“Classe Tous Risques”

Lino Ventura, Robert Desnoux, and Thierry Levoye in “Classe Tous Risques” (1960); Via Rialto Pictures
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The backstory for “Classe Tous Risques” (1960) is, as the young folks say, problematic. Overseen by a French director, Claude Sautet, this gangster picture is based on a 1958 novel of the same name by José Giovanni. Therein lies a complicated tale.

Monsieur Giovanni was, in actuality, Joseph Damiani, a Corsican by descent with an elite Parisian education, a tendency for duplicity, and a keen disregard for human life. What kind of villainy didn’t he engage in? 

His membership in the Vichy youth group Jeunesse et Montagne was the least of it. Not only did Damiani join the Nazi-adjacent French Popular Front and the Nazi-sponsored Schutzkorps, he was an active hand at blackmail and murder — with Jews being a particular point of focus.

Apprehended by the authorities, Damiani was found guilty of murder. Only a last-minute reprieve saved him from the guillotine. Twenty years of hard labor was downgraded to 11 and a half time-served, after which Damiani adopted the “Giovanni” nom de plume and began writing novels and screenplays. 

Giovanni’s underworld experience fell neatly in line with a cadre of French filmmakers enamored of the illicit allure of life outside the law. Giovanni was one of the screenwriters, along with Sautet and Pascal Jardin, of “Class Tous Risques,” which will be undergoing a six-day revival at Film Forum starting March 15.

Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo in “Classe Tous Risques” (1960); Via Rialto Pictures
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Giovanni’s participation undoubtedly counts for the film’s sui generis status. As a gangland epic, the story is oddly intimate, imbued, as it is, with a distinct sense of the human toll exacted from life-on-the-run. Part-and-parcel of that intimacy is the ready application of brutality. Should a person prove unsuitable to one’s plans, that same person can summarily be tossed overboard.

That is exactly what happens to the captain of the speedboat unlucky enough to pick up two hardened criminals, Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) and Raymond Naldi (Stan Krol). Among those accompanying them are Davos’s wife Thérèse (Simone France) and their young sons Pierrot and Daniel (Robert Desnoux and Thierry Lavoye). Upon arriving on shore, a shootout ensues between the gangsters and a pair of customs officials. The only survivors are Davos and the boys. Word gets out of the murders and a manhunt traversing Italy and France commences.

Davos puts out word to a nucleus of former associates that he’s in need of safe passage to Paris. Each of these contacts are men for whom Davos has done significant favors — and each of them, in this instance, blinks. They ultimately decide to  hire someone outside of their circle, a solitary thief by the name of Éric Stark (Jean Paul Belmondo).

The plan is for Stark, posing as an ambulance driver, to bring his “patient” Davos for medical care in the city — a ruse that proves effective in getting past police roadblocks. It doesn’t hurt that a woman they’ve picked up on the way, Liliane (Sandra Milo), is an actress. Liliane, smitten with Stark, helps our anti-heroes by posing as a nurse.

Cervantes wrote that “thieves are never rogues amongst themselves,” but tell that to the motley crew of underworld types who are chagrined when Stark actually succeeds in bringing their former partner-in-crime back to Paris. Davos is livid at their lack of loyalty, but he’s also in desperate straits: The law is closing in. One more big score should be enough to make it away clean. Stark is the only man Davos can trust.

Belmondo had yet to make a splash with “Breathless” (1960), but he inveigles himself into every scene here, playing off Ventura’s brooding thunder with a devil-may-care insouciance. 

The picture ends on a note that seems redolent of studio interference, and the oddments of voice-over narration feel tacked on. Still, “Classe Tous Risques” is an engaging amalgam, by turns casual and a hurly-burly, of documentary-like verisimilitude and sunlit noir. If you’re in the mood to witness a turning point at which old school wise-guys were upended by new school cool, this movie is an entertaining place to start.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 12, 2024 edition of “The New York Sun.”

“Carol Doda Topless at The Condor”

Carol Doda in “Carol Doda Topless at The Condor”; Via Picturehouse
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“Carol Doda Topless at The Condor,” a documentary by Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker, is either the saddest movie to come down the pike in recent memory or a gauge of just how confused we are at this cultural moment. The truth, you might assume, is somewhere in between, but this is a film that spends a lot of time skirting the truth, opting, instead, for a put-on-a-happy-face ambiguity. “Topless at The Condor” is a fascinating and dispiriting entertainment.

You wouldn’t know that from how the film is being marketed. “Every city has a history,” the poster reads, “San Francisco has a legend.” A vintage black-and-white photo of Carol Doda, the first stripper to go topless in these United States, is set against a backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge and a row of nightclubs that once lined the city’s Broadway district. Within the fold of Doda’s arms is a collaged array of women holding up their bras, all of which are presumably intended for the nearest bonfire. The visual pun is that these first-wave feminists are nestled within Doda’s pre-feminist bosom.

Forget, for a moment, that one of the scholars featured in “Topless at the Condor” states that the phenomenon of bra burning was a media myth. Instead, consider how Doda is being heralded as “a symbol of empowerment.” The film’s website is downright chummy, being an accumulation of period kitsch, including a San Francisco timeline that includes the Gold Rush; the invention of sourdough bread; the first black woman millionaire, Mary Ellen Pleasant; and, of course, the release of this film.

Not much is known about Doda’s formative years: speculation about them runs in conflicting currents. Born in 1937, Doda was the child of divorce: Her parents separated when she was 3. At age 14, Doda was working as a cocktail waitress. At 26, she danced topless, having been encouraged by a publicist to don a “monokini.” Doda’s notoriety increased after attempts to ban topless dancing failed to pass the courts. And when she enlarged her breasts through a series of silicone injections? As Doda’s career proved, nothing succeeds like excess.

Carol Doda in “Carol Doda Topless at The Condor”; Via Picturehouse
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Tom Wolfe would go on to write about “The Put-Together Girl” and Doda appeared in the Monkees’ one-and-only movie, “Head” (1969). By that time, she had established her signature dance routine, predicating it on a song co-written by a young Sly Stone, “The Swim.” The trappings at the Condor were elaborate: Doda would enter the stage gyrating atop a grand piano that was lowered from a hole in the ceiling via a hydraulic lift. The crowds went wild.

But so, then, did life. Doda kept fairly mum about its details, though she intimated that her travels had been difficult. A raft of disappointing men, including Frank Sinatra, left their mark. Did she have children? Apparently so, though many of the interviewees in the film are shocked at the mention of the idea. 

The 1960s took a turn toward the decade’s end — from the freewheeling inanities of Flower Power and the hard-won promises of the civil rights movement to societal tangents that were sectarian in character, morally expedient, and nihilistic in nature. The Summer of Love became less sunny. Is it at all a coincidence that Doda took up “bottomless” dancing in 1969?

Whatever charm or innocence Broadway may have had at one point in time was lost as the area became a haven for prostitution, drugs, gangsters, and pornography. The environs became grottier, the clientele shadier, and violence was on the upswing: a markedly suspicious death occurred on top of the same piano that served as Doda’s stage. A series of bad business decisions and dubious career moves on Doda’s part led to a loss of income and a diminution of fame. Age, too, brought its complications.

The archival footage we see of Doda — she died at age 78 in 2015 — is sometimes cogent, often cringe-inducing, and never as incisive or revealing as a dispassionate viewer might like it to be. In the end, this pioneer of empowerment comes off as a forlorn spirit caught up in forces not of her own making. 

When we’re told that “modern women wouldn’t be where they are without her,” it’s worth pondering just how beneficent Doda’s not altogether happy example might be. It’s a question that is left unanswered as this lopsided and loving documentary comes to a close.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 21, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Listening to what you see; Selected contributions on Dutch art” by Peter Hecht

Rembrandt, “Orestes and Pylades before King Thoas of Tauris” (1626); Via Wikimedia Commons
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Few things make a book reviewer’s eyes glaze over as quickly as the arrival of a compilation of writing about art. Rarefied byways of contemporary culture tend to encourage the intellectual manques within their parameters to indulge in grudgery, theory, and jargon. While every literary genre has its thornier precincts, art history and art criticism are particularly notorious for their hermeticism.

It was with a cautious sense of optimism, then, that I read the preface to “Listening to what you see; Selected contributions on Dutch art,” a new book by a historian and former professor at Utrecht University, Peter Hecht. “I have always tried to write clearly … taking the risk that ‘if I show my cards openly, certain readers will probably think that they cannot be of much interest.’” This quote from Goethe prompts Mr. Hecht to “wish that every academic were made to learn it by heart.”

From Mr. Hecht’s lips to God’s ears, but suspicion is a hard habit to curtail, particularly at a time when postmodern shibboleths and ideological fire-breathing have become the air we breathe. The good professor follows up with a rather unfashionable notion: “Writing about one’s love for art is an obligation not a luxury.” As if he were reading our minds, he lays down the law: “Please do not be cynical about this.”

We’re barely into the first chapter when Mr. Hecht lets us know his thoughts about relativism: “I do not believe that history is so difficult and unknowable that one has to accept all possible and impossible assertions [about art] as being of equal weight and value.” Mr. Hecht is an advocate for facts on the ground or, rather, on the canvas. He’s intent on returning the artwork’s agency to the subject under discussion: “too often … the painter’s poetics seemed to have been all but forgotten.” 

“Listening to what you see” is a collection of papers, reviews, and essays that span, roughly speaking, 30 years. As is typical of efforts such as this, Mr. Hecht’s book suffers from a certain repetitiousness, as a number of cherished ideas bob up-and-down through sundry writings. Nor is the book always kind to the layman: Deep dives into iconography may be of serious scholarly import but they’ll likely leave generalists at sea. 

Carel Fabritius, “Self-portrait” (circa 1647-48); Via Wikimedia Commons
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The most prominent of Mr. Hecht’s idées fixes is the interpretive overreach of art historians. Although not altogether inclined to dismiss the symbolic underpinnings of Dutch genre painting, he questions whether the images are as rich in signifiers as we have been led to believe. Can’t some artists have been attracted to certain subjects because, you know, they were really good at painting them? 

Gerard Dou, a student of Rembrandt and the prototypical fijnschilder, is a constant in Mr. Hecht’s writings and, one suspects, a favorite. Noting that there was “very nearly nothing on God’s earth that Dou’s virtuoso brush could not successfully imitate,” Mr. Hecht posits that perhaps something as straightforward as the delight taken in mimesis accounted for Dou’s considerable success. Who needs moralizing when craft can provide its own rationale?

Dou set out to prove that his chosen metier was superior to sculpture, as Mr. Hecht convincingly argues in a chapter titled “Art beats Nature, and Painting does so best of all.” The author writes about the recurring placement of a relief sculpture, “Putti teasing a goat” (circa 1626-30) by François Duquesnoy, within Dou’s pictures and, in particular, “The violinist” (1653). Roping in Chardin’s “Lady with a bird organ” (1751) to bolster his observations, Mr. Hecht notes that “painting can not only represent all things, but even suggest what music does to nature.” 

Elsewhere, Mr. Hecht introduces us to a 17th-century painter and one-trick pony, Godefridus Schalcken; compares Rembrandt and Rubens to the latter’s detriment; and remembers the first time he came across Francisco de Goya’s “Portrait of Don Ramón Satué” (1823). He also dares mention the “Q” word: “The art historian who sidesteps the quality issue is … a rather pitiful specimen.” A gentleman to the end, Mr. Hecht is provocative all the same. “Listening to what you see” is a tonic.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 19, 2024 edition of “The New York Sun.”

“You Can Call Me Bill”

William Shatner at Galaxy Con 2020, Richmond, Virginia; Via Wikimedia Commons
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Early into the proceedings of “You Can Call Me Bill,” Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary about the nonagenarian actor William Shatner, the term “Shatnerian” is discussed as a method of acting. What might it mean and how does one go about describing it?

Mr. Shatner is incredulous: “People’s supposed imitation of me is, I don’t know, I don’t hear it.” Whereupon we see a clip of a genre movie stalwart, Bruce Campbell, explaining the venerable icon’s mannerisms and cadence. Mr. Campbell’s impression of Mr. Shatner is spot on, very funny, and done with evident love.

How genuine is Mr. Shatner in his incomprehension of the Shatnerian? A few moments after that clip, we see him performing at the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival. With the help of a slide presentation, he insists that “when I speak I never ever, ever talk like. Every. Word. Is. Its. Own. Sentence.” 

Then there was that sterling moment in the otherwise forgettable Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro vehicle “Showtime” (2002), in which Mr. Shatner played a television director trying to get an authentic performance from the real-life cop portrayed by Mr. De Niro. “This guy,” he opines with an admirable deadpan, “is the worst actor I have ever seen.” 

That clip isn’t included in “You Can Call Me Bill,” but there are snippets of Mr. Shatner’s various television commercials, almost all of which succeed on the basis of self-parody. The man knows the difference between being an actor and hamming it up. Which isn’t to say Mr. Shatner hasn’t become more eccentric as he’s aged; he’s more portentous, too. Mr. Phillipe’s picture is a portrait of an old man in blowhardish fettle.

Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, and DeForest Kelley in “Star Trek”; Via Wikimedia Commons
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The documentary isn’t a complete or, perhaps it is better said, conventional portrait. Although “You Can Call Me Bill” is touted as “an intimate exploration of the life and career,” it’s not as full an accounting as a Trekkie might hope for. 

Sure, there are snippets from the original “Star Trek” (1966-69), as well as moments gleaned from Mr. Shatner’s turn as Denny Crane in “Boston Legal” (2004-08) and, less so, “T.J. Hooker” (1982-86). And who could forget that episode of “The Twilight Zone” in which he played Bob Wilson, a man whose fear of flying is compounded by his spotting an alien on the plane’s wing? 

Movie clips are peppered throughout, including a passing moment with Spencer Tracy in “Last Judgment in Nuremberg” (1961) and, to less stellar effect, starring as a begrudging Satanist in “The Devil’s Rain” (1975), a Z-grade potboiler. Yet what about the man’s questionable forays into pop music? Although Mr. Shatner is seen doing recitations with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, we don’t hear of his punk-wise collaboration with Ben Folds, “Common People.” Really, it’s pretty good.

What do we get in “You Can Call Me Bill?” Childhood trauma touched upon; a glancing mention of Mr. Shatner’s Jewish upbringing; a thoughtful exegesis on his acting heroes, Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando; the time he had to go on for an ailing Christopher Plummer in a stage production of “Henry V”; and how to go about portraying the captain of a starship: “As long as he has a command presence, he can be a joker.”

Most of the time we get Mr. Shatner in a philosophical mood. As the only person interviewed in the movie, he rambles on — I’m sorry, pontificates — ike an admixture of Henry David Thoreau, Kahlil Gibran, and Henny Youngman. Lest you think the last analogy is pejorative, know that Mr. Shatner spends a good hunk of time deconstructing Youngman’s signature joke, “Take my wife, please.” 

Mr. Phillippe has granted Mr. Shatner an indulgence and let him run with it. Showbiz mavens will be disappointed in the film’s lack of career detail and, let’s be honest, the absence of celebrity gossip. I mean, don’t we all want to know more about Mr. Shatner’s backbiting relationship with a “Star Trek” co-star, George Takei? Should you be one of the millions of fans who have a soft spot for the actor who embodied the trials and tribulations of James T. Kirk, you’ll forgive “You Can Call Me Bill” its digressions.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This article was originally published in the March 19, 2024 edition of “The New York Sun.”

“Club Zero”

Mia Wasikowska in “Club Zero”; Via Coop99
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“The problem with this movie is that it is entirely too believable”: That was the opinion of a friend, an academic of long standing who is a bemused observer of social mores, with whom I watched the new film by Austrian director Jessica Hausner, “Club Zero.” Anyone conversant with ideological fashion will recognize the currents that are refracted through Ms. Hausner’s satirical lens. “Club Zero” is a pitiless movie. 

“Club Zero” joins “American Fiction” in questioning the progressive bromides that have come to dominate the cultural landscape. The parameters of her movie are icier than Cord Jefferson’s take on identity politics and, as such, less ingratiating. The laughter “Club Zero” generates isn’t full-bodied so much as trepidatious. We’re sometimes left to wonder just what it is we’re finding funny — which means, I think, that Ms. Hausner’s picture hits the mark more often than not.

This is the director’s second time working with screenwriter Géraldine Bajard, their previous collaboration being “Little Joe” (2019). That film, a similarly affectless take on science-gone-too-far, didn’t get a lot of critical love. “Club Zero” will likely follow suit. The picture has barely seen the light of day and is already being hailed as a cult classic — testimony to Ms. Hausner’s stringent sensibility and rarefied aesthetic, but also a marker of its quixoticism and integrity.

In its formal rigor and distinctive production design, “Club Zero” is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971). Ms. Hausner’s movie is nowhere near as sensationalistic, nor does it possess the scope of Kubrick’s dystopian “horror show.” Chalk up this distinction to a difference in budget — “Club Zero” is more modest in that regard — but don’t discount the contemporaneity of each film’s respective time-frame. Kubrick, positing a distant future, could afford to engage in hyperbole. For Ms. Hausner, the future is now: Understatement is a coefficient of parody that cuts close to the bone.

Miss Novak (a prim, almost preternaturally certain Mia Wasikowska) is a new hire at an exclusive British boarding school. She has been brought in to teach a course in “Conscious Eating.” Her class is small in size and diverse in make-up, and the students are intensely particular as to why they’ve signed up. Some of their reasons are rational (controlling diabetes; staying trim for athletics), others practical (beefing up one’s CV), and some troubling (locating a philosophical basis for bulimia). One humorless young woman’s goal is to save the planet. Everyone’s on board with that.

Luke Barker, Florence Baker, Gwen Currant, Ksenia Devriendt, and Samuel D. Anderson in “Club Zero”; Via Coop99
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Yet is everyone on board with Miss Novak? As the class progresses, her lessons in mindfulness, self-care, and fill-in-the-fashionable-nostrum take on an ever more rigorous mandate. One clueless boy in the class, Ben (Samuel D. Anderson), likes food. As a result, he’s looked down upon by his fellow students and, in a more insinuating fashion, Miss Novak. Peer pressure, being what it is, converts Ben to a diet that is ever more limited in options — much to the consternation of his mother (a gawky, voluble and decidedly prole Amanda Lawrence). The rest of the parents only become concerned when their children stop eating altogether.

As much as it nettles their good liberal bona fides, these mums and dads begin to have second thoughts about Miss Novak’s pedagogy. So does the school’s principal, Miss Dorset (Sidse Babette Knudsen, fitted to the nines and magisterial in her absurdity). After initially hewing to the new teacher’s dietary regimen, Miss Dorset finds that High Tea is less rewarding without a dash of whole milk and a plate of cookies. Miss Nowak needs talking to.

In the grand tradition of Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, and in-its-prime National Lampoon, Mses. Hausner and Bajard reveal extremism as being nihilism festooned in do-gooder drag. “Club Zero” is a hard film to like, but it is welcome all the same.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 14, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Much Ado About Dying”

David Newlyn Gale in “Much Ado About Dying”; Via Solisiu Films
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Rarely has a movie captured frustration and joy with as much integrity as Simon Chambers’s new documentary, “Much Ado About Dying.” This is especially the case toward the end of the film, when we are witness to an individual’s last moments on earth — only to discover, rather abruptly, that he had more moments forthcoming. The song to which this miraculous scene is keyed? “You Sexy Thing,” by a 1970s British soul group, Hot Chocolate.

The refrain, you’ll remember, is, “I believe in miracles” — to which David Newlyn Gale, a former actor, shimmies enthusiastically from the confines of his not-so-death bed. That the reaffirmation of life should occasion joy should be obvious, but how could this transition be considered frustrating? Anyone who has been tasked with taking care of a sick and elderly relative should be able to intuit the answer. A dignified death can, in some cases, be a welcome event.

Prior to Gale’s surprising return to life, Mr. Chambers had prepared for the worst. Uncle Charlie had been suffering from a severe urinary tract infection for which he refused treatment. This condition prompted erratic behavior on the old man’s part — as Mr. Chambers relates, “It was like being drunk on your own pee” — and death was but a few days away. Upon arriving at home, Mr. Chambers broke down and cried, which, he said, was something he never does.

Uncle Charlie’s near-miss with the almighty occurred four years into his time under his nephew’s care. Having previously left London to start life afresh, Mr. Chambers traveled to India hoping to make a documentary about the world’s second-largest country and its citizens going all-in on gas-powered automobiles during this time of climate crisis. As we watch Mr. Chambers filming from the back seat of an ambulance at traffic-congested Delhi, he receives a phone call. It’s Uncle Charlie: “I think I may be dying.”

Uncle Charlie is adamant that his nephew return to London. Mr. Chambers asks why it is that his sisters can’t stop by to help. They’re no good, Charlie tells him, being “far too bossy.” Given that his cinematic endeavors are leaving him cold — “I felt disconnected from the people” of Delhi — Mr. Chambers packs his bags, camera in tow, and heads to his uncle’s home. It’s an apartment in an alarming state of disrepair, strewn with garbage and peppered with a bevy of conspicuously unsafe space heaters.

David Newlyn Gale and the Barn-ettes in “Much Ado About Dying”; Via Solisiu Films
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The place is a mess and so, too, is Uncle Charlie — at least, physically. Mentally, he is alert and lively, if not always capable of making sensible decisions. These characteristics are less indicative of the cognitive failings that can accrue with age than markers of a singular temperament. 

Yes, Uncle Charlie falls within the grand tradition of English eccentrics, being a sharp wit with an impressive command of Shakespeare and possessed of an uncanny knack for coming up with the right quip for the right occasion. He’s also the most stubborn of men and, when the mood suits him, the most compliant. 

Prior to Mr. Chambers’s arrival, Uncle Charlie had been under the care of a Polish couple next door, Zibby and Beata, as well as an on-again, off-again young man by the name of Rodrigo, the latter of whom proves capable of deceit and, it seems, thievery. Significant sums of Uncle Charlie’s money have gone missing, and Instagram tells us that a supposedly destitute Rodrigo is traveling the world. We’re left to wonder just how good a judge of character Uncle Charlie might be.

Also, we’re left to wonder if the reason Uncle Charlie insisted on Mr. Chambers’s assistance is their shared homosexuality. The director is equivocal about relationships — at one point, Mr. Chambers claims that he’s returned to the closet — and Uncle Charlie, as you might expect from someone belonging to a different generation, is more circumspect about his longings. 

He’s certainly not mum about life and its many contradictions. Death, he says, is “like going on a wonderful holiday without the bother of having to pack.” Not-so-spoiler alert: May David Newlyn Gale now rest in peace. As for Mr. Chambers, he has given us a life-affirming film of daunting emotional gamut. “Much Ado About Dying” is worth your ado.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 11, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“The President’s Analyst”

James Coburn and Joan Delaney in “The President’s Analyst” (1967); Via Kino Lorber
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Movie fans wanting to sample the halcyon days of the 1960s — or, rather, Hollywood’s version of it — are recommended to Kino Lorber’s newly remastered Blu-Ray of “The President’s Analyst” (1967). Never heard of it, you say? There’s a reason for that: J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI, was irked by the film’s depiction of the agency as a cadre of by-the-book buffoons. Calls were made to the White House, which made calls to Paramount Pictures, which pulled the movie from distribution.

Or so the story goes. The FBI did, apparently, visit the set, requesting that producer Robert Evans nix the picture. He rebuffed the agency’s suggestion, only to have the honchos at Paramount Studios twist his arm to the extent that changes were made. As the introductory title card tells us: “This film has not been made with the consent or cooperation of the Federal Board of Regulations (FBR) … or the Central Enquiries Agency (CEA).”

So, yes, mentions of the FBI and the CIA were altered by dubbing their acronyms in post-production — which seems altogether too neat a coincidence for a film whose subject is political paranoia. 

Stranger things have happened, certainly, and if “The President’s Analyst” is not the find its admirers claim it to be, the picture does qualify as some kind of curiosity. Think of it as “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) leavened by “Get Smart” (1965-70) and then put into motion by a creative team huffing-and-puffing to keep up with the zeitgeist. It’s a desperate venture that manages to get by through sheer dint of effort.

James Coburn in “The President’s Analyst” (1967); Via Kino Lorber
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Which is another way of saying that if your idea of a good time is watching James Coburn — yes, he of the vulpine smile, measured gaze, and angled physique — don a Beatles wig and groove to some acid-fueled freakadelia, well, then, “The President’s Analyst” comes recommended. 

Coburn is game throughout and the story lets him undercut his macho image. Among the signal moments is when his character, the pacifist Dr. Sidney Schaefer, takes up arms and emerges from an operatic pink cloud in a hail of bullets. “It’s vital,” he tells his comrades, “that we make the public hate The Phone Company.” 

Substitute “Google,” “Amazon,” or “Baidu” for “The Phone Company” and you’ve got yourself a prescient movie, one for whom the Soviets, China, and Canada — yes, Canada — are less worrisome than the machinations of big tech. Thanks to “the miracle in modern communications,” Arlington Hewes (a scarily benign Pat Harrington, Jr.) opines, every individual will have a small chip dubbed The Cerebrum Communicator embedded within his or her brain. All of which is explained by a cartoon graphic that puts a happy face on the threat to individual autonomy.

As I say, prescient stuff, but it takes wading through some clumsy satire to get there. The basic premise of the film is that Dr. Schaefer, being privy to top-secret information as the analyst-on-call for (we assume) Lyndon Baines Johnson, is deemed a security risk — especially when he slips out from under the clutches of his keepers. Whereupon every government in the world wants to kidnap him for the intel he possesses. The only way in which Coburn’s character avoids detection is to join up with a band of hippies making their way across the country. Their van decor, fashion sense, and slang are as groovy as you might fear.

Screenwriter and director Ted Flicker didn’t make many films. He was a TV veteran who scored big in the mid-1970s as co-creator of the hit series “Barney Miller.” Prior to that Flicker was an active hand in the burgeoning improvisational comedy scene, working with talents like Gene Hackman, George Segal, Buck Henry, and Godfrey Cambridge. The latter figures prominently in “The President’s Analyst,” and Cambridge has a grand old time shticking it up with Severn Darden as a pair of competing spies. They’re almost worth the price of admission for this notable, if decidedly ungainly, comedy.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 9, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Vampires in Silent Cinema” by Gary D. Rhodes; published by Edinburgh University Press

Stacia Napierkowska in “Les Vampires” (1915-16); Via Wikimedia Commons
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Where were you during the vampire dance craze of the 1890s? The Famous Hi Henry’s Minstrels were traveling across America showcasing the “Grand Vampire Transformation Dance” to enthusiastic audiences. The good ladies of Massachusetts, eager to catch a wave, sashayed across the stage as only the undead can do wearing a saucy melange of stars, spangles, and loose skirts. In Britain, a gender-bending comedic performer, Nellie Navette, wasn’t to be outdone, doing her variation of the “Vampire Dance” while dressed as a bat.

After petering out toward the beginning of the new century, the vogue found renewed vigor around 1909, having been influenced by the notoriety of a painting by Edward Burne-Jones, “The Vampire” (1897); a concomitant poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling; and a drama, “A Fool There Was,” by an American playwright, Porter Emerson Browne. It was through Browne’s stage production that the notion of “the vamp” gained popular currency. Theda Bara, wouldn’t you know, starred as the lead in the 1915 film version.

Those curious as to what vampire dancing entailed are recommended to Loïe Fuller’s performance in an eponymous 1905 short film in which the American dancer manipulates a bodysuit made of flowing silks. A more provocative variation can be seen in the second episode of “Les Vampires” (1915-16), a French crime serial in which Stacia Napierkowska struts her stuff in a skin-tight bat costume. Should you want to learn more about this peculiar fad, it can be gleaned from “Vampires in Silent Cinema,” by Gary D. Rhodes, professor of media at Oklahoma Baptist University. 

Mr. Rhodes has done his due diligence as a researcher and is set on doing some scholarly house-cleaning: “The word ‘vampire’ is enough to generate excitement in some historians who may not be all that exacting.” Eager to clarify the subject at hand, Mr. Rhodes devotes the first chapter to righting the historical record, noting the difficulty in doing so. The medium at the time was “evolving … and its relationship to later film practices might well be one of the reasons it can be hard to read properly.”

Cinematic vampire fans are a hardcore bunch who’ve proven capable of faking the historical record. Mr. Rhodes recounts the story of “Drakula” (1920), a Russian version of Bram Stoker’s novel first mentioned in the pages of a 1963 issue of “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” After speaking to the unlikelihood that the Soviets would dedicate time and resources to a horror story by a British author, Mr. Rhodes cites a 2012 item from a Russian website that highlighted a Russian-Ukrainian picture that included an odd production note describing “Drakula” as “not horror, but horror.”

Poster for “Drakula halála” (1924); Via Wikimedia Commons
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Then, in 2013, a three-minute fragment of “Drakula” was posted on YouTube. Allegedly discovered somewhere in Serbia, the video is a scene of the first meeting between Jonathan Harker and Dracula, here seen as a Rasputin-like figure with long gray locks and an extravagant mustache. Eight years later, another video from the movie was posted online, a two-minute fragment that was found, it was said, just outside of Kyiv. Mr. Rhodes puts paid to their authenticity. The first segment was anachronistic and clearly a forgery; the latter film contained footage from the least vampiric of sources, “The Newark Athlete” (1891).

Still, Russia does get credit for “The Afterlife Wanderer” (1915). In it, Olga Baclanova plays Vera, a young innocent who is cursed with vampirism because “she loved life too much.” The Russian press wasn’t thrilled with it: “Whoever wrote a screenplay like ‘The Afterlife Wanderer’ should burn with shame all his life.” With an almost audible sigh of gratitude, Mr. Rhodes points to the film as the first true depiction of a vampire in cinema history.

The book culminates with individual chapters devoted to “Drakula halála” (1921), “London After Midnight” (1917), and “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” (1922). The first two films have been lost and exist only as, respectively, a novella and a series of still photos. Mr. Rhodes includes the entire text of “Drakula halála,” an adaptation that is more redolent of the spirit of the Bram Stoker novel than its particulars. Cinemaphiles will note that the original screenplay was co-written by Kertész Mihály, who later achieved immortality as the director of “Casablanca” under the name Michael Curtiz.

F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” is the lodestar of Dracula pictures. Is there anything left to say about this much mooted artifact? Mr. Rhodes, recognizing the film’s ubiquity, approaches it in a novel manner: imagining what it might have been like to attend the movie’s premiere at Berlin’s Marmasol Theater, “when not a single scratch appeared on a pristine print that advanced through a film projector, its teeth sinking into Nosferatu’s sprocket holes with each turn of the take-up reel.”

Although the chapter is abundant in qualifiers, the author grounds his opening night recreation on a raft of newspaper articles to intriguing effect. Should you be a detail-oriented fan consumed by the trials, tribulations, and transformations of the undead — a term the good professor spends some time unpacking — “Vampires in Silent Cinema” comes recommended.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 7, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“The Roaring Twenties”

James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in “The Roaring Twenties”(1939); Via the Criterion Collection
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The year 1939 is often cited as Hollywood’s finest moment, as proof positive that mercantilism (the studio system) and aesthetics (good movies) are mutually compatible. Give a casual movie-goer half a tick and he’ll come up with examples like “The Wizard of Oz” or “Gone With the Wind.” Scratch a little harder and you might hear about “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or “Stagecoach.” The list is long and deep.

Add “The Roaring Twenties” to this accounting. The Criterion Collection has just released a 4-K restoration of Raoul Walsh’s gangland epic on Blu-Ray and DVD. Among the extras included in the package is an interview with a former Sun critic, Gary Giddins, and audio commentary by a biblical scholar who had a soft spot for crime movies, the late Lincoln Hurst.

“If you had the two of them in the same picture,” Walsh noted when speaking about “The Roaring Twenties,” “you knew that you had good audience interest in the conclusion of this picture.” How could you not with a film that featured both James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart? “When you have a man like Jimmy Cagney in a gangster picture, he would give an approach that nobody else can handle.” Walsh’s take on Bogart ran along similar lines.

Walsh made a distinction between the film’s two stars and coevals like Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Gregory Peck. The latter were, for all intents and purposes, sacrosanct: the audience wouldn’t stand for their characters dying. Yet, as Walsh makes plain, “you could kill a Cagney or a Bogart and still have a successful picture.” Why might that be, do you think? 

James Cagney and Gladys George in “The Roaring Twenties”; Via the Criterion Collection
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The lasting power of first contact and, with it, typecasting shouldn’t be underestimated. Although they assumed a host of non-gangster roles during their careers, both actors made splashes as bad guys: Cagney as an avaricious bootlegger in “Public Enemy” (1931), Bogart as a hoodlum-on-the-run in “The Petrified Forest” (1936). Nor did they shy from playing suspect characters as they grew older: witness Cagney’s turn as a psychotic momma’s boy in “White Heat” (1949) or Bogart’s temperamental screenwriter in “In a Lonely Place” (1951).

Cagney’s character in “The Roaring Twenties” is a variation on his role in “Public Enemy”: Walsh makes that plain when he has Eddie Bartlett crush a cigar into the face of a surly nightclub owner just like Tom Power did with a grapefruit to Mae Clarke in the earlier film. The milieu has shifted to Manhattan from Chicago and the narrative is more varied, particularly in a side-story involving Eddie’s promotion of a singer from Mineola, Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane). Walsh’s tale of bootlegging, betrayal, and murder sometimes takes on the guise of a musical comedy.

The story follows a small cadre of veterans, primarily Bartlett and George Hally (Bogart), as they make their way in a post-war America. Stuck for any kind of work, Bartlett finds his way into bootlegging, using his wits, his muscle, and his ambition to build an empire. In a convenient plot twist, he reconnects with Hally and they partner up to thwart a local mob boss. Inconveniently, at least for Barlett, Hally resents playing second fiddle and doesn’t think twice about ratting out his associate. Honor amongst thieves is thin gruel in Walsh’s universe.

The dialogue throughout is snappy and knowing. Walsh’s direction is almost surreptitiously fluid and his handling of violence stark. Even when the story lapses in motivation or rationale, the cast is there to right the course of events. A secret ingredient is Gladys George as the world-weary, wise-cracking, and lovelorn chanteuse, Panama Smith. She and Cagney have a crisp rapport, and when Panama tells Eddie a home truth about love, Walsh focuses the camera on Cagney for an extended reaction shot that is heartbreaking in its understatement. 

Which only goes to confirm Walsh’s opinion on Cagney and his singular, cocksure talent. Although “The Roaring Twenties” isn’t necessarily the best work by all those concerned, the work they’ve done in it is part-and-parcel of why movie fans treasure them. If you’re curious as to why Cagney, Bogart, Walsh, and George are big shots — that is, by the way, an insider reference for fans of the picture — this is a good place to start.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 6, 2024 edition of “The New York Sun.”

“Fleischer Cartoons: The Art and Inventions of Max Fleischer” at the Museum of Modern Art

Scene from “The Runaway” (1924); Via Fleischer Toons
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Observers of pop culture weary of the controversies surrounding Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of “Snow White” can seek some reprieve by going back to the source. No, not the studio’s full-length original “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” (1937) or, for that matter, the fairy tale that was codified in print by the Brothers Grimm. I’m talking about “Snow-White” (1933), a seven-minute black-and-white cartoon featuring the inimitable Betty Boop.

Whether Boop can be considered a “girl boss” or any such paragon of umpteenth-generation feminism is a distinction I’ll leave to more enlightened minds to determine. Still, it should be noted that the creepoid scion of the patriarchy — you know, Prince Charming — is nowhere to be seen. Instead, this “Snow-White” is graced by the vocal talents of Cab Calloway, who sings the harrowing blues song “St. James Infirmary” in the guise of Betty’s pal, Koko the Clown.

“Snow-White” is one of six “greatest hits” that will be featured at the Museum of Modern Art on the opening night of “Fleischer Cartoons: The Art and Inventions of Max Fleischer.” It won’t be the only opportunity during the series that New Yorkers will get to enjoy Calloway’s music or, for that matter, his moves. “Minnie the Moocher” (1932) and “The Old Man on the Mountain” (1933) also feature Calloway, albeit reinvented through rotoscoping, a manner of animation involving the tracing of live action elements. 

There is, then, an element of naturalism informing some of the most unnatural cartoons committed to film. Take “Snow-White,” in which Calloway is transformed into a ghostly figure with looping, elastic legs. The distortions of form are wild; their basis in the real, unimpeachable. The ultimate effect is unnerving. Chills can’t help but go up the spine upon watching this raucously over-the-top entertainment.

Max Fleischer and Bimbo; Via Alamy
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The rotoscope was invented by Max Fleischer, one of six children born to Jewish emigres who made their way to New York City from Kraków. An inveterate tinkerer, Max’s interest in new technologies corresponded with a gift for drawing: He was, for a time, staff cartoonist for the Brooklyn Eagle. 

Max’s brother Dave had been working as a filmcutter at a film production and distribution concern, Pathé Exchange. A deal to make cartoons with Pathé fell through, so the brothers went on to work at Bray Studios, a concern headed by an old friend of Max’s, fellow cartoonist John Randolph Bray. The series of resulting short animated films collectively titled “Out of the Inkwell” would prove hugely influential. Their innovations and humor redound to this day.

“The Tantalizing Fly” (1919), among the earliest surviving Bray efforts, gives a good idea of the imaginative scope of the Fleischer Brothers. The picture opens with Max — not animated, but live action — at his drawing board and dipping his pen into the inkwell. As he attempts to draw a clown (in actuality, a rotoscoped Dave), a fly keeps alighting on the page. The resulting contretemps between the three protagonists forms a resolutely modern play on the metaphorical capabilities of illusion, in just under 4 minutes. The movie is dazzling in its virtuosity and very funny.

The films made by the Fleischers would become more virtuosic as they gained in popularity, with spectacular innovations in animation coupled with a sense of humor that was increasingly, to poach adjectives from MoMA’s curator, Dave Kehr, merciless, phantasmagorical, and ferocious. In other words, these ain’t Disney pictures, folks: they’re too manic, too surreal, and, according to some lights, profoundly Jewish. 

Whatever else they might be, Fleischer Brothers cartoons are masterpieces of the artform. I’m sorry to report that the nine Superman cartoons Max and Dave put their hands to are nowhere in evidence, and that the adventures of Popeye are limited to a single outing, “Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor” (1936). Still, this technicolor film is gorgeous, tuneful, and hilarious — indeed, a greatest hit. “Fleischer Cartoons” confirms that Max and Dave were, to quote Sindbad and Popeye, “most remarkable, extraordinary fella[s].”

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 4, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Archibald J. Motley Jr., “Blues” (1929); Via Mara Motley, MD, and Valerie Gerrard Browne
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The American painter Archibald J. Motley Jr. (1891-1981) is likely best known for his multi-figure compositions depicting the variousness of Black life in America — of backroom card games, elegant formal dinners, “holy rollers” in church, bustling commercial thoroughfares, and rambunctious jazz clubs. 

The paintings are luminous and funny, bumptious in their forms, often lurid in ambiance and velvety in tactility. Canvases like “Blues” (1929), “Black Belt” (1934), and “Nightlife” (1943) underscore the urbanity that is at the heart of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.”

Whether these are the finest examples of Motley’s oeuvre is a question worth asking. Notwithstanding their considerable appeal, the pictures have always seemed stilted, like inventories of stuff crammed together rather than organic wholes given life. Motley’s cultural investment in the pictures is clear, but was his temperament? 

Take into account the somewhat persnickety personage we see in “Self-Portrait” (circa 1920) or, even better, “The Octoroon Girl” (1925) and the radiant “Brown Girl After the Bath” (1931). The latter two are supernal paintings, each possessed of an equanimity whose quietude did not exclude a frank embrace of sensuality. Notwithstanding the generic titles of each canvas, these are portraits of individuals, hard-won and shaped with exquisite command.

William Henry Johnson, “Woman in Blue” (circa 1943); Via Clark Atlanta University Art Museum
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Motley isn’t the only artist who is seen in abundance during the run of the Met exhibition. James Van Der Zee’s photographs, whether they be of tea time at the beauty parlor or a shoeless street preacher, are, as documents of an era, silky and stern. William Henry Johnson’s chock-a-block portraits, owing as much to vernacular art as to Van Gogh and Soutine, are invariably bracing, and the portraiture of Laura Wheeler Waring, whether it be of an unnamed young woman or Marian Anderson, is of a high order.

You know what’s on view of a lesser or, rather, unnecessary order in “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism”? Pictures by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Kees van Dongen, Chaim Soutine, and Edvard Munch. 

Granted, the exhibition’s intent is to “situate Black artists … as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life.” Denise Murrell, the museum’s Merryl H. and James S. Tisch curator at large and organizer of the show, speaks of how “many New Negro artists spent extended periods abroad and joined the multiethnic artistic circles in Paris, London, and Northern Europe.”

Historical context and artistic comparisons are important, but they’re applied only selectively throughout the installation and, in the end, serve less as a grounding for the Met’s ambitions than a half-hearted, oh-by-the-way inclusion. 

James Van Der Zee, “Couple, Harlem” (1932); Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Is it interesting to learn that Matisse visited jazz clubs on his visits to Manhattan and, from some accounts, hobnobbed with Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong? Absolument, but the corresponding pictures are marooned in this particular outing. Would that Ms. Murrell had placed van Dongen’s “Plumes Blanches” (1910-1912) next to Beauford Delaney’s “Dark Rapture (James Baldwin)” (1941). I mean, talk about “cross cultural affinity.” Such pairings are few and far between.

Be that as it may, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” is a rare creature, an unapologetic crowd pleaser of genuine scholarly merit. Whatever complaints that can be accrued by rote nods to ideological fashion are subsumed by the quality and range of the work itself. Accompanying the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints are a host of documentary items, including copies of The Crisis, a magazine founded by W.E.B. Dubois, and a loop of film featuring Josephine Baker and sundry other nightclub talents.

Let’s hope the success of this venture results in deeper elaborations of individual oeuvres — say, the metaphorical totems of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller or the prismatic symbolism of Aaron Douglas. In the meantime, here is an exhibition of considerable merit, gravity, and joy.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 1, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Japanese Horror” at Film Forum

A scene from “The Face of Another”; Via Janus Films
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“The Face of Another,” a 1966 picture by the Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara, beggars casual description, being a jerry-rigged melange of popular antecedents, existential pontifications, and political underpinnings. The screenplay was adapted by the novelist Kobo Abe from his book of the same name. Teshigahara and Abe had collaborated before, most notably on “Woman of the Dunes” (1965), an arthouse mainstay that earned Teshigahara an Oscar nomination for Best Director. 

He lost to Robert Wise, who helmed “The Sound of Music.” Could there be an entertainment more different in tone and temper than either of the Teshigahara films? American audiences and critics didn’t connect with “The Face of Another,” though it was a sizable hit in Japan. The film’s thematic drift toward fatigue, demoralization, and self-doubt likely resonated with audiences for whom the aftermath of World War II was, if not necessarily fresh, then resonant.

One doesn’t have to go out too far on a metaphorical limb to find a linkage between the film’s emphasis on bodily damage and the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Then there are the oddments of Germanic culture weaving their way through the proceedings, from a soundtrack that features Tōru Takemitsu’s take on a Viennese waltz to scenes that take place in a beer hall named München. Teutonic heraldry of a vaguely militaristic sort is present and repeatedly underscored.

“The Face of Another” is one of some two-dozen films featured in “Japanese Horror,” a series mounted by Film Forum. How frightening is Teshigahara’s movie? There’s not much in the way of jump scares — the contemporary litmus test of the genre — but a whole lot that is discomfiting. Wheedling their way through the film are influences as diverse as “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920), “The Invisible Man” (1931), “Mad Love” (1935), and, especially, George Franju’s haunting “Eyes Without A Face” (1960).

Kyōko Kishida, Tatsuya Nakadai, and Mikijirō Hira in “The Face of Another”; Via Janus Films
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Our protagonist, Mr. Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai), has recently suffered an industrial accident that has left his face mutilated. Wearing an encompassing bandage around his head, he’s become bitter, dismissive, and caustic — not least because his wife (Machiko Kyō) does her best to avoid him. Okuyama’s psychiatrist (an impenetrable Mikijirō Hira) has been experimenting with a procedure in which a synthetic substance can be molded into an approximation of human flesh. There’s no time like the present to put it into effect.

Once the surgery is complete, Okuyama acquires a different face and, with that, takes on some curious ideas. Among the most unsettling is a proposed attempt to seduce his wife under these new circumstances. Concurrent with the main narrative is a story of disfigurement, loneliness, and lust in which a young, beautiful, and flagrantly scarred woman (Eiko Muramatsu) attempts to navigate a befuddling and often hostile world. All the while Teshigahara shuffles the deck with a bevy of cinematic flourishes that only go to amplify the film’s weird digressions. 

Place “The Face of Another” alongside the original “Godzilla” (1954) as one country’s response to the disasters of war. Other films on the docket reach further back in time, at times hundreds of years. 

The most compelling of the bunch are “Ugetsu” (1953), “Onibaba” (1964), and “Kuroneko” (1968), all of which are medieval in their settings, drenched in atmosphere, and powered by folklore. “Onibaba” is a barebones masterpiece about womanly comradeship that can alternately be read as a feminist parable or metaphysical fairy tale. Again, it’s not a scary movie per se, but it does trade in a silky brand of supernatural unease.

Scene from “Onibaba”; Via Janus Films
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Director Kaneto Shindo’s script is typical of Japanese horror films in that it’s prone to philosophical portent and, ultimately, possesses more layers than you might initially give it credit for. Blessed with stunning cinematography — in this case, by Kiyomi Kuroda, who also worked on “Kuroneko” — “Onibaba” would make a potent double-bill with “Face of Another”: The films’ key motif is masks and their ability to transform those wearing them. 

There’s more to Japanese horror films than men in rubber monster suits destroying downtown Tokyo. Film Forum is offering an exemplary program to discover for yourself what that “more” might be.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the March 1, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Pitch People”

Al Spino in ‘Pitch People.’ Via SJPL Films
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It’s fairly common knowledge that “Aida” is a 19th-century opera by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. Did you know it’s also a business strategy that was put into practice by an ace pitchman, Jerry Crowley? “Aida,” in this case, serves as an acronym for “attention, interest, desire, action” — the latter being the transmission of both a bargain too-good-to-be-true and a fistful of cold hard cash.

“Pitch People,” a documentary by Stanley Jacobs, is having its New York City premiere this coming Friday at Village East Cinema, some 25 years after its completion. Why the delay? Although it made the festival circuit back in 1999, the picture was never picked up for distribution. It took a worldwide pandemic, as well as the advent of streaming platforms, for Mr. Jacobs to take the film out of storage and give it a proper airing.

What is a “pitchman?” New Yorkers who have frequented the Union Square Greenmarket over the years may recall an elderly British gent who had a way with vegetable peelers, Joe Ades. Sitting on the curbside and keeping an eye out for Greenmarket officials — Ades never filed for a permit to vend his wares — he would regale curious passersby, in his mellifluous Manchester accent, with the miraculous capabilities of his product.

Ades was a grafter, the British term for a person of industriousness and ambition. You might be forgiven for thinking the word bears a close resemblance to “grifter,” an association Mr. Jacobs doesn’t altogether dispel. Still, the director keeps things light, opening with a scene from “The Inspector General” (1949), wherein Danny Kaye plays a snake oil salesman. Less manicured film clips follow, including a hugely unconvincing Indian chief extolling the health benefits of “Dr. Killpain’s Famous Stomach Bitters.”

Lester Morris circa 1950 in “Pitch People”; Via SJPL
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“You could go back in biblical days,” one of many featured salesmen, John Worsley, says, “and there were guys behind tables pitching or hawking something.” Elsewhere, pitching is posited, with a wink and a nod, as the second oldest profession. It also made good as a family business, if the Morris clan of Asbury Park, New Jersey, is an indication. 

Lester and Arnold Morris talk about their father, Nat, in terms that are admiring all the while admitting that his parenting style was strict. A day working with dad had Arnold crying: “But, boy, I’ll tell you, I never made the same mistake twice.” Tough he may have been, but Nat did invent the Morris Metric slicer, the crazy straw, and, in so many words, the infomercial. 

The villains of the piece, to the extent that anyone is villainous, are the Popeil family. Seymour Popeil was Nat Morris’s nephew and, to hear tell of it, “the same as anybody else: He was a hustler.” Seymour established his own business in Chicago, manufacturing kitchen gadgets that were a bit more high end and a bit more expensive. He went on to ensure his place in history by adding the word “-matic” to his products, i.e., the vegematic. Lawsuits ensued between Popeil and the Morris family; perhaps there was a certain amount of envy, as well.

Other than Ron Popeil, the name casual television watchers might recognize is Ed McMahon. Johnny Carson’s sidekick worked his way through college during the 1940s pitching vegetable slicers on the boardwalk at Atlantic City. A 1986 clip from “The Tonight Show” has McMahon rattling off his patter like he’d been doing it yesterday: “I know a woman in Bayonne, New Jersey, who cut a tomato so slim it lasted all summer long!”

“Pitch People” ends on an equivocal note. Over the strains of Bruce Springsteen’s “Sandy,” various pitchmen, none of them young, muse about the fate of their craft as the 20th century was drawing to a close. An actress who specialized in being the incredulous housewife in a number of infomercials, Nancy Nelson, says that the social good contributed by pitchmen is “not a big deal, but it’s nice.” The same could be said for Mr. Jacobs’s affable and entertaining documentary.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 29, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY

Beatrix Potter illustration for ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit.’ Via Wikimedia Commons
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What is your favorite moment from the 20 or so children’s books written by Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)? At the press preview for an exhibition on the British author that recently opened at the Morgan Library & Museum,  “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature,” the curator and department head of literary and historical manuscripts, Robert H. Taylor, ended his opening remarks by reading from “The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher,” to wit: “And instead of a nice dish of minnows—they had a roasted grasshopper with lady-bird sauce; which frogs consider a beautiful treat; but I think it must have been nasty!”

Which is just about perfect when contemplating Potter’s admixture of naturalism and fantasy, of animal appetites and animals acting like people.

One of the many highlights of “Drawn to Nature” is a delicate watercolor-and-pencil rendering from about 1895 titled “The Rabbit’s Dream.” Likely predicated on Potter’s pet rabbit Peter Piper, the piece features a bunny snugly tucked into a four-poster bed. Surrounding this scene is a halo of rabbits drawn from life. Direct observation was key to Potter’s genteel brand of anthropomorphism.

As for drawing, so, too, for story. Writing in the catalog, a librarian at Exeter Cathedral, Emma Laws, notes that “the enduring appeal of [Potter’s] fictional characters … owes something to the fact that underneath their clothes they are real animals.” Notwithstanding the appealing nature of the characters — please, let’s not call them “cute” — their protagonists operate in a realm in which nature is, if not absolute in its dispassion, then given to its wiles.

Peter Rabbit’s father, you’ll remember, went to his great reward after having suffered “an accident” occasioned by Mr. McGregor, after which Mrs. McGregor baked père Rabbit into a pie. Elsewhere, canine shopkeepers ponder the economic consequences of eating their customers and two porcine aunties, having led “uneventful lives,” end up on the breakfast table. Potter wrote that “the secret of the success of Peter Rabbit, it was written to a child–not made to order.” Most adults, she knew, underestimate the imaginative capabilities of children.

A Beatrix Potter letter to a child, August 21, 1892; Via Wikimedia Commons
* * *

“Drawn to Nature” was organized by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and is part-and-parcel of a range of programs mounted in honor of the Morgan’s centennial anniversary. The exhibition includes a number of “picture letters” from the Morgan’s own collection, each of which offers correspondence punctuated by drawings, many of them tiny. Look for the haiku-like jotting of the author striding matter-of-factly away from a man holding her portfolio. The accompanying text — “I think Miss Potter will go off to another publisher soon!” — is, in this context, all but redundant.

In an eight-page letter, dated September 4, 1893, Potter wrote to the 5-year-old son of her former governess, Annie Moore, in which she recounted the adventures of a family of rabbits. Moore returned the letter, encouraging Potter to flesh out the story. After revising it into book form, the story was subsequently submitted to, and rejected by, half-a-dozen publishers. The seventh time proved the charm for “The Tale of Peter Rabbit.” The rest, as it is said, is history.

The Morgan has filled out that history in a handsome manner, providing an origin story (a sketchbook by 10-year-old Beatrice), influences (William Henry Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Randolph Caldecott), a smattering of academic drawings (look for the astonishingly nuanced “Sole of a nail-studded Roman shoe”), and myriad studies of fungi. Vintage Potter merch is on display, as well as family photos and our lady’s walking stick.

Among the gifts that Potter bequeathed to posterity was 4,000 acres of land in the Lake District at Northwest England. Now part of the United Kingdom’s National Trust, as well as being a Unesco World Heritage site, this land is the basis for the last portion of “Drawn to Nature,” underscoring how a “splendid reality” could be gleaned from a “quixotic venture.” Which, come to think of it, was the key to Potter’s gift all along, and which this splendid exhibition proves to winning effect.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 26, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“The Bishop and the Butterfly” by Michael Wolraich

* * *

The insect mentioned in the title of “The Bishop and the Butterfly,” a new book by Michael Wolraich, refers to a specific individual: Vivian Gordon, a woman with a knack for poetry, an eye for fashion, and a moral compass whose parameters were generous and, in the end, deadly. Gordon’s body was found at the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park on February 26, 1931. She was 39 years old, the victim of strangulation.

The newspapers, ever fond of alliteration, would dub Gordon “the Broadway butterfly,” but the metaphor cuts more than one way. The murder of this “shakedown artist” would send ripples not only through New York City, but through the entirety of the state and, by fiat, the country. 

In the book’s final paragraph, Mr. Wolraich runs through a number of historical “what if’s” should Gordon’s death not have been the subject of tabloid interest and consequent government reform. Her spirit, he writes, “is one small forgotten thread in the glorious tapestry of New York City.”

So, yes, the butterfly effect unfolds with the inexorable logic of hindsight during the course of “The Bishop and the Butterfly,” an engrossing, sometimes heart-breaking, and invariably jaw-dropping read. Mr. Wolraich has a journalist’s eye for the telling detail and a novelist’s knack for the salacious, the colorful, and the too good to be true. Or, perhaps it is better said, too bad to be fictional. 

Although there is a putative hero in the story — that would be the “bishop,” lawyer Samuel Seabury — “The Bishop and the Butterfly ” is rife with scoundrels, miscreants and opportunists. These can be raffish (Mayor Jimmy Walker), cunning (defense lawyer Samuel Liebowitz), or pathological (Harry Stein). 

Polly Adler, a high-end procuress whose clientele included the literary wits of the Algonquin Club, is in the mix, as is Joseph Force Crater, a New York state supreme court justice who vanished into thin air in 1930 and whose case remains open to this day.

Did Crater meet his fate in Vivian Gordon’s Murray Hill apartment? That was the opinion of an unidentified gangster quoted in the Daily News. He claimed that Gordon had accidentally killed Crater and then sent for a pair of thugs to get rid of the body. The judge, having previously enjoyed Gordon’s favors, had been invited over in order to be blackmailed.

This hypothesis is unproven but not unreasonable: Gordon long had a strategy of extorting money from her paramours. Detectives would later discover Gordon’s little black book, a ledger that contained the names, numbers, and addresses of some 560 men. Among them were gangsters, politicians, jurors, Broadway producers, and businessmen with noms de plume like “the baking powder playboy” and “the candy Croesus.” 

All of which doesn’t begin to cover the ground Mr. Wolraich traverses throughout this Byzantine story of dirty pool, tarnished reputations, and jurisprudential comeuppance. The back-slapping machinations of Tammany Hall are front and center. At its periphery is that most consummate of politicians, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Upstanding actors are few and far between, but they do exist and their tenaciousness is, in the end and against significant odds, constructive. 

“The Bishop and the Butterfly” is eminently readable and outrageously colorful, a true-life thriller in which no stone, however seamy or compromised, is left unturned.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 25, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Drift”

Cynthia Erivo in “Drift”; Via Utopia
* * *

The crystalline waters and gruff bonhomie of Greece are a far cry from the provinces of China, but Singapore-born director Anthony Chen has traversed those locales in his two recent films, “The Breaking Ice” and, now, “Drift.” 

The change in locale isn’t the only thing that’s different. “Drift” is Mr. Chen’s first English-language film, but not, as reports have it, his last. The next picture, “Secret Daughter,” will take Mr. Chen to America and India. If we must have globalism, best that it be embodied in the hands of a humanist gifted with a gentle, meditative touch. Mr. Chen is that man.

“Drift” is based on the novel “A Marker to Measure Drift” by Alexander Maksik, who collaborated on the screenplay with Susanne Farrell. The setting is an unnamed Greek island — a keen-eyed acquaintance pegs it as an amalgam of different parts of the country — and the subject is the psychological dislocations of being a refugee. 

Except that Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo) isn’t the kind of refugee we’ve been reading about in news reports for close to a decade now. Jacqueline hails not from the Middle East, but the West African country of Liberia. How she arrived in Greece is never explained, nor why it is that Jacqueline ended up in Greece in particular. Yet there she is, on a beach — bereft of money, housing, and friends.

Alia Shawkat and Cynthia Erivo in “Drift”; Via Utopia
* * *

Life in Liberia is explained through a series of flashbacks. Jacqueline’s father is an official in the government. The family travels among the privileged classes. A machine gun-wielding security detail at their spacious home hints at a level of societal unrest. The township surrounding their house confirms it, what with the troubling incidents seen from the back window of the family’s chauffeured limousine. Jacqueline, on break from school at London, could not have returned at a worse time.

But that was then and this is now. Jacqueline trawls the beaches of Greece for a safe place to sleep. She earns extra cash by giving foot massages to tourists on the beach using olive oil cribbed from a nearby taverna. This statuesque woman with the British accent otherwise remains aloof from those around her — not least, African street vendors and the police. She sleeps in a cave and is diligent about her hygiene. Jacqueline makes a point of keeping her dignity.

Jacqueline’s presence does not go unnoticed. An American tour guide, Callie (Alia Shawkat from “Arrested Development”), strikes up a conversation with Jacqueline while her charges are given time to walk amongst the ruins at an archeological site. If Jacqueline is something of a mystery, by turns intensely aloof and emotionally scattered, Callie is forthright and generous. Still, her outgoing nature can’t disguise an air of loneliness.

A mutual need for companionship, and perhaps more, powers the second half of “Drift.” Truth to tell, once Ms. Shawkat enters the proceedings, the film gains in traction. To say as much is less a slight on Ms. Erivo’s performance than it is a marker of a script that keeps Jacqueline at too much of a distance for too long. Mr. Maksik and Ms. Farrell overplay Jacqueline’s anomie to a point where the audience, though keyed into the circumstances behind her erratic and sometimes self-defeating behavior, becomes exasperated.

Waylaying sympathy is a questionable dramatic device. If Mr. Chen ultimately brings Jacqueline’s emotional reawakening to a kind of fruition, it comes at the cost of a film whose internal rhythms are alternately too measured and too fractured to establish a convincing sense of compassion. As a result, we admire “Drift” less for its accomplishments than for its ambitions.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 7, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Here”

Liyo Gong and Stefan Gota in “Here”; Via Cinema Guild
* * *

It’s bad form, we have repeatedly been cautioned, to judge a book by its cover, but can one judge a film by its intertitles? After a typical array of flashy production credits, “Here,” the new film by Belgian director Bas Davos, reiterates that information with small, non-declarative type conspicuously situated toward the upper left of the blackened screen. A dedication, “For Eric,” follows in the same location and at the same scale.

When the movie’s title appears three minutes in, it is placed toward the bottom of the screen in lowercase letters with the “r” reversed. The usage of typography should be part and parcel of a movie’s aesthetic, and anti-ostentatious design needn’t be a sign of affectation. Yet much like the trend of not using capital letters when citing one’s proper name, there can be a coyness, a self-regarding préciosité, to the flouting of commonplaces.

Mr. Davos’s softly stated titles are indicative of the aesthetic he brings to his cinematic endeavors. He’s not as arch as Wes Anderson, nor is he as mannered as Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Mr. Davos is gentler than both, but he shares with them a notion of filmmaking that underscores contrivance at the diminition of narrative. This is another way of saying that the story in “Here” wanders. It’s a movie so laconic it can’t help but prompt frustration.

There is a story in “Here” — a pretty good one, too. It’s a film about emigres that’s also about human connection and, perhaps, love, though the latter takes its time coming to any sort of fruition. 

The film begins with the camera doting on a construction site in a desultory corner of Brussels, after which we are introduced to Stefan (Stefan Gota), a worker who is getting ready for an upcoming holiday break. He’ll be going to Romania on a family visit. Stefan’s first priority before leaving: emptying the fridge.

Gathering together odds-and-sods that haven’t yet spoiled, Stefan makes a pot of soup and distributes portions to his friends, his mechanic, and his sister. Strolling through the city for miles on end, he’s notable not only for the ever-present container of soup, but a pair of shorts that displays a distinct lack of savoir faire. When visiting his sister Anca (Alina Constantin), Stefan intimates that he might not return to Brussels after his trip.

Even the best laid plans of someone as noncommittal as Stefan are worth taking with a grain of salt. This isn’t the case with Shuxiu (Liyo Gong), a young Belgian woman of Chinese descent, and a professor of botany at an unnamed college. Before we see Shuxiu, we hear her voice. The young woman’s thoughts filter over the soundtrack, waxing philosophically upon waking from a deep sleep: “The names of things came back, like a wave crashing over me.”

Greenery figures heavily in “Here,” and not just the array of mosses that Shuxiu, a trained bryologist, extracts samples from in a public park. Mr. Davos punctuates the film with long takes of leaves and bushes and trees and foliage through which light keens and breezes blow. What this all connotes is hard to discern. In the accompanying press materials, Mr. Davos frets about an “ailing planet,” but his static panoramas of the natural world feel less like poetry and more like padding.

Mr. Davos, who also wrote the screenplay, is more generous with Shuxiu as a character, creating a woman of scope, ambition and kindness. Stefan, in contrast, is an enigma bordering on a cipher. When the two inadvertently cross paths, not once but twice, we can’t help but cheer on their wary friendship even as we’re left to wonder what it is, exactly, the discerning professor sees in the rootless Romanian. Mr. Gota coasts too much on affectlessness to break out of the movie’s languor. 

Say this much for “Here”: the quiet congeniality of its ending strikes a welcome chord, largely through the efforts of Ms. Gong. Here’s hoping that this engaging young actress’s next venture is as rounded and sure as she is.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 8, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Out of Darkness”

Safia Oakley-Green in “Out of Darkness”; Via Bleecker Street
* * *

Etymologists curious about the point of origination for curse words, particularly the epithet known to polite society as “the F-bomb,” will want to see “Out of Darkness,” director Andrew Cumming’s feature film debut. The introductory title card informs us that the events about to transpire took place 45,000 years ago. At a moment of high tension not long thereafter, the oldest of the picture’s cadre of Paleolithic characters lets fly with the aforementioned four-letter word.

At least, that’s how it is transcribed in the movie’s subtitles. What kind of speech, you might wonder, is at the center of “Out of Darkness”? Mr. Cumming, having fretted that “people are just going to think this is nuts” should our distant forebears be seen speaking the King’s English, asked poet and historian Daniel Andersson to confabulate The Original Language. A grab-bag of Arabic and Basque, TOLA is the means by which our wandering group of cave people communicate. 

The director and his crew also conferred with Rob Dinnis, a professor of archeology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Dr. Dinnis was the co-author, along with Chris Stringer, of “Britain: One Million Years of Human History” (2014), a book that corresponded with an exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum. “The view of primitive, club-wielding cavemen … has been rejected in  scientific circles for many years now.” Mr. Cumming was intent on making our out-of-date forebears as up-to-date as possible.

We are, then, far afield from Raquel Welch and her animal-skin bikini made famous in “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) and other entertainments predicated on misapplied notions. Given the vagaries of historical research, it’s a good bet that some of the conclusions reached by Messrs. Dinnis and Stringer have since been overturned or amended. Still and all, their expertise brings a gritty naturalism to “Out of Darkness” — which is, as it turns out, a nifty entertainment.

Chuku Modu and Kit Young in “Out of Darkness.’Via Bleecker Street

The plot is elemental. A group of men and women are searching for shelter and food, necessities that they’ve been without for some time. Ave (Iola Evans) is pregnant and in desperate need of nourishment. She’s carrying the baby of Adem (Chuku Modu), who already has a child, Heron (Luna Mwezi). Adem’s younger brother Geirr (Kit Young) accompanies the clan, as do two outliers: Odal (Arno Lüning), the oldest of the bunch, and Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), a “stray” picked up along the trail.

Complications arise. If the lack of game and edible flora is problematic, it’s nothing compared to a presence located within the darkened woods, a shrieking entity whose encounters with the group prove, to put it gently, decisive. When Heron is snatched from the clutches of the night, Adem charges into the woods on a rescue mission. Odal suggests that the demons in the forest require a sacrifice to allow safe passage. Other sacrifices, most of them extreme, follow suit.

“Out of Darkness” is being sold as a horror movie. If your marker for such a designation is things that go bump in the night and a director who cites “Alien” (1979) as an inspiration, then that’s what’s on the docket. Yet the situations, trepidations, and comeuppances experienced by the characters in the film seem, in the end, less monstrous than eminently reasonable for a film about a species doing its best to navigate a strange, dangerous, and wondrous world.

And wondrous the Paleolithic age definitely is, particularly under the lens of director of photography Ben Fordesman, who transforms the Scottish Highlands into a Stone Age dreamscape with a suppleness worthy of Caravaggio. Sound designer Paul Davies elaborates on the ambience of the natural world with preternatural concision. As for Mr. Cumming: He navigates through the abiding artifices of cinema as if it were a second skin. “Out of Darkness” is a sleeper.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 9, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Pandora’s Box”

Louise Brooks and Sig Arno in “Pandora’s Box”; Via Janus Films
* * *

How does a director best cull a performance from an actor? One Austrian filmmaker, G.W. Pabst, encouraged enmity and distance on the set in the hopes that his players would bring a concomitant ferocity to their performances. At least, that was the story told by the actress Louise Brooks (1906-85) in her 1982 biography “Lulu in Hollywood.” Pabst “was not aroused by sexual love … it was sexual hate that engrossed his whole being with its flaming reality,” she wrote.

A casual observer could be forgiven for questioning the efficacy of “flaming reality,” but there’s no doubting that Pabst was significant in cementing Brooks’s claim on history. After kicking around Broadway and Hollywood for close to a decade, the actress traveled to Europe looking for more rewarding film roles. The two films the 23-year-old Kansan made with Pabst, “Pandora’s Box” (1929) and “Diary of a Lost Girl” (1929), found her working in a milieu in which she “was treated with a kind of decency and respect unknown to me,” Brooks wrote.

Film Forum will be hosting a new 4K restoration of “Pandora’s Box” beginning on February 14, presumably as a postscript to its recent series of lesbian-centric movies, “Sapph-O-Rama.” Among the indelible figures in the film is Countess Augusta Geschwitz (Alice Roberts), a lesbian without apology and a character who longs for Lulu, the role played by Brooks. Contemporary viewers, particularly those who’ve had little experience with early cinema, will likely be taken aback by how forthrightly Pabst and Roberts present the good countess.

It’s also a safe bet that 21st century audiences will be taken aback by Brooks. No flamboyant gesticulations, exaggerated expressions, or stilted confrontations here, but, rather, an actress — a presence, really — of remarkable magnetism. Chalk it up to her sleek beauty and that signature bob haircut, sure, but don’t discount Brooks’s uncanny naturalism. Few actors have been as unfettered in front of the camera. Although her modernity is typically associated with the Roaring Twenties, Brooks is no poster girl for a bygone age. She’s forever fresh, startling in her contemporaneity — she still shocks.

Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box”; Via Janus Films
* * *

The modest Midwestern community in which she was raised was not remembered fondly by Brooks, being a place in which its members “prayed in the parlor and practiced incest in the barn.” But Brooks was driven: She was dancing alongside Martha Graham at age 15, appearing in nary a stitch two years later in the Ziegfeld Follies and signed to Paramount Pictures upon turning 21. She had an array of affairs, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo, and counted W.C. Fields as a close friend.

Hollywood proved too contentious an environment for a contentious young actress. When Pabst heard that Brooks’s contact with Paramount had hit the skids, he forsook casting Marlene Dietrich in the rule of Lulu, dismissing her as “too old and too obvious.” 

Brooks’s esprit, a highly charged mix of naivete and sensuality, fit with the director’s plans to adapt “Earth Spirit” and “Pandora’s Box,” two plays by the German dramatist Frank Wedekind. Was the spotty reception of the film due to its racy content or, as some scholars have suggested, Brooks’ status as an American?

Whatever the case, “Pandora’s Box” survives as a remarkable achievement, a jerry-rigged morality tale that is deeply cynical, not a little misogynistic, and almost ridiculously melodramatic. The story of an avaricious young woman who uses the considerable means at her disposal to get what she wants takes some wild and often wildly erotic turns. 

That Brooks managed to retain a sense of sweetness after having steeped herself in the seedier precincts of Weimar Germany speaks to her hard-won resilience. Those who haven’t made Lulu’s acquaintance are in for a ride.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 12, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Onlookers”

Scene from “Onlookers”; Via KimKat Productions
* * *

“Immersive” is a word many of us have come to hold in suspicion as it has increasingly become a marker of overkill, as if the arts were somehow in need of multimedia sensationalism as a means of reaching the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses. Has the human species become so addled by the technological industrial complex that we’re unable to appreciate the qualities of a book or a painting or a movie without the attendant “interactive” foofaraw?

Alarm bells went off upon my reading the press information accompanying “Onlookers,” the new documentary by Kimi Takesue. Right out of the gate the picture is touted as immersive, being a meditation on “how we all live as observers.” The press notes underscore “the picturesque beauty of the local landscape” — in Ms. Takesue’s film, that would be the country of Laos. 

How, you might wonder, is “Onlookers” more immersive than, say, “Barbie,” which is its own kind of meditation? The clue lies, I think, in “Fire Over Water: Films of Transcendence,” a series mounted by the Metrograph in which Ms. Takesue’s picture will make its U.S. theatrical debut. Centered on cinema’s ability to both prompt and embody metaphorical longings, “Fire Over Water” comprises 12 films by “cinematic explorers” like Michaël Dudok de Wit, Kim Ki-Duk, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Their efforts, we are told, stray from the path of conventional storytelling.

Which is another way of saying that the niceties of plot, character, and dialogue are shucked for long takes, stolid rhythms, and occluded symbolism — all of which are usually keyed to a crystalline emphasis on cinematography. Immersion, here, has more to do with quietude and cultivating distance than dynamism.  

In “Onlookers,” we watch as locals set out their wares for sale or solemnly line up to provide food for a raft of Buddhist monks. The scenes shift between awe-inspiring panoramas of the natural world and the grittier precincts of the city. Our eye navigates each panorama having been prompted by a gently coercive sense of necessity set into motion by the director.

Scene from “Onlookers”; Via KimKat Productions
* * *

Ms. Takesue employs a stationary camera set at a polite length from her subjects. Individual shots run at least 30 seconds with no causal link between them. There’s a strong hint of the theater to the director’s machinations and, with that, a sharp eye for composition and choreography. Given how Ms. Takesue depends on chance incident — upon the wiles, say, of individuals or animals traveling in-and-around the camera’s lens — it’s impressive that there isn’t a bum shot in the movie. At moments, one is reminded of the expansive organizational facility of Pieter Brueghel. 

Describing “Onlookers” as a travelogue is something of a misnomer. Although she plunks us down in the various highways and byways of Laos, Ms. Takesue doesn’t elaborate on the nation’s customs, culture, history, or economy. There is no narration. Whatever dialogue extant is picked up on the fly in conversations between, say, Western tourists backpacking their way through the country. Ambient sounds predominate — chief among them, roosters and automobiles. The sound design, courtesy of Abigail Savage and Tom Efinger, sparkles.

Who are the onlookers referenced in the title? The tourists who wend their ways through the streets of Laos, for sure. The audience, too — that is, after all, in the very nature of being an audience. But Ms. Takesue is the primary onlooker. A camera is only as objective as the person holding it. 

The good citizens of Laos who wander into its purview acknowledge the filmmaker, albeit furtively, and, in a couple of cases, turn away from it. How much thematic and, perhaps, moral culpability does Ms. Takesue take on as a not-so-innocent fly on the wall? It’s to the credit of her ravishing film that we waylay our quibbles until after the final credits roll.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 15, 2024 edition of “The New York Sun.”

“Cig Harvey: Feast” at Robert Mann Gallery

Cig Harvey, “Cherry Cake, Rockport, Maine” (2023); Courtesy Cig Harvey and Robert Mann Gallery
* * *

The photographer Cig Harvey is having a New York moment. She’s one of 14 artists included in “Human/Nature: Encountering Ourselves in the Natural World,” a group show at Fotografiska on Park Avenue South. Even better, Ms. Harvey is having a concurrent solo exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery on the Upper East Side, “Cig Harvey: Feast.”

“Feast” is an exemplary introduction to the British-born photographer who now calls home the hinterlands of Maine. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by a host of commercial galleries across the country. Ms. Harvey’s fourth outing with Mann is up-and-running until April 5.

“Feast” plays off the title conceit in a relatively straightforward manner, what with the work’s emphasis on fruit and cake. Ms. Harvey credits her fascination with the latter to her daughter, who began making extravagant cakes some years back. Taken with the metaphorical capabilities of the subject, as well as the inescapable tension that can accrue between pleasure and guilt, Ms. Harvey began taking pictures. Are the resulting images of sweetmeats the envy of professional food photographers? Likely not: Ms. Harvey’s photos have about them the distinct air of memento mori.

In that regard, the pictures can be slotted within the trajectory of European still-life painting, of objects being employed as symbolic embodiments for the consequences, shortcomings, and rewards of experience. Seventeenth-century Dutch painting is particularly relevant upon considering the meticulous nature of Ms. Harvey’s art. “The Banquet, Camden, Maine” (2023), with its resplendent outlay of foodstuffs illuminated by keening trails of candlelight, would not look out of place next to the stray canvas by Abraham van Beyeren or Rachel Ruysch. Exactitude is the rule; sensation, the leitmotif.

Cig Harvey, “Cake and Dahlias, Camden, Maine” (2023); courtesy Cig Harvey and Robert Mann Gallery
* * *

An appreciation for material sensuality filters through Ms. Harvey’s pictures. Textures are finely wrought; romantic portent is inescapable. As for chroma, though light may be a “physical entity … color is a perception in the brain” that Ms. Harvey brings to almost otherworldly saturation: in the effusion of yellow-green that settles over “Gold Road, Camden, Maine” (2022), say, or the silty violet that is at the core of “Wisteria, Camden, Maine” (2021). There is, in Ms. Harvey’s photos, no divide between the mundane and the magical.

Ms. Harvey’s compositions veer from an acceptance of natural events (a field of flowers; fish in a pond) to the blatantly choreographed: the legs of a young woman in a grassy field or, say, cake placed in a metal box floating in a pond. Either way, the tableaux are weighted with meaning even if the nature of that meaning eludes explicit or rational explanation. 

“Cake and Dahlias, Camden, Maine” (2023) is the most over-the-top of the pictures, being a clustered abundance of sugar, sprinkles, flour, and flora that only begins to hint at impermanence as its contents edge toward the periphery of the composition. Here, Ms. Harvey’s “primal roar” is at its most exorbitant and lush, being of a piece with an exhibition that is, at once, sumptuous and sobering.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 19, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Veselka; The Rainbow at the Center of the World”

Tom and Jason Birchard in “Veselka; The Rainbow at the Center of the World”; Via Fiore Media Group
* * *

Before beginning this review of the new documentary by Michael Fiore, “Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World,” let me give a virtual high-five to the third-generation owner of the venerated Lower East Side eatery name-checked in the title, Jason Birchard.

Toward the beginning of the film, we watch Mr. Birchard standing outside his restaurant on Second Avenue. Seeing a bicycle delivery man barreling down the sidewalk, Mr. Birchard steps in front of him, iterating that “it’s a sidewalk. A sidewalk. That means you walk on the sidewalk. Bike is in the bike [lane].” The bicyclist, mumbling something or the other, decamps and walks his vehicle. 

There are few things that can bond strangers more than a shared pet peeve. In strong-arming the social grace of pedestrian passage, Mr. Birchard emerges as a hero. Has the city been keeping tabs on just how many accidents or, God forbid, fatalities have been caused by those who insist on using sidewalks as their own personal autobahns? It’s enough to make a concerned citizen write a letter to the Mayor’s office….

Then again, given how Mayor Eric Adams comes off in “The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World,” a concerned citizen might think twice about doing so. After being invited to break bread — or, rather, sip borscht — with members of the Ukrainian community, the mayor can hardly concentrate on the issue under discussion: the Russian war on Ukraine. 

As the Ukrainian consul general to New York, Oleksii Holubov, attempts to garner political recognition for the plight of his country, the mayor is distracted: He’s too busy acknowledging wellwishers who have gathered on the pavement directly outside the windows of Veselka. As Mr. Holubov speaks of atrocities, our mayor mugs for the crowd. The resulting frustration on behalf of Messrs. Holubov and Brichard is plain to see.

Poster for “Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World”; Via Fiore Media Group
* * *

It took the arrival of the Ukrainian national baseball team for the mayor to ascend the steps of City Hall and extol “the resiliency of what it is to continue to push forward in spite of all that you are facing.” The players have arrived in New York City for a two-game charity event to help keep Ukraine in the forefront of the news cycle. Mr. Birchard and his staff, a significant number of whom have Ukrainian roots, treat them to a home-cooked meal.

The turn-out for the game at Maimonides Park in Brooklyn is disappointing  — the crowds are sparse and, ultimately, the Ukrainians lose to the NYPD team. Mr. Birchard is philosophical, eager to believe that this effort will instill hope for the players as well as for his staff. Chief among those in need of boosting is Veslkeka’s operations manager, Vitalii. He’s worried about the fate of his mother and grandmother in Ukraine; his behavior is understandably withdrawn.

“Rainbow on the Corner of the Center of the World” is a story about emigres, family, and the repercussions of world events. Wolodymyr Darmochwal, born in a small town called Bolekhiv, left Ukraine in the late 1940s to escape Russian oppression. Darmochwal came to New York City and opened a corner candy store in the center of Manhattan’s Little Ukraine, dubbing it the Ukrainian word for “rainbow,” “Veselka.”

Darmochal’s non-Ukrainian son-in-law, Tom Birchard, dropped out of college in 1966 to help out at the restaurant on what was intended to be a temporary basis. This self-assigned “holding pattern” lasted 54 years; now his son Jason oversees operations. And so the story unfolds: through expansion of the premises and the menu; the punk rock scene and its unexpected benefits; the aftermath of 9/11, Covid, and, now, war.

Is it necessary to hurl critical brickbats at what is a valentine to a long-standing and much-beloved ethnic outpost? Cavils about a soundtrack heavy with David Sanborn’s saxophone or Mr. Fiore’s lack of a firm editorial hand are mitigated by the gemütlichkeit of the Birchard family and the generosity they extend to their staff, their diners, and, through their charitable efforts, the citizens of Ukraine.

If Mr. Fiore’s picture isn’t as delicious as a night out at Veselka’s, then it’s at least certain to warm the cockles of even the sternest of cineaste hearts.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 22, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Nothing But A Man”

Ivan Dixon in “Nothing But A Man”; Vis the Criterion Collection
* * *

A 1964 film by director Michael Roemer, “Nothing But a Man,” is likely best known for the reason that everyone involved with it is better known for other things. The picture’s male lead, Ivan Dixon, spent five seasons as Sergeant James Kinchloe on the television series “Hogan’s Heroes,” later becoming a film and television director. Another performer, Abbey Lincoln, has a claim on history as a civil rights activist and jazz singer. 

Then there are Julius Harris, who would star in a number of signature Blaxploitation films, including “Superfly” (1972) and “Hell Up in Harlem” (1973), and Yaphet Kotto, who earned worldwide fame for his role as Parker in the smash hit “Alien” (1979). The men would be reunited as Bond villains in “Live and Let Die” (1973), respectively starring as Tee-Hee and Dr. Kananga. “Nothing But a Man” was the first film credit for both actors.

Mr. Roemer, still with us at age 96, isn’t as high-profile. His reputation has, all the same, gained in recent decades, particularly with the rediscovery of “The Plot Against Harry” (1971). The deadpan comedy about gangsters, redemption, and the tsuris that comes with trying to do right by family met with little notice upon its original release. It has since been hailed, rightfully in my estimation, as an absurdist masterwork.

Recently released as a Blu-Ray by the Criterion Collection in a new 4K restoration, “Nothing But a Man” isn’t absurd in the least, but it is similarly unsung and equally as masterful. Although the picture has been acknowledged by any number of critics as well as the Library of Congress, “Nothing But a Man” isn’t necessarily a film that rolls off the tongue when discussing cinematic highlights of the 1960s. 

Given some of the films from that troublesome decade that are touted as milestones — I’m looking at you, “Easy Rider” (1969) — “Nothing But a Man” comes on like a benison. It’s the rare work of art that elaborates on its historical parameters even as it transcends them. As a snapshot of life amongst Black Americans living under trying circumstances and during a time of change, Mr. Roemer’s picture is hard to beat.

Abbey Lincoln and Ivan Dixon in “Nothing But A Man”; Via the Criterion Collection
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The director collaborated on the script with Robert M. Young, who also served as the film’s cinematographer. Having fled Nazi Germany as a child, Mr. Roemer predicated some of his own experience as an oppressed minority into the screenplay. The two men did their legwork, traveling to the American South in what the director dubbed the “Underground Railroad in reverse.” These two Jewish New Yorkers encountered resistance from and threats by members of the white community upon meeting, talking, and staying with African-American families during their travels.

The result of their efforts is a film of stark understatement, of a people coming to terms with shifts in culture that hold promise even as they underline their vulnerability. 

Duff Anderson (Dixon) works on a railroad crew alongside a corps of men given to brassy talk, card playing, and a life of itinerant pleasures. Duff is meditative, soft-spoken, and made of stern stuff. He’s tight-lipped but decisive. Dixon assays the role with terse and often pointed authority. He’s riveting in the part.

Forsaking a night at the pool hall with his buddies, Duff wanders through town and finds himself at a church social. It is there that he meets Josie (Lincoln), a decorous woman in her 20s and, alas for non-believer Duff, the preacher’s daughter. 

Duff is out for some quick action, but Josie’s benevolence and her fortitude leave a mark. Lincoln, in a measured performance, matches Dixon beat for beat in terms of integrity and nuance. Duff and Josie become that rarest of cinematic properties: a real couple.

Duff and Josie undergo significant travails. There’s the disapproval of Josie’s parents to their nuptials and the nagging absence of Duff’s young son, who he abandoned in Memphis. When Duff quits the railroad and starts working construction, he earns the enmity not only of his white bosses but his black comrades, many of whom are disinclined to challenge the status quo. And then there’s Duff’s father, Will (Harris), an alcoholic who spends what little time he has with his son rebuffing any attempt at reconciliation.

“Nothing But A Man” isn’t an easy movie for a variety of reasons, particularly for what it says about race relations in mid-20th century America. Still, the script doesn’t ennoble the characters at the risk of denuding them of their humanity. The rough edges of Mr. Roemer’s made-on-the-cheap movie endows it with a documentary-like verisimilitude that grounds the mise-en-scène and bolsters the drama that accrues from it. 

What we’re left with, in short, is a remarkable achievement, a film of profound insight and welcome charity. Here, in short, is one of the best films of the 1960s and, for that matter, the here-and-now.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 19, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.

“Monolith”

Lily Sullivan in “Monolith”; courtesy Well Go USA
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Having waded through a deluge of press releases during my years as a critic, I’d like to throw down a gauntlet to “creatives” as they look to garner notice for their paintings, their songs, their movies, their music, their whatevers: Let’s see if we can make what remains of 2024 a year free of convoluted jargon, political hand-wringing, and hard-charging theoretical nostrums.

You know what I’m talking about, the litany of social justice platitudes that presumably gloss the subject at hand with an impenetrable sheen of righteousness. Avoiding such cant will be tough, I know, but crafting a press bulletin minus the inescapable frisson of guilt-mongering is a challenge worth considering. It might even convince your audience that pleasure needn’t be inherently suspect.

All of which was prompted by director Mike Vesely’s comments about his new film “Monolith.” 

Here he is setting down the underpinnings of his picture: “The Western World … is built on these crimes — colonization, exploitation, domination — and only continues to exist as-is through willful ignorance and a fear of the unknown.” He goes on to say that “perhaps to move forward … we’re going to have to burn everything down.” Doubtless, he’d like that moment to arrive after his movie hits the theaters.

Forget, for a moment, the narrow intellectual prism by which Mr. Vesely posits Western civilization. Consider, instead, his cinematic colleague, screenwriter Lucy Campbell. Although she does go on about privilege and truth (“whatever that means”), Ms. Campbell talks about the excitement she felt working with Mr. Vesely and producer Bettina Hamilton. Why? Because they are “two of the biggest, loudest sci-fi nerds I have ever met.”

Lily Sullivan in “Monolith”; Via Well Go USA
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Now we’re talking: Never underestimate the initiative of nerds committed to a common cause. Not that “Monolith” is without serious undercurrents; memory and hubris are two of the themes touched upon in its narrative. Still, Ms. Campbell’s script is crisp and clever, and Mr. Vesely keeps things tight, tense, and brisk. Most importantly, they’ve prompted a bravura performance from the movie’s star, Lily Sullivan.

Not only is Ms. Sullivan the star of “Monolith,” she is, in fact, the only actor in the picture. Although we are privy to dialogue with other characters, we experience them only as voices over the phone or online. Ms. Sullivan’s character, a journalist known only to us as The Interviewer, is front-and-center throughout the entire film. Similarly, the story takes place in a single locale: a sleek house situated in the far reaches of the Australian countryside. 

Our heroine is holed up in what turns out to be her parents’ house after having committed a career-killing ethical gaffe. Attempting to put her foot back in the game, she’s hosting a podcast of dubious integrity and sensationalistic mien. When an email arrives detailing what sounds like some weird confluence of art heist and otherworldly influence, the Interviewer’s curiosity is piqued. After a package arrives on her doorstep that contains a thumb drive featuring a home movie from her 9th birthday party, things get weirder. And then the stomach ache begins….

Mr. Vesely and Ms. Hamilton have crafted a tidy science fiction thriller. Cheap, too, but money is only a problem when a film’s production values impede its ability to snag and then hold our attention. Here the economy of budget has fostered creativity of means, making for a picture in which every detail has been weighed and counter-balanced to impressive effect. This is one product of Western civilization that delivers the goods.

(c) 2024 Mario Naves

This review was originally published in the February 15, 2024 edition of The New York Sun.