Joe's View

If you missed the Nov. 22 airing of “LENNONYC” on the PBS series “American Masters” you can catch up with it on DVD Tuesday via A&E Home Entertainment.

As usual with Susan Lacy’s long-running series, the Lennon documentary is way above average, examining one specific period in the musician’s life rather than trying to cover his whole career. And, of course, the “American Masters” label wouldn’t apply to Lennon’s years back home in England with The Beatles.

The film shows us how the artist and his controversial wife, Yoko Ono, escaped the madness of Beatlemania in England — and the press obsession with Ono as the destroyer of The Beatles — to make a new life in New York City in the early 1970s.

Although Lennon remained a high profile figure wherever he went, New York in the turbulent 1970s provided him with the ability to lead a fairly “normal” day to day life away from the intense tabloid press coverage in his native land. The documentary shows Lennon as another of the millions of talented foreigners who have helped to make New York City the center of American cultural life.

“LENNONYC” mixes strong interview segments with archival footage of Lennon in New York, including large samples of the political/musical events he took part in.

Yoko Ono “supported” the film but doesn’t appear to have tried to whitewash her late husband. We get a full accounting of Lennon’s famous “lost weekend”  period, when he ran off to Los Angeles for a hedonistic escape from his marriage (with May Pang).

Ono tells us that she wanted Pang to go to L.A. with her husband so that he wouldn’t become completely unhinged there. Apparently, the brilliant musician always needed a strong woman to guide him through day to day responsibilities.

Lennon came back to the city for one of the most productive periods of his career. Of course, there is an unintentional pall cast over the second half of the two-hour film because we know that the tight creative and personal bond between Lennon and Ono will be destroyed at the end of 1980.

The last horror movie I caught in a theater — “Saw 3D” — was revolting rather than scary.

No suspense, victims you didn’t care about, and extended torture sequences.

The only real horror in the evening was the 17 bucks a New York theater charged for a Halloween weekend screening.

From my point of view, suggested horror is always more effective than any graphic display — remember the nighttime shark attack in the opening scene of “Jaws”?

I have a very short list of movies that have truly frightened me — near the top is the 1973 Nicolas Roeg ghost story, “Don’t Look Now,” starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.

If you’re a fan of the occult and have never seen it, the film should go to the top of your Netflix or Blockbuster list.

The British Film Institute includes “Don’t Look Now” in its “BFI Modern Classics” series of concise books devoted to re-examining films that have grown in stature over the years.

Author Mark Sanderson doesn’t exaggerate much when he writes about the picture’s “horrific, heart-stopping climax.” Many movie scenes go right out of your head a few hours after you leave the theater, but, believe me, you won’t soon forget the closing moments of Roeg’s film.

What’s so marvelous about the movie is that even after you know how the story ends, “Don’t Look Now” rewards repeat viewing because it is so visually dense that it’s hard to absorb all of the clues Roeg puts on the screen long before the finale.

Based on a Daphne du Maurier short story, the movie follows a British couple played by Sutherland and Christie who lose their daughter in a drowning accident at the beginning of the film. After the funeral, the couple travels to Venice — in the off-season — where Sutherland has been hired to restore the frescoes in a historic church.

Sutherland keeps having daydreams or visions that he can’t quite fathom. Christie believes these are messages from their daughter on “the other side” warning of danger, but the husband dismisses the notion as grief-related hysteria.

While the couple wanders around a creepily deserted Venice, the police are looking for a serial killer of young women.

What makes the picture powerful and horrifying is that we are drawn so close to the protagonists that we care deeply about their fate. The result is that rare horror movie with real dramatic depth and for which the adjective “haunting” is totally apt.

Most of the obits for director Irvin Kershner — who died Saturday at the age of 87 — stressed his work as a filmmaker-for-hire on the 1980 George Lucas production “The Empire Strikes Back.”

As much as I enjoyed the sequel to “Star Wars,” I think it’s too bad that Kershner’s early films have been largely forgotten.

The Philadelphian got his start in late 1950s television — his work included the pilot for the first primetime soap “Peyton Place” — and crossed over to movies in the early 1960s.

Kershner’s 1961 picture “The Hoodlum Priest” is a gritty (for its time) study of a priest determined to reform criminals. Don Murray gives a strong performance in the title role, but it is Keir Dullea as a delinquent who cannot stay out of trouble who steals the picture.

I haven’t seen the movie since a TV airing in the late 1960s but I can still remember Dullea’s work in the harrowing death row sequence.

Kershner became known for his special skills with actors and throughout the 1960s did excellent work with Sean Connery in “A Fine Madness,” George C. Scott in “The Flim Flam Man” and Robert Shaw and Mary Ure in “The Luck of Ginger Coffey.”

The director’s career hit a peak in the early 1970s with two movies that no one ever talks about, but are well worth checking out on DVD — “Loving” and “Up the Sandbox.”

“Loving” came out in 1970 and suffered the misfortune being about a demographic that the huge youth audience of that day didn’t care about — alienated suburbanites pushing middle age.

George Segal stars as a commercial artist — commuting in and out of New York City from Westport — who is getting bored with marriage and fatherhood and is looking for some excitement in his career and his sex life.

The picture is about roughly the same group that has been fetishized in the hit AMC series “Mad Men” — “creative” people working for highly commercial interests in Manhattan, and their frustrated pre-feminist wives.

Eva Marie Saint gives a devastating performance as Segals’s wife who knows her way of life is being blown apart by the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism. Her character has been happily tending to the Westport house and the children when her husband starts having a midlife crisis.

Kershner shot the picture entirely on location in Westport and New York — and gave legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis one of his first major studio film gigs — and it now has a fantastic time capsule value in addition to the strength of the performances and the script.

“Loving” was a complete box office bust, but it did attract the attention of Barbra Streisand who had just created a new production company, First Artists, with Paul Newman and a few other actors.

Streisand had purchased the movie rights to one of the first feminist era bestselling novels, “Up the Sandbox,” by Anne Roiphe. After being locked into such megaproductions as “Hello, Dolly!” and “On a Clear Day You can See Forever,” the actress wanted to make a smaller film dealing with the sexual and social issues that were bubbling up at the beginning of the 1970s.

She hired Kershner and his cameraman Willis, shot the film on real locations in New York City, and agreed to be photographed in a “natural” way that is unlike her appearance in any other movie. Willis once said he was determined to have the star be a part of the imagery on the screen rather than standing in front of it, as she had in her first four movies.

“Up the Sandbox” is not nearly as good a film as “Loving” — the messy narrative includes several long feminist fantasy sequences that don’t really work — but it has a real early 1970s Manhattan feeling and Streisand proved that she could work as a team-playing actress as well as a star. It’s a shame the film flopped at the box office in 1972, scaring the star away from similar contemporary material during her peak years as a star.

Lost in a lot of the international press coverage of the first Broadway performance of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” Sunday night was the fact that the show was the first “preview” and that the Julie Taymor/U2 musical won’t officially “open” until next month.

Theater people know that previews are meant to test a new show in front of real audiences — and reviewers work under the premise that they aren’t supposed to weigh in until they are invited to press performances right before the official opening night — but this system has been breaking down for years.

Now that the Internet allows preview-goers to spout off anonymosly — on chat rooms such as the very lively “All That Chat” (bookmarked on this page) — theater buffs become aware of what shape a new show is in weeks before it opens.

Here’s just one of the dozens of reports that turned up on “All That Chat” following the Sunday night preview:

“A friend of mine was at Spiderman Sunday night. This is a 52 year old guy who I have been going to musicals with since we were 16 and saw The Wiz together. He has seen countless shows and is VERY forgiving; he likes almost everything. I was shocked at his reaction. He said it was hands down, THE most God awful piece of crap he has ever seen. This had nothing to do with the technical glitches. He actually left feeling angry that garbage like this even got off the ground(pardon the pun). by the way, he’s a big U2 fan, has all their albums, and he loves rock musicals.”

In most cases, interest in this sort of “buzz” is restricted to the show queens who want to know all of the behind-the-scenes Broadway news. They follow the preview reporting on everything from “La Bete” to “The Scottsboro Boys.”

“Spider-Man” has ramped everything up, because of its reported $60 million budget, multiple production delays, and the fact that the score is by Bono and The Edge. Rather than wait until a much later preview, reporters and celebrities flocked to the Foxwoods Theatre Sunday night, with a lot of those folks no doubt hoping to be witnesses to a major debacle.    

Producers and the creative staffs of previewing shows hate this new form of reporting — claiming it’s unethical (or worse) — but they have compromised themselves by charging full price for previews.

They claim previews are meant for revisions and reworking — and other semi-private creative matters — but they ask members of the public to pay full fare.

Previewing a new musical in New York City cold — rather than going out of town for a try-out booking — has always been problematic.

Shows as diverse as Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion” and the Arthur Laurents mystery musical “Nick & Nora” suffered from bad buzz during prolonged in-town previews.

In both cases, the musicals were significantly improved by the time they opened, but couldn’t overcome the early, bad word-of-mouth. Fortunately, “Passion” survived its Broadway pummeling and has gone on to be produced all over the world, including an award-winning London production.

Back in the Golden Age, no producer would mount a new show without test runs in New Haven and Philadelphia and Boston — where sophisticated audiences knew they were seeing works in progress — but as musicals became more expensive and more complicated scenically, it cost too much to move from city to city and then into New York.

“Spider-Man” is the second show this season to suffer from preview problems. “Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown” (below) had technical snafus at early performances that caused the director to ask the audience to be patient. Early reports on the musical were bad, but enough changes had been made by the time I saw it (including a whole new opening number) that “Women” was, I’m sure, a very different show than it was four weeks earlier.

There doesn’t seem to be any way around this problem in the Internet age, but I think producers should consider steep price cuts for previews so that the insiders who insist on going early won’t be able to bitch about paying full price.

Call them technical dress rehearsals, let everyone in for $20, and I think the bad preview buzz might diminish.

The Epix premium cable service has come up with a great special offering for the next eight days — an HD remastered Woody Allen Hanukkah double feature every night.

The programmers have steered away from recent Allen films such as “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” in favor of pictures he made in the 1970s and 1980s, what you might call the writer-director’s peak years.

The series starts with two of Allen’s least popular movies, “Interiors” (below) and “September,” two rather grim dramas in the style of the filmmaker’s idol, Ingmar Bergman.

The Hanukkah festival will go on to include three masterpieces — “Manhattan” (above), “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” — as well as two of the director’s best collaborations with Mia Farrow (“Alice” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo”).

Epix is also showing two of Allen’s least loved and least seen pictures, “Shadows and Fog” and “Another Woman.”

Following his Oscar triumph with “Annie Hall” in 1978 — it was one of the rare comedies to win best picture — Allen attained a carte blanche status that has continued to this day.

As long as he works on rather tight budgets, Allen retains complete control over his films from casting to advertising to presentation on video.

The writer-director once famously said that simply “showing up” is the most important aspect of anyone’s working life; he has rigorously followed that philosophy by making a new film each year since 1977.

You could make an argument that the filmmaker has hurt his own reputation by making a movie every year — “Melinda and Melinda” and “Hollywood Ending” come to mind — but he is just about the last American director of the 1970s who is still making personal movies with no studio interference.

The narrow focus of the Allen movies — most of which are about well-off, white people living in the posher areas of New York City — is undeniable and has drawn considerable fire from some reviewers.

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote on line earlier this month, “…What we find in Allen’s movies, apart from a lively stream of patter, is flattery to our egos as right-thinking individuals and a kind of soul-searching that excludes any possibility of social change — a provincial narcissism that corresponds precisely to our present situation in relation to the rest of the world.”

It is true that Allen has never gone off the reservation the way that such peers as Martin Scorsese have, but would we want to see Woody’s version of something like “Shutter Island” or “Cape Fear”?

For more information on the film festival, go to www.epixhd.com

Does anyone remember the Sissy Spacek-Kevin Kline movie, “Violets are Blue”?

It was a 1984 flop — written by Naomi Foner (mom to Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal) and directed by Jack Fisk — that rarely turns up on TV these days and has never appeared on DVD, but is fondly recalled by at least one person who saw it.

The movie is about the lure of an old love that never lasted. The characters played by Kevin Kline and Sissy Spacek were crazy about each other in the late 1960s but went their separate ways — she became a photojournalist, he took over his dad’s beach resort newspaper.

15 years later, Kline is happily married to Bonnie Bedelia when Spacek returns home for a visit. She has never married — too busy with her career — and he starts to wonder if he settled down too quickly and might have a second chance with Spacek (and a much more exciting career as a journalist if he takes off with her).

I thought about the movie for the first time in decades when I watched a preview of a new made-for-Lifetime film debuting tonight at 9 p.m. — “Unanswered Prayers” — that is strikingly similar to “Violets are Blue.”

It’s another well-written and well-acted examination of people pushing 40 who wonder if they should have taken another road 20 years earlier. Like the golden oldie from 1984, the new film treats the dilemma intelligently  and doesn’t harshly judge the adulterous impulses between old lovers who have long been separated.

Eric Close (above) stars as Ben Beck, Samantha Mathis (above, left) is his wife Lorrie, and Madchen Amick (top) is Ben’s high school girlfriend, Ava Andersson, who left the small Virginia town (and Ben) for greener urban pastures elsewhere.

Ava returns to town when her mother dies and she and Ben begin to wonder if they made the wrong choices.

It’s a potent, timeless theme, and Lifetime has done a good job of casting and producing a movie with a real sense of place (actual Virginia locations rather than a Canadian substitute). Ben and Ava don’t go as far as Sissy and Kevin did in “Violets are Blue” but their flirtation threatens Ben’s marriage.

The movie’s title is derived from a 1990 Garth Brooks hit — about a husband who is glad his prayers to get an old girl friend back went unanswered — and the singer served as executive producer.

“Unanswered Prayers” is another example of Lifetime pushing beyond its old label “television for women,” which often meant soapy movies in which men were guilty until proven innocent. All three of the troubled characters in tonight’s film are given a very fair treatment by director Steven Schacter and writers Deena Goldstone and Joyce Eliason.

The good news is that Australian singer-actor David Campbell has returned to the United States with a new CD and a cabaret tour.

The bad news is that Campbell’s East Coast stint is a brief one — a five night gig at Manhattan’s Feinstein’s at the Regency that starts tonight.

A little more than a decade ago, when he was only in his mid-20s, Campbell created a sensation on the New York cabaret scene with a series of club dates that pushed him from the small (and now defunct) Eighty Eights to the Rainbow Room in record time.

He went on to appear in an Encores! production of “Babes in Arms” at City Center and then starred in the New York premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s previously unproduced debut musical “Saturday Night” at Second Stage. (Both of those shows were recorded.)

Just when he seemed to have conquered the town, Campbell returned to his native Australia where he proceeded to become a major stage and concert star.

Campbell never got around to doing a show on Broadway during his time in New York, but in a recent phone interview from Australia the performer said he would still like to find the right show for an extended stay in Manhattan.

The new CD “On Broadway” and a companion documentary he did for Australian television has whetted his appetite for the genre after the forays into pop, soul and big band music that have made him a star in his native country.

He viewed the recording as a bit of an education for his fellow Australians in the history and the power of Broadway.

“People in New York think everyone knows everything about Broadway,” Campbell said.

“Their idea of explaining the history of Broadway is Julie Andrews saying, ‘Of course, Ethel did this next…” he said, chuckling of the homegrown PBS approach to American musical theater.

“I didn’t think that was very inclusive, so I wanted to do my own bit of history and explain (to Australians) why it (Broadway) is so important,” he added.

The spectacular CD “On Broadway” — released in the United States by Sony Masterworks — also serves as a mini-history of Broadway complete with an overture and songs spanning the Golden Age of the 1940s and ’50s, as well as the Sondheim era of the 1970s (the singer does an awesome version of “Being Alive”).

Campbell looks to the future as well, with a terrific tune called “Goodbye” from the forthcoming musical “Catch Me If You Can.”

The Broadway album follows a series of very popular Australian CDs devoted to swing and the music of the 1960s. Campbell takes great care with the sequencing of songs on his recordings, giving them the same sort of “concept” feeling that made the Frank Sinatra Capitol albums of the 1950s such milestones.

“We’re in a time where not many people notice or recognize an album as an art form,” he said of this current age of song-by-song downloads from iTunes and other music purveyors.

When we spoke, Campbell said he was looking forward to reconnecting with New York and the audiences who made him a very hot ticket in the late 1990s.

So what about a Broadway show?

“Somebody asked me about that the other day. When I look at the shows (of the past decade) I don’t feel that I missed out on too much,” he said of such blockbuster hits as “Wicked” and “Mamma Mia!” (neither of which had suitable parts for him).

Campbell would be more interested in doing a musical along the lines of the Sondheim show he did in Australia — “Company.”

“I would love to do something like that, a New York classic. It’s very exciting to think about and when I go over this time I’m definitely dipping my toe in the water,” he said of checking out the contemporary Broadway scene and what role he might play in it.

“I’m still hungry but I think I’m better than I was — more grounded — and I’m certainly not the boy next door anymore. The boy next door went off and had a laugh and lived,” he said.

(For information on David Campbell’s shows at Feinsteins at the Regency in Manhattan, go to www.feinsteinsattheregency.com)

You could make an argument that stage actors are among the hardest working people in show business.

Eight times a week — no matter what their mood or personal problems — the performers in Broadway shows deliver the goods for a live audience that expects to be thrilled by the play or musical that they’ve shelled out a lot of money for.

Despite the rigor and discipline of working on a show, many actors also show up for benefits and other special events on their one night off a week.

From special tribute evenings at Lincoln Center to benefits like the “Gypsy of the Year” show next week, the actors on Broadway give back a lot to their community.

One of the most entertaining charitable enterprises of the Broadway community is the “Carols for a Cure” CD that collects Christmas carols and other holiday tunes performed by the casts currently in musicals. The money goes to the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS charity.

Producer Lynn Pinto came up with the idea more than a decade ago and has followed through with a new CD every season. Each year, Pinto faces the challenge of booking studios during the summer and planning recording time around the incredibly hectic lifestyle of Broadway performers (she also plans sessions for shows that are still in rehearsal but will be running on Broadway by the time “Carols for a Cure” is released).

The CDs are wonderful in and of themselves, but as the years have passed, they have become unique souvenirs of musicals that came and went quickly, such as “Five Guys Named Moe” and “The Great American Trailer Park Musical.” In some cases, the shows never received original cast recordings, so the “Carols for a Cure” CDs are the only audio record of the shows and their performers.

The new “Carols for a Cure” features 23 selections from current Broadway shows, everything from “Million Dollar Quartet” to “Promises, Promises.” It’s especially fun to see long-running shows, such as “Phantom of the Opera” and “Mamma Mia!,” come up with something new for each year’s CD.

The recordings are made by both stars and ensemble players. The notables on the new edition include Bernadette Peters, this year’s Tony winner Douglas Hodge and the terrific husband-and-widfe duo Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley (who replaced the original stars of “Next to Normal” earlier this season).

The cast of “American Idiot” — including Stark Sands (above) — contributed a gorgeous rendition of “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

The combination of a great cause and a terrific recording makes “Carols for a Cure, Vol. 12” a perfect holiday gift. Since the project began it has raised close to $3 million for BC/EFA.

(You can order the CD set directly from BC/EFA at ww.broadwaycares.org)