This week Time Out New York released its list of the 100 Best movies shot in New York. All the Internet loves a list, and as such things go it’s well done, but while cycling through it I couldn’t help but think that perhaps the world—and American movies—would be a great deal better off if New York City got a little time off.

There is an attitude prevalent among New Yorkers, whether they fess up to it or not, which is that their lives are—by virtue of the highly-recognizable background that they’re being lived in front of—especially important. This is particularly rampant among passers-by living out a few seasons of a Seinfeld/Friends/Sex and the City/How I Met Your Mother/Girls fantasy, though there is also a sizable population of chest-thumping native New Yorkers who prefix sentences with the statement “I’m a native New Yorker…” as if it’s an actual accomplishment rather than a matter of geographical happenstance.

This attitude is reinforced by the disproportional representation of New York City as a backdrop—this is, after all, where stories take place. Which is not to say that Gotham has cornered the location-shooting market. A great many contemporary films make use of Los Angeles (motivated by cut-corner bone-laziness) and Boston (motivated by the desire to make a movie about the criminal underclass without using black actors), and if a film’s location is not specified you can bet that it’s shot in Vancouver (green-and-gray palette), Shreveport (scented with po’ boys), Toronto (native Torontonians cannot recognize Toronto on film), or some combination of the three.

But the Bloomberg administration has been a good friend to film and television production since 2002, encouraging record levels of investment and employment. From a business standpoint, this is doubly smart: not only does the “Made in NY” incentive program create jobs—always politically popular—but it reinforces “New York City” as a brand, encouraging future tourism and NYU enrollment. Not to say that your average Bloomberg-era New York City movie—and there are relatively few that appear on the Time Out list, though among them are such unimpeachable choices as James Grey’s Two Lovers—has a dialogue with the city that goes any deeper than, say, an establishing helicopter shot of the Manhattan skyline (remember when these weren’t de rigeur?) and possibly a scene that takes place at Shake Shack. It’s a far cry from transcribing onto celluloid the scent of “subway farts,” to take a phrase from a Michael Atkinson write-up of The French Connection that has always lingered with me.

What is sorely missing in all of this is the sense of digging into the byways and offramps of our nation for stories, a sense associated with what I call the “Discover America” period of the 1960’s and, particularly, 1970’s—I think of Phoenix, Arizona in The Gauntlet; San Antonio, Texas in Rolling Thunder; Stockton, California in Fat City. Like the tee-shirt says, ‘I HEART New York,’ but let’s give it a rest.

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I am, it is generally known, a cat fancier. This has sometimes infringed on my critical faculty; I have never, for example, been able to forgive Bela Tarr the cat torture scene in Satantango. Though I fully believe Tarr’s statement that the scene was supervised by SPCA overseers, and that he adopted the cat in question after the shoot wrapped, I can’t help but think of Klaus Kinski’s cutting comments on Werner Herzog in the former’s great autobiography, Kinski Uncut a/k/a All I Need is Love a/k/a I Am So Wild About Your Strawberry Mouth, saying that Herzog turned to animal torture whenever his movies started to drag. Certainly this is true of a number of pictures trashier than Tarr’s or Herzog’s, in which feline sacrifice is used as a symbol of dark and serious intention. I think offhand of The Book of Eli and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to cite two recent examples. How much more affectionate one feels for the always-human and humane Chris Marker, who coined the memorable aphorism: “The owl is to the cat what the angel is to man.”

Perhaps because of my great partiality for cats, I have not harbored one in more than a dozen years, largely out of abject fear of eventually losing it—as Louis C.K. has joked (paraphrasing): “The gift of a pet is really the gift of eventual but inevitable and utter heartbreak.”

Yet after scrupulously keeping myself free of such potentially-painful ties, I recently came into possession of a pair of sixteen-year old (!) cats, one of whom—a butterball-turkey shaped Russian Blue named Spanky—passed on this 4^th of July, following the example set by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Despite the inevitable and utter sadness resulting, I find I now only have cause to regret my many barren, catless years, thinking to Dickens in The Old Curiosity Shop: “Thus it will always happen that these men of the world, who go through it in armour, defend themselves from quite as much good as evil; to say nothing of the inconvenience and absurdity of mounting guard with a microscope at all times, and of wearing a coat of mail on the most innocent occasions.”

What does all of this have to do with the Seventh Art? Absolutely nothing—I’m just saying, get a cat, they’re great. By way of attempting to tie things together, however, here are some pictures of black cat auditions, for a segment of the 1962 horror anthology Tales of Terror.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Reading my François Mauriac by guttering candlelight, I re-encountered the following, from the 1962 essay collection Cain, Where is Your Brother?:

“A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again. Everywhere else, we carry them with us. It is enough to close our eyes to feel this breath against our neck, this faithful hand on our shoulder. The house, the garden, also remember: my mother’s easy chair still sags under her weight; the fabric looks worn where she used to rest her elbows. Our familiar universe multiplies around us as the images of those who continue to live within us.”

I can confirm the truth of the opening sentence, as I have spent innumerable hours in cemeteries, trying in vain to commune with those belowground. As often as not I have not been looking for “my” dead, though I have passed some time in what passes for a family plot in dismal Darlington, Indiana. I am, you see, a whore for dead noteworthies, for standing over the earthly detritus of the good and great.

Of course if you want to “know” these dead, you can only revisit their earthly works, but this knowledge does not prevent my paying calls. I favor authors most especially, but composers, politicians, tycoons, and painters will do—only a couple of weeks ago I ferreted out Thomas Cole in Catskill’s Thompson Street Cemetery, using a .jpeg from the invaluable Findagrave.com website as my compass.

And then of course there are the movie people. Of these, the most satisfying to find was Maurice Pialat, who has resided since 2003 in Paris’ Cimetière de Montparnasse. The cemetery’s photocopied directory of famous residents was seemingly updated only once every decade, so locating the plot took no small amount of sleuthing and halting Franglais. Some time after having paid my visit to Mr. Pialat, I heard a pertinent apocryphal story: While preparing to shoot his excruciating film about a death in the family, 1974’s La geule ouverte, Pialat took his cinematographer, the great Nestor Almendros, to see the late Mme. Pialat, who had presumably been interred in the family mausoleum in Puy-de-dome or wherever he’s from. Then, so to aide Almendros in the understanding of death which was so essential to the film they were to make, Pialat had the lid of his mother’s coffin pried open, so that the blanching cameraman could look upon the work of corruption.

Nearest to my own indigenous country is the grave of one James Byron Dean in Fairmount, Indiana, which I have thrice visited and which, come to think of it, is probably where this whole ridiculous habit got started. On the eastern seaboard, where I’ve spent the last decade, opportunities for meeting decedent movie people are certainly available, though I haven’t availed myself of many. Otto Preminger was unusual in making New York City his base of producer-director operations in life, and retains this iconoclastic distinction in death, occupying a bit of turf in The Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery. It’s on my to-do, for though I’ve been to Woodlawn, I did not come calling on Otto (I can, however, recommend a visit to Herman Melville and his tragic family). And did you happen to know that Montgomery Clift is buried in a secret, gated Society of Friends Quaker cemetery inside Brooklyn’s Prospect Park? If ever a piece of information demanded a grappling hook and some Dutch courage, this is it.

My favorite eastern gravesite for a movie person is for a man who is only secondarily a movie person—the novelist Nathaniel West, née Nathaniel “von” Wallenstein Weinstein (1903-1940), who in addition to writing masterful novellas A Cool Million, Miss Lonelyhearts, and The Day of the Locust—the quintessential poison pen letter to Hollywood—amassed bill-paying screenwriting credits on studio-era assembly line products like Rhythm in the Clouds and Let’s Make Music. After getting an automobile smash-up while hastily returning from a Mexican hunting trip—possibly after hearing that his friend Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald had keeled over in the apartment that he shared with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham—Mr. West has been consigned to Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens County. Mount Zion is a particularly picturesque Jewish cemetery containing many of the residents of turn-of-the-last-century tenements, as crowded in death as they were in life—210,000 burials on 78 acres. The key feature, however, is the New York City Department of Sanitation’s Queens West Garage, which stands on a hill overlooking the cemetery, the twin chimneys of its garbage incinerator jutting skyward. (I have, incidentally, visited the equally dismally situated Scott Fitzgeralds in Rockville, Maryland’s once-bucolic Saint Mary’s Cemetery, which today gives a good view onto busy Baltimore Rd. and a glass-box corporate park building across the way.)

If you want to see “more stars than there are in heaven,” of course, you must go west young man. Unfortunately, Whispering Glades, the quintessential California kitsch burying ground in Tony Richardson’s 1965 film of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, is but a contrivance of set design, whipped up on the grounds of Beverly Hills’ Greystone Mansion. But you can visit its supposed inspiration, Forest Lawn Memorial Park, where I “met” Stan Laurel and Sir Charles Laughton, before bedecking Fritz Lang’s headstone with a white rose. And just imagine—had Waugh only stuck it out during his brief furlough in Los Angeles, he might today be at Culver City’s Roman Catholic Holy Cross Cemetery, buried between Bing Crosby and Bela Lugosi.

But if you’ve only limited time for the dead, the very walkable, visitor-friendly Hollywood Forever Cemetery offers the most bang for your buck: A cenotaph of Johnny Ramone! C.B. DeMille! The ashes of Screamers frontman Tomata du Plenty! John Huston and mother Rhea, once a reporter at the preposterous tabloid the New York Graphic, alongside young Sammy Fuller! And only a short distance away from the Hustons is the gravesite that, in all of my perambulations among the dead, has come closest to arousing something like genuine emotion in me—that of Virginia Rappe (1895-1921), whose principal claim to fame was having a splendid rack and dying of a ruptured bladder after allegedly being jazzed with a Coca-Cola bottle by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Take it away, La Merm! (Cenotaph at Shrine of Remembrance Mausoleum, Colorado Springs; ashes with family in New York, to be interred at a later date.)

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

This week has been dominated by the long-spreading shadow preceding the anticipated touch-down of Christopher Nolan’s latest Batman opus. Has there been such a brouhaha over the theater since the O.P. Riots of 1809? Or perhaps New York City’s Astor Place Riots, in which the patriotic supporters of homegrown American Shakespearian Edwin Forrest ran Englishman William Charles Macready’s Hamlet out of town? The case of The Dark Knight Rises is rather the inverse of that of Forrest, for it involves an Anglo director and principally Commonwealth cast putting a histrionic, tony polish on that most lowbrow and American of products, the comic book… and, per H.L. Mencken, “No good American ever seriously questions an English judgment on an aesthetic question.”

Among other things, the rising of The Dark Knight resulted in the shutting down of User Comments on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes when a slew of the film’s anticipatory superfans began throwing virtual brickbats at the film’s critics. As of yesterday, I noted that my own Village Voice review has garnered some 258 Comments, none of which I will ever read, though a friend was good enough to forward along one which, in tenor and grammar, will have to stand in for the whole: “whats the matter… not enough naked butts of men for you to like the movie?” This morning, I awoke to the news that a man had opened fire on a packed midnight crowd at a Batman Rises screening in suburban Denver. Discounting the possibility that this very pathetic and well-armed individual had received some precognitive influence from the film’s vision of domestic terrorism, this only offers tragic further evidence that this is the current event.

The environment in which a Dark Knight Rises could be so fervidly, even violently, anticipated was discussed this week in a Los Angeles Times piece by Neal Gabler, addressing the perceived lack of respect with which the, er, rising generation treats film history.

Mr. Gabler’s work as an entertainment historian deserves the greatest respect. I count his An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood and his biographies of Walter Winchell and Walt Disney as invaluable, and I am already a-tremble with anticipation of the tales of sponge-dicked, Jameson-fueled orgies with Christopher Dodd that await within Gabler’s announced Edward Kennedy bio. As a theoretician on the sociological effects of entertainment, however, Gabler seems to me singularly tepid, obvious, and useless. Gabler’s 1998 polemic Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, the subject of which can be well extrapolated from the title, was a collection of bastardized Debordisms with Debord’s name conspicuously absent from the Index, and none of the master’s epigrammatic flair or crabbed, bitchy wit. The final chapter scurries back from any and all conclusions of the previous 200 pages, second-guessing all propositions while confessing that maybe, just maybe, social role-playing does, indeed, pre-date the Latham loop. It would be a doorstop were it not for Life’s first-chapter historical overview “The Republic of Entertainment,” obviously the fruits of decades of scrupulous note-taking—if memory serves, it even touches on the Astor Place Riots! Today the book occupies a privileged cardboard box populated with doom-and-gloom titles like The Twilight of American Culture and Allan Bloom’s literally incomprehensible The Closing of the American Mind, the sort of books that were sent-up in Adam Brooks’ Definitely, Maybe in the tome authored by Kevin Kline’s magnificently-monikered academic Hampton Roth: The Decline of Almost Everything.

Any old how, Gabler’s latest emission shows that he hasn’t lost the ability to urgently identify the continuing operation of long-standing universal truths and see in them disturbing new developments. His argument, a series of slashing generalizations largely based on the testimony of friends teaching in university film programs, goes like this:

“Young people, so-called millennials, don’t seem to think of movies as art the way so many boomers did. They think of them as fashion, and like fashion, movies have to be new and cool to warrant attention. Living in a world of the here-and-now, obsessed with whatever is current, kids seem no more interested in seeing their parents’ movies than they are in wearing their parents’ clothes… movies may have become a kind of ‘MacGuffin’—an excuse for communication along with music, social updates, friends’ romantic complications and the other things young people use to stoke interaction and provide proof that they are in the loop. A film’s intrinsic value may matter less than its ability to be talked about.”

Note, just for starters, that the two generations whose film-watching habits are deemed worthy of discussion are the boomers (b. 1946 to 1964) and millenials (b. 1982/83 to 2004). This leaves a good two-decade gap during which there were, apparently, no changes in viewing habits worth noting—or, more likely, whatever changes there were fell outside of Gabler’s sample group of himself, his kids, and his tenured colleagues. In contrast to the narcissism of millenials, who are too busy YouTubing and attending rainbow parties to lock themselves in with Leslie Howard night on TCM, “boomer audiences didn’t necessarily believe their aesthetics were an advance over those that had preceded them”—the bold claim Gabler makes for his “Never trust anyone over 30” coevals, before proceeding to cite the example of venerable proto-boomer Andrew Sarris (b. 1928).

What is not considered is the possibility that the millenials in those classrooms may be too busy thinking about what they’re going to do to address their rapidly accruing academic debt while silently steaming at their smug graybeard professors who went to college for free, those very same lovable boomers who handed off a shit-sandwich of a country to their children and children’s children, who now pay off their vacation by writing condescending editorials that aggrandize their own generation’s role in preserving film history, which is rather difficult to whole-heartedly care about when you’ve got no future.

The worst part is that Gabler, as in the retreating chapter of Life: The Movie, is too honest a writer to ignore how unseaworthy his thesis is: “One has to acknowledge that part of this cinematic ageism is the natural cycle of culture…” Indeed one must. Even accepting that Gabler may somewhere have a point, however badly he has expressed it here, even as critics are pilloried for voicing conscientious objections to the preordained Movie Mass Culture Event of the Year, it is a sucker’s game to bear one’s self ceaselessly into the past. So I cede the floor to André Gide, whose Pretexts have been my recent bedside reading:

“I demand the right to love my age just as Barrès loves Lorraine, his fatherland, and to defend my love by as specious a chain of reasoning as his. I can’t do a thing about it: here and now is when I am alive. I belong to my time and I am the child of my country; not being able to avoid that, I am not so foolish as not to know how to love and admire them both.”

So, with earnest hopes for the post-Batman future, and for more naked butts of men, I remain yours very truly.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

It’s now just over a week since James Eagan Holmes opened fire at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, and time enough has passed to collate the reactions.

For starters, there has been the usual chorus of calls for stricter gun control laws, a rather trickier issue than it seems on the face to be, as illustrated in an illuminating post in Ezra Klein’s Washington Post Wonkblog. Over at Movieline.com, S.T. VanAirsdale wasted no time in calling for the “Cinemark theater chain, the National Association of Theater Owners and the Motion Picture Association of America” to unite their lobbying power towards this end, and against the NRA’s pro-gun advocacy.

In my week’s moviegoing, although subjected to a halfhearted tote bag search at a Friday afternoon day-of screening, I detected no such concerted plan of action by the abovementioned entities, whose most pressing concern before last Friday was rallying against New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed soda size cap. Witness, to this end, a new series of pre-movie spots that seek to stir up New Yorkers’ dudgeon, compelling theatergoers to join an AstroTurf grassroots movement defending their God-given right to pay an obscene amount of money in order to swill huge promotional cups of hissing phosphoric acid while watching The Bourne Legacy. Who says there are no great causes left?

My first words after viewing this absurd new campaign: “First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew…”

America, meanwhile, showed itself to be commercially defiant in the face of tragedy, unwilling to let the terrorists (or whatever) win by showing up in numbers sufficient to grant The Dark Knight Rises a reported opening weekend take of $160.9 million domestic, respectably boffo B.O.

In the groping-for-explanations phase, which we as a nation officially entered on the morning of July 20^th, there is always a heightened scrutiny over the purported cultural intake of the perpetrators. I have often entertained a paranoiac fantasy in which, through some Hitchcockian set of circumstances, I stand falsely accused of some horrifying act and my own bookshelves are consequently parsed for damning evidence, of which there is, God knows, a lot. We may all remember the linkages made, in the immediate aftermath of 1999’s Columbine shootings, to DOOM, Marilyn Manson, Natural Born Killers, and even the trenchcoated shootouts in The Matrix, until the latter film’s value as art was upheld by no less an authority than Al Gore, presidential-hopeful, future Academy Award winner, and then-husband of PMRC scold Tipper. And of course there was Richard McBeef playwright Seung-Hui Choi’s snarling self-portrait, allegedly inspired by Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, in which the Virginia Tech butcher posed with a ball-peen hammer while failing entirely to look potent or menacing, which is really rather sad considering that he actually did manage to murder 32 people.

Knowing from these precedents the attention that was forthcoming, TDKR director Christopher Nolan last weekend released his own statement on the events in Aurora:

“I would not presume to know anything about the victims of the shooting but that they were there last night to watch a movie. I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.”

James Eagan Holmes’ actions could not exactly have been inspired by The Dark Knight Rises, because he did not see The Dark Knight Rises—although after a fashion he did, since the blockbuster culture of which it’s the apotheosis is so hysterically redundant. Regardless, it has certainly been noted in the last week that Mr. Nolan’s rather savage film contains a scene in which a crowd is gathered for an important and joyful pastime, the shared experience of watching a “Gotham Rogues” football game, which is interrupted when every member of the team, save the one played by former Pittsburgh Steelers wideout and serial shit-eating-grinner Hines Ward, is killed in an act of terrorism engineered by Tom Hardy’s Bane.

This is shortly before Bane announces himself as the savior of Gotham City, posturing as a sans culotte who will deliver control of the city to its underclass. Why precisely Bane considers it good PR to publicly slaughter both the Gotham Rogues and Rapid City Monuments—football players traditionally being heroes of the very lower-and-working class whose contrivance Bane is presumably courting—is not addressed, any more than was the matter of what the Joker does when left to himself at Bruce Wayne’s penthouse fundraiser for Harvey Dent, once Batman and Maggie Gyllenhall go out the window together in The Dark Knight.

This is because Mr. Nolan is a careless, not to say callous, director, who cannot be bothered with such practical considerations when there are epic slaughters to stage and big themes to brood over. Can a direct line be drawn between Mr. Nolan’s Irwin Allen-like pleasure in death seen in extreme long-shot and the actions of James Eagan Holmes, who according to some sources was imitating Heath Ledger’s fidgety and very bad performance of madness-as-avatar-of-anarchy The Joker in The Dark Knight (“Some just want to watch the world burn”), and who was apparently stupid enough to think he could get laid using Adult FriendFinder? Was the crowd at Gotham’s Heinz stadium so inured to the spectacle of violence—watching as they were a game that leaves its gridiron heroes with lifelong physical and mental trauma by the time of their mid-30s retirements—that they barely took note when twenty-three human lives were snuffed out before their very eyes?

Perhaps the most eloquent advancement of the blame-the-movies position came in an essay that does not address the Aurora killings at all. In the latest edition of tony triannual n+1, Christopher Glazek ties together Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix’s I’m Still Here, the premature deaths of several scions of Hollywood, and the author’s schizophrenic older brother’s imitation of material from big-budget thrillers—including the Bourne films—to arrive at a damning J’accuse. “I will never exact revenge on Hollywood for determining the architecture of my brother’s madness,” Glazek fumes, after having pilloried the movie men for peddling cheap and faulty identikits:

“When art fails to imitate life, even the unafflicted are driven to make their lives somehow imitate art. Building an inner world is exhausting: we look to film and television to show us versions of ourselves, to allow us to process our lives, to excuse them, and maybe to ennoble them. And yet, at this task, Hollywood is notoriously deficient. Some stories do not get told. Some identities are never offered up for examination.”

I have yet to make sense of the “When art fails to imitate life…” bit, but throughout can detect the old censorious logic that evaluates works on the basis of how they may act upon the most susceptible and feeble-minded among us. Can we suppose, though, that even were there never such things as movies, the most powerless among us—those unable to exercise control over even their own turbulent minds—would not still take refuge in the images of power, as with the old stereotype of the madman dressing up as Napoleon? (Whose capacity for organizing spectacular slaughter, it should be said, put even Christopher Nolan to shame.)

Taking for granted—and I certainly do—that a culture that bows and scrapes before a quarter-million dollar rehashing of an intellectual property designed to entertain WWII-era pre-adolescents is not necessarily a healthy one, it needs be admitted that the overwhelming majority of people exposed to it do not seem to become dangerous psychopaths as a result. As to if they may become emotionally-and-intellectually stunted on a steady diet of superheroics is another point entirely, but we should not call for intervention when education should suffice. Why, that would be like… telling people what size soda to drink!

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

NEWS ON THE MARCH! This week the venerable UK film mag Sight & Sound released its seventh “Greatest Films of All Time” survey, the results of which have been unveiled every decade since 1952.

The big news, if that even applies, was that Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) had been toppled from the #1 slot, from where it had reigned as king of the hill from 1962 to 2002. The new boss was none other than Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Your humble columnist is a regular S & S contributor, and his Top 10 contained one of the 191 votes that helped achieve a coup that anyone could have anticipated if he cared to see the signs: Hitchcock was the cover star of August’s Sight & Sound, coinciding with the run of The Genius of Hitchcock at the BFI’s fine Southbank facility.

If anyone might have been pleased by this reversal of fortunes, it’d have been Chris Marker (1921-2012), who died this week; I am indebted to the good people at Light Industry for pointing me towards his “Notes on Vertigo.” Otherwise, the significance is relative. I qualify “big news” because the Greatest Films of All Time list is notoriously a rather monolithic thing, with any small shift granted significance well out-of-proportion with its actual meaning. What are we talking about?

Kane was the product, quite famously, of a 25-year-old Wisconsin wunderkind whose arrival in Hollywood was occasion for sky-is-the-limit optimism amongst ambitious artisans, and frantic circling of the wagons amongst the established order. In one of his rush job “Pat Hobby” stories, filed in February of 1940, Scott “I’m a good writer—honest” Fitzgerald has his washed-up souse of an ex-scriptwriter playing up to the fears of old-guard studio gatekeepers: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Orson Welles is the biggest menace that’s come to Hollywood for years. He gets a hundred and fifty grand a picture and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was so radical that you had to have all new equipment and start all over again like you did with sound in 1928.”

Alfred Hitchcock was, like Welles, a 25-year old—albeit a rather more potato-faced one—when he has his directorial coming-out, but Vertigo was released near its director’s 59^th birthday, after he’d spent nearly three decades doing the necessary politicking to remain at the upper echelon of popular filmmaking. The film stars James Stewart, once America’s perennial innocent, but now pushing 50 and irreparably sunk into what Manny Farber called his “harassed Adam’s-apple approach to gutty acting.” The difference between Kane and Vertigo is as stark as the difference between 1941, with its captive audience and its robust box-office, and 1958, when the studios were overhauling their business model in a panic. It’s the triumph of sunset over sunrise, decadence over youthful exuberance.

Fitzgerald’s aforementioned “I’m a good writer” plaint comes from a letter he sent after seeing changes made to his script for Three Comrades, which was based on a novel by All Quiet on the Western Front author Erich Maria Remarque. The recipient of the letter was the film’s producer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a career movie man of some cultivation, and a far cry from the stereotypical front-office philistine. A little over a year after that letter was written, Mankiewicz’s older brother, Herman J., would begin work on a film tentatively titled The American, which later became Citizen Kane.

Either in spite of or because of Mankiewicz’s tampering, Three Comrades, filmed by Frank Borzage and released by MGM in 1938, is a fine film. And though Scott Fitzgerald was, honest, a more than good writer, success in prose does not always translate into what we broadly call film sense. There is no finer example of this than the career of Gore Vidal, another of this week’s casualties. Gore was one of our most perspicacious essayists on literature who was simultaneously responsible for more nonsensical pronouncements on the subject of motion pictures than anyone I know. (As if to drive the point home, 1990’s Hollywood is the worst of his “Narratives of Empire” series.) Where letters and cinema intersected, however, Vidal was capable of some real insights:

“Mine is the first generation of authors brought up on talking films,” he told one interviewer, “and I think we were more affected by films than any of the other narrative forms. Tell me someone’s favorite actor when he was ten years old, and I’ll tell you who he is. Could Norman Mailer have existed without John Garfield? He’s been playing Garfield, and I’ve been doing George Arliss. You get hung up on an image.”

This line is pursued in Vidal’s “The Top Ten Best Sellers According to the New York Times as of January 7, 1973,” contained in the essential United States: Essays 1952-1992. The piece begins with Vidal’s recollection of sitting in the MGM commissary with Christopher Isherwood and John O’Hara, continues through a one paragraph dismissal of the entire politiques des auteurs—the sort of thing that Kent Jones was thinking of when he called Vidal a “cinematic illiterate” in his profile of Andrew Sarris—and then hits paydirt:

“I think it is necessary to make these remarks about the movies of the thirties, forties, and fifties as a preface to the ten best-selling novels under review since most of these books reflect to some degree the films each author saw in his formative years, while at least seven of the novels appear to me to be deliberate attempts not so much to re-create new film product as to suggest old movies that will make the reader (and publisher and reprinter and, to come full circle, film-maker) recall past successes and respond accordingly… Except for the influence of the dead Ian Fleming (whose own work was a curious amalgam of old movies in the Eric Ambler-Hitchcock style with some sado-masochist games added), these books connect not at all with other books. But with the movies… ah, the movies!”

It would be profitable to perform a similar act of cross-medium reverse-engineering of influence on the generation of early literature-influenced filmmakers—for example, it is impossible to calculate the effect that the strenuous outdoorsy cult of Teddy Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling had upon the generation of American action directors who came of age during the 1920’s. Reading Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, I recently discovered the author’s essay on Kipling, which analyzes a boy’s attraction to the Jungle Book author:

“…understanding Kipling’s ellipsis and allusions, you partook of what was Kipling’s own special delight, the joy of being ‘in.’ Max Beerbohm has satirizing Kipling’s yearning to be admitted to any professional arcanum, his fawning admiration of the man in uniform, the man with the know-how and the technical  slang. It is the emotion of a boy—he lusts for the exclusive circle, for the sect with the password, and he profoundly admires the technical, secret-laden adults who run the world, the overcalled people, majestic in their occupation, superb in their preoccupation…”

Now, if there is a better description of the American cinema’s cult of professionalism, as epitomized by Howard Hawks and eulogized by Jean-Pierre Gorin in Routine Pleasures (1986), will someone please let me know?

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

“I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror” said Carson McCullers of Columbus, Georgia—but I am afraid that I actually rather enjoy returning to Cincinnati, Ohio.

I am particularly fond of the late summer, when the Mill Creek valley becomes a bowl of soupy humidity, and the omnipresent whirr of the cicadas ensorcells susceptible souls in a voluptuous ennui (and, apparently, induces flights of purple prose.)

This afternoon I met an old friend for lunch at the highly recommended Pleasant Ridge Chili, one of the city’s hundreds of purveyors of Cincinnati-style chili, which is a thin, messy concoction prepared with finely-ground beef that looks and tastes nothing like what the rest of the Western world thinks of as chili. (Pleasant Ridge also specializes in gravy fries heaped with Cincinnati-style chili’s signature grated cheddar cheese, which is for some reason the color of a traffic barrel.) Afterwards, we decamped to a local watering hole, where the bartendress apparently misunderstood the wisecrack I made about my “Supple complexion” when asking our ages, responding amiably that “Well, we’re mostly a white bar.” (She also said she’d thought that my orange New York State license plates were “Party plates”—restricted DUI plates in Ohio are the same color.)

O, Cincinnati! Most southern northern city? Most northern southern city? Cheap cracks at my hometown’s quaintly retro racism aside, I have always been a firm believer in taking pride in one’s own, and under the administration of Chris Tucker-esque Mayor Mark Mallory, there is more reason for that pride than in any time in memory. The reopened Washington Park, faced with the soon-to-be-renovated Music Hall tabernacle, is an unqualified triumph! Vine Street above Central Parkway is shoulder-to-shoulder with merry-makers on a Saturday night! The Reds are in first place! Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill!

Can a downtown movie palace be far off? How can we do without? A stroll through Cincinnati film history suggests the Athens of the West might also go by the name Hollywood on the Ohio:

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Ostensibly set in fictional “Boone City,” William Wyler’s film, like the Samuel Goldwyn-commissioned McKinley Kantor novel on which it was based, takes place in a thinly disguised Cincinnati…or so apocrypha has it. McKantor’s hometown of Des Moines has, insofar as I can tell, as good a claim on being the secret identity of Boone City as any place, while a 2006 article by one James I. Deutsch in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television sets out to debunk Cincinnati’s right to any especial pride in Best Years. My buddy, however, swears that the city itself is visible via aerial footage in the scene where Dana Andrews, Frederic March, and Harold Russell look over their native country through the nose cone of a transport plane, and I have it on some authority that the “Jackson High” football field pointed out by Homer is in fact Corcoran Field, near Victory Parkway, where the Xavier University Musketeers played until 1973. So, there’s that.

A side note on the persuasive power of criticism: When I saw Best Years in college, I was deeply emotionally impressed by it. Not long afterwards, I got my first copy of Manny Farber’s Negative Space on my first trip to the west coast, at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, and was so impressed by the censorious phrase “a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz,” which Mr. Farber applied to Best Years, that I would never be able to even think about the movie seriously ever again. 

The Apartment (1960)

You are correct if you recall that The Apartment actually takes place in New York City, but it is worth noting that Jack Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter was transferred from Consolidated Life’s branch office in Cincinnati before arriving in the corrupting Big Apple, and at one point he recounts to Shirley MacLaine’s Fran an abortive suicide attempt in the city’s Eden Park. For whatever reason, either Wilder (or co-scriptwriters Charles Brackett and/or I.A.L. Diamond) seemed to have a weakness for the Buckeye State: Joe Gillis in 1950’s Sunset Blvd cut his teeth as a cub reporter for The Dayton Daily News, while 1966’s The Fortune Cookie is as near a thing that exists to the great Cleveland movie.

Other noteworthy name-alone appearances of “Cincinnati”: 1972’s The King of Marvin Gardens (Bruce Dern: “I was in jail one time in Cincinnati. I don’t know if you heard about that”) and 1974’s The Phantom of the Paradise (“Where do you think you’re going, Tinkerbell?” “Cincinnati, to see my mother!”).

Homebodies (1974)

The one certifiable Cincinnati masterpiece. This is the second feature by Larry Yust, who’d made his name on a series of literary adaptations for 16mm classroom projection made under the auspices of Encyclopedia Brittanica films—works that continue to haunt many a weak-kneed Boomer. I wrote about the sadly-neglected Homebodies once—a film that I have it on good authority that Mayor Mallory is also a fan of—for a since-defunct magazine, and find that my observations on it hold up:

“More than merely scenic, Homebodies is one of the better films to frontally approach the self-inflicted mutilation that occurred in postwar American cities under the code name of “urban redevelopment” (This is, of course, the secret subtext of every blighted-city film; Robert Moses practically deserves a co-director credit on Fort Apache, the Bronx). The landscapes that backdrop Homebodies look like Dresden, but the damage is from redevelopment, not bombs; the film’s tenements, another century’s touching idea of middle-class elegance, were actually being razed as Homebodies was shooting for interstate expansion and low-income (read: sub-standard) housing… There is no spilled blood in the most excruciating scene in Homebodies, which comes when as the wrecking ball starts to work on the block of apartments where Mattie and her irregulars have made their stand, folding in wallsand crumbling cornice stones. It feels like a vivisection, progress murdering a thing of still-functional, everyday beauty. Earlier, one of the vigilantes proposes a toast to the bricks-and-mortar of their imperiled tenement, then to the flesh-and-blood of its residents. Understanding how profoundly foundations run, this is a rare film to understand the lives of buildings.”

Airborne (1993)

Released in a strange teen movie lull between the high John Hughes era and the Freddie Prinze, Jr./ Jennifer Love Hewitt late-‘90s, Airborne starred Shane McDermott as Mitchell Goosen, a surf-loving California teenager whose parents banish him to the gulag of his aunt and uncle’s house in Cincinnati while they go on a research trip. The film’s view of the city is predicated on the idea that a) it snows all the time in Cincinnati and b) the city is absolutely mad for hockey, neither of which thing is true. I noted recently that Culver City’s Cinefamily were hosting a screening of Airborne, which I guess means that it’s attained some degree of cult cache, possibly due to early appearances by Seth Green and Jack Black. At one point, after a successful meet-cute with Brittney Powell at the Botanical Gardens, McDermott literally says “I think I’m starting to like Cincinnati” to the camera, an unabashedly corndog line-reading which I cite almost every time I am lighting out of the 275 loop for New York as though I have Apaches on my tail.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Prompted by the death of Gore Vidal, which was subject of this column two weeks prior, I finally picked up a copy of Screening History last week, the author’s sole work built around—I cannot say devoted exclusively to, given the free range of his raconteur’s voice—the subject of moving pictures.

Maybe a dozen times before in as many different used bookstores I had picked up and put down this this scanty 96-page tome with its slightly ridiculous jacket image in which Mr. Vidal, half turned around in his movie theater seat, affixes the viewer with a wry gaze, an image from the 1989 film of Billy the Kid starring Val Kilmer visible over his shoulder.

The image was selected because Vidal had written the Kilmer film’s screenplay, although, were they publishing two years later, Harvard University Press might have selected a still from 1994 Joe Pesci vehicle With Honors, in which Vidal played one of the university’s own scholar-squirrels, Professor Pitkannan. The Billy of ’89 was, incidentally, not Vidal’s first crack at the material; some 30 years prior he’d written the teleplay which eventually became Arthur Penn’s feature debut The Left-Handed Gun, a film that Vidal disowned. I’d say he’s justified in this—if ever there was a case of a movie being paralyzed by fussy blocking minutia and convulsive actorly affect (by Vidal’s old friend Paul Newman), this is it.

Screening History originated as one of the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures on the History of American Civilization that are delivered every two years at Harvard by a notable personage. Vidal’s address, sandwiched between those by Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination) and Eugene D. Genovese (The Southern Tradition), was given in 1992 when the author was 66 or, as he puts it within, “in the spring time of my senescence,” with two decades to live but mortality already very much on his mind: “As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit,” the address begins “it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.”

Screening History sets down in prose, for the first time, biographical details that would be fruitfully expanded in Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest. It consists of three parts, the first of which is a recollection of Vidal’s early infatuation with the movies as viewed from Washington D.C.’s picturehouses. The second, “Fire Over England,” is an analysis of the Anglophiliac Hollywood of the ‘30s, which old isolationist Vidal interprets as a P.R. barrage by Brit émigrés and UK propagandists—including Alexander Korda and script punch-up man Winston Churchill—for the purposes of whipping up American sympathies for the cause of “gallant-little-England.”

Although glossing over the supreme importance of the Western, Vidal’s point is that, in the main, American history was not screened in his youth: “…a whole generation of us film watchers had defended the frontiers of the Raj and charged with the Light Brigade at Balaklava. We served neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis; we served the Crown.” Noted exceptions are two films of 1939, Gone With the Wind (of which Molly Haskell, corroborating Vidal’s point, writes that Leslie Howard “was the ‘It’ gentleman of the rampant Anglophilia of which Hollywood was both addict and supplier”) and Young Mr. Lincoln, discussed in the third section of Screening History, “Lincoln.”

“I am not a devotee of the director John Ford,” Vidal writes of Young Mr. Lincoln, “but he and his cameraman achieved a moment at the picture’s end which still demonstrates that the right picture can be equal, almost, to the right word.” That Vidal is not a devotee of Ford’s is quite evident, for he mentions Samuel Mudd in the previous paragraph without ever mentioning Ford’s beautiful fraud of American history, The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), an exoneration of Warner Baxter’s Mudd on trumped-up evidence, nor does he mention Ford’s beautiful examination of fraudulent American history, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

That “almost” in “the right picture can be equal, almost, to the right word” is telling, as is the implication that the subservient “picture” must ever be scrambling uphill in hopes of attaining the heights of the lofty “word.” (“I am a creature of the written word,” Vidal’s lecture concludes, “and I only go to the movies for fun.”)

Making an uneasy truce between picture and word is, of course, the ever-devaluated duty of the film critic—a vocation in which one is much called-upon to justify one’s existence. This is apparently the case regardless of the media one specializes in; I was this week directed to a “Riff” in the New York Times Magazine, “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who are Actually Critical” by bookchat scribbler Dwight Garner, which is an admirable entry in the dreary-if-apparently-necessary genre of remedial “making the case for criticism” pieces. (Incidentally, here is Vidal, in Screening History, on the Times: “a reckless paper when dealing with those who question its values.”)

If nothing else, Garner’s piece drew my attention to a decade-old, “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be critics” howler from Dave Eggers. It is a safe bet that anyone who so much as suggests that criticism isn’t necessary or vital, and that our comprehension of art or the world is not broadened immensely by acquaintance with William Hazlett and Van Wyck Brooks and Otis Ferguson and Robert Hughes (R.I.P.), is probably a blowhard and an idiot. Recently while riding the subway I read the sentence, “The overvaluation of love is the beginning of the end of love; the overvaluation of art is the beginning of the end of art” in Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination and was so overwhelmed that I almost felt compelled to sit down on the floor. Only time will tell if this outlives Eggers’ screenplay to Away We Go, in which he named his protagonist “Burt Farlander.”

I do not, I should note, foster any delusions about my own place in the critical hierarchy, which is as an impoverished and debased relation to this noble family. The vast majority of what I do is fast-turnaround deadline criticism that, being a purportedly heterosexual American male and thus incapable of not habitually filtering my experience of the infinitely variegated world through simplistic sports metaphors, I am fond of comparing to a basketball buzzer-beater: Without the luxury of selecting your shot, you just get the rock and heave it up and hope for the best.

Speaking of which, maybe my most pleasurable movie moment of the week came when viewing High Time, a Bing Crosby vehicle of 1960 that was “helmed” by Mr. Blake Edwards, and stars Ba-Bing as a Class of ’29 high school grad enrolling as a 51-year old freshman at Pinehurst University. His dorm-mates include Richard Beymer (Twin Peaks’ Jerry Horne), Patrick Adiarte, and heartthrob of the moment Fabian, playing a southerner with a fluctuating accent and an alleged innate ability to master whatever sport he picks up. In one scene set during a basketball game, perfectly cross-cut between bleachers and court, Bing haltingly propositions French professor Nicole Maurey while the star of Don Siegel’s Hound-Dog Man hustles to make up a scoreboard deficit, and is repeatedly shown in medium close-up chucking the ball like it’s a shot put. With that kind of release the ball is obviously destined to bound off the backboard, yet when we cut to the hoop, there it is at the end of a perfect rainbow arc, shushing through the net. The magic of that sublime liar, the cinema! And with such simple pleasures, we muddle through.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

The Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles’s traditionally blue-collar South Bay connects San Pedro on the West side to Terminal Island and Long Beach on the East. The area is well-represented in motion pictures—Jimmy Dunn’s sailor Jimmy Harrigan and company run amok there during shore leave in Raoul Walsh’s 1933 Sailor’s Luck, while Fritz Lang’s 1952 Clash by Night transposed the action of Clifford Odets’s stage play from Staten Island to San Pedro.

As for the Vincent Thomas Bridge, the kicker of a recent Associated Press news item informs me that it “has been used in many Hollywood productions, among them Charlie’s Angels, Gone in 60 Seconds, and The Fast and the Furious.” The first time I drove over it, however, in the midst of a rather lurid orange and fuchsia sunset, the shock of recognition was immediate—“It’s the To Live and Die in L.A. bridge!”

The Vincent Thomas Bridge was in the news, of course, because this last Sunday, the 19^th of August, at approximately 12:30 PM, director Tony Scott pulled his Toyota Prius over on the shoulder of the bridge, scaled an 8-to-10 foot fence—not bad for a 68 year-old—and jumped nearly 200 feet to his death. Like most people, I reacted with astonishment at this news. Tony Scott driving a Prius?

A bit of testimonial from brother, Ridley, about the early days of Tony’s career in moving pictures:

“Tony had wanted to do documentaries at first. I told him, ‘Don’t go to the BBC, come to me first.’ I knew that he had a fondness for cars, so I told him, ‘Come work with me and within a year you’ll have a Ferrari.’ And he did.”

“No more Tony Scott movies. Tragic day.” read a widely-circulated Tweet by Ron Howard in wake of the news of the plunge—not exactly “Now he belongs to the ages,” but these are diminished times. I am however inclined to think that, rather than something shared by multiplex consumers the world over, the tragedy is the private property of Scott’s family, specifically his 12-year old twin sons, now without a father.

A leaked item suggesting that Mr. Scott had inoperable brain cancer was quashed by his family—though rumors along those lines have continued to circulate—leaving only speculation as to his motives. Without wishing to disrespect the departed, it seems unlikely that the body of work that Tony Scott left behind is of the sort that can be parsed for a key to unlock the Scott Melancholia, that in this case the divide between public product and private pain is, pardon my saying, not easily bridged. The highly-visible lunch hour timing suggests that, anyways, Mr. Scott’s showman’s instincts were undiminished to the end.

This being big news, The Los Angeles Times wasted no time in publishing a tie-in piece, “Five Famous Directors Who Committed Suicide.” The round-up consisted of the usual suspects, including W.S. “One-Take Woody” Van Dyke, the easygoing, workmanlike director of four William Powell-Myrna Loy Thin Man movies who, at 53, cured health problems exacerbated by anti-medicine Christian Science bull-headedness with self-slaughter. Also on hand were Bell, Book and Candle’s Richard Quine (likewise ailing), and Brit expat James Whale, the Frankenstein director whose swimming pool drowning suggests the Hollywood ending of Sir Francis Hinsley in Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 “Anglo-American Tragedy,” The Loved One.

Per the dictates of the Biz, for every successful suicide production, there’s another flop. Busby Berkeley, who fucked his way down many a chorus line, never really cared for any woman but mother, and unsuccessfully attempted to follow hot on her heels to the grave in the late ‘40s. Philippe Garrel first failed to off himself after the collapse of revolutionary solidarity in May of ’68, then to overdose alongside his beloved Nico, and has since built a filmography out of his attendant regret. An acolyte of Robert Bresson in so much else, the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader, fond of spinning yarns about his many drunken gun-in-mouth nights, followed his master’s fascination with the self-destructive death-drive throughout his career. (For further thoughts on Bresson and suicide, about the only two things I do think about during the average week, I’ll direct you to Bombast #39.)

Schrader never filmed his proposed biopic of Hank Williams, Sr., whose attenuated career was nothing if not an extended suicide by means of self-neglect and self-abuse, but one of Schrader’s greatest directorial accomplishments was 1985’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which starred the great Ken Ogata as Yukio Mishima, the Japanese novelist who elevated self-slaughter to the level of performance art when he committed ritual seppuku after a doomed-to-failure attempt to set off a political coup.

Mishima’s death was spectacular, but hardly exceptional. I don’t know if it is possible to overstate the extraordinary frequency of suicides among Japanese men of letters, having taken the likes of Osamu Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata, Takeo Arishima, and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, whose short story, Rashomon, was famously adapted by Akira Kurosawa in 1950. Incidentally, Kurosawa’s brother, Heigo, was a popular benshi (narrator for silent films) who, when left unemployed by the coming of sound cinema, committed suicide in 1933 at age 27. A career later, Kurosawa attempted to follow suit by slitting his wrists and throat in 1971, but he survived the attempt. Jūzō Itami was not so lucky (unlucky?), although still today many will tell you that he was assisted in his dive off of a Tokyo office building by the same yakuza who were incensed enough by Itami’s depiction of them in his 1992 satire Minbo no Onna to slash and scar the director’s face.

In these United States, Ernest Hemingway is a strong contender for our greatest literary suicide. Prone throughout his life to depressive episodes, Hemingway wrote to John Dos Passos describing one: “I felt that gigantic bloody emptiness and nothingness. Like couldn’t ever fuck, fight, write, and was all for death.” The hard fact is that few people excel in their ability to do any of the abovementioned activities after a certain age, and Hemingway was looking at a downhill prospect in 1961. Another diagnosis of Hemingway’s fatal decision, however, comes in this apocryphal quote from James Jones: “The problem with Papa was he always wanted to suck a cock. But when he found the one that fit, it had a double barrel.”

In matters of death imitating art—and following stage direction—it is difficult to top the Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky for style points. Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930 using a prop pistol he’d kept after the 1919 filming of a movie he starred in called Nye dlya Deneg Radivshishya (“Not Born for Money”). The film was based on the 1909 novel Martin Eden, whose eponymous hero commits suicide; the book was written by Jack London, who very possibly may have as well. London, by the way, enjoyed unparalleled fame in Russia in the period immediately before and after the Revolution; here is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, in the novel of the same name, unsuccessfully looking for a copy of Martin Eden: “Strange! The vicissitudes of celebrity! In Russia, I remember, everybody—little children, full-grown people, doctors, advocates—everybody read and re-read him. This is not his best book but O.K., O.K., I will take it.” (Interestingly, a visit to Mayakovsky’s imdb entry availed me of the following tidbit: “Vladimir Mayakovsky was the leading Russian Futurist poet of the 20th century who created an entirely new form of Russian poetry loosely resembling such modern day rappers as Eminem and Snoop Dogg.”)

Ahem. If any figure in the film world devised a flamboyant exit that might rival those of Mishima and Mayakovsky, it would certainly be Jean Eustache. Eustache’s claim on cinema history comes in the form of his great 1973 self-exorcism The Mother and the Whore—a film whose pitiless analysis of a triangular relationship in which Eustache was involved prompted the suicide of the real-life analogue of Bernadette Lafont’s “Mother” character, one Catherine Garnier.

“Jump, Narcissus,” reads a piece of bathroom graffiti spied in the film by Jean-Pierre Leaud’s character, the director’s alter-ego, and in due time the Eustache would follow the spirit of that advice. Prematurely middle-aged through a vampiric schedule of dissipation, he put a bullet through his heart on November 5, 1981, while a retrospective of his films ran at IDHEC in Paris.

Eustache had attempted suicide as early as 1957, evidently to escape military service in Algeria, and as a result spent a year in a psychiatric hospital. Following his one great success, he’d gained a reputation as a chronic gambler, enemy of critics, drunkard, and all-around flamboyant wreck. ‘Jack Daniels’ is, tellingly, the credited technical adviser on Mother; in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, Eustache’s bit part was, naturally, ‘The Man at the Bar.’ In his last months, Eustache had been resting a leg wrecked by a fall in Greece (a suicide attempt or an accident, depending on who you believe) and had become a recluse. The critic Alain Philippon refers to recollections of the director at this time as a secluded, “Mabusian” figure, holed up in his apartment on Run Nollet with his then-state-of-the-art VCR. The writer and filmmaker Jean-Andre Fieschi would discover Eustache’s body; a note on the door allegedly read: “Knock loudly to wake the dead.”

Incidentally, the abovementioned Philippon, a Cahiers du cinema critic who authored the only extant book-length study of Eustache, committed suicide in 1998. A review of Philippon’s collected writings by Olivier Seguret in Liberation some years later quotes none other than Garrel: “The desire for cinema returns us, in final analysis, to stories about fear of the dark, secrets behind the door, pacts in closets, raids on obscure caves…” If we may imagine that Philippon, by following his favorite filmmaker in journeying beyond the door, fell victim to something like a Eustache Curse, I accordingly encourage all of my detractors to write BFI and urge them to accept my proposed BFI Classics volume about Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore so that, hopefully, they won’t have to read me any longer.

One regular reader recently noted a perhaps unhealthy obsession with the departed in this column, which admittedly sometimes reads like a cinephile’s obituary page. I will heretofore try to remember Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that “the Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead,” and dwell no more in gloom. Au revoir, Tony! Strange, the vicissitudes of celebrity!

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

It so happened that I had re-watched Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, as I am wont to do about once a year, the night before the news of the Republican National Convention’s surprise guest speaker leaked. And so I dutifully tuned in to see “Clintus,” as he was once nicknamed by his friend and mentor Don Siegel (D- IL), without having seen any of the previous three days of the RNC—more because of pre-existing professional commitments than because of apathy, although I have plenty of that quality to go around. Other than what could be gleaned through the crawl of social networking updates by predictably indignant liberal friends, the extent of my knowledge of the event was that the leviathan known as Chris Christie had, on a previous evening, opened for 3 Doors Down.

There is a particular sort of disorientation that comes of watching network television, particularly the absolutely insane commercial breaks, after a long period of going without. You are exposed to a whole host of stimuli that you’re no longer immunized from or acclimated to and, in that brief, bracing moment of re-entry, you see them as though you had never seen them before, nakedly exposed in their full ludicrousness by the stark light of novelty. I have heard many people attempt to approximate this feeling; I most recently experienced a species of it during an evening spent re-watching an hour or more of TV show opening credits from 1991-92, a binge that brought back the trapper-keeper graphics and various other pop tropes of the Bush Sr. era in one hot shot, OD rush.

Of course all of this now looks profoundly dated—as the particular stylistic devices that the mandarins of media have today decided denote “realism,” “cutting-edge,” etc., will look profoundly dated in another two decades. My professor at Wright State University, Dr. William Lafferty, who has an unusually robust sense of the absurd, once kicked off a lecture by entering the classroom wearing a camo cap that read “The Future is Stupid”—a bit of merch from the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s Survival Series. The idea, as I recall it, was to instill us students with a healthy respect for history by way of disrespect, proceeding to lead us along a perilous line of logic. The past, which, to arrogant moderns, largely appears ridiculous in its fashions, superstitions, and prejudices, was once “modern” itself, and presumably regarded itself with the same egoistic esteem that we do. Our self-regarding present will, however, one day become the past, and a future present will in turn laugh at it, as we laugh at ersatz flying machines and dance marathons and bell-bottoms. And so too will that future present one day become the past for a future future present, and so on, ad infinitum. If the past is stupid, it follows that the present is stupid; if the present is stupid, it follows that the future will be as well.

This, in its negative way, mirrors Leopold von Ranke’s assertion that “every generation is equidistant to God,” which has long been central to my historical thinking—the implication of “The Future is Stupid” being that that equidistance is very distant indeed. This line of thinking is basically Dr. Lafferty’s stock-in-trade: “I’m just trying to prove that Ecclesiastes 1:9 pertains to film,” he told me of his current syllabus when last we spoke. As vividly as “The Future is Stupid,” I remember the curt reaction of another film history professor, Dr. Charles Derry, when some gormless undergrad audibly scoffed at a piercing off-screen screech during the Comanche attack at the beginning of John Ford’s The Searchers: “How would you sound if someone slit your throat?” Quite sincerely, I will never cease to marvel at the quality of education that I received for a few mailed-in cereal box tops.

I had begun to talk about the shock of re-exposure because, prior to watching last night’s RNC blowout, I had—excepting a brief ride on the Herman Cain train—foresworn of watching televised politics since 2009 or so, when I finally shook an unhealthy Washington Journal problem. So, dear reader, imagine my confusion at tuning in to watch Taylor Hicks undulating on stage, to see the introduction of a parade of Olympic champions in a mysterious sport called “Skeleton.” What fresh hell is this?

After a well-produced getting-to-know-your-candidate video, capped by one of those dull and interchangeable coach quotes that Americans seemingly cannot get enough of, the moment I’d tuned in for arrived. A friend described it in a manner that I could not possibly hope to improve upon: “Hollywood actor and director Clint Eastwood took to the stage at the Republican National Convention tonight to deliver an unscripted conversation with a stool that held an imaginary President Barack Obama.” By the end, I was quite ready for orange slices and fetal spooning.

Pink-cheeked and tow-headed Eastwood’s apparently off-script act managed to stay just barely on the right side of coherency through most of its uncomfortable duration. The most successful moments involved the invisible president, in a voice heard only to Mr. Eastwood, presumably instructing both presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and Mr. Eastwood to “Go fuck themselves.” Eastwood has in the past teamed very well opposite mute comic partners, most notably the orangutan, Manis, in Every Which Way but Loose, but I do not see this late-career turn towards prop comedy developing into a cornerstone of his repertoire.

Eastwood’s piece of incredibly shabby sub-ventriloquism was followed by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the baby-faced assassin, who actually got into a good rhetorical roll until muffing his crescendo with an unacknowledged gaffe in which he stated that a central tenet of the American dream was a yearning for “more government instead of more freedom.” Rubio in turn introduced the Republican presidential candidate, whose most compelling features are his Touch of Grey Mr. Fantastic sidewalls and vague spiritual resemblance to Guy Smiley. During a long, soft speech mostly concerned with establishing an origin story that should’ve been pitched to the American people months ago, Mr. Romney did briefly pique my interest by implying that his mother was a Hollywood actress of some note, though there is little evidence to support this claim. And most eerily, by the time Mr. Romney’s tissue of woven-together homilies had ended and the balloons dropped, the psychedelia of the scene settled, and began to seem very familiar. I was comfortably breathing the air of TV politics again, and I suppose I will know none other for a long time to come.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Once upon re-watching The Thin Man (1934), I made a point of counting the martinis that William Powell’s Nick Charles slung back during a single party scene. I can’t remember the exact total, but it was an amount more than sufficient to make an ordinary man’s Saturday night segue quite quickly into an unhappy Sunday morning.

This attention to imbibing may seem a curious pastime, but in my life as a film writer, I have made the drunk act something of an area of expertise (the double meaning is fully implied, as any regular reader of this stately column knows). The 1930’s were something of a golden age for connoisseurs, rendering up not only the Charles’s continuing adventures, but such boozy doozies as James Whale’s Remember Last Night? (1935). A murder mystery starring Constance Cummings and Edward Arnold, the film involves an assembled gang of Long Island socialites trying to recollect, through the fog of a blackout haze, exactly how it was that one of their party was bumped off during the previous evening’s spree—the first instance, to my knowledge, of the formula that recently yielded a hit with The Hangover (2009).

And then there is the matter of William Clause Dukenfield, late of Philadelphia. A rummy ex-vaudevillian with a penchant for ridiculous monikers, sporting a rosacea-splattered physiognomy that was a monument to wrecked health (“You’re as funny as a cry for help,” says a waitress in Never Give as Sucker an Even Break), viewing dowagers, Baby LeRoy, and small-town Babbitts alike through meager, suspicious eyes, slurring out an endless string of high-proof quotables in his petulant purr, W.C. Fields is one of a handful of Americans who proves that our national culture has not existed in vain.  Watching Fields’s henpecked, subjugated husband in Man on the Flying Trapeze rolling up his socks before bed is a poem of domestic desperation, an eloquent answer to the question “Why I drink.”

Fields is the patron saint of the philosophical drunk, and his salutation, “Take your hat off in the presence of a gentleman,” should always be remembered when uncapping a fresh bottle.

Aside from Nick, Nora, and Fields, perhaps the great screen tippler of the 1930s was Will Stanton, a Hal Roach player who made a career of comic slurring and putting on coats wrong-sleeve first. Stanton’s raison d’etre can be seen to good advantage in the charming 1932 Me and My Gal, in which director Raoul Walsh gives him free reign to perform his act on a studio recreation of the docks of New York… and perform it, and perform it, and perform it, tumbling into the brine to be fished out by Spencer Tracy’s beat cop not once but twice. Mr. Stanton’s imdb entry is worth a perusal: The same year as Me and My Gal, he appeared as “Drunk (uncredited)” in Any Old Port! and Lovers Courageous, while further along were such roles as “Drunk on Train” (Arizona to Broadway), “Drunk on Bus” (Cross Country Cruise), “Drunk Soldier” (The Man Who Reclaimed His Head), “Drunken Prisoner” (Baby Face Harrington), “Drunk at Fight” (The Irish in Us), and “Drunken Waiter” (The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo)—all in the space of four years! After this, the demand for Mr. Stanton’s services subsided slightly, although he remained available to dust off the old weave in 1944’s Shine on Harvest Moon (reprising his role as “Drunk (uncredited)”) and 1946’s Renegades (as “Barfly”)

I am certain that there are jolly instances of “getting tight” in the American cinema of the 1940’s—a ready vision of smirking bedroom eyes over clinking highball glasses before illicit, implicit film noir sex springs to mind—but when one thinks of booze in postwar pictures, one mostly thinks of hard times and broken men. There is that whimsical Irish boozer Jimmy Dunn playing the whimsical Irish boozer father in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Ray Milland haunted by slithering hallucinations in The Lost Weekend of the same year, Tyrone Power reduced to geekdom for a nightly bottle at the end of Nightmare Alley (1947), Humphrey Bogart’s creatively impotent screenwriter Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place (1950), Paul Newman’s literally impotent ex-jock in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Dean Martin ready to fish a silver dollar out of the saloon spittoon for a drink at the beginning of Rio Bravo (1959), and Robert Stack’s spoiled, rotten scion to an oil empire in Douglas Sirk’s Texas-set Written on the Wind (1956).

The most terrifying tragic drunk of all, being that he’s the most hideously recognizable, appeared in another Lone Star melodrama of the same year as Written. The film is George Stevens’s Giant, and the drunk is James Dean’s Jett Rink, who, in the course of the film, goes from wildcatting Texas trash taking a daily pint of rye under the sun to a nouveau riche oil baron, living perpetually squiffed behind his sunglasses. There is a scene in Giant that never fails to inspire me with obscure terror, in which Dean’s Rink sits alone at a table in his new hotel complex with Carroll Baker’s Luz, the much-younger woman he is courting. He’s completely gone, and she doesn’t know quite enough about drink to understand where he’s got off to, and is trying like hell to carry the conversation along, to think well of him and follow the train of his derailed thoughts. It is wonderful to imagine oneself as a Nick Charles when in one’s cups, but the truth may be nearer to the cataleptic one that Dean shows us in the last vision of Jett Rink, a crooked, wasted thing “not even worth hitting.” I think of an exchange from Whit Stillman’s ensemble comedy Metropolitan (1990), involving the group’s designated toper, Fred (Bryan Leder):

“I think I’ll be going now. I have nothing to say, and I’m completely boring without a drink.”

“It’s only midnight. You can’t go.”

“I’m sorry, but without cocktails, staying up all night loses its charm. Besides, I haven’t had anything amusing to say since I stopped drinking.”

“Did you have anything amusing to say before you stopped?”

“I know, but it seemed amusing. Now it doesn’t.”

“Well, you were asleep.”

“Was that it?”

So completely does Dean reveal the depths of the human catastrophe of alcoholism in Giant that everything else can seem an afterthought. It is a relief, then, to re-encounter the rosy Will Stanton drunk act of the 30s in the late 1960s, in the person of Dean Martin’s buddy, the “Lovable Lush” Foster Brooks. While a staple on Dean’s Celebrity Roasts, Brooks never made much of a splash on the big screen, aside from a role in Academy Award honoree Hal Needham’s Cannonball Run II (1984). And he recorded his “drunk pilot” act for posterity in Jerry Lewis’s swansong, Cracking Up (1983).

Jerry was, of course, a painkiller man, so let us turn to Jerry Lee Lewis, who will undoubtedly be celebrating his 77th birthday this month with strong waters, to play us out. Bottoms up!

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

“Yesterday had been summer in the city, the end of summer stale and jaded, with a dejection in the air that dragged like an old skirt in the gutter.” So begins one of my favorite works of fantasy fiction, 1927’s “The Dark Chamber” by Leonard Cline, one of those wonderful American pulp-aesthetes of the Coolidge era, before the utilitarian crash that caused such literary ormolu to be melted down and pawned.*

The passage describes perfectly the stifling, choked atmosphere of New York City at summer’s close—or at least that’s my recollection, being a vocational film critic who dwells in darkness more than your average subway booth attendant (while earning significantly less). As at the end of every summer since time immemorial, I find myself regretting that I did not spend more time during the summer noticing that it was, in fact, summer. Very often the lyric “Spending warm summer days indoors/ Writing frightening verse to a bucktoothed girl in Luxembourg” flitters through my head; Morrissey is referring to fellow Mancunian Ian Curtis, and we all know how that turned out.

To what degree are movies inimical to life? To what degree is art? It’s a question I posed in one of this column’s earlier outings, when it traveled under another name, dated September 15^th of 2011—which makes me believe that this crisis of faith is a yearly event, roughly synchronized with Labor Day. This has been exacerbated by reading Kenneth Peacock Tynan again—this time a 1975 collection of the author’s enthusiasms called “The Sound of Two Hands Clapping,” produced some time after Mr. Tynan had retired from both regular theater reviewing and from his appointment at the National Theatre Company. Among its contents is an unpublished Playboy interview of 1970, done shortly after Oh! Calcutta!, the “erotic revue” that Tynan assembled, edited, and produced, which made a conspicuous splash (or gush). With an unusually perspicacious and probing interviewer, Tynan discusses, among other things, the “befouled word” art:

“…I feel that an unhealthy amount of attention is paid, an undesirable intensity of reverence is shown, to what are often visions and precepts and ideologies that arise out of a failure to live a fulfilled private life. Much of the art consists merely of messages transmitted from the lonely to the lonely. There is too much veneration accorded to the imaginative visions of failed human beings.”

If there has been a finer definition of the cult of the Japanese director Mikio Naruse, of which I consider myself a member in good standing, than “messages transmitted from the lonely to the lonely,” I confess that I do not know it.

Aside from Tynan, I have been busying myself with the latest missive from J. Hoberman, “Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21^st Century Cinema),” purchased after watching the author introduce a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2001 In Praise of Love, a movie that I find it difficult to praise or love. In “Film After Film,” from New Left Books imprint Verso, the Tacitus of celluloid returns to the “timeline” structure of chronicles “The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties” and “Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War.” This go-around, however, Hoberman’s trademark present tense was literally written in the present tense, for “Film After Film” repurposes weekly Village Voice reportage on the state of the medium—starting from the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (including a 9/12 screening of Godard’s film at the Toronto International Film Festival) through the first fumbling steps of the young millennia—so as to descry the direction in which the Seventh Art is headed.

One essential matter, identified in the opening chapters, is the switch-over from the “indexical” truth of the photography-based movies and the Bazinian ideal of “Total Cinema” to the contemporary triumph of the digital, with the ubiquity of Photoshop/ CGI turning “live-action” filmmaking into an offset of animation. Hoberman identifies several fin-de-siècle tipping points for the shift, including 1999’s The Matrix, whose “bullet time” sequence seems destined to be the Al Jolson “You ain’t seen nothing yet” of the digital revolution. Hoberman quotes David Edelstein on the effect of Lana and Andy Wachowski’s hit, which was to “cut us loose from the laws of physics in ways that no live-action film had ever done, exploding our ideas of time and space on screen.”

The subject—that is, the slow disappearance of what-goes-up-must-come-down cause and effect and even the most rudimentary spatial relationships from contemporary cinema—is one of enduring interest. I’ve used this space to write on it in the past (**) and, in a particularly fecund summer of unemployment and genteel alcoholism, I produced the following for Reverse Shot, identifying Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron as a harbinger:

“Impact trumps information, as different calibers of artillery rumble in basso continuo; the spatial relationships between combatants or the geography of their melees ranges from muddled to indecipherable, depending on the scale of the fight. The result creates a degree of ambivalence in the viewer: who knows who to cheer on when you don’t know who’s doing what to whom? The film’s centerpiece battle moves with such a stirring flicker that it’s difficult to notice how garbled its terrain is; in it, a German platoon led by James Coburn’s upright, harassed Sgt. Steiner, uninformed of a full retreat by a snide superior (Maximilian Schell), are submerged by a surging Russian army on counter-offensive. The Germans fall back into a dilapidated factory, into a dingy tunnel and, suddenly… out onto a hillside, somehow safe from the battle? Did they flank the Russians? Teleport?

Trying to fall back and reconstruct the logistics of what’s just happened is about as impossible as trying to draw Charles Bovary’s cap as it’s described on the second page of Madame Bovary (try it), and one can argue that Peckinpah was interested in telling a story about war as something that beggars articulation, just as Flaubert was interested in probing the limitations of the word (“Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity”)—for the passing of time reveals the man reductively referred to as “Bloody Sam” more-and-more as a poet. One less susceptible to the romance of artist-heroes might suggest that Sam’s reported on-set benders on 180-proof Slivovitz and powder hogging off the editing table may’ve been the deciding influence of this foggy war. And there is the fact that Peckinpah had far less arms and armor than expected to work with on-shoot, and no real air force, which required some tricky cutting for epic effect. Whatever the case, it’s one of those ripe ironies of film history that any aesthetic advance is an invitation and that, if he cannot be held directly responsible, we can still draw a pretty clean line between Peckinpah and the blizzards of nonsensical beauty from Tony Scott, Michael Bay, and the rest usually criticized with the less-than-descriptive catch-all pejorative “MTV-style editing.”

This is not to say that the only way to make movies is through slavish obedience to the laws of nature, gravity, and film grammar, but it seems to me that both the aesthetic conservative and the radical have an interest in seeing the classical unities preserved in some form. Re-viewing Major American Artist Richard Fleischer’s 1974 Mr. Majestyck, with Charles Bronson as one baaaaaad melon-farmer, for a recent Voice piece, I was struck by its unruffled composure and sublimation of artistic personality as by a Grecian urn, inspired to effuse, Keats-like, that: “this classical middle-range moviemaking is the very foundation of a healthy film culture, the solid baseboard that must be in place in order to spring into the unknown.”

Speaking of springing—the gravity-defiant, far-from-indexical Resident Evil: Retribution is closing out its opening week in theaters, proving that the CG revolution need not necessarily mean dispensing with time and space. I’ve recently spoken my piece about Paul W.S. Anderson while, not to be outdone, my fellow enthusiast R. Emmet Sweeney, in his delightfully catholic blog for TCM’s Movie Morlocks, convened a mini-summit on the pleasures of PWSA with The NY Times’ hardcore auteurist Dave Kehr, from which I extract the following exchange:

Kehr, unfavorably contrasting the choreography of action in Joss Whedon’s The Avengers: Every shot is just a guy shooting, with no sense of who he’s shooting at or chasing after. There’s just no relationship between this action and that action. It’s either complete in itself or it’s forgotten by the next shot. So it’s not about the logic of how you fight an army of 12 invincible zombies and get out alive, which has a certain amount of plausibility in the Anderson because the strategy is there, the athletic abilities are there, the ballet-like quality of moving through the air… It feels kind of serene in a way. It’s always so cool, she just knows how to execute it.

Sweeney: You can see people thinking in Resident Evil: Retribution…

DK: Yeah, she’s thinking down the line—look at this person, what’s he going to do, how am I going to react.

One of Retribution’s cool-in-both-meanings-of-the-word set pieces has Milla Jovovich’s Alice defending herself with a pistol and chain as she’s assaulted from both ends of a floodlit corridor by berserk undead. It’s an act that requires a maximum of concentration and spatial awareness, a premonition of where the whipping chain’s point of contact needs be dispatched six foes into the future, and a consciousness of the contents of the clip, and its execution is so no-sweat elegant as to seem like an endlessly drilled kata in some very particular martial art.

Watching such deliberation triumph over the blind ravening of mindless and unreasoning appetites—what is this if not the triumph of reason over passion? Precisely the subject of The Master, the other Paul Anderson, P.T.’s, latest, though it’s approached through very different means. It has proven impossible for many, including yours truly, to overlook the coincidence of the Andersons’ head-to-head openings as an opportunity to score polemical points, though let us hope for only more film art that chooses any path, be it that of elegant cause-and-effect (PWSA) or leap-of-faith visionary (PTA).

* Good news, everyone! Cline’s The God Head is finally back in print!

** Noting that I finished the above-linked column with a reference to former Cincinnati Bengals wideout Jerome Simpson’s distinctly Jovovichian forward flip over Daryl Washington of the Arizona Cardinals, and I would be remiss to file this column without reference to the passing of NFL Films’ resident genius, Steve Sabol, whose brilliant career was made of winnowing a seemingly indecipherable melee of gridiron activity into articulate units of decisive action, putting in place a system that consistently ensures exquisite slow-motion close-ups of spirals dropping into prayerfully outstretched fingers.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Just now I watched the reconvened NFL referees give every last chance of victory to the “Cleveland Browns” expansion team, which nevertheless earnestly lost its fourth straight game of the still-young season to the Cleveland Browns of Baltimore, a/k/a the Ravens, a/k/a Murder, Inc.

Americans everywhere are breathing a resounding sigh of relief at this “Return to Normalcy,” in the immortal words of Warren Gamaliel Harding, assuaging a nationwide uneasiness that set in after the final Hail Mary play of last week’s Seahawks-Packers game in Green Bay, replays of which had very quickly supplanted the Zapruder film in our national imagination and conversation.

Ever so briefly, the NFL referees lockout returned the question of professionalism to the national forum. In large part this is because the NFL’s Rules of Engagement are something that almost every American male—and an ever-growing percentage of females—has a functioning grasp of, and can with some semblance of authority recognize a violation of.* (By contrast, the population that has a workable grasp of due process of law, Congressional points of order, and other such marginalia must constitute a small and eccentric sect, indeed.)

We have become, as a nation, so accustomed to making all of our decisions based on a criterion of low overhead—how to get the barest modicum of competence for the barest minimum of price—that a re-acquaintance with the very concept of an honest day’s work for an honest day’s wage occasioned by l’affaire NFL has been a little bracing, not least for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. A back house across the street from the building I live in collapsed a few months ago, shortly after renovations to ready it for new tenants, who were luckily away. The back house was owned by the same people who own my building, and was undoubtedly “renovated” by the same crew of day laborers who were, when I got wind of the collapse, busily gutting the apartment above me. The anxiety occasioned by the day-to-day racket of sledgehammers on load-bearing walls just overhead is pretty much, in a nutshell, the experience of living in a nation whose crumbling, creaking infrastructure is held together with spit and paste. (Subject for a disaster movie: The day, 5 or 10 or 20 years from now, when the rusted-up fire escapes inevitably start peeling off of New York City’s apartment buildings and pulping pedestrians.)

But with the qualified NFL refs returning to the gridiron, all is right again with the world, and questions about the value of professionalism can safely be put to rest in the mind of the average American—even as it continues to preoccupy those of us who muck about in the arts. I am indebted to my colleague Nicolas Rapold for drawing my attention to the following excerpt in the press kit for Beasts of the Southern Wild, attributed to director Benh Zeitlin: “Someone’s ability to bake doughnuts or laugh loud is just as good a reason to make them a dolly grip as their ability to push a dolly.” The “bake doughnuts” bit is presumably a reference to bakery owner Dwight Henry, who gives a terrible performance in Zeitlin’s movie as the father of stoic moppet Hushpuppy. Zeitlin must have realized Henry was no great shakes as a performer, as he largely cuts around Henry’s performance. His doughnuts, for all I know, may very well be delicious.

What constitutes a professional in cinema? What constitutes a qualified ref? A popular pastime like football, movies are something that most folks fancy they have some grasp of. Though here the comparison ends, for holding is, eye-of-the-beholder value judgments aside, always holding, whereas no two spectators want or find precisely the same thing in a movie. As the old saw goes, everyone has two jobs: their own, and film critic. (Most film critics also have two: film critic and unpublished novelist.)

The path to a career as an NFL referee is fairly clear-cut: One calls games at the Pops Warner, junior varsity, and college levels; attends officiating camps and clinics; works one’s way through the arena leagues, and so on. The qualifications required in becoming a vocational critic are rather more obscure. Thankfully, no physical requirements have been instated, as they have been for NFL refs, or the column space of America’s Entertainment sections would all at once go blank. My colleague Armond White has suggested that a critic should, among other things, at the very least be over 30, like a Senator—though if criticism is currently experiencing a plague of fresh-out-of-university whippersnappers pushing their elders out of their entrenched positions, this would be literally the only occupation in America in which such a thing was happening. Mr. White’s evangelical zeal for criticism-as-calling is always stirring, though he has a particularly narrow-gate interpretation of those to whom the calling is extended and, like many evangelicals, seems to make the dispensation of salvation his exclusive property.

Talk of the once much-discussed schism between print (“Professional”) and online (“Amateur”) criticism has died down, along with the rather absurd assumptions perpetuated by the conversation: getting one’s byline on fishwrap does not automatically bestow legitimacy; the online-only scribe is not, by definition, a sausage-fingered fanboy stacking Diet Mountain Dew cases in mom’s basement. There is, of course, the traditional role of educational pedigree to officially confer expertise, though the variance in diploma value between universally-agreed-upon critics-of-quality is so great as to make this a virtual non-issue. One could argue, then, that legitimacy is something to be bestowed by the consensus of one’s established peers, but the very shaky state of establishment film criticism—or even criticism as a practicable vocation—leads to widespread status anxiety that makes any consensus unlikely. As in most walks of life, the very great have self-confidence enough to be gracious, the medium-talents project their own rankling insecurity in accusations of canting hypocrisy, and everyone else is too busy trying to keep their own house in order to give much of a shit.

Who, then, can we authoritatively say is qualified to capture and quantify the transitory act of moviegoing? In the era of scientific review aggregators, shouldn’t some kind of Power Rankings system be in place to contrast the relative merits of, say, Kent Jones and The New York Post’s Kyle Smith? It is toward this end, dear reader, that I will earnestly endeavor in the week to come.

*- Last week, when writing about the ongoing erosion of spatial integrity, it occurred that there might very well be a correlation between the decline of enforced conscription in neighborhood boxing clubs in these United States and a tradition of maintaining a certain degree of fidelity in filming action—for if you have ever practiced maneuvers or taken a punch, you are certainly more likely to call “bullshit” when seeing that same action depicted without at least a measure of clarity on-screen.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

I have been working on a list of things whose presence alone can render a movie at least watchable. One of them is a character dashing a salt shaker into a mug of beer. Other examples include:

*Maps being drawn in the mud of a river bank with a pointy stick.

*Squinting, denim jackets, and expressively rolled cigarettes.

*The hero, after being brutally beaten, dragging himself into a forlorn, overlooked corner to slowly recuperate and plot his revenge. (This is called The Yojimbo.)

Surprisingly high up on this list, when ranked by infallibility, is the presence of Emile Meyer.

I cannot say exactly when I first became aware of Emile Meyer. As a teenager I saw Paths of Glory, in which Meyer dons a cassock and cappello roman to play the priest who leads the condemned soldiers to their execution, walking arm and arm with Timothy Carey’s howling Pvt. Ferol. Kubrick always had a particular fondness for faces that weren’t, shall we say, movie star faces, like Meyer’s and Carey’s. Case in point: The Killing, which includes such indelible character actor mugs as Carey, Jay C. Flippen, the ubiquitous Elisha Cook, Jr., Ted de Corsia, and Kola Kwariani.

But as I think further on it, I believe it was somewhere between The Lineup (1958) and Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), while working my way through the Don Siegel filmography, that the image of Meyer first really embedded itself in my mind. Most of those who’ve seen the former picture will immediately remember Eli Wallach and Robert Keith as a duo of philosophical psychopaths terrorizing San Francisco. Theirs is clearly the material that galvanized Siegel, and it is chilling to imagine just how dull of a narrative The Lineup would have been if they didn’t gradually take it over. However, the circumstances of the film—it was conceived as a spinoff from the CBS police procedural radio/ TV drama of the same name, the pilot of which Siegel had directed—demanded that it begin with series star Warner Anderson as the investigating Lieutenant setting off on their trail. For reasons unknown, Anderson’s TV partner, Tom Tully, is absent. In his place, however, there is a stocky, sweaty, squinty, middle-aged, footsore, hemorrhoidal, rumpled, potato-sack lumpy actor with a thick-tongued delivery and a Crisco comb-back of thinning hair who bears an uncanny resemblance to my 4th grade math teacher, Mr. Eisert. Ladies and gentlemen, Emile Meyer.

The Lineup was the third film in which Siegel had used Meyer, preceded by Riot and 1957’s Baby Face Nelson, which had Mickey Rooney in the title role. Here is Siegel, in one of the signature screenplay-style dialogues that dot autobiography “A Don Siegel Film,” on the decision to cast Meyer in Riot—the only appearance of the actor’s name that I could find in my Index-less copy:

WANGER: Let’s get on with the casting. What about the Warden?

ME: Emile Meyer looks the part and fits the character.

WANGER: I know Emile. A good choice.

Juicy stuff, no? “WANGER,” incidentally, is Riot’s producer, Walter Wanger, who had been inspired to make the film after a four-month stay at the Castaic Honor Farm, a minimum security prison facility north of Los Angeles, where he had been sent after shooting MCA talent agent Jennings Lang. The legend has it that Wanger caught Lang in flagrante delicto with Joan Bennett, Wanger’s wife and Lang’s client, and was enough of a crack shot to clip off one of Lang’s testes with his bullet, which allegedly prompted Bennett to riposte, “Oh, for Chrissakes, Walter, he’s only an agent!”

I found a rather more amusing—if not much more revealing—reference to Meyer in John G. Stephens’ From “My Three Sons to Major Dad: My Life as a TV Producer”:

“Sometimes, like in Big House USA, Schenck and Koch wanted to cast against type. I remember seeing Riot in Cell Block 11 with a very unusual actor playing the prison warden. A real rough, tough-looking guy, Emile Meyer, who spoke with a lisp. He was excellent. I also remembered Meyer’s performance as Ryker, the lead heavy in the movie Shane. I bring him in to meet Schenck and Koch. They’re thrilled. Going through the dailies for Big House, Meyer seems to be great. After production on Big House finishes, and we’re starting to cast for the next film, Aubrey calls me in.

‘Ya know whatcha gotta do, kid. Ya gotta bring us more people like Emile Meyer. When we suggested Emile Meyer to you, you didn’t know who he was… you gotta start thinking like that. Bring us more Emile Meyers.’

‘Right, Aubrey’

Out comes Big House USA. The reviews are quite good. The only person the critics rap is Emile Meyer. ‘A good movie that couldn’t be ruined by the amateurish Emile Meyer.’ Aubrey calls me in again.

‘Don’t bring us any more bums like Emile Meyer. Use your head.’

‘Right, Aubrey, never again.’”

Riot seems not to have surfaced on commercial DVD; I see that The Lineup is available in a set of Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics released in 2009, alongside Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat and the great Phil Karlson’s 5 Against the House (I am told that the commentary track for The Lineup features “L.A. Confidential” author James Ellroy opining thusly on Meyer’s screen persona: “That motherfucker would take you in the back room, plant a throwdown gun on you, then beat the shit out of you with a phone book.”) For those unconcerned with watching things right , it can also be viewed in its entirety on YouTube .

The Internet does not, surprisingly, runneth over with information about Meyer, but here are some of the generally agreed-upon facts. Meyer was born in New Orleans, Lousiana, in 1910; to this we can partly attribute his particularly slushy drawl. The epigram of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” has popularized the following passage from A.J. Liebling’s “The Earl of Louisiana,” which describes the “ Yat dialect ” of metropolitan New Orleans:

“There is a New Orleans city accent… associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans.”

Hence Meyer’s trademark “lisp,” not always a boon. Reviewing Paths of Glory in the NY Times and condemning Kubrick’s decision to have his Frenchmen speak in American vernaculars, the august Bosley Crowther singles out Meyer for especial attention: “Emile Meyer is perhaps least effective (when he speaks) in the role of a French priest.”

To return to the biography—what few sources exist concur that previous to his middle-aged debut in pictures, Meyer basically had stuck around his hometown holding a variety of odd jobs; per one: “longshoreman, safety inspector, cab driver, insurance salesman.” How, then, did this unprepossessing working man become the screen’s most unlikely freshman since Sydney Greenstreet heaved his mass into The Maltese Falcoln? Well, Elia Kazan was an early advocate of urban location shooting off of the New York-Los Angeles axis, and when Gadge’s production of Panic in the Streets—concerned with a race-against-the-clock effort to prevent an outbreak of plague in New Orleans—touched down in Southern Louisiana, Meyer was among the locals discovered and cast (uncredited) as the captain of the ship Nile Queen, in which capacity the 40-year-old-and-looking-50-something amateur holds his own opposite Richard Widmark. This was followed by an apprenticeship period—we find Meyer billed as Capt. Meyer in a “Mardi Gras” episode of a TV series called The Unexpected—until his big break as the ranch boss in 1953’s Shane, in which Meyer delivers the impassioned monologue for which he is best remembered, if he is remembered at all. (When I told my opposite number in a two-man Meyer mini-cult that Emile was to be the subject of my weekly column, he responded: “I hope SundanceNOW doesn’t crash from the traffic.”)

After Shane, Meyer’s phone scarcely ceased to ring. Having proven that he could convincingly heft himself onto horseback, Meyer was much in-demand in Westerns, usually as lawmen: He is the Sheriff who causes trouble for John Payne by getting plugged in Allan Dwan’s 1954 Silver Lode, and also pins on the star in Jacques Tourneur’s 1955 Stranger on Horseback and Andrew V. MacLaglen’s 1956 Gun the Man Down. Capt. Meyer was also frequently asked to button his girth into a policeman’s tunic, most memorably as Kello, the jovially-menacing “fat cop” in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 Sweet Smell of Success (“Come back, Sidney, I want to chastise you.”), though also quite effective opposite Jerry Lewis’ rebel without a cause in 1957’s The Delicate Delinquent and singlehandedly authenticating the soundstage steaminess of Otto Preminger’s 1955 The Man with the Golden Arm. The ‘60s largely found Meyer increasingly given over to television work of the detective/Sergeant/ship’s captain type, though he pops up in the 1974 drive-in smash Macon County Line, and has a poignant cameo vending guns out of a briefcase in John Flynn’s The Outfit. A 1973 adaptation of the Richard Stark/Donald Westlake “Parker” novels, which also provided material for John Boorman’s Point Blank, Flynn’s Outfit is a sort of requiem for the American blue-collar crime programmer, with Meyer appearing alongside Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook, Jr., and an obviously-ailing Robert Ryan, who would very soon be dead of cancer.

Meyer would himself succumb to Alzheimer’s in March of 1987; his family plot in New Orleans’ Greenwood Cemetery is visible, for those so inclined to pay virtual respects, on Findagrave.com. A more intriguing piece of Internet ephemera: Meyer’s AllMovie Guide entry, by Hal Erickson, yields the following tidbit: “In addition to his acting work, Emile G. Meyer also wrote TV and movie scripts. On that subject, Meyer was given to complaining in public as to how the old-boy network of Hollywood producers tended to freeze out any writer without a long list of screenplay credits.”

Somebody find that rusted shut filing cabinet and pry it open! What are those scripts like? Crime thrillers? Autobiography? Erotic reverie? Something in the nature of fellow character actor Marc Lawrence’s 1972 Pigs a/k/a Daddy’s Deadly Darlin’? If pictures don’t have glorious Drew Friedman faces like Meyer’s anymore, at the very least someone can get cracking on putting one of his yellowing scripts into production!

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Can you smell the cannonades? A long-fomenting revolution is underway! Movies are going to be fun again!

Was the Lexington moment when Dan Kois pushed away a steaming plateful of cultural broccoli—that is, the works of art, specifically movies, that are supposed to be good for you, but which no-one really likes—at the NY Times Magazine back in 2011? Certainly it set the think pieces a-marching, and since Stephanie Zacharek has struck back against the perceived dictatorship of opinion surrounding the critical reception of The Master with a manifesto in favor of gut-opinion and against shame-enforced re-viewing, while someone called Jason Bailey at The Atlantic’s website has waved the banner of “Film Culture Isn’t Dead; It’s Just More Fun.” Something like the Voltaire to this American Revolution, Pauline Kael—she of “If art isn’t entertainment, then what is it? Punishment?” fame—is cited explicitly in Bailey’s piece, and implicitly in every sentence that Zacharek has ever written. Watch the tweedy opposition starting to break rank!

A bit of background: As everyone knows, formal, academic, and experimental film have held American pop culture in a stranglehold for—well, for as long as I can remember. I can only relate my personal experience, in hopes that some greater truth can be gleaned through it.

I was born in 1980, a little under a year before the first MTV broadcast, in a medium-sized city in the Middle West of the United States. Growing up in a cable-free household, we only had three networks, public television, and terra incognita of the UHF band to choose from. This was the era of the Sunday matinee, and week after week after week the film programming was the same—in fact, most of my readers can probably recite the names along with me: Straub-Huillet, Bresson, Alexander Kluge, Marguerite Duras, Michael Snow, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg. If you got left of the dial you might dig up something trashy—early Bergman, say—but for a most part, the stranglehold was inescapable.

There was little enough relief to be found in taking a trip to the nearest multiplex. This was the 80’s: Raul Ruiz, Manoel de Oliviera, and Agnieszka Holland were lining them up around the block; Maurice Pialat was on The Tonight Show almost as often as Ed McMahon; Kings Island, the amusement park that I frequented as a lad, opened a six-inversion steel looping roller coaster based on Alain Resnais’ Mon Oncle d’Amerique. How could you hope to hear about the contemporary successes of Paramount Pictures (Flash Dance, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cops) when Variety was still running front cover stories on the Zanzibar group?

Of course the works of John Hughes, the Footlooses—“MTV Generation” movies displaying the “pop” sensibility—they were out there, but if you didn’t have an art house or a university film society with an in-the-know programmer within reasonable distance of your home, good luck trying to see them. These are the films that would become the Samizdat texts of an entire generation, swapping bootlegs and quoting Back to the Future to one another, much as early Christians would trace half of a fish in the sand when meeting a possible confrere… And so we waited for the moment when the senescent cultural commissars would be caught dozing…

See what I did there?

The argument whereby a writer positions himself as a plucky standalone David against the Goliath of po-faced film culture is roughly as valid as Bill O’Reilly’s War on Christmas. It is fundamentally false, boorish, and unnecessary, and belies a profound lack in the person making it. “Any serious filmgoer must wrestle with a pervading sense of guilt and fear,” writes Bailey—I would say that guilt and fear are probably universals, though I gather he is talking about the perceived atmosphere of intellectual intimidation around the New York Film Festival. Apparently “serious filmgoer” is functioning here as a synonym for “person with a serious lack of confidence in their opinion.”

As we’ve been repeatedly reassured that film culture, in its self-serious, chastity-belt incarnation, is going the way of the dinosaur, a stagnant pond which has ceased entirely to feed into the great coursing river of pop monoculture, it is curious to note how anxious some are to deal it the coup de grace, as though the very continued existence of such a thing is unforgivable. Thus ever has it been since the days of La Kael, from whose body of work one might very well have taken away the idea that there were an army of academics and bluestockings—her beloved “a professor friend…” straw men—laying siege to the lobbies of America, ready to batter down the doors and pronounce an ukase on fun.

There is a signature moment in the “What do we want? Entertainment!” think-piece where the author pulls the reins and scatters a few sophisto names before their reader, as insurance that they not be taken for mere bumptious lowbrows. For cultural carnivore Dan Kois, it’s Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (A One and a Two); for Zacharek, it’s Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane; for Bailey, NYFF pans like Resnais’ You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet and Leviathan are counterbalanced with measured praise for selections like Antonio Mendez Esparza’s Here and There (“Quietly powerful”), Christian Petzold’s Barbara, and Christian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (“riveting yet low-key”). Though Bailey has read enough previous iterations of his manifesto to go them one better, adding an extra later of self-conscious reflexivity: “ I can tick off my favorite obscure art films in an attempt to deflect that argument (I even liked the Leviathan directors’ previous effort Sweetgrass—a leisurely documentary about sheepherding), but it’s bound to sound like someone insisting he has plenty of black friends when called on a racist joke.”

In that spirit, I will fess that, per James Chance, “I (basically) prefer the ridiculous to the sublime”—witness this week’s NYFF communique, in which I use Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur as a tawdry, spangled mallet with which to punish Michael Haneke’s Amour, which I have amused myself by rechristening, MAD Magazine-style, A Snore and A Bore. I also hope that I have kept before me the immortal words of Shawn Carter—“What you eat don’t make me shit”—and not too freely flung accusations of canting hypocrisy at those who claim to like what I do not like.

I have, incidentally, already used the phrase “canting hypocrisy” recently in this column, as I have compulsively used it in conversation since reading the historian Ben Wilson’s Decency & Disorder 1789-1837, which makes a panoramic study of culture in what Lord Byron called the Age of Cant, and comes to the following conclusion:

“Accusations of cant should be used sparingly. Those who see hypocrisy everywhere and impute it indiscriminately to their opponents place themselves on shaky ground. If cant was so endemic, then what put them in the privileged position of being honest and candid? Those who detested the temper of the age and wanted to be free of hypocrisy and affectation all too often resorted to overacting their part. Their contempt of prudery made them gratuitously obscene.”

This goes for me, you… and everybody who was just a little too excited to learn that Ingmar Bergman’s estate included copies of Ghostbusters and The Blues Brothers, like it actually meant something. C’mon.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

If you want to develop a schizophrenic attitude about the value of a dollar, I suggest dividing your adolescent listening time between finger-wagging punk/hardcore music, and licentious, make-it-rain hip-hop. The first is produced (mostly) by white kids hailing from various points on the upper-to-lower middle-class spectrum, preaching (mostly) a doctrine of abnegation and indifference to the pecuniary rewards of the sell-out, establishment world. The second is produced (mostly) by black kids coming from somewhere between a lower middle-class and Section 8 background, preaching (mostly) a doctrine of C.R.E.A.M. GET THA MONEY DOLLA DOLLA BILLS Y’ALL.

As to which side of this the author of this column fell you can probably divine from the fact that he is writing an online-only column for an hourly rate that compares unfavorably to pizza delivery. Nevertheless, I always keep one eye on the numbers—mind on money, money on mind.

I was recently made aware of both a post on the MSN Money site confirming, should anyone have doubted, that the pursuit of anything worth doing is a one-way ticket to penury, as well as a Forbes article by J. Maureen Henderson asking ‘Are Creative Careers Now Reserved Exclusively for the Privileged?,’ which handily rounds up a number of recent pieces asking the same question, concluding: “Basically, yes.”

While ruminating on these tidings, my last couple of weeks have largely been given over to covering the New York Film Festival, where I saw Alice Englert, daughter of the filmmaker Jane Campion, in Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa, and Mickey Sumner, daughter of Sting, in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha. Sumner appears opposite Greta Gerwig, who assumes the lead role in a film she co-wrote with Baumbach, about a 27-year-old trying to make it as a dancer in New York.  “Someday when cultural historians look back at this era, they’ll wonder why we so obsessively documented the lives of college-educated city-dwelling Americans between the ages of 22 and 28” opines The Onion AV Club’s Noel Murray, setting himself to analyzing the role played by class guilt—his own, and that of other critics—in the reception of the Toronto International Film Festival’s fare, particularly Frances Ha and the Swedish film Eat Sleep Die, which has a working class subject (I am presuming that the title refers to the life-cycle of the menial laborer).

Frances Ha, incidentally, also stars Adam Driver of HBO’s Girls—like Baumbach and Gerwig’s film, based on the tribulations of being a young NYC creative—and as Frances Ha concluded its NYFF run, news arrived that 26-year-old Girls-creator Lena Dunham had sold her first collection of essays to Random House for upwards of $3.5 million dollars. By the time she was Frances’ age, Gerwig had already been anointed by the NY Times, and Baumbach had completed his first feature; Dunham has at most the experience of one summer of straightened circumstances to draw upon when speaking to the life and post-collegiate hard times of her demographic coevals.

As it happens, I liked Gerwig and Baumbach’s movie, which was humble but not apologetic in presenting its subject as one worthy for consideration, and had a nice, glancing way of touching on class, fitting to the way that young people in the process of self-definition tend to efface their backgrounds. I think often of a passage in the 1940 novel Angels on Toast by the great Ohio-born New York City-novelist Dawn Powell, about Midwestern transplants who would:

“…sit in the dark smoked-wood booth drinking old-fashioneds and telling each other things they certainly wished later they had never told and bragging about their families, sometimes making them hot-stuff socially back home, the next time making them romantically on the wrong side of the tracks. The family must have been on wheels back in the Middle West, whizzing back and forth across tracks at a mere word from the New York daughters.”

As for Dunham, I haven’t revisited her body of work since making it the subject of two of these columns, lo many months ago, though she has ever since been in the periphery of my sight, be it through netting more money than I will ever see in my entire life in a single afternoon, vowing to satisfy “women of color who want to see themselves reflected on screen” in upcoming Girls episodes, or inadvertently offending the entire nation of Canada with a jocular Twitter reference to the Bernardo/Homolka “Schoolgirl Killer” murders, before breathlessly backpedaling. (I am indebted to my adviser in Canadian affairs, Adam Nayman, for drawing this last item to my attention.)

“Generally not a proponent of apologizing for one’s work…” Tweets Dunham, who has recently announced plans to redress perceived racial imbalance on her program, while waving the hashtag white flag “#Canadaphile.” It should be added that the multimillionaire master of the humblebrag has meanwhile made it known that she is currently on a bus tour of Europe, proof positive that all them simoleons haven’t taken away our Lena’s common touch, and that she will continue to travel in the style that almost no-one with the money to do otherwise would. Will Lena stay at youth hostels? The Petit trianon? The particular marriage of class obliviousness and self-absorption disingenuously masked under the guise of self-depreciating her “First-world problems,” which constitute Dunham’s persona is, I can only surmise, the very thing that makes a vocal minority of pop culture observers want to apply a rock to her face. Perhaps instead of all the nervous scuttling, Lena might do better to take a page from the Mitt Romney corpus: No Apology!

Who loves a rich girl? Certainly not The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman, whose insipid “don’t rock the boat” column wonders if the daughter of software magnate Larry Ellison, 26-year-old Megan Ellison, whose Annapurna Productions financed P.T. Anderson’s The Master and the upcoming Killing Them Softly, might “ruin what is left of the independent movie business” with her too available checkbook. But why is it, exactly, that women seem to get the lion’s share of flack for nepotism? One hears constantly that Dunham is the scion of successful artists, but it’s mentioned as a point of pride and nothing more that Anderson’s dad was onetime Cleveland horror host Ernie ‘Ghoulardi’ Anderson… who certainly made his pile as the voice of ABC-TV when Paul was growing up.

‘Are Creative Careers Now Reserved Exclusively for the Privileged?’ Well, not exclusively… though the continuance of an eternal imbalance is hardly surprising. Heed the words of Edwin Reardon in George Gissing’s New Grub Street of 1891, a copy of which should be sent to every household where a child plans to enroll in the liberal arts:

“The difference between the man with money and the man without is simply this: the one thinks, ‘How shall I use my life?’ and the other, ‘How shall I keep myself alive?’ A physiologist ought to be able to discover some curious distinction between the brain of a person who has never given a thought to the means of subsistence, and that of one who has never known a day free from such cares.”

The space of one column is not sufficient to solve the problem of The Muses Out of Work—apologies to Edmund Wilson—so I will end with a eulogy. As of this Wednesday, the numbers of the working men in cinema became one less with the death of Kōji Wakamatsu, the construction worker and petty gangster turned filmmaker, whose film Go, Go Second-Time Virgin I wore out on an American Cinematheque DVD as an undergraduate. I can only hope that Miss Dunham’s European vacation will sufficiently broaden her worldview to allow the creation of work on the same level.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Last Saturday, October 20^th, I fulfilled a dream that began when I was a wee 12-year-old watching reruns of NBC-TV’s CPO Sharkey on the infant Comedy Central: I finally saw national treasure Donald Jay Rickles perform live. The evening’s entertainment was held in the vast Mark G. Etess Arena at the Trump Taj Mahal, where the show biz royalty in attendance included The Exorcist author William Peter Blatty and actor Tony Danza.

Mr. Rickles has not significantly altered his routine from that which is visible in John Landis’ 2007 documentary Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project. That material is, in turn, not vastly different from that heard on Mr. Rickles’ albums of the late ‘60s, Hello, Dummy! and Don Rickles Speaks!

I do not mention this as a complaint, for Mr. Rickles, who is 86 years old, can still create the sensation of spontaneity and danger, even while guiding his routine along grooves that have been well-worn through the decades. The heart of that routine, for those unfamiliar, involves Mr. Rickles combing the crowd, determining the ethnic heritage of singled-out subjects, and then flurrying those subjects with prejudicial jabs about their race and creed. Because it was a graying Atlantic City crowd, the front-row gene pool was mostly of the Italo-Irish-Semetic caste—in a piece of serendipity, Mr. Rickles actually fished an ex-cop with an honest-to-God Irish brogue out of the crowd! Additionally, he managed to locate a Chinese woman, and alleged to have spotted one of those whom he insists on continuing to call “black brothers.”

Rickles’ race-based razzing belongs to an American entertainment tradition at least as old as Weber and Fields. Here is Trav S.D., writing in his breezy history of vaudeville, No Applause—Just Throw Money:

“The ethnic variety of vaudeville made it the theatrical equivalent of the melting pot. Black, white, Jew, gentile, man, woman, child, Irish, Italian, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, shoulder to shoulder, toe to toe, cue to cue… The symbolic value of this mulligan stew of multifarious humanity—all combining to create a single, harmonious polyglot entity—cannot have failed to have an educative impact on the awkward, adolescent nation.”

The “ethnic variety” included blackface, Irish Acts, and “Dutch Acts” with performers speaking in the Katzenjammer Kids patois of recently-arrived German immigrants. The entertainers might be “playing” their own race, as in the case of corked-up African-American acts like Walker and Williams, or Irish acts like Hanigan and Hart, trafficking in risible bog-hopper stereotypes. Just as often, the performers were playing against their ethnic “type”; one sterling example is that of vaudeville-to-film crossovers The Marx Brothers: While a young Groucho allayed his Alsatian roots into a Dutch act, Chico adopted the Wop accent, which would stay with him through his career, as protection on the streets of Italian-populated Yorkville.

As the Marx Brothers’ careers illustrate, the movies—and radio—were the inheritors of vaudeville’s talent, vaudeville’s audiences and, often quite literally, of vaudeville’s theaters, with entire circuits swallowed up by new cinema conglomerates, as in the merger of the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Corp chains into RKO. Meanwhile, the most popular radio program of the 1930s, Amos ‘n’ Andy, drew directly from the minstrel tradition. That Amos ‘n’ Andy has, for all practical purposes, been swept under the rug in an ongoing effort to chasten and sanitize the problematic history of our nation’s popular culture is one cryin’ shame; another is that Robert Altman and Harry Belafonte’s long-discussed Amos ‘n’ Andy film, Cork, never came to fruition.

The “educative impact” of polyglot vaudeville which Trav S.D. speaks of has been much on my mind of late as, in the course of a single week, I’ve encountered several instances of actors playing against racial type. In Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1955 The Naked Dawn, soon to be playing Anthology Film Archives’ pocket-sized Ulmer retro in an absolutely immaculate 35mm print, there is Arthur Kennedy, at the height of his Massachusetts cowboy phase, under a layer of bronzer and seeming more plausibly Mexican than Puerto Rican actor Eugene Iglesias. In The Loves of Pharaoh, a 1922 German mega-production made by Ernst Lubitsch as he prepared to leave Berlin for Hollywood, a cast of Teutonic thousands including Emil Jannings can be seen playing Egyptian and Ethiopian. (In its newly-restored incarnation, Pharaoh played three nights on the new big screen at the BAM Harvey Theater, accompanied by 18-piece ensemble Numinous, performing a score conducted by Joseph C. Phillips, Jr.)

Aside from anomalies like Al Pacino’s forays into exploring the Hispanic soul, the once-commonplace conceit of playing against racial type has become taboo, disappearing almost entirely. Like the purging of Amos ‘n’ Andy—comedy has fared worse than tragedy in historical sanitation—this development generally has been taken as a sign of progress, concurrent to the increased visibility of enfranchised non-Caucasian actors taking the parts that rightfully should be theirs. This is, of course, correct. But if much playing against racial type was a cut-and-dry matter of adopting the costume of the Other to mock and denigrate, it must be said that this tradition also had an educative role in the history of American entertainment: Might there not have been an incremental increase in empathy when predominantly-white American audiences felt the same chill of poverty that Richard Barthelmess’ mock Chinaman did in D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, admired the cleverness and sang froid of Peter Lorre’s Mr. Moto, waited on tenterhooks to hear the outcome of Andy’s romance with Madame Queen in Amos ‘n’ Andy? Here is an apposite passage on the frictions resultant in against-type racial casting from Pauline Kael, on Lawrence Olivier’s Othello of 1965:

“Part of the pleasure of the performance is, of course, the sheer feat of Olivier’s transforming himself into a Negro; yet it is not wasted effort, nor mere exhibitionism or actor’s vanity, for what Negro actor at this stage in the world’s history could dare bring to the role the effrontery that Olivier does, and which Negro actor could give it this reading? I saw Paul Robeson and he was not black as Olivier is; Finlay can hate Olivier in a way Jose Ferrer did not dare—indeed did not have the provocation—to hate Robeson. Possibly Negro actors need to sharpen themselves on great white roles before they can play a Negro. It is not enough to be; for great drama, it is the awareness that is everything.”

Certainly few critics today would so freely indulge in such speculations without fear of crushing reprisal—and this is our loss. What has, likewise, been lost in the disappearance of casting against racial type? It may be that I am over-valuing the real-world value of the educative aspect of this tradition. It is worth noting that Lubitsch’s Loves of Pharaoh was almost exactly contemporary to the Karl May-directed, Subcontinent-set, brownface epic The Indian Tomb, co-written by Fritz Lang and his future wife Thea von Harbou… later a member of the Nazi party, like Pharaoh’s Emil Jannings. How does one explain the process by which a nation whose popular entertainments exhibit such a fascination with exotic cultures become among the most violently xenophobic in history?

I have been thinking about all of this not only because Mr. Rickles brought me back to the contentious-but-open racial dialogue of a previous era, but because I have recently watched Lana Wachowksi, Tom Twyker, and Andy Wachowski’s clumsy omnibus Cloud Atlas, a film which, more than any in recent memory, makes use of actors playing against racial type (and, in one instance, against gender.) Adapted from a 2004 novel by English author David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas consists of six interlocking stories set in six different eras. It is the inspiration of the filmmakers to circulate the same cast throughout the six different segments, regardless of the dictates of ethnography: Mixed-race actress Halle Berry appears as a Maori slave on a Polynesian plantation in 1849, then as a blonde Jewess in 1936 Edinburgh; Anglo actor Jim Sturgess plays a Caucasian American lawyer in ’49 and an Asian freedom fighter in Neo Seoul, 2144, who liberates fast-food chain chattel Soonmi-451, played by Korean Doona Bae… who receives a dusting of freckles and a curly wig to play the betrothed of Sturgess’ lawyer. And… I think Tom Hanks is supposed to be black?

The lesson of Cloud Atlas, if I am not mistaken, is something about the brother-and-sisterhood of man, and how we are not so different after all. The intent is “educative,” in keeping with the Wachowski siblings’ self-appointed mission of pop subversion—but, as usual, the gulf between intention and execution is a veritable Marianas Trench. Compare, for example, The Matrix, the Wachowskis most effective piece of pop mythology, to John Carpenter’s They Live! Both movies put forward an idea of the world that we know as in fact being, outside the purview of the average man, a vast conspiracy perpetrated by sinister, predatory forces. Only one of these films, however has a sense of humor, a setting that uses specificity as a byway to reach the universal, and an alert sense of class. Who was it that said, “It is not enough to be; for great drama, it is the awareness that is everything”? J. Hoberman concluded his sympathetic review of the Wachowski-penned V for Vendetta with “It’s the thought that counts,” but there is very little room for anything but noble sentiments here—and exactly how much moral courage does it take in 2012 to be, as Cloud Atlas is, against slavery in the broadest sense?

“All men are brothers; that’s the bottom line,” said James Baldwin—an essential truth that cannot be repeated too often. I believe that this is the point that the Wachowskis and Twyker are trying to put across, though the actual impression left by the multi-role performances in Cloud Atlas is that of a parade of bad prosthetics and worse accents, all of which tend to highlight differences within the human family rather than similarities. For all the Wachowskis undeniable ambition, one could probably glean more about the universal condition from a double feature of Livin’ Large and Soul Man… which would probably come in at under the runtime of Cloud Atlas, whose embedded references to Melville’s Typee, “Solzhenitsyn in Vermont,” and Soylent Green only serve to put the movie deeper in the shadow of its moral and artistic superiors. But in a movie that owes much to Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance, the Wachowskis and Twyker have dared to revive an against racial-type acting tradition as old as the silents—and for this, I ever-so-slightly tip my hat.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

This week, the world of film criticism was rocked by some unexpected news. I am referring, of course, to Gene Shalit’s encounter with a utility pole in Lenox, Massachusetts. I wish the best of luck to Mr. Shalit, who has perhaps done more than any single man in America towards making film criticism a serious and esteemed profession for adults. And, if I may be permitted a serious moment, chortling over Mr. Shalit’s mugging on the artwork for the Gene Shalit’s Critic’s Choice VHS boxes gave me literally minutes of pleasure as a younger man. My thoughts are with him.

I made a passing mention last week to Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Naked Dawn, specifically for its performance by Arthur Kennedy. I was privileged to see a beautiful print of Ulmer’s film, along with some others, during Anthology Film Archives’ lead-up to a modestly-sized Ulmer retrospective. This already small program, set to run from October 31^st through November 6^th, has of this date already been clipped in half by the landfall of Hurricane Sandy, which rearranged the garbage outside my house and put the “Haunted Asylum” in the neighboring Powers Street garden into serious disarray, while devastating countless lives in New York City and all along the eastern seaboard. (If you haven’t already reached for your wallet or otherwise done something, do so forthwith, you lazy sod.)

It remains to be seen if the doors of Anthology—along with those of 92Y Tribeca and Film Forum, both among the downtown screening spaces knocked out by Sandy—will reopen this weekend, though one must have faith that there will always be another Ulmer retro around the bend. In his peripatetic career, Ulmer, born in 1904 in the present-day Czech Republic, cast off films like so many seeds along the winding path of his thirty-five year career. Such a diverse, uneven, and fecund output does not lend itself to comprehensive retrospective, so Ulmer’s films tend to be screened in the same piecemeal fashion that they were made. In one retro one might catch 1938’s Yankl der Shmid (The Singing Blacksmith), a Yiddish-language picture shot in Newton, New Jersey; at another, 1939’s Moon Over Harlem, a melodrama of black aspiration “Produced at Meteor Studios,” also in the Garden State. Both are examples of the sort of marginalia that Ulmer was forced into after Universal’s 1934 film The Black Cat. Depending on who one wants to believe, his predicament was necessitated either by the film’s box-office failure, or because he ran off with continuity girl Shirley Castle Alexander, the wife of Universal head Carl Laemmle’s nephew.

I have been slowly working my way through whatever can be viewed of Ulmer’s entire 128-picture filmography; it remains to be seen if I will exhaust his films, or be exhausted myself first… like Alexander Thayer, who died a decade before his endless notes had been collated into the first German edition of his Life of Beethoven. And here, with a sort of awe, I have been perusing Erik Ulman’s entry on Ulmer at Sense of Cinema’s Great Directors database, which, in the course of a lengthy exegesis, makes a cautiously qualified comparison between 1960’s Beyond the Time Barrier and “Beethoven’s last quartets.”

Most recently I have been viewing “late” Ulmer, including Time Barrier, a ten-day-wonder filmed at the Texas Centennial Exhibition Fair Park and interpolated with material from Fritz Lang’s The Indian Tomb, which distributor American International Pictures also held the U.S. rights to. For myself and, I suspect, for many of my generational cohorts, Time Barrier, like much B sci-fi of the period, looks a little incomplete without the silhouette of Crow T. Robot across the bottom of the screen. But I don’t bring up Mr. Ulman’s effusions in the spirit of mockery, for we all have our pet Ulmers.

My own soft spots were stroked by Ulmer’s swansong, 1965’s The Cavern. I confess to a particular weakness for directors’ last works—Robert Aldrich’s All the Marbles…, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame, John Ford’s Seven Women, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse—which springs from much the same source as my fondness for Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà . These are films in which one can see a signature style and preoccupations winnowed or gnarled to their essence, if nothing else—and in the case of The Cavern, there is a great deal else.

There is an overwhelming temptation to take a final film as a testament film, even though it’s more likely just what the director happened to be working on shortly before he died, lost the ability to function on-set, or lost that ability in the discerning eyes of money men. In the case of Ulmer, who rarely passed up a chance to regret the forced compromises of his career, there may be some justification in taking the latter view of The Cavern, which may very well have been undertaken with a view towards artistic redemption. This is reinforced by the scuttlebutt on Ulmer’s last film, L’Atlantide a/k/a Journey Beneath the Desert (1961), which had him taking over for an ailing Frank Borzage, the great poet of Seventh Heaven and Street Angel and a fellow veteran of the silent days who was only ten years Ulmer’s senior. It’s the kind of moment in which one sees the near future, and writing on the wall becomes clearly legible.

According to Bertrand Tavernier, The Cavern was written by Dalton Trumbo, though official credit for the screenplay goes to Brits Jack Davies and Michael Pertwee. (As Trumbo had shaken the blacklist with 1960’s Exodus, it’s not entirely clear why the cover would’ve still been deemed necessary.) Set in Italy during the Allied Campaign, The Cavern concerns a seven-person, multinational party that, after an arbitrary rear-guard detonation, gets sealed into a cave being used as a storage depot and munitions dump, inside of which they are forced to attempt to work cooperatively in order to escape.

Brian Aherne is a Colonel Blimp-ish Brit ex-General, Braithwaite, now working as a journalist, attached to two Americans, Private Klein (John Saxon) and Captain Wilson (Dallas’ J.R., Larry Hagman). The Allied side is rounded out by future Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall, a jocular Canadian RAF pilot, while the Axis consist of Hans von Borsody’s German lieutenant, whose melancholic harmonica soundtracks their imprisonment, an Italian guard played by Nino Castelnuovo (soon to take the lead in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), and Rosanna Schiaffino as the lone female, a peasant girl who has been keeping Castelnuovo’s character company. The scarcity of the fairer sex will inevitably become an issue—“TRAPPED With a Woman Like Dynamite!” reads the American poster—while the other precious commodity, a store of brandy, is hoarded by Braithwaite and Wilson, the group’s closet rummies.

Strife in the script was matched by chaos in the production. Along with Aherne’s epistolary A Dreadful Man – A Personal, Intimate Book About George Saunders, a valuable source for information about the Cavern shoot is Tom Weaver’s A Sci-Fi Swarm and Horror Horde: Interviews With 62 Filmmakers, in which Marshall is interviewed about the filming. According to both Aherne and Marshall, The Cavern began shooting in Tito’s Yugoslavia, with the intention of using the famed Postojna Caves as their location, but—either because of a check that didn’t clear or a political changing of the guard—retreated to sets built in Trieste and finally to real caves outside of Cinecitta. Per Shirley Ulmer in her interview with Weaver in Bernd Herzogenrath’s The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer, somewhere between Belgrade and Trieste Ulmer suffered “a small stroke,” one of several that would leave him infirm in the years to come. (Anthology’s program is meant to honor the 40^th anniversary of Ulmer’s death.)

Was this a case, as with “Secret President” Edith Bolling Wilson or Emily Warren Roebling, when a spouse stepped in to finish the work of her ailing Great Man? Did Shirley, described by Aherne as Ulmer’s “loyal, overworked wife, who acted as assistant producer, script girl, wardrobe mistress, secretary, cashier, and everything else” add co-director to her list of credits? I will repress the temptation to wildly speculate—though will note that Schiaffino gives a fiery feminist monologue that would warrant a “Right on!” from the most die-hard Women’s Libber.

Regardless of the troubled circumstances that surrounded The Cavern, the final result is a film of total coherence and surprising emotional heft, a tin-can Grand Illusion that slips from chaos into chaos, while briefly coalescing into harmony during a centerpiece Christmas dinner. For Dave Kehr, who calls the film a “chilling nihilist allegory,” Aherne’s seasonal “reading of Genesis… echoes absurdly among primordial stalactites”—though I have seen few more moving evocations of the fundamental absurdity of a war being fought between ostensibly Christian nations.

Alongside this glint of hope, the film is full of gritty, detail-oriented sequences that deal with practical mechanical solutions for getting one’s self unstuck from a cave, and the characters’ sweaty, singleminded focus contributes to the film’s sense of gathering oppression, leavened by a sort-of gallows humor which is evident in periodic intertitle updates that read, for example, “346 Days Later.” As a study in group dynamics, it’s peerlessly designed, breaking the whole of seven captives into all possible component pieces without once seeming schematic. And, for fans of a well-executed screen punch, Saxon gets in a good crack at Hagman, snapping him right under the chin to shut his mouth. As a younger man I’d mostly thought of Saxon as a figure of fun, the corny white cat in Enter the Dragon who very clearly doesn’t know karate, but I’ve since found ample cause to revise this opinion, and he does vital, seething work here.

I had originally ended this column on a note of cautious optimism, uncertain as to if New York audiences would have an opportunity to see the movie which I was enthusing over… but as I go about my customary late-in-the-day revisions, word has reached me that Anthology Film Archives will, in fact, be back online tomorrow, screening The Cavern at 9 PM on Saturday, 11/3, and at 7 PM on Sunday, 11/4. This is good news, indeed—and because one good Ulmer deserves another:

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

There is unquestionably a future for movies, but it’s unclear if the form that movies will take in this future will resemble anything like the form they’ve taken in the last century. Steven Soderbergh capped his much-ballyhooed retirement from filmmaking by premiering his Behind the Candelabra on HBO, and now Steven Spielberg reveals how near his Lincoln was to being a pay-cable exclusive as well.

This bombshell was dropped at the opening of the new USC School of Cinematic Arts building, where Spielberg and George Lucas dueted on “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” envisaging the coming catastrophe and industry-wide upheaval in the movie business. “There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground,” said Spielberg, “and that’s going to change the paradigm.” Already Spielberg’s prediction of sliding-scale ticket prices seems to be coming true, while recent appraisals of the multiplex’s abandonment of 51% of their potential public make it difficult to feel much pity for the doomed. Unlike Spielberg, perhaps, I have cherished the dream of this “implosion” since I was old enough to think about movies in a serious way, for it is very often in such moments of decadence, when the holders of purse-strings are driven into a panic by the sudden failure of reliable formula, that art may have its day. You do not have the risky career of a Sondheim, for example, until the Great White Way has been abandoned for a combat zone.

While quietly repeating the mantra “Come, Armageddon, come,” I have looked for my kicks where I can find them. Past and future seem preferable to the summer release slate. Ozu and Dwan and Chan are on New York’s rep screens. New DVD releases make historical artifacts of filmed and taped moving picture art more immediate and available than ever (many of today’s most praised hourlong dramas only flatter base impulses, peddling fantasies of power and potency to work-numb hive-dwellers, so thankfully Shout! Factory has unleashed 20 discs worth of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a class-conscious series whose merciless depiction of the uneasy relationship between desire and capital has lost none of its satirical sting). And, increasingly, I find myself scrounging around for interesting new web-exclusive content—the Borscht Corp.-affiliated miami1996.com and the oeuvre of Eugene Kotlyarenko being recent enthusiasms—since, as HBO and Netflix and many others are betting, direct delivery of wireless content is the way of Things to Come.

I have also been revisiting an old fixation of mine, the work of an Internet personality avant la lettre, which has surfaced on YouTube since the last time I cared to check (approximately May of 2005.) “Wow if youtube was around when he made these, he would be ridiculously famous,” says thachoice, commenting on the first of five posted hunks of videos comprising Len Cella’s Moron Movies, while littlegreenjason has it that “This guy was making Vines before Vines.”

Cruising the video store aisles with bored friends, looking for something that had cover art or a title so unfathomable that one had to see what was inside, was an experience particular to the VHS era in which I spent my formative years, when straight-to-video stuff was churned out specifically with an eye to drawing in kids like us—“I dare ya” trash like Ice Cream Man and Leprechaun: In the Hood and Rumpelstiltskin. (As recently as 2003, I novelty-rented something called Monsturd.) And while there’s no pressure to dwell on anything in today’s world of point-and-click disposability, going through the trouble of renting made you feel obligated to watch the whole thing.

This is how I became acquainted with Cella’s Moron Movies, which, through some unfathomable mix-up at Blockbuster’s corporate headquarters—the wrong box checked on an order form?—was available in almost every chain video store in America, usually next to its sequel, Moron Movies 2. “Moron Movies?” you, the video store patron, would incredulously scoff, “What’s this?” And that way lay perdition. Here is fellow SundanceNOW contributor Michael Koresky:

“My parents rented it, about 1998, and let me know they had watched the ‘strangest thing they’d ever seen.’ My mom, brow rumpled, said, ‘It’s just a guy sitting around his house, making faces.’ My dad shrugged. They got their money back from Blockbuster, as they swore to the clerk that ‘this isn’t a real movie.’”

The VHS cover—there has to date been no DVD release—promises ‘OVER 100 OFF-THE-WALL SHORT COMEDY FILMS’, though it might more accurately read ‘ENTER THE VOID’. The “walls” said shorts were “off” of were invariably blank. Standing before them, frequently direct-addressing the camera, was Len Cella, the star/writer/director/cinematographer and all-around auteur of every single minimalist blackout skit. Cella is the only human being who appears in the Moron Movies, which were self-shot between the ’70s and mid-’80s, on 8mm and later Super HG tape. Should a scenario call for an exchange of dialogue, Cella’s own voice addresses Cella from off-screen. The skits rarely contained more than a single punchline, delivered resentfully—though these shorts are obviously a labor of love, Cella exudes the air of being forced into them. They never exceed a minute of runtime.

Cella has a head of thick, steel-gray hair. He wears large eyeglasses that I tend to associate with high school shop teachers, and speaks in a drear, droopy monotone, delivering his lines as though he’s just stepped in something. His home, in which most if not all of his skits are shot, appears bare and Spartan, not at all suggestive of a woman’s touch. Shoestring gags are built around a few recurring props, like a stuffed baby alligator and a pair of mounted bull horns. Cella also displays a fondness for jokes involving common household objects: Toothpaste, coffee mugs, toilet plungers, and doorjambs—in such episodes as ‘Another Use for Tough Meat,’ ‘Poor Man’s Slicer’ and ‘Why Jello Isn’t a Good Doorstop,’ Moron Movies has doors enough to make Bresson jealous.

Watching Moron Movies, I don’t believe that I have ever laughed, but Oh! have I come up with questions. Chief among them: Who is Len Cella? One short, titled ‘Another Boring Travelogue,’ identifies him as a resident of Broomall, Pennsylvania, a city in the Delaware Valley just outside of Philadelphia. Seemingly shooting from the upstairs window of his home, Cella narrates while slowly zooming in on a stunted tree in the snow-covered median that divides the four-lane road outside. “Broomall, Pennsylvania is noted for its boring sky which covers the town from one end to the other,” he says. “Thousands of boring cars pass by each day without stopping. In 1870 a boor by the name of Buddy Broomall stood at this very spot and said: This is Broomall.” The same strip of median is visible in another skit, ‘How to Kick Yourself,’ in which Cella runs through what is presumably his front yard and flings himself against a mattress with a boot taped to it.

A May 13, 1984 piece in the Wilmington, NC Star-News identifies Cella as “a 46-year-old Ivy League dropout (University of Pennsylvania) who had been living on $500 a month as a house painter.” The article, titled ‘‘Moron Movies’ make it big’, notes that “[a]fter three unpublished novels, a failed humor magazine and undistinguished stints in sportswriting and advertising,” Cella had finally broken through as a filmmaker. Screenings of Cella’s work at the local Lansdowne Theater (which he’d rented) were followed by regular appearances of Moron Movies on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. This was around the time of the release of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, a film in which star Jerry Lewis was rumored to be playing a variation on the aloof Carson—and here, the real Carson had seemingly acquired his own pet Pupkin!

Carson and producers had to choose from among the clean skits, for Cella was known to work blue—“A turd is a man’s best friend… Ladies, tuck a turd in your panty-hose and have no fear of getting raped,” goes one punchline, complementing the predatory humor of King Dong, an early short datable to 1968, which is some kind of proto-Cinema of Transgression companion piece to Richard Kern and Nick Zedd’s Thrust in Me.

What was it about Len Cella that appealed to Carson, who also placed “Len Cella’s Silly Cinema” on TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes, hosted by sidekick Ed McMahon and produced by his own Carson Productions? Did this most reclusive of public men, imprisoned beneath the Aunt Blabby wig by America’s affection, find some vicarious wish-fulfillment in Cella’s one-man-band act and the hermitic misanthropy implicit in it? In ‘My Kid’s Artwork’, Cella gripes over a procession of sloppy scribbles: “These things are everywhere. It’s depressing.” In ‘What You’d Do if You Had the Nerve,’ Cella rolls over and gives the finger to the camera as Carson never could, prompted by his own voice-over cues. (“When your wife wakes you to go to church…When your wife wakes you for sex after you spent half the night with your girlfriend.”) In ‘Lies from a Miserable Married Man’, Cella opines, while washing the dishes: “Them single people ain’t happy. I’d rather mow the lawn than go to an orgy.”

Did Cella actually have a kid? A wife? A girlfriend? Was he a fixture on the Broomall swinger’s scene? Was his curmudgeonly public persona wholly divorced from the private man who, neighbors would tell you, was a real sweetheart? I’d long taken it for granted that Cella was an alcoholic. This may have something to do with skits like ‘How to Tell if You’re an Alcoholic’ (“People wake up early to go fishin’. Fuck fishin’, I’d rather drink.”), his frequent use of empty wine jugs as props, and his creation of a recurring character called Harry Hangover. Perhaps imagining that he was a sot made it a little easier to accept the whole thing. Cella seems unwholesome in other respects, too. Aside from the abovementioned fondness for rape gags, “a chinrest for looking through peepholes” is one of his wacky inventions. He shoots himself shirtless rather more often than is necessary. A skit called ‘Believe it or Not’ has the laugh-line, “This pecker was used by three children to escape a second floor fire,” while ‘The Perverted Cameraman’ consists of Cella zooming into the crotches of zoo animals.

For a time in the early ‘80s, Film as a Subversive Art author Amos Vogel hosted a public-access program called Reel Philadelphia, dedicated to “independently-produced films in the Delaware Valley.” One wonders if any submissions from Cella ever arrived in his inbox and, if so, what Vogel might have thought of them. Certainly Cella, whose favorite word is ‘aggravate,’ fits the motto from author Günther Eich that Vogel kept in his home office: “Be sand, not oil, in the machinery of the world.” Outside of Cella’s work, there is a rich tradition of independent filmmaking in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Most famous perhaps is George A. Romero, a filmmaker in whose genre work the Catholic tradition of social justice is very much evident, himself an early mentor to Tony Buba of blighted Braddock, a politically-engaged activist. Cella, however, was the nihilist next-door, his crabbed worldview outlined in a Moron Movie called ‘Poor Box’: “Give, and you might receive. Take, and be sure of receiving.” Cella’s is Outsider Art, to be sure, but attuned to the funny pages zeitgeist, the single-panel deadpan of The Far Side combined with Garfield’s tres ‘80s vindication of anti-social impulses.

Returning to my Cella research after an eight-year hiatus, the truth appears both stranger and less sensational than I had imagined. A 1990 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, which catches up with Cella as he’s doing stand-up in Havertown, identifies him as the father of a 12-year-old girl. Quite recently, a London-based filmmaker named Simon Mercer sat down with the mustachioed, seventysomething Cella and produced a 23-minute documentary portrait called King Dong, in which the subject drinks nothing more potent than a 2-liter of Mug Root Beer. Views of the Cella compound, an ultraminimalist live-in set, every surface done in German Expressionist shades of black-and-white by the former housepainter, suggest that the Moron Movies were not at all the work of an incompetent wannabe gagman, but the product of a personal aesthetic privately and obsessively cultivated with no apparent concern for what pleasure or discomfort it might give. I am not at all certain which is the more disturbing possibility.

Cella’s most recent work after a lengthy hiatus is called CRAP (For People with Pisspoor Upbringings), and what is visible of it in an online preview shows that his interest in scatological humor has by no means become constipated. Cella reprises old bits, flipping the bird at the camera and imaginary kids. Since the days of Moron Movies he has, along with the culture as a whole, become considerably cruder, cursing freely and referring to the act of male self-love as “yankin’ on yer root.” In ‘New Dirty Words’, he gives the definition of ‘WATCHMEDODODO’—“A men’s room stall with no door”—which he punctuates with an image of himself shitting in a bucket next to a busy street, the median from ‘Another Boring Travelogue’ visible in the background. This and more can be seen on the 55-minute CRAP DVD which was and presumably still is available for a $16.00 check or money order to Len Cella, 2631 W. Chester Pike, Broomall, PA 19008 (A glance at Google Street View confirms that Chester Pike is the thoroughfare visible throughout his filmography.)

Cella has a MySpace page, and is also on Twitter as @Godcella. He has Tweeted 7 times, all on March 6, 2009, before walking away. His output includes such gems as “I’m trying to figure out what twitter is all about,” “Somebody please tell me what twitter is all about,” and “I’m choking like a dog on a fishbone. We’re all doomed.” Could be! Cella’s isolation chamber-style art, product of a lonesome-seeming middle-aged man, has since become the domain of lonesome-seeming teenagers. Should Spielberg’s predicted implosion come, will a new Golden Age follow?—or will we be reduced to pod-dwelling drones, intravenously pumped with reverse-cowgirl sex and violence by HBO, staring anxiously into the selfie mirror while transmitting our own narcissistic Moron Movies into oblivion? Cella, in a skit called ‘Schitt for President,’ gives his own recipe for a healthy democracy: “More whores, that’s my motto. When I’m elected, there’ll be a gun in every hand.” What was it Camus said about those who create apocalypses in their garrets? So before you march out to celebrate multiplex End Times tonight with Man of Steel or This is the End, do spend a little time with Len Cella, a human disaster in whom the repressed anti-social impulses of the disaster movie are most nakedly on display.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.

When in Saugerties, Ulster County, New York state, be sure to visit the Orpheum Theatre. Reading comments in the invaluable cinematreasures.org website, I have learned that the Orpheum has perhaps a century of history behind it—listed in the American Motion Picture Directory of 1914-1915, it had a Robert-Morton organ installed in 1928, and was triplexed sometime in the modern era. On a recent Budget Monday night—$5 admissions!—I went to see Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, buying my ticket from a startlingly weedy middle-aged man with busted knuckles and a peroxided Prince Valiant haircut, a character right off of Dan Clowes’ sketch pad, and popped up into the upstairs theater, in the converted balcony.

The lights went down, and though the audio for Gore Verbinski’s inevitably incredibly shitty The Lone Ranger movie began to play, the screen remained troublingly blank. One of the twins platooned on concessioneer/usherette duties—imagine The Shining girls at 19, one distinguishable from the other only by her bedazzled short-shorts—bounded upstairs and into the booth, offering a hasty apology about having to “reboot.” Five minutes later, Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer were on-screen… and the interstitial music that had been playing while we found our seats continued to softly toot out of the speakers, right through the opening credits of the Feature Presentation. When I went down to the lobby to inform the staff, they flew into an indignant uproar. “That’s impossible,” said Clowes Guy, “The player is unplugged!” “It must be part of the movie,” added Short-Shorts, though she did condescend to follow me upstairs and stand on one of the seats and put her head next to the speaker (not the one that was leaking interstitial music) and let out a melodramatic sigh as if to say “I told you there was no music, dummy.” A couple in my row were sufficiently disturbed by the music to get up and leave, but eventually the staff must have figured out what was happening, because the dissonance stopped and the only incidental noise was a persistent crinkle created by the woman behind me removing candies from a crisp little plastic bag, one-by-one, with that meticulous “quiet” cautiousness that actually causes infinitely more disruption than just going for it—an insidious, Chinese water torture effect. This only lasted for about 45 minutes, though, and on the whole it was a more pleasant moviegoing experience than my last dozen press screenings. The magic of an evening at the cinema!

The Orpheum was the last leg of my tour of the Hudson Valley’s movie houses. I’d also visited the 6-screen Roosevelt Cinemas in Hyde Park, across the street from the FDR homestead—apparently Eleanor herself was a frequent guest in the days when it was a single-screener—just down the Albany Post Road from the Hyde Park Drive-In, which I passed up because, well, it was playing Man of Steel. Even in retreat from New York, the Twittersphere kept pop culture close at hand: All weekend my social media feed was jammed with links to tie-in pieces on Superman and Kanye West’s Yeezus, proof positive of the extent to which the machinations of PR today sets the agenda for criticism, as tent pole releases are preordained as events and, accordingly, are feted with scads of virtual ink, regardless of their quality or lack thereof. Marketing, marketing, all is marketing!

Case in point: I was at the Roosevelt to see This is the End which, in addition to making a plot point of a Milky War bar, has at least two prominent product-placement shots promoting the LA Weekly. (I haven’t seen such an egregious Voice Media Group plug since Before Midnight co-star Julie Delpy’s execrable 2 Days in New York, which had scenes in the Village Voice offices, and, coincidentally, somehow warranted a cover feature in the VMG papers.*) This was one of those occasions, ever more frequent, where going to the movies is the worst part of my day—only hours before enduring another spittle-flecked turn by Seth Rogen, I’d watched the sun settle behind the Catskills on the Walkway Over the Hudson Park, the former Poughkeepsie-Highland railroad bridge, since converted to pedestrian use.

These mountains were a source of inspiration for Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, whose studio you may visit in Catskill—though the far more popular destination is Olana, the Victorian Alhambra built across the river in Hudson by Cole’s onetime pupil, Frederic Edwin Church, looking exactly down on his former master’s land. In comparing these two dwellings by two American artists of two successive generations—one humble, the other triumphal—you can see a history of American prosperity in the 19th century march towards Empire, and the concurrent growth and change in the status of the Artist. I’m told that today, Brice Marden can at least afford the hotel in downtown Tivoli, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that we have reached the Dissolution stage of Cole’s famous series The Course of Empire. Hard times have been all the harder in upstate—IBM, the largest employer in the Hudson Valley, just cut 700 jobs in Duchess County, and while Hudson’s Pride parade was underway last weekend, 54-year old resident Eric Feight was hard at work on an X-ray weapon designed to kill Muslims. Signs of apocalypse abound, and not least in the film industry—though recent prognostications by Mssrs. Spielberg and Lucas are defied by one Scott Mendelson in a piece for Forbes.com, stating that rumors of the death of cinema have been greatly exaggerated:

“[T]oday I see a slow comeback of sorts for the very kind of old-school ‘movie’ that is called all-but-extinct every single summer,” Mendelson writes. “It’s no coincidence that these kind of ‘cinema is dead!’ pronouncements come about during the summer season, when it does seem like the theaters churn out nothing but would-be event films every single weekend. But if you look a little closer, and especially if you look outside of the summer season, you’ll see a return of the kind of smartly-budgeted, often star-driven *movie* that everyone claims never gets made anymore.  It’s not a perfect system, but it’s actually better and healthier for audiences than it was even half-a-decade ago.”

An interesting side note: I was at least for a time in the same film production class as Mr. Mendelson at Wright State University. What I principally remember about him is that he always had the latest box-office figures committed to memory, which was a matter of great amusement to myself and my friend, Adam Pfleghaar, committed Artists who cared not a jot or a tittle about money. “How much did Legally Blonde make this weekend, Scott?” we would ask, and he would patiently tell us. “How much is that in cheeseburgers,” we would ask, and then giggle, as was our wont. Looking at Facebook, I see that Mr. Mendelson today seems prosperous and has a lovely-looking family, while Mr. Pfleghaar and I remain poor as church mice and barren of fruit. Doubtless there is a lesson in here.

I have my byline, at least, but will have to settle for being the Wright State film program’s second most famous dropout. First place belongs to dynamo Jim Van Bebber, the writer, director, editor, stuntman, and fight choreographer of 1988’s Dayton-shot Deadbeat at Dawn. Van Bebber’s 2003 opus The Manson Family has just been released by Severin Films, a package that I absolutely must get my mitts on. One of the pleasures of returning home after being away, y’see, is finding what sort of swag has accumulated on my mailbox. For example: From Scream Factory, the horror subsidiary of Shout! Factory, I received Blu-Rays of Charles B. Pierce’s 1976 proto-reality horror patchwork The Town that Dreaded Sundown, as well as 1985’s Lifeforce, part of an ongoing effort on the part of SF to make the works of Tobe Hooper available in the best possible condition.

Texarkana-based Pierce made his breakthrough with 1972’s The Legend of Boggy Creek, built around the story of local legend the “Fouke Monster”—and Sundown likewise makes use of a regionally-specific bogeyman, the Phantom Killer, who left five dead and three grievously injured in Texarkana in 1946. Like Pierce in Texarkana or Van Bebber in Dayton, Hooper established himself working outside of the industry centers. The story behind the making of his 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, shot in Round Rock, TX, belongs to the annals of Lone Star state independent production lore along with the careers of Richard Linklater and Larry Buchanan and Eagle Pennel, or the production of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Beyond the Time Barrier (1960) at the Centennial Exhibition Fair Park in Dallas.

Hooper’s best movies are ordeals: I am thinking of the moment in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 when Leatherface “hides” Caroline Williams’ character behind the face he’s just peeled off of her still-living friend (Lou Perryman, co-star of Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match), of the terrible tintinnabulation of the score and the feral, slavering lead performance by Neville Brand in Eaten Alive, of the climax inside the mechanical guts of the out-of-control dark ride in The Funhouse. And Lifeforce is an ordeal, certainly, though it’s an ordeal of a rather different sort, a creaking freighter overloaded with plot, exposition packed into every available crevasse, the cast cluttered with a roll-call of characters that might easily have been cut in half.

Lifeforce was the first film made in Hooper’s three-picture deal with Cannon Films, then run by the gatecrashing Israeli duo Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. (I talked to the latter on the phone in 2010, and the fact that the interview was frequently derailed by the subject’s racking, hacking, almost fatal-sounding cough somehow did not make it into my piece.) The story doesn’t make a lot of sense, or maybe I didn’t have the endurance to make sense of it—it’s something to do with space vampires, taken from a novel by Colin Wilson called, appropriately, Space Vampires. The screenplay, which I can only presume is all too faithful to the source, was co-written for the screen by Dan O’Bannon, who had established himself as a specialist in sinister-forces-running-amok-on-a-spaceship-where-there’s-nowhere-to-run-to fare with John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1970) and Alien (1979). O’Bannon, who later wrote Invaders from Mars for Hooper/ Cannon, died in 2009, though was resurrected in Jason Zinoman’s 2012 book Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror. In addition to giving the finest account I know of the abovementioned production history of Texas Chainsaw, Zinoman elevates O’Bannon to canonical unsung hero, providing a venue for O’Bannon’s claims of being screwed over by USC film school collaborator Carpenter and by Walter Hill, whom he believes unjustly took credit for Alien’s screenplay.

Now, Lifeforce isn’t a good movie, but it still warrants watching for a host of different reasons. The critical dialogue of the moment doesn’t tolerate this sort of talk, though, for if anything that isn’t brand spanking new is to be discussed at all, it must be discussed as an “underrated” or “forgotten” masterpiece (cf. the revised opinions of Heaven’s Gate and At Long Last Love, both recently arrived to DVD.) Similarly, a fascinating but ultimately unfulfilled career like that of O’Bannon will be elevated at the expense of Carpenter or Hill—the urge to plant critical flags on undiscovered country is strong. Which brings to mind something that Richard Brody recently wrote in his blog The Front Row, discussing the calling card cult of Vulgar Auteurism: “The single most bewildering line I’ve read on the subject of V.A. is from Matt Singer, at Indiewire, who echoes Vern, the mononymic critic. Vern: ‘There’s a lot more new shit to say about Isaac Florentine than Martin Scorsese. I try to do both.’ Singer: ‘There’s not a whole lot of discovery at this point with the films of Orson Welles.’”

I realize I was just knocking the cliché of the forgotten masterpiece, but in the case of 1975’s Hard Times—Hill’s ‘30s-set directorial debut, now on Blu-ray from Twilight Time, and also among my new possessions—that phrase just happens to fit. Hard Times’ star, Charlie Bronson, is introduced riding the rails into New Orleans under the opening credits. There’s a moment of commiseration in this sequence that I find deeply moving, where Bronson locks eyes with a Walker Evans-model type who’s stopped his flivver at the railroad crossing, and in a glance they silently exchange a mutual understanding of what it is to be really and truly broke.

Bronson would’ve been 53 during filming, though he’s in peak condition. This is important, for his taciturn character, Chaney, takes up a career in bareknuckle boxing once he arrives in the Big Easy. The fight scene are genuinely jaw-rattling, and rely on real fisticuffs common sense–Headhunters get punished! Work the body! And these are not the only life-lessons to be gleaned: Chaney is promoted by James Coburn’s “Speed,” a profligate dandyish gambler who lives lavishly while his meal ticket fighter, by contrast, maintains a ascetic routine, like that of Ryan O’Neal in Hill’s next film, The Driver. Interviewing Hill earlier this year, I asked him about the Depression-era values—thrift, economy, self-denial, self-reliance—that his films seemed to endorse, and he replied:  “All of the adults that I grew up with were absolutely marked by the Depression—my parents, my family, everybody that I knew. This was something that loomed very large in their consciousness. In fact, I think we’re getting sadly reacquainted with it.” While this background is implicit elsewhere in Hill’s filmography, Hard Times is a real Depression movie—as, after a fashion, is Hooper’s Eaten Alive, which was very loosely based on the case of Joe Ball, “The Alligator Man.” A saloonkeeper in Elmendorf, Texas who disposed of customers in his reptile pit until his apprehension and suicide in 1938, Ball is a figure who might have been every bit as much a part of the local folklore of Hooper’s youth as The Town that Dreaded Sundown’s Phantom Killer would’ve been for Pierce. (Did you know, by the way, that Poughkeepsie’s serial killer, Kendall Francois, is nicknamed “Stinky”? You’re welcome.)

Yet, someone must be making money from movies… As detailed in a fine recent piece by Vadim Rizov, studio tent pole releases are increasingly directed towards the Chinese market, and may thusly prove more resilient than expected in the face of declining domestic box-office. And where Mr. Mendelson sees hope in 2012’s “absolute deluge of wide release ‘regular movies’ [that is, non-tent pole studio releases] and successful art house expansions,” I see vitality in cases where American filmmakers are falling back onto their birthright, employing the resources of the familiar, local, personal, and specific, all discouraged by an industry that wants movies burnished of the above, so they can travel well. It is in looking homeward that we may find a restorative agent for our cinema—so it was in such storied chapters in the history of our indigenous art as the independent horror boom of the ‘70s and the Hudson River School.

And what do you know? Some of the finest examples of new American film art will be on display during the week to come at the fifth annual BAMcinemafest. Particularly worth making time for are Eliza Hittman’s intimate tour of tideland Brooklyn, It Felt Like Love, which I was able to see at the Maryland Film Festival, and Michael Bilandic’s Hellaware. As in his 2011 Happy Life, which concerned an aging, obsolescent ‘90s club kid being priced out of NYC, Bilandic proves himself an affectionate pop anthropologist, identifying the creative and communal impulses at work in generally despised subcultures, impulses that are not so different from those that inspire film culture, such as it is, at its best. Hellaware is a deceptively-simple joke-punchline film, and a highlight in what is nothing less than the New York cinephile equivalent of the Gathering of the Juggalos.

*- My former Voice editor Alan Scherstuhl has contacted me assuring me that my implicit characterization of the Delpy cover story as “quid pro quo bullshit” is incorrect, assuring that there was no knowledge of the Voice connection when the Delpy story was pitched and vetted, that the presence of the LA Weekly name in This is the End is a mystery to everyone at the LA Weekly and affiliates, and that the sinister plot being implied is, in actual fact, nonexistent. While it is not Bombast policy to delete once ‘Publish’ has been pressed, in interest of full disclosure I will note that I pulled a nice paycheck to write the program for the BAMcinemafest, am personally acquainted with both Eliza Hittman and Michael Bilandic–the latter whom likely rented me Hard Times at Mondo Kim’s in 2006–and am generally full of hot air.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.

The first time I watched The Secret of NIMH, if my memory serves, was in the break room at La Petite France, in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, where I’d been stowed while waiting for my mother’s waitressing shift to end. The climactic swordfight, which I watched several more times through the course of my childhood, I would remember as the most brutal thing that I had ever seen.

In actual fact there are only a couple dabs of blood visible in this scene, a fact I noted with surprise the first time I watched The Secret of NIMH as an adult. This was in the mid-aughts, in some annex room at Symphony Space with folding chairs set up for a kiddies’ screening, though I was myself on a date (it made sense at the time, in a kind of inside joke-y way). NIMH (1982) is the directorial debut of Don Bluth, who’d formed his Don Bluth Productions with a gang of defectors from The Walt Disney Company. Through the ‘80s, Bluth Productions was a viable competitor for The House that Walt Built, and NIMH, based on a children’s book by Robert C. O’Brien, shows a good hand with subterranean atmosphere, its detail work certainly exceeding anything to be found in contemporary trace-along Disney works like The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound. What really stayed with me after re-watching, though, were the touching and tremulous line readings of the actress voicing Mrs. Brisby, the widow of heroic Jonathan Brisby, a brown field mouse left alone to care for her children. One moment is particularly rending: Mrs. Brisby is hidden behind tall grass, and we cannot see her, but we hear her say in a private voice that is very close to a sob: “I wish Jonathan were here.”

Mrs. Brisby’s voice belonged to Elizabeth Hartman, an actor who I knew by then from Don Siegel’s The Beguiled (1971). Now, there is a great deal that goes into a screen performance, but I cannot escape the impression that voice is in many respects an actor’s quintessence—when James Gandolfini died last week, many who were looking to encapsulate the sum total of the loss turned to Gandolfini’s performance in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, a film in which the actor never appears in the flesh, yet a role which epitomized Gandolfini’s combination of looming bulk and disarming vulnerability. A number of great actors, usually prompted by the failing of their bodies, have given their final performances from the recording booth—Paul Newman, Orson Welles, James Stewart—for the famous voice is the last to go. And as it happens, Secret of NIMH was Elizabeth Hartman’s final performance, though she wasn’t even forty when she read her part—but more on that in time.

Elizabeth Hartman was raised in Boardman, Ohio, a suburb of Youngstown. She was the middle child of three, born in comfortable circumstances to William and Claire Hartman, a building contractor and housewife. All accounts seem to agree that Elizabeth, nicknamed “Biff,” was desperately shy from an early age, though she was pretty—she modeled for a Brooks Brothers’ store in Cleveland—and able to slough off her shyness completely when walking the boards. Hartman began painting scenery and working as an usherette in the Youngstown Playhouse as a teenager, later appearing there in “A Clearing in the Woods,” which first gave her a firm idea of her vocation, an ambition that was solidified when she won Ohio High School Actress of the Year for her role as Emily Webb in the Boardman High School production of Our Town. Thornton Wilder’s play is a work almost cruel in its pathos—seeing the David Cromer-directed production at the Barrow Street Theatre in 2009, I felt a horrible lump in my throat from the moment the stage manager began to address the audience and describe the dimensions of Grover’s Corners, for I knew that if this play was done right I would be a blubbering catastrophe by the third act, and it looked very likely that, yes, it was going to be done right. Just to think of Emily’s “My, isn’t the moon terrible?” delivered in Ms. Hartman’s voice, with its particular little catch, is almost too much to endure.

From Youngstown, Hartman went to study acting at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) in Pittsburgh, where she met her future husband, Gill Dennis, then working as a stage director. Her classroom experience was supplemented by work with the Kenley Players in Warren, Ohio, whose director, John Kenley, would remember her as “very pretty in a Victorian way,” which is spot-on. Hartman had a face designed for a cameo, long strawberry blonde hair meant to be woven into jewelry or pressed between the pages of a book as a forget-me-not keepsake.

Hartman left Pittsburgh to make a go at New York, passing a summer at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, but she failed to set Broadway ablaze. Finally returning to Kenley, Hartman was put in touch with agent Howard Rubin, who in turn brought her to the attention of MGM—and the very same Little Nell quality that Kenley had noted came through in her screen test for A Patch of Blue. Adapted from Scotch-Australian-Japanese novelist Elizabeth Kata’s Be Ready with Bells and Drums, A Patch of Blue depicts the friendship between Gordon, a black newspaperman, and Selina, a poor blind white teenager who is ignorant of her friend’s color, but blissful at his attentions. English director Guy Green—coincidentally the cinematographer on both of David Lean’s Dickens films—also wrote the screenplay for Patch, transposing the scene from the Deep South to downtown Los Angeles, to the benefit of the film’s credibility.

The first shot in A Patch of Blue is a pair of shaky hands—Hartman’s—stringing beads. Her Selina is a blind girl reduced to Cinderella servitude, her existence confined to the four soiled walls of the apartment where she’s imprisoned doing house and piecework for her family: her drunk, desiccant grandfather (Wallace Ford) and her slovenly, waddling tyrant of a mother (Shelley Winters, setting the bar for Awful Tenement Mother of the Year, only to be outdone in gorgon monstrousness by Mo’Nique in Precious.)

After a great deal of begging, Selina convinces her grandfather to deposit her in a neighborhood park for the day, and there she meets Gordon, played by Sidney Poitier at his most human and humane. Gordon brings Selina little things—pineapple juice, a pair of sunglasses—which, in her meager life, take on the aspect of wonders, exotic gifts from a faraway world. He even brings her back to his apartment, where Ivan Dixon, then recently the star of Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man, shows up as Gordon’s dubious brother. He has some right to doubt Gordon’s motives: No mere racial goodwill play acted by eunuch cyphers, A Patch of Blue deals with a flesh-and-blood couple, and Gordon’s saintly altruism is brought down to earth by ethically dicey lust, for though Selina is essentially a trusting, naïve child, she has a woman’s body and desires. (Two years before Loving vs. Virginia, A Patch of Blue contains one of the first interracial kisses in American movies, between a chalk-pale white girl and a ebony black man, and there is nothing chaste about it.)

Green lays on the lurid flashbacks rather thick but, with Hartman’s help, he does remarkably well conveying sightless, untutored Selina’s subjective experience of the hazards of negotiating a simple city street. Patch of Blue can be fairly called Dickensian, and Hartman suits this because she has the ability, through her absolute unselfconscious emotional transparency, to make goodness—bright, ecstatic, incandescent goodness—seem really appealing, which was among Dickens’ particular gifts. As much as her joy, Selina’s terror comes through undiminished by the filters of actorly decision-making—witness her distressing abandonment in the park during a flash thunderstorm. Writing about Hartman, critics almost always have recourse to the same words: haunted, vulnerable, fragile, delicate. Speaking of her work in Walking Tall, Pauline Kael pinpointed Hartman’s appeal thusly: “You want to reach out to her.” And that is here from the beginning: Hartman’s Selina is like some breakable thing perched on a threatening precipice, and you feel compelled to protect her, secure her in place.

A Patch of Blue is released. Hartman is nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award and Golden Globe. In Youngstown, April 18^th is declared Elizabeth Hartman Day. Yet on the cover of the 2003 Warner DVD release, only Winters and Poitier’s names are deemed marketable enough to appear about the title. What took the shine off such a promising debut?

Hartman’s next film, Sidney Lumet’s The Group, was a two-and-a-half-hour, two-and-a-half million dollar epic drawn from Mary McCarthy’s 1963 bestseller of the same name. A bona-fide moneymaker, it would seem a solid sophomore outing, but it was also a messy ensemble film where loose pieces tended to get lost in the shuffle. The Group follows a clique of eight Vassar friends from their 1933 graduation—at the dawn of the Roosevelt presidency and into the midst of the Great Depression—to the beginning of World War II. Their stories are bookended by two ceremonies at St. Mark’s Church: The wedding of Joanna Pettet’s Kay to a would-be playwright (Larry Hagman), and Kay’s funeral, after her marriage has gone bust and she’s tumbled out of her hotel room window while listening to the news of Hitler’s tanks rolling into France. Hartman apparently turned down meatier roles to play Priss, a worrywart Economics major who goes to work for the NRA, only to ultimately find herself under the heel of her tyrannical pediatrician husband.

While wearing its social import on its sleeve, The Group is basically a slapdash piece of work, hampered by an insensibility to the period it portrays, a visual murkiness that’s surprising considering that Boris Kaufman is cinematographer, and thudding conceits like the repeated ironic use of a school song chorale. All of these faults and more were dutifully chronicled by Kael, on-location taking notes for what would become her 25,000-word “The Making of The Group,” which was commissioned and turned down by Life magazine. In its stead, Life published Kael’s short profiles of The Group’s actresses under the title “A Goddess Upstages the Girls” (“The Goddess” in question being the effortlessly supreme Candace Bergen.) Kael’s comment on Hartman, later much quoted: “Whether she can develop the toughness necessary for a real acting career is the only doubt one might feel for her future.”

Throughout her roasting of the impersonal professionalism of the present generation of TV-to-movie directors, which Lumet’s shortcomings were taken to be indicative of, Kael seemed to be urging an American New Wave into being through sheer force of will. Hartman’s next film, 26-year-old Francis Ford Coppola’s sex comedy You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), adapted from a novel by David Benedictus, showed something of the same ambition. Though the on-the-fly street photography of contemporary New York–inspired by the Nouvelle Vague‘s freewheeling use of Paris–gives Big Boy a certain documentary appeal today, the insistently innovative technique belaboring what is essentially a burlesqued bildungsroman, all edited into a madcap fluster by Aram Avakian, adds up to a case of the strained zaniness that typifies counterculture comedy.

More than for views of since-demolished Luncheonettes and an under-construction Madison Square Garden, though, Big Boy is worth seeking out because it showcases a rare example of faith in Hartman’s range, showing her for a great deal more than an off-brand Sandy Dennis. Hartman is one of those mutable actors who can be exactly as attractive as they need to be in the moment—in A Patch of Blue she appears rather homely at first, with a blunt expanse of forehead, wincing smile, and a turned-in slouch, but as soon as Gordon starts to call her beautiful, beautiful she becomes.

In The Group, Hartman’s Priss is the most meek and mild of the bunch, mocked as “so flat down there she’s never had to wear a brassiere,” mortified by her body and not least her inability to breastfeed. And yet here, the same year, in the opening tracking shot of Big Boy, is the very same actress with the very same body, indomitably strutting the floor of the New York Public Library reading room like it’s a runway to the strains of The Lovin’ Spoonful. (Coppola did his part to build his starlet’s confidence, taking her on motorcycle rides where he would roar above the sound of the engine: “You’re sexy, beautiful, Barbara Darling!”)

Barbara Darling is an inscrutable Off-Off Broadway ice queen who moonlights as a go-go dancer—or is it the other way around? (The name may be a nod to Darling, the film that provided Julie Christie the chance to make off with Hartman’s Patch Oscar.) Big Boy’s nominal protagonist, Bernard, a put-upon gap-toothed virgin played by the Canadian actor Peter Kastner, is ensorcelled by Barbara at a performance of a caricatured avant-garde piece called The Department Store in which she appears in the mute role of a mannequin, looking dispassionate as a Grecian marble beneath piled red hair. A smitten Coppola gives Hartman a few such iconic moments, filming her poised atop the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, or jerking her torso wildly above the dance floor of a nightclub where, improbably, scenes from Coppola’s Dementia 13 are being projected onto the walls.

It’s a siren’s frug, a dance of death! In pursuing and “catching” Barbara, Bernard is unwittingly reduced to her doormat, a live-in lover unable to even enjoy consummation because his beloved has the cock-withering habit of taking on a maternal demeanor in intimate situations and airily referring to herself in the third-person. All of this is but a game for Barbara because, as established in a blithe flashback skit, she’s had it out for men in general ever since being molested in boarding school. (If taking such a matter lightly seems crude, it can only be said in defense that the film takes everything lightly.) Hartman, younger even than her would-be wunderkind director, nevertheless brings nuanced insight to a role which, on the page, is little more than that of a castrating bitch. If Barbara keeps herself scrupulously in control, Hartman makes it evident that Barbara is herself not in control of the forces that demand control of her. Barbara Darling is, in short, a bit of a schizophrenic, most piteous when she’s at her most pitiless—as Hartman’s quavering voice rises to become something jagged, strident, serrated, you somehow feel concern for the monster, not the prey.

As a comedy, You’re a Big Boy Now is a flop in every respect, but Barbara Darling works on her own wavelength. Hartman finds a profound connection with a trite character, perhaps because there is something of Hartman in Barbara, both inveterate escapists: We are told that boarding school Barbara was “Unhappy every day… except when they show the movies,” while John Kenley said of his protégé that “She was a finished actress when she got on that stage. She disappeared into the woodwork when she got off.”

A period in the woodwork was coming up. You’re a Big Boy Now was followed by strictly routine work in John Frankenheimer’s The Fixer (1968), which was in turn followed by inactivity as Hartman, uniformly disappointed by forthcoming offers, walled up in her E 68^th St. apartment to re-read Emily Dickinson. Talking to the NY Times’ Judy Klemesrud for a 1969 article titled ‘After A Patch of Blue, Gray Skies,’ from which the preceding motorcycle anecdote comes, Hartman described this period as “my slow, quiet breakdown.” Klemesrud caught up with Hartman in December, 1969, shortly after her marriage to Dennis and her Broadway debut, in which she appeared with Henry Fonda, Ed Begley, and Margaret Hamilton in none other than Our Town—a Plumstead L.I. Playhouse production presented at the ANTA Theatre, today the August Wilson. (Hartman had been offered the part of Emily by Martha Scott, who originated the role.)

While waving off rumors of her extreme introversion as an embellishment of the MGM publicity department with one breath, Hartman confirmed them with the next: “The real me, I guess, is the shy, up-against-the-wall person. I like sympathy. I like people to feel sorry for me… You can tell from your fans what you are, I’ve got the adolescent crowd and the poetic boys. Those are the kinds of people who write to me and stop me on the street. It’s certainly not the lusty men.” But in her next role, Biff, Elizabeth and Barbara Darling would be tested against heretofore unseen levels of machismo.

PART 2 NEXT WEEK, BOMBASTKATEERS!

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.