4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Happy Pop Art Day! It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Pop Art Films
Empire (1965, dir by Andy Warhol)
Vinyl (1965, dir by Andy Warhol)
Lupe (1966, dir by Andy Warhol)
Chelsea Girls (1966, dir by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey)
Poor Little Rich Girl (1965, dir by Andy Warhol)
In March of 1965, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, and Chuck Wein went to the New York City apartment of Edie Sedgwick and made a movie. Edie Sedgwick, at that time, was a 22 year-old model who had been christened a “youthquaker” by Vogue. She was also, for a year or so, the best-known member of Andy Warhol’s ensemble. Of all the so-called superstars that spent time with Warhol and appeared in his films, Edie was the one who actually was a star.
The film opens with Edie waking up, walking around her bedroom, smoking a cigarette, popping pills, exercising, and lounging in bed. (That’s pretty much my morning routine too, except for the cigarettes.) She doesn’t speak. The only sound that we hear is a record being played in the background and the whirring of Warhol’s camera. Because of a faulty lens, the first 30 minutes of Poor Little Rich Girl are out-of-focus. We can see Sedgwick’s form as she moves and we can, for the most part, tell what she’s doing but we can’t see any exact details. Her face is a blur and sometimes, her body seems to disappear into the walls of the room itself. It’s a genuinely disconcerting effect, even if it was an accident on Warhol’s part. Edie is there but she’s not there. The blurry image seems to reflect an unfocused life. Edie is the poor little rich girl of the title and indeed, she was known as a socialite before she even became a part of Warhol’s circle. The blurriness indicates that she has everything but it can’t be seen.
After 30 minutes, the film comes into focus. Clad in black underwear, Edie answers questions from Chuck Wein, who remains off-camera. Sometimes, we can hear Chuck’s questions and sometimes, we can’t. Our focus is on Edie’s often amused reaction to the questions, even more so than her actual answers. Edie smokes a pipe and looks at herself in her mirror and she talks about how she blew her entire inheritance in just a manner of days. She raids her closet and tries on clothes while Wein offers up his opinions. Edie is living the ultimate fantasy of trying on different outfits while your gay best friend makes you laugh with his snarky comments. Edie comes across as someone who is living in the present and not worrying about what’s going to happen in the future. It’s only when she nervously smiles that we get hints of the inner turmoil that came to define her final years. The camera loves Edie and, even appearing in what is basically a home movie, Edie has the screen presence of a star. There was nothing false about Edie Sedgwick.
Edie Sedgwick, Chuck Wein, and Andy Warhol
Watching the film today, of course, it’s hard not to feel a bit sad at the sight of a happy Edie Sedgwick. While Edie would become an underground star as a result of her association with Andy Warhol and his films, their friendship ended when Edie tried to establish a career outside of Warhol’s films. Edie’s own struggle with drugs and her mental health sabotaged her career and she died at the age of 28. I first read George Plimpton’s biography of Edie Sedgwick when I was sixteen and I immediately felt a strong connection to her and her tragic story, so much so that I was actually relieved when I made it to my 29th birthday. Though most people ultimately see Edie Sedgwick as being a tragic figure, I prefer to remember Edie as she appeared in the second half of Poor Little Rich Girl, happy and in focus.
The Sundance Film Festival is currently underway in Utah. For the next few days, I’ll be taking a look at some of the films that have previously won awards at Sundance.
First released in 1987, Waiting For The Moon is a lowkey and fictionalized account of the relationship between Gertrude Stein (Linda Bassett) and Alice B. Toklas (Linda Hunt).
The film takes place in 1936, almost entirely at the home that Stein and Toklas shared in France. Back in the years immediately following World War I, their home was a stopping spot for almost every writer who no longer felt at home in the conventional world. It was the place where the members of the so-called Lost Generation met to socialize and discuss their art. (Ernest Hemingway memorably wrote about visiting Stein and Toklas in A Moveable Feast.) However, Waiting For The Moon takes place long after those exciting years. Gertrude and Alice are now living a rather comfortable and settled life. Occasionally, someone will stop by. Hemingway (played by Bruce McGill) shows up. Picasso stops by for a visit, though we only hear him. But, for the most part, the film focuses on Gertrude and Alice. The film follows them as they bicker like the old married couple that they essentially are, even if society in 1936 wasn’t willing to acknowledge it. Alice proofreads Gertrude’s latest writing. Gertrude waits for word from her doctor. They talk about old times and old friends. At one point, an aspiring writer named Henry Hopper (Andrew McCarthy) pays the two women a visit and, for a day at least, it’s like old time. Henry is earnest and idealistic and full of plans for the future. Unfortunately, he’s also planning on fighting in the Spanish Civil War and it doesn’t take a genius to guess that probably won’t go well. Indeed, we learn that several of Gertrude and Alice’s old acquaintances are now fighting and dying in the Spanish Civil War. For the so-called Lost Generation, the battle against Franco is a chance to find themselves but students of history already know how the war is going to end. For that matter, students of history will also realize that World War II is right around the corner. (Needless to say, the film itself offers up not a hint of the controversy that would surround Stein’s activities during the Vichy regime,)
Waiting For The Moon is a deliberately paced film, which is a polite way of saying that it’s a bit on the slow side. That said, the scenery is beautiful and both Linda Hunt and Linda Bassett give good performances as the film’s versions of Alice and Gertrude. Bruce McGill steals the film as the blustery Hemingway. I’m sure Ernest would have approved. (Could Ernest Hemingway ever be played as being anything other than blustery?) The film captures the daydream that I think captures the fancy of many aspiring writers, the idea of being in a place where your thoughts are the center of life and all of your friends understand what it’s like to be a creative soul.
Waiting For The Moon won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival. It’s not an easy film to find. On Amazon, a copy on DVD runs about $52.00. I was fortunate enough to find a copy at Half-Price Books.
In 1989, having already won an Oscar for recreating his Vietnam experiences in Platoon, director Oliver Stone returned to the war with Born On The Fourth Of July.
Based on the memoir of anti-war activist Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July stars Tom Cruise as Kovic. When we first meet Kovic, he’s growing up on Long Island in the 50s and 60s. He’s a clean-cut kid from a nice family. He’s on the school wrestling team and he’s got a lot of friends. When he was just 15, he heard John F. Kennedy telling people to ask what they can do for their country and he was inspired. He decided he wanted to join the Marines, despite the fact that his father (Raymond J. Barry) was still haunted by the combat that he saw in World War II. (In one of the film’s better scenes, a young Kovic notices that the elderly veterans marching in the Independence Day parade still flinch whenever they hear a firecracker.) He enlists in the Marines after listening to a patriotic speech from a recruiter (played by Tom Berenger). Ron runs through the rain to attend his prom and has one dance with Donna (Kyra Sedgwick), on whom he’s always had a crush. There’s nothing subtle about the way that Stone portrays Kovic’s childhood. In fact, one might argue that it’s a bit too idealized. But Stone knows what he’s doing. The wholesomenss of Kovic’s childhood leaves neither him nor the viewer prepared for what’s going to happen in Vietnam.
Vietnam turns out not to be the grand and patriotic adventure that Kovic thought it would be. After Sgt. Kovic accidentally shoots one of his own men in a firefight, he is ordered to keep quiet about the incident. After he is wounded and paralyzed in another firefight, Kovic ends up in a Hellish VA hospital, surrounded by men who will never fully recover from their mental and physical wounds. Kovic is eventually returns home in wheelchair. The film then follows Kovic as he goes from defending the war in Vietnam to eventually turning against both the war and the government. At one point, he ends up with a group of disabled vets in Mexico and there’s a memorable scene where he and another paraplegic (Willem Dafoe) attempt to fight despite having fallen out of their chairs. Eventually, Kovic returns to America and turns his anger into activism.
There’s nothing subtle about Born On The Fourth Of July. It’s a loud and angry film and Oliver Stone directs with a heavy-hand. Like a lot of Stone’s films, it overwhelms the viewer on a first viewing and it’s only during subsequent viewings that one becomes aware of just how manipulative the film is. Tom Cruise gives a good performance as Ron Kovic but his transformation into a long-haired, profane drunk still feels as if it happens a bit too abruptly. A good deal of the film centers on Kovic’s guilt about accidentally killing one of his men but the scene where he goes to the soldier’s family and asks them for forgiveness didn’t quite work for me. If anything, Kovic came across as being rather self-centered as he robs the man’s mother and father of the belief that their son had at least died heroically in combat as opposed to having been shot by his own sergeant. Did Kovic’s need to absolve himself really give him the right to cause this family more pain? Born on the Fourth Of July is an effective work of agitprop. On the first viewing, you’ll want to join Kovic in denouncing the military and demanding peace. On the second viewing, you’ll still sympathize with Kovic while also realizing that he really owes both his mother and father an apology for taking out his anger on them. By the third viewing, you’ll be kind of like, “Wow, I feel bad for this guy but he’s still kind of a jerk.” That said, when it comes to making an effective political film, Adam McKay could definitely take some lessons from Oliver Stone. Born On The Fourth of July is at its best when it simply captures the feeling of living in turmoil and discovering that the world is not as simple a place as you once believed. As idealized as the film’s presentation of Kovic’s childhood may be, anyone who has ever felt nostalgia for an earlier and simpler world will be able to relate.
Oliver Stone won his second Best Director Oscar for Born On The Fourth Of July. The film itself lost Best Picture to far more genteel version of the past, Driving Miss Daisy.
Every Monday night at 9:00 Central Time, my wife Sierra and I host a “Live Movie Tweet” event on X using the hashtag #MondayMuggers. We rotate movie picks each week, and our tastes are quite different. Tonight, Monday January 27th, we’re watching FEAR CITY starring Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Jack Scalia and Melanie Griffith.
So why did I pick FEAR CITY, you might ask?
So join us tonight to for #MondayMuggers and watch FEAR CITY! It’s on Amazon Prime.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1993’s Extreme Justice!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Extreme Justice on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!
Enjoy!
Today is Mozart’s birthday so, of course, today’s scene from the day comes from 1984’s Amadeus. In this scene, the Emperor (Jeffrey Jones) delivers his critique to Mozart (Tom Hulce) and anyone who has ever had to deal with an idiotic critic will be able to relate.
“There’s too many notes!”
What really makes this scene work, along with Hulce’s reaction, is Jones’s blandly cheerful manner. The Emperor really thinks he’s being helpful!
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
4 Shots From 4 Films
The Red Shoes (1948, dir by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, DP: Jack Cardiff)
Saturday Night Fever (1977, dir by John Badham, DP: Ralf D. Bode)
Flashdance (1983, dir by Adrian Lyne, DP: Donald Peterman)
Chicago (2002, dir by Rob Marshall, DP: Dion Beebe)
The 1963 film, The Cardinal, opens with an Irish-American priest named Stephen Fermoyle (Tom Tyron) being instituted as a cardinal.
In a series of flashbacks, we see everything that led to this moment. Stephen starts out as an overly ambitious and somewhat didactic priest who, over the years, is taught to be humble by a series of tragedies and mentors. It’s a sprawling story, one that encompasses the first half of the 20th Century and, as he did with both Exodus and Advice and Consent, Preminger tells his story through the presence of several familiar faces. Director John Huston plays the cardinal who takes an early interest in Stephen’s career. Burgess Meredith plays a priest with MS who teaches Stephen about the importance of remaining humble and thankful. When Stephen is in Europe, Romy Schneider plays the woman for whom he momentarily considers abandoning his vows. When Stephen is assigned to the American South, Ossie Davis plays the priest and civil rights activist who teaches Stephen about the importance of standing up for those being oppressed. In the days leading up to World War II, Stephen is sent to Austria to try to keep the local clergy from allying with the invading Nazis. Stephen also deals with his own family drama, as his sister (Carol Lynley) runs away from home after Stephen counsels her not to marry a good Jewish man named Benny (John Saxon) unless Benny can be convinced the convert to Catholicism. Later, when his sister becomes pregnant and Stephen is told that she’ll die unless she has an abortion, Stephen is forced to choose between his own feelings and teachings of the Church. Along the way, performers like Dorothy Gish, Cecil Kellaway, Chill Wills, Raf Vallone, Jill Haworth, Maggie McNamara, Arthur Hunnicut, and Robert Morse all make appearances.
All of the familiar faces in the cast are used to support Tom Tryon and Tryon needs all the support that he can get. Despite Otto Preminger’s attempts to make Tom Tyron into a star, Tryon eventually retired from acting and found far more success as a writer of the type of fiction that Stephen Fermoyle probably would have condemned as blasphemous. Tryon gives a stiff and unconvincing performance in The Cardinal. The entire film depends on Tryon’s ability to get us to like Stephen, even when he’s being self-righteous or when he’s full of self-pity and, unfortunately, Tryon’s stiff performance makes him into the epitome of the type of priest that everyone dreads having to deal with. Tryon gives such a boring performance that he’s overshadowed by the rest of the cast. I spent the movie wishing that it would have spent more time with John Saxon and Burgess Meredith, both of whom give interesting and lively performances.
The Cardinal is a long and rather self-important film. The same can be said of many of Preminger’s films in the 60s but Exodus benefitted from the movie star glamour of Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint and Advice and Consent was saved by an intelligent script. The Cardinal, on the other hand, is a bit draggy and makes many of the same mistakes that many secular films make when they try to portray Catholicism. Oddly enough, The Cardinal received more Oscar nominations than either Exodus or Advice and Consent. Indeed, Preminger was even nominated for Best Director for his rather uninspired work here. Considering the number of good films for which Preminger was not nominated (Anatomy of a Murder comes to mind), it’s a bit odd that The Cardinal was the film for which he was nominated. (Of course, in 1944, the Academy got it right by nominating Preminger for his direction of Laura.) The Cardinal is largely forgettable, though interesting as a type of self-consciously “big” films that the studios were churning out in the 60s in order to compete with television and the counterculture.
First released in 1960 and based on a novel by Leon Uris, Otto Preminger’s Exodous is two films in one.
The first half of the film takes place in Cyprus in the days immediately following World War II. A young war widow named Kitty (Eva Marie Saint) is sightseeing when she learns of the Karaolos Internment Camp, where the British are interning thousands of Jewish refugees who demand to be allowed to go to the land that will eventually become the State of Israel. Kitty visits with General Sutherland (Ralph Richardson), who oversees the camp and who is rumored to secretly be Jewish because of his relatively benevolent attitude towards the internees. Disgusted by the anti-Semitism displayed by many of the British officers (one of whom is played by Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford), Kitty volunteers at the camp and learns about the Holocaust from those who survived it. She also meets Ari Ben Caanan (Paul Newman), a former officer in the British army. Ari manages to get control of a cargo ship, one that is renamed Exodus. Six hundred refugees stage a hunger strike, vowing that they will willingly starve to death rather than be returned to Europe.
The second part of Exodus takes place in what will become the modern State of Israel. It follows Ari, Kitty, and several of the passengers of the Exodus as they adjust to life and continue to fight for a land of their own, despite the opposition of the British and much of the rest of the world. Karen (Jill Haworth) is a young woman who searches for her father, a brilliant man who has been driven into a nearly catatonic state by the horrors of the Holocaust. Dov Landau (Sal Mineo) is an explosives expert who survived Auschwitz as a Sonderkommando and who was repeatedly raped by the guards at the camp. Dov joins the Irgun, a paramilitary organization that the British consider to be terrorists. Leading the Irgun is Ari’s uncle, Akiva (David Opatoshu), and Dov soon finds himself being targeted by both the British and the Arabs who, despite the moderating efforts of men like Taha (John Derek, who would later direct Ghosts Can’t Do It), want to violently force the Jews out of the land.
Legend has it that, after a private screening on Exodus, comedian Mort Sahl turned to director Otto Preminger and said, “Otto, let my people go.” And it’s true that Exodus is a very long film. Preminger, who started out making film noirs like Laura, spent the latter part of his career making “important” epics and, like many Golden Age directors struggling to compete with television and the 60s counterculture, he tended to make long, star-studded films that dealt with current events and which pushed the envelope just enough to be controversial without actually being radical. However, I would argue that the three-hour running time of Exodus is justified. To understand why Ari, Dov, Karen, and the other passengers of the Exodus would rather risk their lives by staying in what will become the State of Israel, one has to understand both what they went through to get there and also the anti-Semitism that they faced even in post-World War II Europe. If Exodus were made today, it would be a mini-series. Since it was made in 1960, it was instead a 3-hour film with an intermission.
Exodus holds up relatively well, with the sprawling action anchored by the presence of a cast of familiar faces. Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint bring a good deal of movie star glamour to scenes that would have otherwise just been dry exposition. The film’s heart truly belongs to Jill Haworth and Sal Mineo, both of whom bring two life characters who have very differing views of the world. Karen remains an optimist, one who is convinced that people can live together. Dov, fueled by his own guilt and anger, has no room for negotiations and compromises. Mineo received his second and last Oscar nomination for his performance in Exodus, though he lost to Peter Ustinov’s showy turn in Spartacus. Exodus itself was clearly made with a hope for Oscar glory. While Exodus did pick up a handful of nominations, it was left out of the five movie Best Picture slate. The Academy only had room for one historical epic and they went for John Wayne’s The Alamo. The eventual winner was The Apartment, the best of the nominated films. (Indeed, even if Exodus had taken the Alamo’s spot, The Apartment would still be the best of the nominees.) The Oscars aside, Exodus remains a good example of the type of epic filmmaking that once defined the Hollywood studios.
Through the Shattered Lens 