Joe's View

After an odd five-month break, season three of the USA series “White Collar” will resume Tuesday night at 9 with six new episodes running through Feb. 21.

It’s the sort of bizarre scheduling that can kill a good show, and this sleek, shot-in-New York series is a good one, judging by the three January episodes I was sent recently.

Can you arrive as a total newbie in the middle of the season of a show that has been on since 2009? I did, and had fun watching, once I got over some confusing cliffhanger elements (left over from the summer run on USA).

Fortunately, the rest of the episodes appear to be designed as stand-alones so the Jan. 24 and Jan. 31 stories were much more satisfying. I had a great time with these comic capers — the first one a “Rear Window” variation set in Cobble Hill Brooklyn and the second an amusing tale of financial services corruption that takes place in a snooty private school.

With its low violence and sex quotients, “White Collar” has an old-fashioned mystery feel similar to that of the ABC hit “Castle,” which is also rather far-fetched but very entertaining.

The set-up for “White Collar” is simple. A smart and sexy young con artist played by Matt Bomer has been roped into helping the FBI as part of a deal that might get him a full pardon for his crimes.

Matt’s handler, Peter Burke (Tim DeKay), has mixed feelings about working with a convicted felon, but Neal’s criminal brain comes in very handy in tackling particularly complex heists. One of Neal’s old grifter cronies — played by Willie Garson (Carrie’s gay pal on “Sex & the City,” above, right) — helps out, too.

“White Collar” is smarter and funnier than most of its competition, but it only seems to be a matter of time before the very charismatic Matt Bomer crosses over to movies (he was in “In Time” last summer and will appear in the forthcoming Steven Soderbergh picture “Magic Mike”).

Now I want to catch up with seasons one and two on DVD.

Like most baby boom film buffs, I’ve been enjoying the performances of Max Von Sydow for most of my life.

The 82-year-old Swedish actor conquered art house audiences here when he was still in his 20s in a series of Ingmar Bergman classics including “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Virgin Spring.”

George Stevens introduced the actor to Hollywood with the starring role of Jesus in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1965 and then the Swede nabbed another leading role in the big-budget 1966 film version of the James Michener best seller “Hawaii” (below, right).

Since then, Von Sydow has made films in many countries and several languages, but most moviegoers probably remember him best for playing the title role in “The Exorcist.”

The actor has only been nominated for an Oscar once, in 1987 for the Danish film “Pelle the Conqueror,” but he is generating a lot of buzz for his mute performance in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (left), which opened in New York and Los Angeles in late December for Academy Award consideration and will be released nationally on Jan. 20.

Von Sydow is long overdue for an Oscar, but if he should be nominated in the best supporting actor category later this month, he faces very stiff competition from another veteran who has never won the prize, Christopher Plummer, for that actor’s marvelous performance in “Beginners.”

Two of my favorite Von Sydow performances are often overlooked in discussions of his career — the worldly Alsatian assassin Joubert in Sydney Pollack’s great 1975 espionage thriller “Three Days of the Condor” (below) and his deliciously campy star turn as Ming the Merciless in the 1980 science-fiction comedy “Flash Gordon” (above).

Neither performance brought Von Sydow much critical recognition but they have given me great pleasure over the years as I have rewatched the films in question many times.

The killer in “Condor” is, technically, a “villain” — he is part of the hit squad that murders Robert Redford’s girlfriend (and co-workers) in the opening scene — but as the story proceeds, Joubert becomes more sympathetic as we see that he is just a gun-for-hire by the CIA or any other organization that will pay his fee.

We get hints of the humanity under Joubert’s surface in the opening scene when his kind eyes and warm manner make it appear that he might not enjoy the dirty work he does. Later in the film, when his contract has been fulfilled, he becomes something of a mentor to the Redford character by warning him of the dangers he faces within the CIA and then giving him a lift to the airport.

The performance has fascinated me for more than 35 years because there is so much depth and ambiguity in the way Von Sydow plays a relatively small role.

As Ming, the actor had one of his rare comic roles and Von Sydow is spectacularly funny, delivering the juicy Lorenzo Semple dialogue. “Flash Gordon” was a flop in 1980 — audiences then preferred their science-fiction straight up — but the movie has gathered a sizeable cult over the years for its good humor, lively performances and stunning production and costume design (the work of Fellini craftsman Danilo Donati).

But the sly, tongue in cheek tone is powered mostly by Von Sydow savoring such evil Ming pronouncements as “Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror.”

Neither of these performances earned Von Sydow Oscar nominations but over the years they have entertained me much than such Academy Award-winning work as Helen Hunt’s in “As Good As it Gets” or Jack Palance’s Oscar-winning performance in “City Slickers.”

The new non-fiction book “Betrayal” (Forge) is about the FBI man who was sent to Boston to clean up its shockingly corrupt office — it’s a gripping story of gangsters having their way with those who are supposed to enforce laws.

Everyone knows that undercover cops and FBI men who work with informers run the risk of “going native” — becoming as crooked as the low-lifes they associate with — but the scale of the corruption in the Boston FBI, as reported in this book, was staggering.

“Betrayal” reads like a superior thriller and there’s a good reason for that — the federal agent Robert Fitzpatrick collaborated on the memoir with Jon Land (below, left), the Providence novelist whose most recent book was the terrific “Strong at the Break” (which I reviewed in this space last spring).

Land has shaped the material for maximum drama and he makes us care about Fitzpatrick as a person as well as a law enforcement officer. “Betrayal” shows us the FBI man’s tough childhood in and out of a series of shelters and orphanages and then the toll Fitzpatrick’s job took on his marriage and family life.

Fitzpatrick rose through the FBI ranks, making quite a name for himself in the 1970s with the ABSCAM investigation in Miami that nailed numerous bigshots including New Jersey senator Harrison Williams.

Based on his reputation for getting results, Fitzpatrick was sent to Boston to try to clean up the mess there regarding agents and their criminal informants — the state police and other Massachusetts law enforcement officials believed that the FBI was in bed with the notorious Irish gangster James J. “Whitey” Bulger.

In their quest to bring down the Italian mob, the FBI was tacitly building up the power base of Bulger by providing him with as much information as he was giving the feds. People were dying in Boston as a result of the free-flowing exchanges between presumed federal enforcers of the law and one of the most vicious hoodlums in the country.

“Betrayal” turns into a tale of paranoia when Fitzpatrick begins to wonder if he was sent to Boston under false pretenses — that his mission was meant to fail in order to build up the FBI men who were in tight with Bulger.

The circumstances surrounding this case were used in the Martin Scorsese film “The Departed,” where Jack Nicholson played a depraved crime lord modeled on Bulger, but the real facts of the affair are much worse than anything in the 2006 best picture Oscar winner.

Fitzpatrick lays out the unholy alliance between the FBI and Bulger early in the book:

“Having proven himself to his (FBI) handlers, Bulger wasted no time in taking over the Winter Hill Gang in the wake of gang leader Howie Winter’s incarceration. The fact that the Italian mob remained the Bureau’s number one priority gave Bulger carte blanche to run the Irish mob however he saw fit…Boston watched as the Winter Hill Gang under Bulger…consolidated its vicious hold on the city’s rackets, thanks in large part to the federal arrests and subsequent incarceration of the competition (Bulger) served up neatly on a plate.”

Bulger wasn’t brought down for his many crimes until last June.

“Betrayal” is packed with the same suspense, humor and strong characterization we have come to expect from the Jon Land novels and the result is a moving and horrifying memoir about law enforcement officer criminality that merits comparison with “Serpico.”

Did you see the recent news stories in 2010 about the first “legal” male prostitute in America?

He worked for one of the state-regulated bordellos outside Las Vegas and was available to any woman who wanted to hire him (the prostitute made it clear in news reports that his services were not available to men).

The New York Post sent a female reporter to interview the guy, but a few weeks ago it was announced that he was quitting due to a lack of business — raising that age-old question of whether or not women are hard-wired to split sex and romance the way men who use prostitutes are.

Judging by the rise of “Girls Gone Wild” and other spring break-related porno-documentaries, college-age women who go to Cancun and other places are as eager for “hook-ups” as their male counterparts, but is that all they are looking for?

Traditionally, when a woman is portrayed as being sexually aggressive in a movie or TV show — ala Samantha in “Sex and the City” or the Jackie Bisset character in the George Cukor movie “Rich and Famous” — we are told this is a fantasy perpetrated by the gay dramatists and directors behind the cameras.

An interesting 1998 French film, “The School of Flesh,” explores this rarely discussed issue of the way modern women are balancing love and sex.

Based on a novella by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, the story follows a Paris fashion executive (played by the great Isabelle Huppert) who is drawn to a considerably younger man (Vincent Martinez) she knows is a bisexual prostitute catering to male clients.

Director Benoit Jacquot never tells us what attracts the woman to the young man — other than his physical attributes.

Through the terrific performance by Huppert we get to delve into the turbulent personality of a woman who thinks casual sex is enough for her, but begins to want some sort of long-term romantic relationship with a guy who is clearly unsuitable for her.

How many “real” women would get into a situation like this one?

Is the character simply a stand-in for the bisexual Mishima?

Those are just two of the questions that are fun to bat around after watching “The School of Flesh.”

Old-fashioned showmanship is still alive and well in Hollywood.

We might be in the middle of the “prestige season” in which critically acclaimed Oscar contenders are being rolled out for awards consideration, but at the box office last weekend, the little, Z-grade exploitation film “The Devil Inside” soared over all of the competition with a $34.5 million gross in the first three days of release.

The opening was the third strongest January debut ever, after “Cloverfield” ($40.1 million) and a re-release of “Star Wars” ($35.9 million).

A high gross doesn’t mean much if you spend a lot of money to make a movie, but “Devil” is what they call a “pick-up” — a film shot independently which is acquired for release by a major studio — and it cost Paramount less than $1 million to purchase the film.

So, even if the studio spent $10-$15 million on marketing, the movie is already in profit after less than seven days in national release — something that is unheard of for an average studio production with a budget of $75 million and an ad buy of $20 million.

Of course, with a picture like this (scoring a rare F rating in industry exit polling last weekend) you have to get in and out quickly, burning the audience in a few days before the atrocious word of mouth gets out. And in these social networking days, word of mouth is faster than ever (I had a good time over the weekend reading the outraged Tweets of moviegoers who were sucked in by Paramount’s effectively creepy marketing campaign).

Paramount has a fairly long tradition of making a good, quick buck with effectively marketed pick-ups.

Way back in 1976, the studio bought a grisly Mexican quickie based on the true story of the rugby team that survived a plane crash in the Andes and reverted to cannibalism to live. Paramount dubbed the picture into English, slapped on the title “Survive!” and made a bundle before word of mouth got out.

The quickie release killed another studio’s plans to make a big-budget movie based on the Piers Paul Read bestseller about the case, “Alive” (17 years later, the Disney studio finally made a movie out of the book and it quickly bombed at the box office because of its high cost-to-gross ratio).

Paramount launched two hugely lucrative franchises with canny pick-ups — the “Friday the 13th” series in the 1980s and the “Paranormal Activity” films in this decade — but those pictures had good buzz (at first) so it seems highly unlikely that we’ll be getting a “Devil Inside 2.”

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.