Joe's View

Commentary tracks on DVDs are often little more than thinly disguised PR for the movie in question, but you can’t say that of Al Pacino’s insights on the never-theatrically-released “The Local Stigmatic” which I finally caught up with this week.

Based on a one-act play by British writer Heathcote Williams, the 56-minute film was shot during the 1980s, completed in 1990, and then never publicly shown, with the exception of some private screenings for acting and film classes.

Pacino finally agreed to include “The Local Stigmatic” in a DVD package of other films he has produced independently, including “Chinese Coffee” and “Looking for Richard.”

I’ve always been fascinated by “Stigmatic” because I knew one of the actors who played a major role — the late great Joseph Maher — and had been hearing about it for years from him as the piece was being edited and re-edited by Pacino and director David Wheeler.

Pacino financed the film himself and it was shot in multiple locations — from New York City to Atlanta — as the star raised the money and when the small cast had no other conflicting (i.e.paying) jobs.

Maher and Pacino had first done the piece together on stage in 1968.

Pacino has always been famous for exploring the same stage roles again and again — the performer has done multiple productions of “Richard III,” “American Buffalo” and “Salome,” among others — but he kept returning to “The Local Stigmatic” for decades.

The play is about two nihilistic London men, simmering with rage over the advantages that celebrities have over them, who viciously assault a British stage and film star they meet in a West End bar.

On the commentary track, Pacino talks about his fascination with the play and his feeling that it has never been properly appreciated. According to the star, the original New York stage production was panned and was only able to run after Jon Voight put up some extra money.

“I don’t know why I’ve been caught by this thing,” Pacino says in the intense whisper he uses throughout his commentary.

“How do people get like that?,” he asks rhetorically of the pair of thugs played by Pacino and Paul Guilfoyle. “Can you see them as little babies?”

The star goes on to say that he believe Williams was ahead of his time to see the hunger for fame — and the undercurrent of resentment for those who have it — that is so rampant in our culture. “How could he have known this stuff in 1964?,” Pacino says of Williams’ insights into fame and fans-turned-assassins. “He nailed it.”

Ironically, the film itself is very seriously flawed. Pacino seems too old for his punk role and his cockney accent is distractingly uncertain (the star’s worst vocal work this side of the notorious “Revolution”). The piece opens with a 10 or 15-minute monologue about dog racing that is very hard to focus on.

Listening to Pacino talk about the project is another story — he is forthright, generous to the other performers, and very funny about his own obsessiveness. While the movie seems squishy and uncertain, Pacino is riveting and I was very glad to hear his take on this little-seen labor of love.

Tonight’s “Martini & a Movie” screening at the Fairfield Theatre Company continues my 10-month series of films that celebrate — and criticize — just about everything to do with New York City.

So far, we’ve had fun with some less well known comedies (“A Thousand Clowns”), dramas (“Heights”) and satires (“Just Tell Me What You Want”). I thought it might be good to stay away from the usual suspects — i.e. the quintessential New York stories of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee.

I wanted to include a film about one of my favorite Manhattan institutions — the theater — and decided we couldn’t do much better than Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 love/hate letter to Broadway, “All About Eve.”

It’s far and away the best known movie in the FTC series running through June, but I thought it would be fun for people to have the chance to see this classic with an audience — the juicy dialogue and dramatic situations were made for sharing with other moviegoers.

The movie won the Oscar for best picture and also earned Mankiewicz Academy Awards for his script and his direction. Some film buffs diss the dialogue-driven comedy as being “uncinematic” because it is remembered for its characters and dialogue rather than the visuals, but who cares when the people and the talk are this bright?

Bette Davis stars as stage great Margo Channing who thinks she is doing one of her rare good deeds by hiring a fan (Anne Baxter) as her new assistant.

What it takes the self-absorbed star a while to figure out is that Eve Harrington plans to steal Margo’s life — from her next big Broadway vehicle to Channing’s director/lover Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill).

Davis was never better than she is in “All About Eve” and rightfully assumed the picture would win her a third Oscar. She didn’t count on the stiff competition from another great star making a comeback — Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard” — who split the vote, leaving the prize with sensational newcomer Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday.”

Davis might have also suffered from the studio’s decision to place her co-star Baxter in the best actress category rather than in the supporting division (two performers from the same film sharing the same category tend to hurt each other’s chances).

One of the most interesting aspects of “All About Eve” is the fact that Davis was a last-minute second choice for a movie that would give the star one of her signature roles.

The part seems so tailor-made for Davis that fans of the movie are often surprised to learn that Claudette Colbert was set to play the lead until a back injury made it impossible for her to do the movie.

Mankiewicz sent the script to Davis, she said yes immediately, and the rest is Hollywood history. Would the movie have been as good with Colbert? Would Colbert have pulled off an acting triumph that earned her a second Oscar?

We’ll never know, but it is fun to speculate.

(“All About Eve” will be shown tonight at 8 at the Fairfield Theatre Company, 70 Sanford St. Doors open at 7:30 for the free screening.)

Luca Guadagnino’s lush and swoony romantic 2010 film, “I Am Love,” oozes style — and just a smattering of substance — and will probably remind the baby boomers who watch it of some of the gorgeous foreign make-out movies of their youth.

Back in the 1960s, three of the biggest hits from overseas were “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “A Man and a Woman” and “Elvira Madigan,” all of which contained almost no plot but were relished for their stunning cinematography, beautiful music and unabashed romanticism.

The intellectual crowd went to Bergman and Antonioni flicks, but the real money was made during the 1960s by subtitled fare that was a little bit more down to earth.

You didn’t just watch those films, you immersed yourself in an alternate universe of beautiful, unhappy lovers wandering in the most stunning scenery imaginable.

The three films played in art houses for months — “A Man and a Woman” set up shop at Manhattan’s Paris Theatre for a full year — and then became staples of the repertory/art theaters that thrived in major urban areas and on college campuses in the pre-cable, pre-video era.

The three hits have been largely forgotten — because they were so fluffy — and their high-gloss style of moviemaking more or less vanished in the 1970s when American filmmakers were freed from the studios

and started shooting on location in natural light (The Paramount release “Days of Heaven” in 1978 was as ravishing to look at as any import).

The indie and foreign scene favors gritty fare these days, so “I Am Love” divided critics while finding some favor with sophisticated moviegoers.

Guadagnino follows a wealthy Milan clan — which has made its fortune in the textile business — as the young matriarch Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton) becomes romantically involved with one of her son’s friends, a chef Antonio Biscaglia (Edoardo Gabbriellini).

The basic plot could be used for a Harlequin romance, but the director makes each shot, each set, each costume, so stunning to look at, that you might have the feeling of paging through the biggest, most expensive coffee table book ever published.

“I Am Love” contains coincidences and contrivances that would be dismissed out of hand if the movie was any less hypnotically beautiful — Guadagnino even dredges up that soap opera/B-movie device of two people getting into a shoving match that ends with one of them falling, hitting their head on the marble edge of a pool, and dying instantly.

Is this movie a classic for the ages? Probably not.

Did I enjoy savoring every shot? You better believe it.

Producer Jerry Wald was not only a creator of glorious 20th Century Fox kitsch in the 1950s and 1960s, he played a significant role in the publishing world of that era as well.

It was Wald who commissioned editor Rona Jaffe to write her career-girl classic, “The Best of Everything,” locking up the rights to the subsequent 1959 movie version long before the novel was published.

The producer had scored one of the biggest hits of the decade with the 1957 movie version of the 1956 Grace Metalious blockbuster book “Peyton Place.”

Wald became so determined to make a sequel that he convinced the author to write “Return to Peyton Place” for publication in 1959 despite the trouble the original book had caused her in New Hampshire, where residents were furious about the way small-town life there had been portrayed.

The scale of the success of the first Metalious novel is still staggering. “Peyton Place” sold 20 million copies in hardcover and another 12 million in paperback and stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 59 weeks.

What makes the 1961 sequel so much fun is that it is a semi-autobiographical account of the trouble Metalious faced when her book came out. The premise is that the sweet Allison MacKenzie character from the original “Peyton Place” went on to write a thinly fictionalized account of the steamy events in her beautiful little hamlet.

Carol Lynley stars as Allison, but it is the veteran actress Mary Astor (below) who steals the show as a powerful old woman who is so appalled by the young woman’s novel that she pushes the school board to ban it from the library and to oust Allison’s stepfather (Robert Sterling) from his job as principal.

Before the book-banning scenes, the widowed Astor character already feels the assault of “modern times” when her beloved only son (Brett Halsey) returns from law school in Boston with a new wife — a “foreign” model (played by the luscious Lucianna Paluzzi, who would turn up a few years later as the female villain in “Thunderball”).

You can see that Astor had a blast playing the old biddy who says over breakfast to her new daughter-in-law, “Can’t you think of anything but sex?,” or when asked by her son what is so wrong with his new bride, replies in a fake-sympathetic tone, “Maybe it’s just the way she dresses.”

There’s an added kick to the Astor performance for those who are familiar with her own history at the center of one of Hollywood’s biggest scandals — a few decades earlier — when her sexual escapade diary was leaked to the press by her husband in the middle of a very messy divorce.

The scandal hurt Astor’s career as a leading lady, but didn’t stop her from becoming one of the best character actresses in Hollywood.

“Return to Peyton Place” was plagued by many delays and last minute cast changes, but one of the late additions — Tuesday Weld (below) as the “fallen woman” Selena Cross — almost matches Astor in the scenery-chewing department (their moments together are fantastic).

“Return to Peyton Place” is dated and full of ridiculous euphemisms for the sex that everyone is so stirred up about, but the wonderful cast and the prudes vs. libertines storyline is still irresistibly entertaining.

When a young film buff friend told me there was an iPhone app designed to let you know when it was safe to take a bathroom break during a movie, I scoffed.

But, sure enough, “RunPee” is now in the third year of its existence with nearly 75,000 customers drawn in by the slogan “Because movie theaters don’t have pause buttons.”

The app is designed to let you know the safest points at which you can rush to the rest room without missing anything major.

I don’t remember ever taking a bathroom break in the middle of a picture during a pretty long lifetime of moviegoing. (I don’t like to miss anything.) But then again, I never buy those half-gallons of soda that now constitute a standard soft-drink size at a movie refreshment stand.

You might think that RunPee would be most popular with bladder-challenged older moviegoers but a glance at the top ten movies visited on the RunPee app during 2011 suggests a much younger demographic:

1. “Harry Potter: Deathly Hallows-2”
2. “Twilight: Breaking Dawn-Part 1”
3. “Captain America: The First Avenger”
4. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”
5. “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows”
6. “The Help”
7. “The Muppets”
8. “Mission Impossible-Ghost Protocol”
9. “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”
10. “Cowboys & Aliens”

After installing the app on my iPhone I had fun scanning some of the listings, but quickly learned that the RunPee folks have no interest in off-beat fare such as “Shame” or “Melancholia” — neither flick is in the data base — but if you’re heading out to “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” “War Horse” or “Young Adult” this weekend, you’re in luck.

For “War Horse,” the RunPee listing includes three good times to go — a three-minute break 53 minutes into the movie (“When you see ‘France, 1914’ on the screen”), a four-minute rest stop at the one-hour-and-16-minute point (“When Emily says to her grandfather ‘Well, I won’t have long to wait”) and then at 1 hour, 57 minutes (“Cue: the German soldier and English soldier flip a coin to see who gets to keep Joey”).

RunPee also provides a synposis of the first five minutes of every film just in case you have to stop off on your way into the theater.

So far, the app is free and carries no advertising.

It’s a question that older moviegoers ask all the time: why do actresses over the age of 40 thrive in Europe while their American counterparts (with a few exceptions like the one and only Meryl Streep) are tossed on the scrap heap?

Overseas, performers as diverse as Helen Mirren and Isabelle Huppert came into their movie acting prime in their 40s and 50s and continue to find good leading roles on screen.

In this country, the female movie stars of 25 years ago — Jessica Lange, Diane Keaton, Sigourney Weaver, Sissy Spacek, Kathleen Turner, and many others — are now lucky to land mediocre small roles in films. Two-time Oscar winner Lange has only stayed in the game by taking on supporting roles on television, such as her recent appearance on the F/X shocker, “American Horror Story.”

Part of the problem is the difference between the budgets for Hollywood films and what it costs to produce a film in France or the United Kingdom.

The studios here would rather spend more than $100 million on one big male-dominated action movie than finance a half-dozen smaller films with female protagonists of any age.

The youth obsession of the United States is also a major factor, of course. Our movies now reflect a culture in which being thin and youthful-looking are two of the most valuable commodities. The older men who run corporations and star in movies seem to believe they can deny their own aging process by hooking up with women 20 or 30 years younger than themselves.

The issues of age and beauty in movies were put into stark relief for me Wednesday night at the Avon Theatre in Stamford where I hosted a screening of a fascinating 2010 documentary, “The Look” about the unorthodox but enduring career of British actress Charlotte Rampling.

Now 65, Rampling was launched in movies 46 years ago as Lynn Redgrave’s bitchy roommate in “Georgy Girl,” but began taking on more daunting roles right away in dark pictures such as Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” where she was, at first, scared to play a woman ten years older than herself.

Rampling’s nerves were steadied by co-star Dirk Bogarde who just a few years earlier had turned his back on a lucrative career as a matinee idol in cinematic bon bons in favor of much more challenging roles in off-beat pictures like “The Servant” and “Accident.”

The actress has had her ups and downs since then, but gained character and insight by working on a rich off-screen life (in “The Look” we see her with such friends as the Brooklyn novelist Paul Auster and the wildly eccentric German photographer Juergen Teller — below).

Rampling has never tried to avoid looking her age and over the past decade that has brought her wonderful mature roles in films like “Swimming Pool.”

The actress appears to have wasted little time on the PR activities that eat up so much of the lives of her counterparts on this side of the Atlantic. And the quality of the films she works on seems to matter more than the scale of the production (hence her small but juicy role in the recent Lars Von Trier film, “Melancholia”).

In “The Look” we see that Rampling’s charisma is more about intelligence and curiosity than rigid standards of screen “beauty.” The things she talks about and asks the (non-show biz) people she encounters in the course of the 90-minute film are as interesting as the way she looks.

Sadly, the documentary was only at the Avon for one showing, but you should keep an eye out for the DVD release in a few months.

We get so used to small-scale, traditional storytelling in the theater that it can be hard to adjust to something surreal and non-linear like “Hypnotik: The Seer Will Doctor You Know” which opened at the Theater for the New City last weekend.

Conceived and directed by Ildiko Nemeth for The New Stage Theatre Company, the 70-minute piece follows a psychic/hypnotist (Peter B. Schmitz) whose entertainment at “the infamous Palace Theatre” is to help volunteers to get to the root of their emotional problems through the use of his supernatural gifts.

The show starts with a bit of Bob Fosse-style razzmatazz as three showgirls (below) fill us in on what we are about to see in a song-and-dance number:

“The doctor will see you now,
And slaughter your sacred cow,
heal all of you invalids,
end all of your clawing needs,
he comes to humiliate…
to re-habilitate,
he wants you to deviate
so he can alleviate
He is a healer, he is a healer, his eyes are blades!”

One by one, the volunteer characters step on to a slightly raised circular platform where the doctor shows us what is going on under their highly controlled surfaces.

We see a soldier reduced to childlike behavior, a pregnant actress reveal her infant-killing tendencies, and an arrogant Hollywood producer become even more of an egomaniac.

The two most together-looking volunteers who stay on the sidelines for the first part of the play judging the action — played by the most compelling actors in the piece, Sarah Lemp (above) and Chris Tanner — end up losing their cool, just like their predecessors, when the doctor mesmerizes them.

In the final scene, the tables appear to be turned, with a man we assumed was a minor character on the fringes of the action, suddenly dominating the doctor in a way that makes us wonder if we are inside the seer’s head, sharing one of his nightmares.

“Hypnotik” blends dance, drama, and beautiful stage-picture-making for an evening that seems meant to suggest ambiguous ideas about the mysteries of human personality — what really makes us tick.

Nemeth has a great eye and her vision is beautifully realized with the aid of choreographer Julie Atlast Muz, costume designer Jessica Sofia Mitrani (her work is outstanding), and lighting designer Federico Restrepo. Nemeth herself designed the easily transformed set.

“Hypnotik” is trippy and surreal in a slyly comic manner that reminded me of some of the later Bunuel films (especially “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”). Nemeth gives us the pieces of a gorgeous and fascinating puzzle, but leaves it up to the audience to put them together. The result is a very intriguing night of theater for those who are looking for something challenging and offbeat.

(“Hypnotik” is playing through Jan. 15 at Theater for the New City, 151 First Ave. For more information visit www.theaterforthenewcity.net)

The new Steve (“Hunger”) McQueen-directed film, “Shame,” opened to mostly strong reviews last month — after stirring a lot of talk in Europe and on the U.S. festival circuit earlier in 2011 — but it appears to have stalled in the marketplace.

After early grosses in limited released proved to be strong, the film’s distributor, Fox Searchlight, bragged that “Shame” was going to end the stigma attached to the adults-only NC-17 rating which is almost always a commercial liability.

The picture appears to be fading fast, however, with declining business in sophisticated urban areas and a real national release now appearing to be dependent upon Michael Fassbender getting an Oscar nomination for his phenomenal work in the leading role.

You know you’re in commercial trouble with a film when it does less business in its third weekend on 51 screens than it did in its first weekend at 10 theaters.

The Motion Picture Association of America created the NC-17 rating in 1990 to replace the X because that tag had become synonymous with porn and several of the nation’s theater chains refused to book any X film (no matter how seriously intended it might be).

The NC-17 hasn’t proven to be much better for legitimate filmmakers who are interested in pushing the boundaries of sex content in mainstream films.
Americans have a vast appetite for pornography, but they don’t seem to like encountering explicit sexual content in “regular” movies.

“Shame” is a very tough film with lots of graphic sexual content, but it is also refreshing to see a drama in which sex is addressed directly, without euphemisms, and without the visual prurience of most R-rated treatments of similar material.

McQueen and Fassbender study a successful and attractive New York businessman named Brandon Sullivan who gets plenty of sex, but who doesn’t seem to be able to connect it with a real relationship.

For Brandon, sex has gone from pleasure to a form of compulsive behavior that is spiraling out of control when we meet him — the behavior is beginning to move into his work life in a way that might threaten his career (i.e. the meltdown of his office computer from a porn overload is luckily blamed on an intern).

Any semblance of order in Brandon’s life vanishes when his troubled younger sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) crashes at his small apartment while doing a cabaret gig in Manhattan. Her search for “love” is almost as compulsive as Brandon’s sexual hook-ups — they both quickly realize that blood is not thicker than water in their case, as they offer little warmth or affection to each other.

“Shame” is a disturbing movie and McQueen presents characters and situations that many people quite understandably do not want to encounter in their search for movie “entertainment.” But I think that Brandon’s condition is relevant to a huge swath of the male population in this post-pornography, post-sexual revoltuion era in which real life connections don’t seem to promise the same instant excitement that is available on a computer screen 24/7.

Fassbender gets one virtuoso scene after another, especially a long dinner date with a very attractive co-worker in which we see him trying but failing to connect on anything other than a sexual level. This scene has a devastating pay-off in which Brandon disastrously attempts to bridge his sexual and emotional interest in this smart and vibrant woman.