen of her fellow stage performers).
Like Judi Dench, Ashley has an ageless sensuality that made it possible to believe every sexy tale Zerline told about her adventures with men when she was a younger woman. An actress prized for her beauty as the ingenue star of “Barefoot in the Park” in 1963 and her red-hot sexiness in an acclaimed Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” a decade later, now possesses a mature charisma that is much deeper and much more interesting than conventional youthful beauty.
Ashley gave the Hartford crowd a great night in the theater and how lucky we are that her creative alliance with Hartford Stage artistic director Michael Wilson has made her a regular visitor to Connecticut over the past decade.
Next up for the star is the fall Broadway debut of Horton Foote’s “Dividing the Estate,” which, like “Zerline’s Tale,” will be directed by Wilson. I can’t wait.

The very popular novelist Harlan Coben has just become the president of the Mystery Writers of America.
In the group’s February newsletter — “The 3rd Degree” — he writes about the unfortunate trend of “ghettoizing” mystery readers into fans of mini-genres such as “cozies” or “private eyes” or “historicals” or “thrillers.”
“They limit and marginalize our readership,” Coben notes.
The comments seemed particularly apt to me because I’ve just read a really good new first mystery, “Pushing Up Daisies” (Thomas Dunne Books) by Rosemary Harris, a writer who divides her time between Stamford and New York City (an interview I did with the author will be running in tomorrow’s paper on the cover of the Arts & Travel section).
Harris has already run into people who have tried to put her into the “cozy” box, because her book is about an amateur sleuth and has “no mutilations, no serial killers,” as the author put it.
But, her story is about smart and sophisticated people who are so well drawn that they could just as easily be characters in what booksellers and publishers have taken to calling “literary fiction” or “popular fiction.” You know…novels.
The labeling frenzy doesn’t do anyone much good — to put Harris in the same general category that includes pet mysteries or Jessica Fletcher-types running around in a colorful little village does everyone a disservice (readers and writers alike).
The same madness can be seen in the general fiction section of bookstores where wonderful novels that happen to be written by women and deal with urban professional women’s lives are lumped under the labels “chick lit” or “romance,” steering a potential male readership away from fine writers ranging from Jane Green to Marian Keyes.
Readers should be the ones who label books after they’ve read them and my only two categories are “good” or “bad.”
A few years ago, I heard the now very popular author Sandra Brown talk about her frustration in the early stage of her career when she wrote books that couldn’t be easily labeled as “thrillers” or “suspense” or plain old “mystery.”
“We don’t know which part of the store your books should be in,” a publishing executive complained.
“Oh, I want them to be up in the front with the best-sellers,” the sly writer replied.

So much of the Joan Crawford image and mythology grows out of the pictures she made in the 1940s and 1950s — when she was almost scarily tough and mannish — that it’s always a shock to see one of the movies she made for MGM in the 1930s when she was a much fresher and funnier actress.
Warner Home Video recently sent me “The Joan Crawford Collection, Vol. 2,” a new boxed set of five Crawford pictures spanning the years from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s. The shocker for me was “Sadie McKee,” a 1934 star vehicle in which the 26-year-old actress plays the daughter of a rich family’s cook who winds up marrying a millionaire alcoholic (Edward Arnold).
Crawford became such a caricature in the post-World War II era — and gravitated to such tough, almost heartless parts — that it is stunning to see how sweet and charming she was in her younger years.
“Sadie McKee” is more a drama than a comedy, but Crawford plays the role with a light touch and there is a natural quality to the young woman’s attempt to make something out of herself after she follows the man she loves (Gene Raymond) to New York.
Through a series of events too complicated to get into here, Sadie is ditched by her beau and gets married to a rich party animal she meets while working as a dancer in a disreputable nightclub.
What makes the film so irresistible is how much we grow to care about Sadie and how down-to-earth and nice she is (“nice” is something you would never say about the characters Crawford started playing a decade later).
The movie’s treatment of alcoholism is remarkably modern. Sadie becomes determined to help her husband kick his addiction in well-written and well-played scenes that don’t feel at all dated.
Although she was very popular in the early 1930s, Crawford began to fall out of fashion by the end of the decade and her contract was dropped by MGM.
The actress was saved by Warner Bros. and “Mildred Pierce” in 1945, but moviegoers never again saw the sweet, girlish star of “Sadie McKee.”
(Warner Home Video is releasing “The Joan Crawford Collection, Vol. 2” on DVD Tuesday.)

The very funny Douglas Carter Beane play “The Little Dog Laughed” is about a closeted gay actor — on the verge of movie stardom — who falls in love with a male prostitute he hires one night while visiting Manhattan. The performer decides the time has come to stop hiding his sexual orientation.
The actor’s agent is, of course, horrified and outraged that the young about-to-be-star’s earning potential will be drastically curtailed by the revelation. The agent, Diane, fears that the actor could go from being the next Tom Cruise to the next Rupert Everett (something no good ten-percenter would want to see happen to a client).
Because sex is at the heart of the comedy, Beane wrote a discreet but necessary nude scene into the hotel room encounter between the actor and the hustler.
The play opened at TheaterWorks Hartford (above) earlier in the month with the nudity intact, but controversy has erupted in Chicago over the decision of artistic director Eric Rosen to omit the naked moments in his production at the About Face Theatre.
Playbill.com reported yesterday that Rosen has been forced to send letters to all of the Chicago press telling them he did not adhere to the writer’s wishes in his staging of the comedy.
Unluckily for Rosen, Beane was in Chicago when this production opened last month and was shocked not to see the nude scene (Rosen had asked Beane if he could cut the nudity, was told “no” and Beane’s agents assured the playwright the nudity had been restored).
Beane’s first thought was to yank the theater’s rights to the play and force a closing, but he decided to let it continue, if the press was informed about the unauthorized change.
It’s fascinating that 40 years after “Hair” and 39 years after “Oh, Calcutta!” stage nudity is still so controversial.
(“The Little Dog Laughed” — with nudity — is running through March 9 at TheaterWorks Hartford. For ticket information call 860-527-7838.)

The “Great Movies You Missed” series at the Stratford Library is ending on a high note Friday at noon with a free screening of the 1995 French thriller, “La Ceremonie,” which is an adaptation of “A Judgement in Stone,” one of the best novels by the British master of crime fiction Ruth Rendell.
Rendell often writes in the vein of the late Patricia Highsmith (creator of the Tom Ripley novels) who was more interested in analyzing how crimes happen than in solving mysteries.
“A Judgement in Stone” violates the whodunit formula in its very first paragraph: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write. There was no real motive and no premeditation; no money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman’s disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as twentieth-century woman.”
Rendell then flashes back to the hiring of Eunice to work as a maid in the Coverdale house; the rest of the book shows the series of chance meetings, small insults, and ignorance of “the big picture” that leads the Coverdale family inexorably to its doom. The result is a story that is much more frightening than the average thriller because we see the pieces of the puzzle being slowly put into place.
Chabrol has adapted Rendell several times; he shares her fascination with the psychology of crime and the way that victims sometimes step into traps that are partially of their own devising.
“La Ceremonie” slightly restructures the Rendell book, and moves it to the French countryside, but it has the same feeling of mounting tension as we see how a wealthy and aggressively “charming” family has no clue as to what is going on with their new maid.
The family has no knowledge of the destructiveness built into the lonely maid’s new friendship with an angry postal clerk who loathes the well-heeled outsiders who have moved to her village for weekend fun.
The casting is superb, with the great Isabelle Huppert as the postal clerk, Sandrine Bonnaire as the passive maid, and Jacqueline Bisset as the well-meaning wife and mother who doesn’t have the time to worry about the personal life of her hired help.
“La Ceremonie” builds slowly but precisely to one of the most horrifying finales in modern suspense movie history.
It is wonderful that Stratford Library programmer Tom Holehan has unearthed this gem as the final offering in his annual weeklong film festival.
(The Stratford Library is at 2203 Main St. For more information on the Friday noon screening call 385-4164.)

Stratford Library programming chief Tom Holehan is one of my local culture heroes so I was very happy when he called me several months back to suggest a film for his annual “Great Movies You Missed” series.
It didn’t take long for me to come up with “Birth,” the 2004 Jonathan Glazer drama about reincarnation that opened to some very strong reviews (some terrible ones, too), but did not deliver the “Sixth Sense”-style supernatural thriller that early multiplex audiences expected. The box-office returns were so bad that the film was gone before it had time to find an appreciative audience.
There are tragic elements in “Birth,” but no horror or violence, so many of the people who saw the picture in its opening weekend dismissed it as boring or wildly improbable.
The commercial problem with this quite remarkable film is that it treats a supernatural experience with deadly seriousness — the upper class New York woman Anna played by Nicole Kidman has to confront the idea that the soul of her late husband has returned a decade after his death in the body of a 10-year-old boy, Sean (Cameron Bright).
Anna is still grieving but has agreed to marry Joseph (Danny Huston), who has been after her for years.
Jonathan Glazer wrote the original screenplay with Milo Addica and Jean-Claude Carriere (the latter writer worked on the 1972 Luis Bunuel classic, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”).
“Birth” combines a provocative premise with superb craftsmanship — the movie’s wintry Manhattan looks stunning as shot by Harris Savides and the music by Alexandre Desplat subtly heightens the emotion in many scenes.
What really carries the movie, however, is the brilliant and daring performance by Nicole Kidman who makes us believe Anna is in the middle of a hellish dilemma — the man she adored and lost has come back in the form of a 10-year-old boy.
If you go on the IMDB site, there are absurd claims that “Birth” becomes a form of “kiddie porn” in the scenes depicting Anna’s growing realization that her husband has returned as a pre-teen.
The contact we see between Anna and Sean is unsettling but not due to any sexual subtext — we are unnerved because Kidman makes us believe what her character believes and we can see that there is no rational way out of the situation.
The wintry look and the extended close-ups of Kidman are reminiscent of the work of Ingmar Bergman who thought the human face was just about the most interesting thing you can look at in a movie and who therefore gave us up-close-and-very-personal views of Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and all of those other great Swedish actresses he worked with.
In this age of lightning-fast cutting, and movies that use actors as expensive props, it is such a pleasure to see Kidman have the chance to use the camera as a tool and to have so many close-up oppportunities. There is an incredible sequence early on in which Anna and Joseph arrive at the opera late and the camera moves in for a tight shot of Kidman’s face that is held for a few minutes so that we can watch Anna’s dawning realization that her husband might be back in a new form.
If you haven’t seen “Birth,” join me at the Stratford Library, 2203 Main St., Wednesday night at 7 p.m. for this free screening.

HBO created a media storm last fall with its most sexually explicit series, “Tell Me You Love Me,” about three couples with sexual problems and the 60ish therapist (Jane Alexander) who is treating the two married couples.
I have smart friends who dismissed the whole enterprise as “porn” after one episode, but the show seemed to me like a valiant attempt to rescue sex as a topic from the pornographers, rather than an emulation of the faceless-bodies-in-motion XXX films that are designed simply for titillation.
It was interesting to me that the most “shocking” element in the debut episode was a sex scene involving Jane Alexander and David Selby (as her husband) that showed them to be the only couple in the drama with a healthy sex life. But, to see seniors enjoying themselves in the boudoir was too much for the ladies on “The View.” Imagine, someone like Jane Alexander having — and enjoying — sex!
(The complete first season of “Tell Me You Love Me” will be released on DVD Feb. 12.)
European filmmakers have been exploring the same territory for many years in pictures such as “Betty Blue” and “The Piano Teacher,” but in this country, frank sexual dramas have had a rough time in mainstream media.
Several weeks ago, at a screening of a Godard film at the Avon Theatre in Stamford, I met a Stamford filmmaker named Dutch Doscher — who has worked on “Afterschool Specials” among other projects — and he asked me if I would look at a short film he made last year (“Leave You In Me”) that has been entered in many festivals, but has been tough to screen publicly because of the full frontal nudity.
Dreading another vanity production (the cinematic equivalent of a self-published novel) I put off watching the film for several days. But, when I popped it into the DVD player I was stunned by the combination of Doscher’s technical prowess (the black-and-white film is flawlessly shot end edited) and the fact that he and screenwriter Michael Darin Cohen were willing to deal with sex so directly and had found two excellent actors (Sarah Jaye and Andrew Ramaglia) who were willing to bare their bodies as well as their emotions.
The movie is a story of that age old sexual problem between men and women — she demands absolute fidelity, he believes sex doesn’t “mean” as much for a guy and that his dalliance with another woman did not take anything away from the love he feels for his romantic partner.
The 20-minute film is set entirely in the bedroom, where these elemental characters hash out their differences in the nude, just after they’ve made love.
Doscher’s film is the farthest thing imaginable from porn — because he makes us care about these two people and to accept their nudity as being entirely natural. The filmmaker doesn’t stray into the graphic, porn-like sexual moments that resulted in many U.S. art theaters refusing to book “Shortbus” and “9 Songs.”
The filmmaker told me that at some screenings he had run into that age-old nudity problem of viewers saying that it was somehow more “graphic” to show Ramaglia’s body than to display his female co-star without clothes.
So far, Doscher hasn’t been able to line up any local public showings of this honest and honestly daring film, but I was pleased to hear from him recently that the movie will be competing next week in a Los Angeles festival devoted to the short film — “Show Off Your Shorts.”
(For more information on Doscher’s film, go to www.innervisionsmedia.com)

You only have three more days to catch Anna Deavere Smith’s new play, “Let Me Down Easy,” during its world premiere engagement at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. I saw it last night and was frankly surprised that there were lots of empty seats in the small theater — this is a national event in our own backyard and in an earlier, more vibrant era for theatre, the run would have sold out before it opened Jan. 9.
Smith has become well known for her acting appearances on TV series such as “The West Wing” and in movies (“Philadelphia,” “The Human Stain”) over the past decade, but this is her first solo stage show in more than 10 years.
Longtime Long Wharf fans still remember Smith’s career-making 1992 show “Fires in the Mirror” in which she embodied characters on both sides of the terrible religious/racial division in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. As Long Wharf artistic director Gordon Edelstein writes in the “LMDE” program, “Never before or since have I witnessed a piece of theatre that so captured the temperature of a city and reflected its zeitgeist.”
Smith followed that piece with “Twilight: Los Angeles” — about the Los Angeles riots — which played Broadway and was later taped for PBS airing.
“LMDE” is the most sprawling of Smith’s theatre pieces, an examination of what the writer-actress calls “the resilience and vulnerability of the human body.”
Smith has spent years interviewing athletes, doctors, models, and media celebrities about health, body image, illness, death, and grief. The artist culled hundreds of hours of interviews into a lucid script and for two-and-half hours, she becomes well known people like Lance Armstrong and Ann Richards, little known doctors and medical researchers, and ordinary people coping with their bodies in good times and bad. In the most harrowing section, she becomes the late ABC film critic Joel Siegel raging against his terminal cancer and network bosses who still expect him to cover the summer movie season.
The show takes us to Rwanda, New Orleans, Yale-New Haven Hospital and sleek lofts in SoHo.
Smith doesn’t mimic her interview subjects, but she transforms herself from scene to scene with costuming and vocal inflections that convince us we have listened to more than two dozen different people — male and female, young and old.
It’s an incredible piece of performance art grounded on real people grappling with primal issues.
The show could, perhaps, use some minor cutting and shaping before it is produced in New York, but it is not to be missed.
(For ticket information on the four remaining performances of “Let Me Down Easy” visit longwharf.org.)