Joe's View

Why is it that Diane Lane never gets a great part in a great movie?
One of the most gifted — and appealing — film actresses, Lane works all the time, but generally in second-rate pictures such as “Must Love Dogs” and “Hollywoodland.”
Even Lane’s Oscar-nominated performance in “Unfaithful” (right) was a classic case of an actress being much better than her material — the star’s good work was completely undercut by the soft core porn elements and the lame thriller plotting in the last 20 minutes of that 2002 adultery drama.
These musings are prompted by the press sceening I went to in Manhattan last night of Lane’s next movie, “Untraceable,” set to open Jan. 25.
The star plays a member of the FBI’s cyber crimes unit who is on the trail of a particularly ghastly killer — a man who traps and kills his victims on a website he calls killwithme.com.
Lane is once again wonderful in a movie that isn’t quite up to the level of her talent. The actress makes us care deeply about the woman she plays, but “Untraceable” isn’t likely to move her out of the second tier of Hollywood actresses.
The 44-year-old actress started working in the New York theater before she was 10 and made her movie debut in 1979, so Lane was very lucky to survive that notoriously rocky transition between child star and adult actress. But Lane has never landed the sort of juicy, full-bodied parts that have gone to her peer Jodie Foster.
Working continuously for 29 years is an accomplishment in itself for any performer, of course, but Lane fans keep waiting for her to get a part that matches her beautifully honed abilities.

As I listened to all of the TV and radio pundits spending hours today trying to explain their innaccurate forecasts in the run up to the New Hampshire primary, I couldn’t help but think that somewhere the late great Paddy Chayefsky was smiling.
Everything you need to know about the collapse of TV news into entertainment and continuous punditry is contained in Chayefsky’s scary and hilarious script for “Network,” which was dismissed by TV insiders in 1976 as farcical foolishness.
I watched the picture again on DVD last week and was struck anew by the writer’s vision.
At Chayefsky’s fictional TV network, UBS, the management realizes how much cheaper it is to talk about the news rather than report it, so a psychic known as “Sybil the soothsayer” becomes a nightly feature, predicting what will happen the next day.
How different is this from the New York and D.C. gas bags who make careers out of telling us what is going to happen rather than what is happening?
Following in Chayefsky’s footsteps, the real TV networks gleaned in the 1980s how much money you can save by hiring a few high-priced talking heads rather than the armies of fairly anonymous reporters and producers who used to dig up something called “news.”
Take away the expensive “experts” and the polling results (and analysis) and you wouldn’t have much to watch on CNN or Fox News.

American photographer, filmmaker, actor William Klein has spent much of the past half-century working in France, where he has attained living legend status.
Back home, the 79-year-old native New Yorker is less well known because his films have been so devilishly hard to see.
Striking stills from Klein’s 1966 fashion world satire, “Who are you, Polly Maggoo?” have been turning up in coffee table movie books for decades, but other than a few scattered museum screenings over the years, the comedy qualified as a lost film in this country.
Fortunately, that situation is changing. The Sundance Channel has been screening “Polly Maggoo” and Klein’s 1969 Muhammad Ali documentary “The Greatest” for the past month. According to internet sources, “Polly Maggoo” will make its long delayed U.S. video debut in March in a special set that will include the director’s 1969 American political satire, “Mr. Freedom.”
I finally caught up with “Polly Maggoo” last week, thanks to the Sundance Channel, and got a kick out of its still-timely spoofing of a consumer fashion culture ruled by whimsical magazine editors and presented to the public by waifish young ciphers who are billed as “supermodels.”
Klein’s vision of the fashion world circa 1966 is as strong as the one presented by Michelangelo Antonioni the same year in his fashion photographer drama, “Blow Up.” But “Polly Maggoo” doesn’t have the powerful narrative spine of the Antonioni hit and eventually devolves into a series of skits (many of them with an anti-American slant that might have been the cause of the film’s lack of a major distribution deal in this country).
The movie follows the Twiggy-like American model of the title (played by Dorothy McGowan) who is profiled by a French TV show called “Who are you?”
The loose framework allows Klein to present a series of fashion world moments that are quite hilarious, including an opening sequence in which Polly and other models present a collection of dresses made out of metal.
Everyone breathlessly awaits the verdict of the crackpot American editor Miss Maxwell (a parody of then-Vogue editor Diana Vreeland played with obvious amusement by “Dark Shadows” star Grayson Hall).
The literally painful dresses are shown (“I’ve been wounded,” poor Polly announces backstage when a piece of her “dress” has scratched her chest), and the room falls deathly silent, awaiting Miss Maxwell’s verdict.
“He’s recreated woman!,” the editor barks, triggering applause and ordering hysteria from the assembled buyers.
“Polly Maggoo” goes on to send-up TV documentaries, French moviemaking of the 1960s and media life in general. A tad long at 102 minutes, the stunningly shot and continuously inventive film nevertheless lives up to its reputation.
(The Sundance Channel is showing “Who are you, Polly Maggoo?” tonight at 7 p.m., with a number of repeats throughout the month.)

The jury has always been out on Otto Preminger’s merits as a director —most critics see him as a minor figure, but a loyal cult following believes there are great visual and thematic qualities in pictures such as “Advise and Consent” (1962) and “In Harm’s Way” (1965). Everyone agrees Preminger was a great showman who knew how to sell his films and a fearless opponent of film censorship.
The producer-director is the subject of a juicy new Knopf biography, “Otto Preminger” by Foster Hirsch.
New York’s Film Forum is sponsoring a Preminger series in conjunction with the book that is running through Jan. 17. Thursday night, Fairfield actor Keir Dullea will speak at the 7:30 p.m. showing of a newly restored print of the 1965 Preminger thriller, “Bunny Lake is Missing.”
In his prime, Preminger was second only to Alfred Hitchcock in his ability to personally generate news stories and to book important talk show appearances for each one of his pictures. Moviegoers knew the Preminger name and face (at a time when most directors were behind the scenes figures) because he was such a frequent and amusing TV talk show guest.
Like another hammy director, John Huston, the Vienna-born Preminger took on a very high visibility acting job — as a Nazi officer in the Billy Wilder classic “Stalag 17” (1953) — that gave him a leg up on the competition.
Throughout his Hollywood heyday running roughly from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, Preminger was also well known for his dictatorial manner on the sets of his movies. Tom Tryon who starred in “The Cardinal” (1963), Dyan Cannon who starred in “Such Good Friends” (1971) and Dullea were just three of the many actors who went public with their horror stories of being mistreated on Preminger sets.
Hirsch’s book is much juicier than the average Hollywood biography because he was able to get on-the-record interviews with actors and crew members who were more than willing to tell battle stories.
Dullea pointed out to Hirsch that no actor ever gave the best performance of his or her career in a Preminger film: “How could you? Everybody was watching his back. If part of you is busy protecting yourself, you’re not in the role entirely: you can’t be. Because I was so tense my voice is in a higher register than it is in any other film…I don’t hate him; it’s too long ago. But the experience was the most unpleasant I ever had.”
According to Hirsch, Preminger only met his match in the nastiness sweepstakes a few times.
On the set of “Hurry Sundown” (1967), cast and crew couldn’t decide who was worse, Preminger or the pre-“Bonnie and Clyde” Faye Dunaway.
Tensions were already high because of the oppressive Louisiana location heat and threats from the Ku Klux Klan over the black actors staying in the same hotel with the white cast and crew:
“For the only time in his career, Preminger’s ‘whipping boy’ did not have the sympathy of the cast and crew, because Faye Dunaway, hard-bitten, competitive, and self-centered, managed to alienate everyone.”
One member of the crew reports: “She took over an air-conditioned trailer and banished dear Diahann Carroll who was to have shared the trailer with her. She made Diahann learn her lines outside the trailer, in the heat.”
“Otto Preminger” mixes gossipy anecdotes from the director’s sets with smart reassessments of the qualities of each film. Hirsch believes Preminger was always underrated and he makes a reader want to return to pictures like “Exodus” (1960) and “Advise and Consent” for another look.
(Film Forum is at 209 West Houston St. in Manhattan. For more information on tickets for the “Preminger” series call 212-727-8110 or visit filmforum.org.)

Conservative movie scolds like columnist Michael Medved often write that Hollywood filmmakers have an “anti-business” bias that permeates movies and TV.
From my perspective, however, there are too many American movies about gangsters and crooked politicians and too few pictures about the lives of the capitalist barons who have always had the ultimate power in this country.
Yes, there have been marvelously evil characters like Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street” and Noah Cross in “Chinatown” and that bellowing tycoon Ned Beatty played in “Network” who embody the anything-for-a-buck business credo, but guys like that are usually kept on the fringes of a story — they’re presented as villains who provide terrific contrast with the heroes who try to vanquish them.
What makes the new Paul Thomas Anderson picture “There Will Be Blood” so unusual is that the businessman monster character occupies the center of the film and we are forced to study what makes him tick.
Only an uncompromising actor — with no image concerns — such as Daniel Day-Lewis would be willing to play oilman Daniel Plainview who amasses a fortune by any means necessary, pushing family and would-be friends away as he keeps his eyes on the prize.
Anderson makes this nasty story palatable through sheer filmmaking savvy — the picture is stunning to look at from start to finish and has a strikingly innovative musical score by Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) — but it is a harrowing reminder of the money madness that dominates our whole culture.
The Plainviews of our day don’t even have national loyalty, as their business interests have broken free to encircle the globe.
Ironically, the source material for the movie is “Oil!,” a novel by the socialist writer Upton Sinclair, who dared to run for governor in California in the 1930s only to have his character smashed (and his campaign derailed) by a series of propaganda newsreels funded by big business and put together by the moguls who ran Hollywood in those days.

Biographies tend to fall into one of two categories — trashy cut-and-paste affairs that stress personal scandal over professional accomplishment, or exhaustively footnoted tomes that keep us at a slight remove from important figures.
What makes Julie Kavanagh’s “Nureyev” (Pantheon Books) so special is that the writer gives us a full account of Rudolf Nureyev’s life and career on stage at the same time that she provides an unsparing view of the man’s wildly dramatic — and sometimes sordid — personal life.
Kavanagh trained in ballet before she turned to journalism, so she has a special appreciation of Nureyev’s devotion to dance and the excitement he generated in the West after his defection from the Soviet Union in 1961.
Nureyev had already established himself as one of the great young dancers in Russia when he decided to bolt in Paris, from a state-sanctioned tour.
Because this happened at the height of the Cold War, the decision made headlines all over the world and gave Nureyev instant international celebrity.
What Kavanagh makes clear is that the young man’s decision was a purely aesthetic one — he was desperate to break out of the classical tradition of Russian ballet and to explore what was happening in the world of modern dance and to connect with innovators such as his fellow Russian George Balanchine (whose mixture of classical technique and innovative choreography made New York City Ballet into what was perhaps the greatest dance troupe of that time).
Nureyev’s explosive entry into the West raised the profile of dance and made the Russian a household name, what one chronicler quoted by Kavanagh called “ballet’s first pop star, the long-haired icon for the decade’s spirit of rebellion and sexual freedom.”
The dancer was on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” was photographed by Richard Avedon and hobnobbed with the international jet set.
Behind the scenes, Nureyev became infamous for his explosive temper and often whimsical demands, but Kavanagh presents him as a phenomenal work horse, maintaining a punishing schedule that kept him traveling almost constantly for 30 years.
Even the man’s critics admit he brought new life to the ballet, sparking a personal renaissance in the career of his superstar partner Margot Fonteyn (who seemed to be nearing the end of her distinguished career when Nureyev pushed her to a new plateau).
Kavanagh writes of Fonteyn: “She claimed that it was her belief that the audience was looking at him, not her, that had allowed her to relax, and ‘really dance for the first time.’”
Nureyev and Fonteyn were swept into the 1960s lifestyle revolutions along with pop stars, generating page one news when they attended a San Francisco party that ended with a drug bust.
The book delves into Nureyev’s apparently insatiable sex drive, but in a way that makes it clear that hedonism was one of the dancer’s few personal outlets. Kavanagh separates the many one night (one hour?) stands in the artist’s life from his great love for fellow dancer Erik Bruhn and other attachments that were nearly as intense.
The sadness of any dancer’s limited time on stage was intensified by Nureyev finding out in the early 1980s that he was HIV positive. He spent the subsequent decade filling his schedule with as many jobs as he could find, with sidetracks into theater (a disastrous tour of “The King and I”) and conducting classical music. The way that he kept going right to the bitter end (in 1993) is both poignant and inspiring.
Kavanagh tells Nureyev’s story so dramatically — and tells us so much about the world of dance beyond her subject’s life — that few readers will complain about the 698-page length of her account.