Joe's View

The three-month film series — “New York Before Disney” — that I’ve been hosting at the Fairfield Theatre Company since mid-summer, is ending Tuesday night with a screening of the virtually unknown 1971 drama “Desperate Characters.”
Filmed in Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1970, the picture is a terrific time capsule from a period when older city dwellers felt their notions of polite society — and, indeed, “civilization” itself — were threatened by the counterculture and an escalating crime rate that was causing a major city-to-suburb shift by the middle class.
Based on a brilliant Paula Fox novel — which has been rediscovered in recent years after being out of print for more than a decade — “Desperate Characters” follows a middle-aged couple, Sophie and Otto Brentwood, who feel under siege in the Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, neighborhood in which they have bought and restored an elegant townhouse.
Sophie and Otto are urban adventurers who are beginning to feel that the gentrification around them has stalled and that they are about to be swallowed up by urban chaos.
The film is a faithful adaptation of Fox’s book which critic Irving Howe said “captures, to some extent, a mood of the late sixties, the anxiety of cultivated liberal people that ‘everything is going to hell’ and the threatening hordes are at the gate.”
The movie was a pet project of Shirley MacLaine whose life and career were in transition in the late 1960s. The star had just suffered the box-office and critical failure of the hugely expensive musical “Sweet Charity” in 1969 and was drifting away from acting and into writing and political activism.
The actress made a deal for a TV series with the legendary British producer Lew Grade that also allowed her to produce two low-budget films of her choosing (MacLaine later agreed with cynics in the movie business who joked, “There is high grade and Lew Grade”).
The sitcom was a flop, but MacLaine was able to make two very interesting New York-set films — with great parts for her — just before she went off to work on the McGovern campaign. “Desperate Characters” was followed by “The Possession of Joel Delaney” (1972), a fascinating supernatural thriller about class differences in Manhattan that is overdue for rediscovery.
Although neither of the MacLaine projects were overtly political, both pictures explored the 1970-71 New York City scene as acutely as they observed the characters in the foreground. The actress brought a maturity and depth to both characterizations that set her up for the triumph she would score in “Terms of Endearment” a decade later.
(“Desperate Characters” will be screened as part of the Fairfield Theatre Company’s free “Martini and a Movie” series Tuesday night at 7 p.m. For more information, call 259-1036 or visit the FTC website at www.fairfieldtheatre.org)

Now may not be the best time to escape to the frivolous, self-involved world of fashion — is this like fiddling while Wall Street and Washington, D.C. burn? — but I have to admit I had a great time the other night visiting the alternate universe of the German designer Karl Lagerfeld via the new DVD “Lagerfeld Confidentiel” (Koch Lorber).
Lagerfeld is clearly a demon workhorse — supervising the house of Chanel and his own clothing line while pursuing a very busy and accomplished “sideline” as a photographer. But Lagerfeld also has managed to find the time and the energy to create a persona that is as amusing and as bizarre as that of anyone to come along in the fashion biz since the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland (whose book of eccentric musings and proclamations, “D.V.,” always gives me a good laugh whenever I pick it up).
In the 2006 Lagerfeld documentary, director Rodolphe Marconi tracks the designer from Paris to New York and back again, giving us a very beautiful and very funny peak into the lifestyles of the rich and famous (and the young and pretty) who rub up against Lagerfeld. It’s the film equivalent of a coffee table book — lovely to look at but very slight in terms of content.
“Lagerfeld Confidentiel” has no narration and Marconi only pauses a few times to ask Lagerfeld questions — most of which are greeted with amused sidestepping.
As Lagerfeld moves from house to jet to salon to disco to restaurant, no introductions are made for us lowly tourists (there aren’t even titles to identify some of the people who are clearly close to Lagerfeld). We all know “Nicole,” of course, since she happens to be one of the most famous and accomplished actresses in the world, but who are all of those other people vying for Karl’s attention? In one scene, the camera moves in for a close-up of a framed picture of a handsome young man in the designer’s apartment but I had to read a fashion writer’s review of the film to learn that the man in the picture was an early and important love of Lagerfeld’s.
Several scenes in the movie involve a handsome young American flying in to be photographed by Karl — and then wined and dined — but, again, it was only in a review of the film that I learned the guy in question was model Brad Koenig (above), the designer’s “muse” for the last five years and the subject of a Lagerfeld photo book called “Metamorphoses of an American” which is devoted exclusively to Koenig.
Marconi keeps things moving so swiftly, and Karl keeps delivering over-the-top lines like “I can’t plan six months ahead! We might be dead by then!” with such regularity, that you give up trying to figure out who the people around Karl are and just go with the flow.

“I Served the King of England” opened to good reviews in New York and Los Angeles last month — and the film expanded to several Connecticut arthouses last Friday — but it is a very eccentric comedy dealing with the horrors of World War II and the communist takeover of Eastern Europe in the years after the war.
Many of the positive reviews included serious reservations about the tone of the picture — in one characteristically odd sequence, clearly meant to be funny, the film’s Czech hero imagines his German bride turning into Hitler while he makes love to her. The press support in this country seems to have more to do with the return of director Jiri Menzel than with what he has put on the screen.
Time Out New York gave the film a rave — four out of six stars — after noting “a few questionably blithe turns (that) reduce complex issues to sex comedy simplicity (WWII is depicted as part Holocaust, part hot Nazi frauleins in a pool).”
Menzel was a major figure in the rise of Czech cinema in the 1960s (before the brutal political repression of the summer of 1968). The director’s 1966 black comedy, “Closely Watched Trains,” won the Oscar for best foreign language film and was part of a wave of Czech pictures that surprised and delighted U.S. arthouse audiences with their sexual frankness and offbeat humor
After the communist crackdown of 1968, two of Menzel’s fellow Czech directors — Milos Forman and Ivan Passer — relocated to America, and continued to make films, but Menzel remained in Europe and went without work for long periods .
“I Served the King of England” is beautifully shot and edited — and contains a memorable Chaplinesque performance by Ivan Barnev (above) as the film’s hapless protagonist Jan Dite — but the way that the zany hijinks of Jan’s early adventures as a young waiter continue through scenes of Nazi and Communist repression was jarring to this American viewer.
Chaplin’s slapstick comedy “The Great Dictator” took aim at Hitler and the Nazis in 1940, before the full implications of the Holocaust were known.
Films that have followed in the same humanist satiric vein — such as Lina Wertmuller’s “Seven Beauties” and Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful” — have been both criticized and hailed for their treatment of the ultimate horror of the 20th Century.
Chaplin scored laughs from Hitler before the full extent of his atrocities became known.
“I Served the King of England” has many warmly humorous sequences, and Menzel’s love of naked flesh gives the picture a jolt of eroticism, but the movie lost me when Jan’s hotel was taken over by the Nazis for their experiments in eugenics. In early scenes, we watch prostitutes and other “fallen” women rushing to rooms upstairs to make whoopee — moments that are charmingly naughty. When Menzel brings the same tone (and staging) to scenes showing perfect Aryan women filing into the hotel rooms to mate with Nazi soldiers, the light approach to the material is baffling, to say the least.
Jan becomes too passive after falling for a beautiful female German soldier — he agrees to so many of her Nazi notions that we don’t understand why, in a key scene, the waiter immediately realizes a train across a station platform is taking prisoners to the death camps and he desperately tries to give his sandwich to one of the passengers.
The gesture seems so out of character — and so pitifully small — that the scene is more clumsy than moving.
Perhaps some of Menzel’s intentions have been lost in translation.

46 years after her death, the mystique of Marilyn Monroe remains strong enough to justify a cover story in the new October issue of Vanity Fair.
The cover taglines and the pull quotes for the very long article are a bit of a cheat, implying that clues to the so-called “mysterious” death of Monroe in August, 1962, might be found in personal papers of the late star that have been locked up — and contested — since her death.
The article traces the history of these papers but never really details their contents. Most of the papers that illustrate the article are numbingly banal items such as liquor store bills, acting union cards and a possible fan letter from T.S. Eliot. The one interesting document is the contract Marilyn personally wrote and sent to Ben Hecht when he ghosted an autobiographical piece for The Saturday Evening Post (in the note, the star displays a steel-trap lawyer’s mind that doesn’t jibe with the mythology of a delicate woman who was crushed by the Hollywood system).
We’ve all been down this road before — the “tragic” Marilyn who died as the result of her mistreatment by studio bosses and a Hollywood culture that failed to recognize the star’s untapped brilliance as a screen actress.
Then there are the nitwit theories that have been spun for decades suggesting that Marilyn was murdered by the Kennedys or the CIA or who-knows-who in order to cover up the fact that she was having affairs with the president and the attorney general.
Marilyn was so clearly spiraling downward — having just been fired by the studio that discovered her a decade earlier and ramping up her use of drugs and alcohol — that a contract killing should have seemed superfluous (and very dangerous) to anyone who knew her well enough to want her dead.
Ironically, in the decades since her death, Marilyn has come to be celebrated more for her “victim” status than for any performance she ever gave in a film. You don’t hear too many 2008 DVD watchers raving about “The River of No Return” or “Let’s Make Love” or “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
Young friends have told me that they find most Monroe pictures unwatchable, with the sole exception of “Some Like It Hot” (the classic Billy Wilder comedy in which the star plays a supporting role, leaving the heavy comic lifting to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon).
In a 1973 New York Times review of a Norman Mailer coffee table book about the star, Pauline Kael seemed to nail the appeal of Monroe when she wrote that it was “her lack of an actress’s skill (that) amuse(d) the public. She had the crassness or desperation to turn cheesecake into acting — and vice versa…She would bat her Bambi eyelashes, lick her messy suggestive open mouth, wiggle that pert and tempting bottom, and use her hushed voice to caress us with dizzying innuendos.”
“Her extravagantly ripe body bulging and spilling out of her clothes, she threw herself at us with the off-color innocence of a baby whore. She wasn’t the girl men dreamed of or wanted to know but the girl they wanted to go to bed with.”
“The mystique of Monroe…is that she became spritual as she fell apart. But as an actress she had no way of expressing what was deeper in her except in moodiness and weakness. When she was ‘sensitive’ she was drab,” Kael noted of the star’s fascinating but basically inept performance in her final film, “The Misfits.”
Some very smart people changed their minds about Monroe’s acting ability after she died, with Mailer doing a complete turnaround on “The Misfits.”
When the picture opened in 1961, Mailer wrote that Monroe “was bad in ‘The Misfits,’ she was finally too vague, and when the emotion showed, it was unattractive and small.”
11 years after the star died, Mailer claimed that the same performance was “the fulfillment of her art.”

New York Times correspondent Sarah Lyall explores the differences between Americans and Brits with great humor and insight in her new book, “The Anglo Files” (W.W. Norton).
As Lyall reports in her introduction, she moved to England in the mid-1990s “for love” – the writer met future husband Robert McCrum at the Frankfurt Book Fair while she was covering the publishing beat out of the Times Manhattan offices.
“Robert was like something out of ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ or at least that’s what I thought, not knowing very many British people and not yet having read a lot of Evelyn Waugh,” Lyall confides.
“I could barely understand half of what he said, but I was hooked by his charismatic arrogance, glinting brown eyes, and expert way around the English language. For his part, he liked my raw New World enthusiasm and the fact that I was cedulous enough to believe pretty much anything he told me about the UK,” she adds.
After Lyall married McCrum, moved to London, and had two daughters, she was able to dig deeper into the differences between people in this country and those who live “across the pond.”
The writer’s clout as a reporter for The New York Times enabled her to investigate whatever Brit peculiarities interested her. The result is a breezy and very funny examination of British politics, newspapers, show business and ,of course, the special role played by the Royal Family in the UK.
Chapter 10 — “The Invasion of the Hedgehog People” — delves into the Brits “sentimerntal attachment to animals, including abstract ones featured in newspapers.”
“Every British animal has its cheerleaders. The country has so many badger-support groups that it was deemed necessary to create an umbrella organization, the National Federation of Badger Groups, now known as the Badger Trust, to coordinate all the disparate badger-related activity,” Lyall writes.
The lowly badger is beloved in the UK thanks to the great children’s book author Beatrix Potter, who made one of the creatures the protagonist of “The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.”
“The Anglo Files” is a pointed, and sometimes viciously satirical, attempt to give readers “A Field Guide to the British.”

With the passage of time, it is understandable that the horrifying events of Sept. 11, 2001 have been contained, exploited and even sentimentalized in the manner of any other historic event.
Enough time has passed for Hollywood filmmakers and major novelists to weigh in on 9/11 and for politicians to exploit the terrorist attack in nearly countless ways (an unpopular mayor became a hero and a potential presidential candidate, and a president who had just stolen an election a few months earlier would gain the clout to win a second term in office).
Tonight at 9 p.m. The History Channel is unveiling “102 Minutes That Changed America,” a documentary that blends amateur and professional videos shot in downtown Manhattan during that terrifying period between the first plane hitting the north tower and the collapse of the two buildings.
The documentary has an immediacy that was not possible in the moment-by-moment coverage of the major television networks – it took the producers of the special two years to sift through videos shot by residents and visitors who were on the scene.
The live coverage that most of us saw that morning was certainly as shocking as anything we’ve ever witnessed on TV – the feeling of chaos descending on New York City and the nation was overpowering – but most of the images were made from a slight distance and the networks self-censored a lot of the horror that was visible to the people who happened to be in the streets near the WTC.
“102 Minutes That Changed America” personalizes what happened to dozens of anonymous New Yorkers with video cameras that morning – two female roommates who scream in terror at what they are seeing outside their window (a few blocks from the WTC) and who feel they are in imminent danger on the 33rd floor of a skyscraper; little children who don’t understand what’s happening or how a huge building could “disappear”; firemen who are desperately herding WTC evacuees from the carnage inside and around the WTC; weeping people in a restaurant attempting to call loved ones on their cells and staring in shock at a television; tourists in Times Square trying to figure out what those live pictures on the ABC jumbotron mean.
I understand that there will be many people who will not want to watch a “You Are There” account of the darkest day in modern American life, but this is a valuable document that will enable future generations to see what happened in New York before “history” took over 9/11.
(The History Channel will air “102 Minutes That Changed America” tonight at 9 p.m, without commercial interruption.)

With so many good movies failing to find theatrical distribution in this country and going directly to DVD, the fairly wide release last Friday of the stillborn, would-be romantic comedy, “Everybody Wants to Be Italian,” is one of the major film industry mysteries of 2008.
The low-budget picture opened to withering reviews which I read while I was away on vacation, a situation that sometimes puts me in a sympathetic, pity-the-underdog frame of mind. But, when I caught up with “Everybody” earlier this week, it more than lived down to its bad press.
The ads and website for the comedy make it look like an attempt to do for Italians what the 2002 indie sleeper “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” did for Greeks.
There are also some echoes of “Moonstruck” in the film’s dizzy, star-crossed lovers and the incessant use of Italian music on the soundtrack, but “Everybody Wants to Be Italian” turns out to be a bait-and-switch proposition because the comedy doesn’t really focus on Italian-Americans the way the Cher/Nicolas Cage vehicle did 20 years ago.
The hero (Jay Jablonski) is Polish and the heroine (Cerina Vincent) is Hispanic. Both of them have had problems finding stable relationships and are urged by friends and family to check out a Boston singles group for Italians.
Jablonski’s co-workers in his fish-shop are Italian and Vincent has an old Italian woman living in her apartment building, so much of the enthnic flavor feels synthetic and tacked-on.
You could easily do a hasty rewrite on the script and remake it as “Everybody Wants to Be Puerto Rican” or “…German” or “…Irish.”
It would be fascinating to learn how this hopeless turkey received a (brief) theatrical life on its quick passage to the bargain bin at your neighborhood video store.

Newton Thornburg’s strangely unheralded 1976 crime novel “Cutter and Bone” was made into the 1981 cult film, “Cutter’s Way,” and tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m. it will be my pleasure to host a screening of the movie at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford.
“Cutter’s Way” was one of the first Hollywood pictures to be released by an art house subsidiary of a major studio — United Artists Classics — and the success of the specialized distribution paved the way to Fox Searchlight, Miramax and all of the other companies of the 1980s and 1990s that brought foreign and indie films to a greatly expanded number of theaters in this country.
After the break-up of United Artists, the founders of the classics division moved on to another troubled company, Orion, before eventually finding a permanent home under the Sony banner as Sony Pictures Classics.
But, enough business talk.
“Cutter’s Way” is one of my favorite movies from the 1980s because of the way it blends classic elements of 1940s film noir thrillers with the cynical countercultural tone of the late 1970s — when the baby boom radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s knew their day was coming to an end and the “Reagan revolution” was about to begin.
The story follows two lifelong Santa Barbara friends —the scarred Vietnam vet Cutter (John Heard) and the rapidly aging beach boy/gigolo Bone (Jeff Bridges).
Bone has lost his idealistic youthful drive and Cutter is raging over a “system” that left him physically and emotionally maimed.
Late one night, after he has been paid to have sex with a wealthy older woman, Bone’s car breaks down in a rainy alley, and he sees someone dumping something large into a trash can. The something turns out to be a dead girl and soon Cutter and Bone come to believe she was a hitchhiker who was disposed of like a piece of trash by one of the wealthist men in town, J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott).
The two men set off on a dangerous quest to nail the politically connected power broker, but instead get a painful lesson in the way that rich people clean up their messes.
“Cutter’s Way” has a very strong sense of place — you can practically smell the rot just under the beautiful Southern California surfaces — and the performances by Bridges and Heard are spectacular.
The 1980 movie scene came to be dominated by the comic book antics of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but “Cutter’s Way” was part of a wave of less-publicized 1980s films such as “At Close Range,” “To Live and Die in L.A.” and “Mike’s Murder” that demonstrated all was not well in boom time, Reagan era America.
(“Cutter’s Way” will be shown Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. at the non-profit Avon Theatre Film Center, 272 Bedford St. Tickets are $10. For more information, call 967-3660.)