Joe's View

The new Nelson DeMille book, “The Gate House” (Grand Central Publishing), hit bookstores last week and should be at the top of the New York Times best-seller list on Sunday — one of popular fiction’s master entertainers has delivered another big and juicy page-turner about a man caught between the Mob and his ex-wife on the Gold Coast of Long Island.
The 674-page book is a sequel to “The Gold Coast,” but you don’t need to have read that one to enjoy this funny and suspenseful tale of DeMille hero John Sutter who has returned to the north shore of Long Island a decade after a cataclysmic scandal — John’s wife, Susan Stanhope, shooting and killing her Mob lover, Frank Bellarosa.
After the divorce, John went on a three-year round the world sail and then resumed his career as a lawyer in London. Susan retreated to South Carolina where her super-wealthy parents have a second home in Hilton Head.
At the start of the sequel, John and Susan return to their old stomping ground for the funeral of a servant who had been with the Stanhope family for decades.
John hasn’t been back in town for long when he is approached by Anthony Bellarosa, Frank’s son, who has taken over the family business and wants John to be one of his lawyers and advisers (Anthony’s dad had John in a similar position before Susan shot him).
John still carries a torch for Susan — who didn’t have to serve any jail time for killing the mobster — and he fears that Anthony has a ten-years-in-the-making revenge planned for the woman who killed his father.
Although DeMille eventually generates great suspense — as Anthony’s plan goes into gear — most of “The Gate House” is a social comedy about wildly dysfunctional families rather than the traditional thriller that the author has delivered on more than one occasion.
One thing that separates DeMille from peers who also ride atop the best-seller lists is his versatility. Over the past decade he has delivered old-fashioned police procedurals as well as provocative topical thrillers such as the recent “Night Fall” and “Wild Fire.”
“The Gate House” is a more leisurely story, but DeMille keeps us going with his wonderful observations of the changing Long Island scene, the jittery post 9/11 atmosphere in Manhattan, and a spirit of sardonic fun that results in a laugh on almost every page. John Sutter is a wise guy — not in the Mob sense but in the way that he takes very few things seriously — and he is terrific character to lead us through the many twists and turns of this immensely satisfying novel.

The obituaries for Michael Crichton — who died yesterday at the age of 66 — stressed his position as one of the most popular novelists of our time. That he was, with an unbroken string of highly entertaining and often very provocative thrillers.
But, I happen to be equally fond of two movies Crichton directed in quick succession four decades ago that seem to have fallen off most people’s radar: the brisk and very scary medical thriller, “Coma” (1978) and the magnificently designed and photographed historical caper film, “The Great Train Robbery” (1979).
In the handful of films he directed, Crichton proved himself to be as good with actors as he was with the mechanics of plotting. The marvelous French Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold gave a terrific performance as the imperiled heroine in “Coma” and Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland make for a delightful pair of crooks in “The Great Train Robbery.”
Crichton also eased Michael Douglas’s way from TV stardom in the 1970s to big screen stardom in the following decade. The actor’s performance as Bujold’s boyfriend in “Coma” (above) displayed the slightly offbeat mix of charisma and moral ambiguity that would power most of the actor’s subsequent star vehicles.
“Coma” was adapted from a Robin Cook novel about a diabolical conspiracy within a Boston hospital involving the murder of healthy patients in order to harvest their organs for sale to wealthy international clients.
The movie was part of a wave of 1970s paranoid thrillers, but Crichton brought humanity and humor to an otherwise grim genre.
“Coma” was one of the rare 1970s thrillers centered on a female character and Crichton seemed unusually sensitive to the character’s position within a male-dominated hospital (the writer-director earned his medical degree from Harvard before he turned to fiction with the 1970 best-seller “The Andromeda Strain”).
If there had been more Hollywood opportunities for actresses in the late 1970s — the decade was largely dominated by male star vehicles and “buddy” dramas and comedies — Bujold could have become a major star rather than a fine character actress.
Crichton continued to direct the occasional film in the 1980s, but he gave up that sideline in 1989 after directing the disastrous “Physical Evidence.” A project that was intended to be a sequel to the 1985 hit “Jagged Edge” — with Glenn Close and Robert Loggia reprising their roles as a San Francisco defense attorney and her crusty investigator — wound up as a barely released Burt Reynolds-Theresa Russell bomb.

Tom Santopietro is a film critic and biographer who seems to have a good handle on both the art and commerce that must be juggled by anyone who works in movies.
Santopietro carved out his own new turf in books he wrote about the film careers of two great pop singers who became accomplished actresses — Doris Day (“Considering Doris Day”) and Barbra Streisand (“The Importance of Being Barbra”).
The critical biographies are unusually smart career assessments by a writer who understands the strengths and weaknesses of his subjects — Santopietro also reminded readers how remarkable it was for the frequently underrated Day and Streisand to maintain careers at the highest levels of the pop music business and the Hollywood moviemaking machine.
The new Santopietro book — “Sinatra in Hollywood” (Thomas Dunne Books) — seems like an inevitable outgrowth of the two earlier volumes. Frank Sinatra’s film and recording careers were strikingly similar to those of Day and Streisand but his pop cultural reach was even greater — Sinatra remained a superstar for a half-century and maintained nightclub and concert careers that the two female stars more or less let go of after they conquered Hollywood.
“Sinatra in Hollywood” tries to counter-balance the major criticism of the star’s work as a film actor — that Sinatra didn’t approach acting with the same level of concentration and seriousness that he brought to his singing.
The big knock against Sinatra in Hollywood was that he didn’t work hard enough on his film performances — he preferred to do as few takes of a scene as possible and insisted on a relaxed shooting schedule that allowed him to continue the nightowl lifestyle he lived as a big band and club singer.
Santopietro points out that Sinatra’s greatest film successes were not in musicals, but in dramas where he delivered devastating performances — “From Here to Eternity,” “The Man With the Golden Arm” and “The Manchurian Candidate.”
When the performer really connected with a part he was as good a film actor as any of his peers. He also displayed good taste as a producer — hand-picking screenwriter George Axelrod and director John Frankenheimer for “The Manchurian Candidate” and then agreeing to Frankenheimer’s crucial choice of Angela Lansbury for the key role that Sinatra originally wanted to offer to Lucille Ball.
“Contrary to popular legend, Sinatra didn’t just wing it in Hollywood,” Santopietro writes. “At the start of his film career, he visited sets, observed directors, and studied the actors.”
“Sinatra in Hollywood” takes us through the making of each film and includes Santopietro’s clear-eyed dismissal of unfortunate dogs such as “Assault on a Queen” and “Dirty Dingus Magee.” In some of the most illuminating sections of the book, the writer makes strong cases for a few of Sinatra’s least seen performances, including such late work as “The First Deadly Sin.”

The new Stewart O’Nan book, “Songs for the Missing” (Viking), sounds like it could be a standard mystery novel — a popular Ohio teen girl disappears in the first chapter and then we follow her frantic parents and friends as they wonder if Kim Larsen could have run away or was abducted by a stranger.
The premise is the same basic story that has dominated so many hours of cable TV news over the past decade — a pretty white girl vanishes with little or no trace and weeks (months?) are spent searching to no avail.
What’s really interesting about O’Nan’s novel, however, is that Kim’s disappearance is just the starting point for a much larger mystery that applies to all of us eventually — how do we cope with the loss of any loved one and how many aspects of their private lives were closed to us?
“Songs for the Missing” turns out to be about the various ways that family and friends go can go “missing” as life separates us and we find new lives in this huge and ever-mobile country of ours.
Fran and Ed Larsen spend the early chapters of the novel dealing with the police and mounting their own private search for Kim. The girl had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to going away to college in the fall when she failed to come home from her job (at a gas station/convenience store) one night.
Kim had a casual boyfriend nicknamed J.P. but both of them knew their relationship would probably end when they took off for different colleges in the fall.
In the search for clues, it becomes clear that Kim had a semi-secret life involving some drug use and a casual sexual relationship with a “dangerous” guy her parents and most of her friends wouldn’t have approved of. This affair would probably not have amounted to anything if Kim had lived and started a new life at college.
The revelation leaves the survivors wondering what else they didn’t know about Kim and what that might say about their relationships with people they are still “close” to.
The unsettling plot is similar to that of the grossly underrated 1984 James Bridges movie “Mike’s Murder” in which a bank teller (played by Debra Winger) finds out much more than she wants to know when a casual lover is the victim of a drug enforcement killing.
O’Nan tells his powerful story of separation and loss in a very tight 287-pages. It’s another wonderful book in an extraordinary body of work that includes “Last Night at the Lobster,” “A Prayer for the Dying” and “The Circus Fire.”

Equal parts troubled and brilliant, the French actor Guillaume Depardieu died three weeks ago in Paris at the age of 37.
The performer had suffered from a series of health problems after barely surviving a motorcycle accident in 1995.
Depardieu had to undergo 17 operations on his leg, one of which left him with a serious viral infection that resulted in amputation in 2003.
Depardieu was on the comeback trail this year when he fell ill with the pneumonia that would kill him in the middle of shooting “The Childhood of Icarus” in Romania.
The actor worked in the large shadow cast by his father — the great French star Gerard Depardieu — but managed to establish his own identity (and formidable talent) in films such as “Pola X” (1999) and last year’s Jacque Rivette film, “Don’t Touch the Axe.”
It was “Pola X” that made me a fan and caused me to seek out Depardieu’s other work. The 1999 Leos Carax film is a harrowing study of a starving poet played to the hilt by Depardieu.
Rarely has a healthy and charismatic young artist’s decline into poverty and illness been conveyed more realistically. Depardieu’s willingness to explore the artist’s intensely self-destructive relationships with women also resulted in some of the most graphic but non-gratuitous sex scenes of the modern era.
Guillaume went through youthful rebellions similar to those of Hollywood children — he served two jail sentences for theft and drug offences by the time he was 17.
It was the 1995 film, “The Apprentices” that got the young actor back on track, winning him the French equivalent of the Oscar (the Cesar) for best newcomer of the year. But this was the same year that the 24-year-old had to contend with the motorcyle accident that would have him going in and out of hospitals for the rest of his tragically abbreviated life.
Perhaps it was the combination of terrible life experience and new confidence as an actor that made it possible for Depardieu to achieve his triumphant “Pola X” performance four years after the accident.
“He’s a real poet who touches me enormously, but who is very difficult, incorrigible,” Gerard Depardieu said of his son in a 2003 interview.
Guillaume made a bad situation worse when he attacked his father in a quickie autobiography — “Tout Donner (Giving Everything)”: “I love him and detest him for the same reasons…(He) is obsessed with the desire to be loved and the need for money.”
In his moving obituary in The Guardian on Oct. 14, Ronald Bergan wrote that the two turbulent actors had reconciled over the past three years.

Koch Lorber is releasing Claude Chabrol’s superb 1991 adaptation of “Madame Bovary” on DVD Nov. 18, which is great news for fans of the French director who is without question the most prolific — and most versatile — of the filmmakers who made up the French New Wave of the early 1960s.
In just the past few years alone, Chanbrol has given us a sharp political satire, “The Comedy of Power,” and the extremely unsettling Ruth Rendell-derived suspense film, “The Bridesmaid.”
The “Madame Bovary” DVD comes with a fantastic documentary — “Playing Life” — a 2001 profile of Isabelle Huppert, the great actress Chabrol has worked with numerous times.
These days, the “extras” on DVDs are often the only way to see film-related documentaries. The recent deluxe version of “How the West Was Won,” for instance, contains a marvelous feature-length documentary on the long-vanished wide-screen process Cinerama. Last month’s Koch Lorber edition of “Ludwig” includes two excellent Italian TV documentaries never before seen in this country — one on director Luchino Visconit and another profiling his frequent star Silvana Mangano.
If you are a fan of Huppert’s — and what serious movie buff isn’t? — the “Madame Bovary” DVD is worth purchasing for “Playing Life” alone.
The 55-year-old actress gave director Serge Toubiana a remarkable degree of access to her working life in 2000, one of the most productive periods of Huppert’s career, when she was doing “Medea” on the stage and working on what is possibly the greatest and most challenging role of her career, the title part in Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher.”
Huppert also squeezed in a memorable Chabrol film during the time covered by Toubiana, “Merci pour le chocolat,” in which the star played an upper class poisoner.
During the course of the documentary, Huppert tells Toubiana that she has always felt like “a formless child given form by roles.”
“Sometimes I feel I am proof that nothing exists,” the actress says of the strange double-life she has lived since she started working in film in 1971.
Huppert believes anyone who acts for a living must juggle “fear” and “pride.”
“I don’t believe one ever plays characters, one plays states of mind,” Huppert once told an interviewer. “A character is completely meaningless to me. One goes through states of mind and tries to link them together.”
The actress is far from humorless in the documentary. During one sequence devoted to her intense work with Haneke on “The Piano Teacher” Huppert talks about her reaction upon learning the director’s goal for the film: “I want the audience to be too embarrassed to watch.”
“(But) it was me on the screen!,” Huppert says of a performance that, fortunately, was seen and admired all over the world (and earned the star her second best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival).
I don’t think there is a better actress working in movies today, so what a gift it is to have “Playing Life” illuminate Huppert’s attitudes and complex working process.

Although the detective story is supposed to be in decline these days — overtaken by thrillers and suspense novels — I’ve read two good examples of the P.I. genre in just the past couple of weeks.
The dean of all P.I. authors, Raymond Chandler, once defined his genre in the sentence, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
Chandler was writing about Los Angeles detective Philip Marlowe in the 1940s, but Chandler’s template has lived on in the work of modern masters such as Michael Connelly and Robert Crais.
I wrote about P.I. genre newcomer Sean Chercover’s terrific “Trigger City” in this blog last week, but I also want to call your attention to a fine New Jersey writer, Dave White, who made his debut last year with “When One Man Dies” (Three Rivers Press), and whose second novel, “The Evil That Men Do,” was published in June.
Both White novels are about a suburban New Jersey P.I. named Jackson Donne, who is seriously considering a career change at the start of “When One Man Dies.”
The 27-year-old Jackson is tired of the work — and the way it stalls and interferes with his private life. He has just been accepted by Rutgers University when a drinking buddy is killed by a hit-and-run driver.
The “accident” takes place right outside Jackson’s favorite bar — the Olde Towne Tavern — and the owner, Artie, is immediately convinced his customer was intentionally hit by the car.
Artie high pressures Jackson into solving this “crime” and we are off on a case as dark and as dirty as anything in a Chandler era urban noir.
We quickly learn that Jackson is a former cop who left the local force under a cloud and that his old partner — a corrupt Narcotics Department officer named Bill Martin — would love to find a way to eliminate Donne.
While Donne tracks down leads on the hit-and-run, he is hired by a woman who wants proof that her husband is a cheater. This leads to a stakeout where Jackson follows the husband as he disposes of a dead body (not that of the wife).
White grabs the reader in the first few chapters with these two parallel cases and then ratchets up the tension as it becomes clear the cases are related and that Jackson’s old cop partner enemy might be in the middle of the whole nasty business.
White mixes the wonderfully offbeat local color of the Jersey suburbs — where most of Jackson’s movements seem to necessitate MapQuesting his way out of the suburban sprawl around the ever-clogged Rt. 287 — with the rich personal drama of a young detective trying to escape the dangerous messes he keeps finding himself in.
I picked up White’s first novel after hearing him speak with great humor and passion about the P.I. genre at the Bouchercon crime fiction gathering in Baltimore earlier this month. I’m looking forward to reading “The Evil That Men Do.”
I agree with best-selling crime writer Laura Lippman’s assertion that “White manages the neat trick of respecting the genre’s traditions while daring to nudge it toward something new and unexpected.”

Robinson Devor’s sort-of-documentary, “Zoo,” was chosen for the prestigious Director’s Fortnight slate at the Cannes Film Festival last year, but it received few theatrical engagements in this country after debuting to mixed reviews in Los Angeles and New York.
The film has been released on DVD by ThinkFilm and is now available through NetFlix.
I watched Devor’s movie the other night and I am still not quite sure what to make of it.
The non-fiction film is done in the self-consciously artistic, pseudo-documentary style pioneered by Errol Morris in films such as “The Thin Blue Line,” which mixed dramatic recreations with hypnotic music by Philip Glass.
Morris used music and fictional cinematic techniques to present the case of a Texas man who was falsely accused of murdering a cop. But,the art film style was combined with actual interviews in which people on both sides of the case had their say.
Devor’s film is ostensibly about the death of a Washington State Boeing executive named Kenneth Pinyan in 2005 after he took part in equine bestiality rituals with a group of people he had met on the Internet.
These “zoos” — they call themselves this because of their practice of zoophilia — claim they have a special affinity with animals that is about more than sex.
Devor and his co-writer Charles Mudede seem to be so afraid of the subject of their film that they spend the whole movie staging beautifully photographed sequences that evade rather than illuminate what happened in the countryside outside Seattle three years ago.
In the director’s commentary on the DVD, Devor brags about the fact that he never resorts to “talking head” footage, but after 15 or 20 minutes of his eerie shots of men gathering in an isolated farmhouse and proceeding to the barn, I began wondering if we would ever hear from one of Pinyan’s non-”zoo” friends or family members or a cop or even one of the politicians who pushed for successful anti-bestiality legislation in the wake of the widespread press coverage of this case.
“Zoo” asks no questions, so we never get any answers.
Devor’s film leaves the viewer with the impression that a straight-on examination of what motivated Pinyan to do what he did would be too pervy. Instead, we get a dreamy, creepy, pointless feature-length introduction to “shocking” material that is never explored.
I’m not suggesting that I would want to see or hear graphic descriptions of “zoo” behavior, but as a journalist I don’t really understand a non-fiction movie that skirts its own subject matter.