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With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

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‘Long Distance Runner’ returns via Warner Archive

Wednesday, May 22, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

The French New Wave of the early 1960s is still written about endlessly because the key directors of that movement, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, had such a major influence on Hollywood and American filmmakers.

Godard is as fashionable today as he was 50 years ago. Every year seems to bring a theatrical restoration and then a major DVD re-release of a Godard classic. The Film Forum in New York has had hugely successful runs of “Contempt,” “Band of Outsiders,” and “Weekend.” The Criterion Collection has released the above titles on DVD along with “Masculine Feminine,” “Made in USA” and several others.

At the same time that Godard and his friends were making their revolutionary films, a fresh new wave of films was also coming out of England thanks to such young directors as John Schlesinger, Richard Lester, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson.

The early 1960s hits “Billy Liar,” “This Sporting Life” and “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” depicted working class life in England in a refreshingly deglamorized visual style (most of these films were shot on location in natural light) and introduced such exciting new movie stars as Albert Finney, Julie Christie, and Richard Harris.

One of my favorite British pictures from that period — Tony Richardson’s “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” — has just been released on DVD through the terrific Warner Archive division of Warner Home Video.

Working from an Alan Sillitoe script (based on his own short story), Richardson created a portrait of a young rebel without a cause that is much more believable and troubling than the Technicolor James Dean version seven years earlier.

The angry, self-destructive Colin Smith (Tom Courtenay) suffered from being just a few years ahead of his time. What was considered anti-social in 1962 would become the norm in the late 1960s.

It wasn’t until the second half of the decade that the sexual and cultural revolutions in England and around the world made Sillitoe’s misunderstood rebel into a hero (the boarding school anarchist in Lindsay Anderson’s 1969 film “If…” took the simmering anger of Sillitoe and expressed it in overt violence that was not thinkable a decade earlier).

The protagonist of “Long Distance Runner” is a juvenile delinquent sent to a reform school who rises above his peers because of his abilities as a runner. The boy expresses his own revolutionary impulses, however, by throwing away a sure win in a key race against a pretigious private school. In the short story — and film — Sillitoe was lighting a match to a fuse on a bomb that wouldn’t explode until a few years later.

The Richardson film had a big impact in the United States where art house moviegoers appreciated its sexual frankness and moral ambiguity at a time when Doris Day and Rock Hudson ruled Hollywood.

The British films also inspired American directors to push for the changes in content that would completely alter the U.S. film industry in just a few years.

The casting of rough-hewn Tom Courtenay in the leading role of “Long Distance Runner” was also a crucial step away from the glossy movie star look of the 1950s. On this side of the Atlantic, Courtenay and the new breed of British film star would embolden directors Mike Nichols and Bob Rafelson to build movies around far from glamorous actors such as Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson.

Stuck in the middle with ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

The ability to binge-watch above average TV series at home points up one of the problems with serial movies like the current “Star Trek Into Darkness” and “Iron Man 3.”

Yes, these movies are bigger and louder than TV — and they come at you in 3D — but they are basically just new episodes in what their producers and financiers hope will be a long-running series of movies.

The technology and the actors’ salaries are so huge and expensive, however, that the best moviegoers can hope for is a new installment every few years. In the case of the “Star Trek” franchise, four years passed between the J.J. Abrams reboot and the new movie.

For me, this big-screen serial franchise format doesn’t work anymore — not when I can see a whole satisfying season of episodes of something like “Homeland” or “Game of Thrones” at home in a few days.

The hit TV shows generally try to hook us with cliffhangers, or unresolved plot points, at the end of a season, but the 10 or 12 episodes generally leave a viewer feeling satisfied that a good story has been told. It’s something akin to the pleasure of reading an ongoing crime novel series by someone like Lee Child.

“Star Trek Into Darkness” is unsatisfying because there’s no real beginning and no real ending — it’s all unresolved middle.

Lots of things happen in “Star Trek Into Darkness,” but the true catastrophes involve masses of extras or characters so far on the fringes of the story that they don’t matter (the Enterprise appears to be an enormous ship, but in all of the years of TV episodes and theatrical features, everything that’s important in the ongoing narrative seems to boil down to the handful of officers and technicians who are in charge).

Some of the biggest dramatic moments in the new movie aren’t as strong as they would be elsewhere because we know that anything terrible that happens to a major “Star Trek” character can be reversed through some foolish sci-fi mumbo jumbo (in the case of “Into Darkness,” it’s a “death” that we know can’t possibly be the real thing).

I enjoyed watching Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto doing their sly tributes to the actors who preceded them in their roles — William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy — but a few minutes after “Star Trek Into Darkness” ended I wanted to see a genuine, self-contained movie.

A late report on the aptly titled ‘White Hot’ at the Flea Theater

Monday, May 20, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

When the very adventurous Flea Theater in downtown Manhattan posts a warning about the sexual content of a play, you know you are in for something a little rough.

“White Hot” by Tommy Smith is playing in the intimate downstairs space through May 26 and it is, indeed, an unsparing view of contemporary relationships — male-female and sister-sister — which makes no attempt to soften the blow(s).

There is no such thing as TMI in the conversation between Lil (Janice Amaya) and Sis (Jamie Bock) that opens the play.

The married and pregnant Lil listens to her sister describe her latest sexual encounter in which the woman’s masochistic desires were more than satisfied by an anonymous man who posed at first as a Russian immigrant but whose accent kept slipping the more they talked.

Role-playing is at the center of Sis’ sex life and she tells Lil that seeing through poses and lies adds to her thrills: “I love when people lie to me. I love the moment when I figure it out. I’m like, there, I got white hot justice on my side.”

After we hear what many of us would view as a sexual nightmare scenario, the seemingly square and content Lil shocks us more than Sis did by asking for the man’s phone number.

The next scene reveals that Lil is married to a passive aggressive academic, Bri (Bradley Anderson), who is as abusive to his wife verbally as Sis’ pick-up was physically.

Lil calls her sister’s nightmare man, Greg (Sean McIntyre), and he proves to be as horrible in person as he sounded in Sis’ opening monolgue.

The playwright admits his own deviance from mainstream, emotionally comforting theater by having Bri express the anger he feels when he reads nihilistic, life-unaffirming stories — Bri could be talking about “White Hot.”

The Flea describes the play well on its website — “…an epic portrait of self-destruction. A brutal comedy about how cruel we can be to the ones we love, when we want what they have.”

There is something bracing about Smith’s refusal to make his dark material more palatable to the audience.

After sitting through so many movies and TV shows (and plays) that feel like they have been manufactured to keep us in a vapid fantasy world, it is refreshing to encounter a writer willing to confront us with people and situations that challenge our illusions.

Courtney Ulrich has directed “White Hot” in a simple unadorned style that connects us directly to what we see and hear. And the quartet of actors is superb — going as far as the material demands in ways that keep us off-balance for the entire play.

(For more information, visit www.theflea.org)

‘Dead, White and Blue’: another murder in paradise

Sunday, May 19, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

There is a fairly reliable melodramatic kick in crime stories set in creepy old mansions or thrillers involving elaborate variations on our modern day boogeyman, the serial killer.

But, there isn’t much surprise or pathos when murder happens in a sinister setting or when the perp is a super-criminal of a sort rarely encountered in real life.

One of the reasons why Carolyn Hart’s “Death on Demand” books pack such an emotional punch is that the crimes are committed in a place we can relate to — a beautiful resort on a South Carolina island — and the line between the criminals and the victims is very thin.

What could be worse than learning a friend or neighbor was driven to kill someone you know? And that there is a horribly “rational” explanation for that crime?

Alfred Hitchcock knew that it was scarier to be suddenly attacked in a Midwestern cornfield in the noonday sun than to run into terrible trouble in an urban back alley late at night.

And Carolyn Hart knows that murder in her idyllic fictional setting of Broward’s Rock can be much more shocking and harder to fathom than a street crime in a New York City slum.

The new novel in the series “Dead, White and Blue” upholds the high standards of this marvelous series about mystery book store operator Annie Darling and her unlicensed private investigator husband Max.

Hart takes a big chance in the novel by opening with the disappearance of a rather dreadful young woman — a beautiful but B-level actress — who has wrecked marriages and alienated many of the people in Broward’s Rock by her sexually aggressive behavior.

She’s not a friend of Max and Annie’s but when the distraight daughter of Shell Hurst’s current husband asks the couple to help find the missing woman, they agree to help the girl.

The more the Darlings investigate, the more they see that the headstrong outsider really had few allies in the community and more than a few people who might benefit from her death.

Hart is clearly on the side of the “good” people of Broward’s Rock — Max and Annie foremost among them — but “Dead, White and Blue” shows that a moral, law-abiding community should not tolerate the murder of even its most disreputable citizens.

As always, Hart weaves her ethical and social concerns into a beautifully constructed mystery in which all of the pieces fall perfectly into place by the final chapter, with justice being served and order restored to Broward’s Rock.

‘Clybourne Park’: everyone’s a little bit racist

Saturday, May 18, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Long Wharf Theatre is closing its season with a very strong production of “Clybourne Park,” the Bruce Norris play about race and gentrification that won the best play Tony for its Broadway production last year and a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2011 based on off Broadway and regional stagings.

The play builds on American theater history by using the 1959 Lorraine Hansberry classic “A Raisin in the Sun” as its jumping off point.

In the first act, set in 1959, Norris reverses Hansberry’s perspective, showing us what caused a family in an all-white Chicago neighborhood to sell their home to the black family that was the subject of the earlier play.

It’s a tense and funny hour in which we learn of the tragedy that hit Russ (Daniel Jenkins) and his wife Bev (Alice Ripley), the lack of support from the “community” around them, and their decision to move closer to Russ’ new job in the suburbs. They are pioneers in the “white flight” that would shift the racial balance in many American cities during the 1960s and 1970s.

We also see the mix of racism and numbers-crunching that sends the neighborhood into a panic — the folks around Russ and Bev see the sale as the first stage in a decline of their community and the value of their homes.

In what sometimes plays like a scathing parody of a 1950s sitcom, the couple’s minister Jim (Jimmy Davis) offers “comfort” that isn’t comforting at all, and an aggressively pleasant neighbor, Karl (Alex Moggridge), takes forever to get to his point — that selling to a black family is a terrible betrayal by Russ and Bev.

Norris has enough good material in the first act for a whole play, but after the intermission we jump forward 50 years to the same neighborhood — which went all black in the 1960s — but is now being infiltrated by young white professionals who want to stay close to their city jobs but have houses that are big enough to start families.

The blacks in the community are as nervous about the changes as the whites were 50 years earlier, and in a brilliant second act climax, the new owners and their professional associates trade stereotypical racist and sexist jokes with a black couple. We see, in the words of that “Avenue Q” song, that everyone is a little bit racist (and sexist and homophobic).

Norris’ play is like a month of op-ed pieces or a year’s worth of Sunday morning TV chat shows on the state of the union’s race relations – except that it’s funnier and smarter.

The structure of “Clybourne Park” is brilliant, but Norris follows through with a series of theatrical flourishes in which the actors who play the 1950s people return in completely different roles when the action moves to 2009. The way the actors are doubled becomes part of the power of the piece — for instance, Melle Powers plays the anxious maid Francine in the first half, but then returns as the confident and unafraid Lena of Act 2.

Long Wharf associate artistic director Eric Ting makes bold choices in his interpretation, so that even if you saw the Broadway production (as I did) there are new aspects of the material explored in this version. Alice Ripley plays the 1950s housewife Bev more straightforwardly than the character was presented in the New York staging, so that the woman’s tragic dilemma becomes even more moving here.

The casting is superb from top to bottom, with the fine actors taking full advantage of the rare opportunity to play two important roles in one play without it ever seeming like a stunt (or a cost-cutting measure).

Rent it now: New York lovers leading double lives

Friday, May 17, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

“Uncertainty” (IFC Home Video) is a little-seen 2010 romantic thriller powered by the seemingly endless choices anyone is faced with on a given day in New York City.

Do you explore uptown or downtown?

Head to Brooklyn rather than Manhattan?

Relax or look for something a bit out of the ordinary?

In the opening scene, Bobby (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Kate (Lynn Collins) find themselves smack in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge on a beautiful July 4, but they can’t decide if they should join her family in Brooklyn for a picnic or spend the day in a private romp in Manhattan.

Bobby tosses a coin — which doesn’t really decide anything — and the lovers race off in opposite directions.

In a supernatural twist reminiscent of that old Gwyneth Paltrow picture, “Sliding Doors,” the rest of the picture follows two different Bobbys and two versions of Kate — the couple that goes to the picnic and the lovers who look for fun in Manhattan.

Writer-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel (whose work includes the solid 2001 thriller, “The Deep End”) keep the two parallel stories clear by labeling the Brooklyn half “Green” and the Manhattan tale “Yellow.”

Obviously there is no rational explanation for what we see, but the result is an amusing and suspenseful bit of metaphysical speculation. Gordon-Levitt and Collins have such strong chemistry together that both halves of the story are equally interesting.

The Manhattan plot turns into a thriller after Bobby and Kate find a cell phone in a cab and make the mistake of calling a few of the numbers stored in the phone in an attempt to find the owner. Soon they are running for their lives from a group of mysterious criminals who say they are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the phone back.

The Brooklyn scenes are strictly personal, with the couple visiting Kate’s parents for a mellow July 4 that becomes stressful as the young unmarried woman struggles to tell her family that she’s pregnant.

“Uncertainty” has a wonderful relaxed, summer-day feeling in many of the scenes and the two stars are very appealing. The movie doesn’t really add up to much, but it’s an entertaining way to spend 105 minutes.

‘Devil’s Double’: the gilded prison of Uday Hussein’s stand-in

Thursday, May 16, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

A mix of docudrama and high voltage action flick, “The Devil’s Double” received a quick and very limited theatrical distribution in 2011, due to mixed reviews, an absence of stars and, perhaps, the lurid subject matter.

The movie tells the story of Latif Yahia who bore a striking resemblance to Saddam Hussein’s demented playboy son, Uday. The two men were schoolmates as youngsters but had drifted apart for many years when Uday decided he needed a body double to appear at potentially dangerous public events.

Saddam had more than one of these doppelgangers who enjoyed the perks of life inside the many palaces of the ruler, but who risked their lives every time they pretended to be Hussein.

“The Devil’s Double” is set before, during and after the first Gulf War when international pressure began building against the increasingly hostile and aggressive Iraqi leadership.

Director Lee Tamahori admits in the extras on the recently released DVD that he wasn’t interested in telling the story of Latif realistically, but wanted to give the based-on-fact material the pacing and larger-than-life feel of a classic gangster picture.

The House of Saddam wasn’t that far removed from a gangster clan — with everyone enjoying an extravagant lifestyle fueled by their ill-gotten gains. Uday lived life in an especially reckless manner that reminded Tamahori of hot-head Sonny Corleone (James Caan) in “The Godfather.”

“The Devil’s Double” will turn off viewers who think the lurid violence of the DePalma “Scarface” is excessive, but the film is anchored by the extraordinary dual performance of Dominic Cooper as Latif/Uday.

While he is certainly aided by the CGI technology that allows Cooper to appear with himself in the same frame without any seams showing — we’ve come a long way from Patty Duke as twin cousins! — the real coup here is the actor’s two very finely detailed characterizations.

The two men may look alike but Uday (below) is a sexually debauched borderline psychopath and Latif (above) is an anxious prisoner appalled by the things he witnesses in his gilded cage.

“The Devil’s Double” becomes an education in the parallel societies that exist in many of the so-called conservative Middle Eastern cultures with the have-nots practicing their religion in an appropriately austere public way and the haves living it up in private nightclubs stocked with drugs and prostitutes.

There is definitely a modern gangster movie vibe in the vulgarity of the clothing and the behavior we witness in the Saddam compounds — Uday and his friends are like the inner-city kids who took “Scarface” as a style and behavior bible rather than as a cautionary tale.

Film Society series ‘Man of Steel’ marks Lancaster’s 100th birthday

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 by:Joe Meyers

Born in New York City the same year that Grand Central Terminal opened, Burt Lancaster became the rare movie star of his era who insisted on miscasting himself (in the eyes of studio chiefs) in a series of unsympathetic and/or eccentric roles unlikely to bolster his popularity.

The late star’s birth year centennial has already been marked with a major film festival in Los Angeles. Another Lancaster retrospective, “Man of Steel: Burt Lancaster at 100,” will start on Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (running through May 23).

Blessed with good looks and a great body — from years of work as a circus acrobat — Lancaster could have remained a traditional leading man from the moment he became a star in his first picture, “The Killers,” in 1946.

Within a few years of his debut, however, the actor went into a production partnership with his manager, Harold Hecht, and he used that clout to push for roles he wouldn’t have landed if he was under contract to a studio (where “more of the same” was the reigning philosophy regarding stars).

Hecht-Lancaster produced pictures that didn’t feature the actor — including the best picture Oscar winner “Marty’ — but it also brought to the screen films that no major studio would have produced in the 1950s, most especially “Sweet Smell of Success” (left), the pitch-dark view of show business and journalism that came out in 1957.

“Sweet Smell” bombed with audiences and many critics, but it quickly became a cult film for its juicy, over-heated dialogue and its dark view of celebrity and show business. Lancaster played a thinly veiled version of the syndicated columnist Walter Winchell who pulled a few strings to ease the picture on its way to financial disaster.

Anyone who views 1950s Hollywood as a time of nothing but saccharine love letters to conformity and traditional values has not seen “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Lancaster and his partner were smart enough to realize that they would have to balance commerce and art to stay in the game and the star managed to do that through the 1980s.

Lancaster started looking to Europe in the early 1960s and the exciting new filmmakers who were working there. When Luchino Visconti found out that his epic “The Leopard” would not receive financing without an international star in the leading role, and Laurence Olivier was unavailable, Lancaster started lobbying for the part.

Visconti was appalled by the casting notion, but the star won him over, they became friends, and the movie became a classic (Lancaster worked with the Italian director again a decade later on “Conversation Piece” which was not well received when it opened but has been embraced in recent years.)

Later in the 1960s, Lancaster took chances on risky projects that didn’t really pay off, like the filmed-in-Fairfield County, “The Swimmer” (below), which failed to bring John Cheever’s classic short story to the screen in a coherent form. But, it was a very worthy attempt.

Lancaster’s career would go on to include working in supporting roles with Bernardo Bertolucci (“1900”), Bill Forsyth (“Local Hero”) and Robert Altman (“Buffalo Bill and the Indians”), pictures and parts that peers such as Henry Fonda and James Stewart would not consider.

The actor won the Oscar for his fiery work in the title role of 1960’s “Elmer Gantry” but his greatest performance came 20 years later in Louis Malle’s “Atlantic City” (above) where the star displayed misplaced resolve, surprising sexual power and battle-weary humor as a has-been gansgter trying to make a buck in the new casino culture on the New Jersey shore.

Lancaster won most of the major critics’ groups prizes that year but lost in the Oscar race to a dying Henry Fonda for his mushy, sentimental work in “On Golden Pond.” Everyone knew the Hollywood score that year, so it is not likely that Lancaster expected the prize, but it remains an embarrassing moment in Oscar history.

Illness cut down Lancaster when he was still itching to work — he lost the title role in Jane Fonda’s production of “Old Gringo” when she could not secure insurance for the actor — but when he died on Oct. 20, 1994, the star had an unequaled resume for someone who came along in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

(For complete schedule and ticket information on the Film Society tribute, visit www.filmlinc.com)

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