Beulah's Finest Hour

Though I've never known him as an auteur, I have known the key works of Leo McCarey for years -- Going My Way, Duck Soup, The Awful Truth to name a few. Until this weekend I had never known about what he and many of his champions consider to be his masterwork that is all but forgotten.

Make Way for Tomorrow is credited for being the inspiration of Ozu's masterwork, Tokyo Story. The plots and conclusions of the two films are decidedly different, but the overall impact in both is overwhelming. Starring character actors Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, it is likely the high point of both of their careers. The final, silent seconds of Bondi at the train station are the most devastating and transcendent I've ever seen in any film. She was in her late 40s at the time and would continue to act for another four decades, winning an Emmy in 1977.

How she captures the emotions of a woman saying goodbye to the man she has loved for 50 years and with whom she must part due to economic realities is not something ever seen in American cinema. It could be dismissed as too depressing, but she does it with such grace that she raises sentimental film to high art.

It dares to be not just sentimental but even more daringly has a very downbeat ending. Such a movie coming out of Hollywood to day would be remarkable, but that it came out in 1937 from a major studio is staggering. Maybe it's cheating to share the final moments, and it's worth checking out the full Criterion reissue that came out last month

Answers to Questions Youth Must Understand

Last night I watched Zabriskie Point for about the twelfth time. I catch it every three to four years, and it seems a little less pretentious to me each time. It played an important part in my formative years, like something peaked at through a key hole since my parents would not respond to my demands that they take me to see it. (My amazingly hip grandmother, who took me to see The Boys in the Band the same year, would not cave in on this one.)

One afternoon in 1969, I came home from middle school to find the above copy of Look magazine with the image of Mark Frechette on the right answered a question that hadn't been all that mysterious to me anyway. It certainly cleared up any doubt about why I had no interest in going to the honor society banquet with Darla in my civics class.

Frechette is not exactly a one hit wonder since he did two other movies afterwards, albeit in Italy. As far as I know, he's the only guy to star in a movie and then be put in jail for holding up a bank to garner funds for a commune. He died in prison at 27 when 150 pound barbells he was lifting choked him to death. Someday I will have to track down the documentary on his life, Death Valley Superstar.

Two years later, I moved on from my obsession with Mark Frechette to Mark Spitz. (It's fittingly ironic that the below clip is from the same episode of the Dick Cavett Show that I posted a couple of weeks ago.)

Someone Who DIDN'T Die Today

Luise Rainer, 99 and still at work.

Now I Know What Nothing Means, But I Keep On Playing

Other good ones:

"I've got a hand full of aces, but I don't know what the game is."

"If I wanted to read my mail, I wouldn't have moved."

See What It Can Do For You

What is your greatest fear? One of my closest friends in Park Slope (who just happened to be from Belgium which explains a lot) said that he had a fear of people with two first names. At the top of the list was Lisa Lisa, with or without the Cult Jam. Second was Tina Louise. Third was Rose Maire. I was never sure if it was Rose Marie or Rosemarie.

We've moved on from the era of two first names to three names, with the middle one not being a real middle name but either a second first name or a precursor last name. True middle names are accents not actual names. (Mine, for example is Lynn.) Bobby Lee Gentry is a perfect example of a nice progression of first, middle and last names. I think it was Jan Michael Vincent (Almost three first names, depending on your perspective) who got things on the wrong foot. Of course, we would then have our share of the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, Tommy Lee Jones, Jennifer Jason Leigh (Hello! Three first names), Mary-Louse Parker (Don't even get me started on hyphens), Haley Joel Osment (or was it Haley Kate Osmond, some fifth cousin of Donny and Marie?), Neil Patrick Harris and Edward James Olmos. It makes one long for the days of Nico, Brickhouse, Odetta and Lambchop. Singular names are so grounding. The Rock is not a singular name but a pretense. When I go by JunkThief, I fear it's a pretentious hybrid with that big capital T sitting in the middle like a shrink trying to reconcile a conflicted couple.

Do you know who was the first singularly name superstar? I really don't. I want to say Nazimova but I'm not sure.
UPDATE: Not that I want to get in an argument with The Angry Young Man, but based on this 2008 photo of Tina with Sylvia Miles, for a 75-year-old woman she does not look that "pathetic". Sylvia, of course, continues to amaze us with her eternally youthful and ageless beauty.

Fire Escape in the Sky

I've been a follower of Scott Walker's since the early 1980s when he was listed on all the "rock snobs" lists, and I have been on a listserv for at least a year about the film Scott Walker: 30th Century Man, a sort of anti-VH1 Behind the Music biography. Scott mentions that in his youth he drank a lot and once going home with a Playboy bunny, but that is important only in that she introduced him to Jacques Brel. Beyond that, there is none of the usual rock/pop star bio stuff of messy love life and substance issues. In fact, it's never clear if Scott has had a long-term relationship of any kind.

The film starts of leading you to believe it might have all the conventional elements of rise, fall and return. Walker went to England, had short but huge success there, went through a dry patch and then started making weirder, darker and more obscure music loved by a very specific circle. There are talking heads that include Lulu, Bowie, Eno, Marc Almond, Radiohead and Alison Goldfrapp. The most priceless moment is late in the film when Lulu, who seemed to have a crush on Scott in the 1960s and toured with him, listens to a track Tilt. Her eyes get bigger as she tries to form a smile of sorts that starts to quaver as the camera moves in, and she just sits in silence listening in apparent disbelief.

Things wrap up with him recording his 2006 release The Drift that included tunes from the perspective of Mussolini's dead lover and Elvis' twin that died shortly after birth. We see a percussionist being instructed on the proper way to beat a side of beef for a perfect sound effect and Scott's voice wailing "I'm the last person left alive" into the abyss.

People love him or hate him, and I definitely fall into the former. I was thrilled that the film ended not with him having some marvelous and joyous reunion before adoring fans, but taking off his sun glasses to explain himself and contending that he will probably just continue to get weirder and darker with the passage of time. That gave me an odd comfort.

A Touch of the Castro and Weimar Chili

It's barely a week into the year 2009, and I'm already halfway to meeting the grand total of number of visits to the Castro I made in 2008 -- two. It's hard to believe that I'd find much reason to exceed that number of visits this year since it's really hard to find much in that neighborhood that is remotely relevant to my life. Though now that the Noe Valley Streetlight Records is gone, I may have to venture over there more often, but if I've already gone that far, why not just drive or 33 it over to Amoeba in the Haight? Anyway, I was able to pick the full two seasons of Stockard Channing's 1979-1980 sitcoms (worth the $6.98 price but not a penny more).

The main purpose was to see the screening of Orson Welles' 1958 A Touch of Evil. It was great to see it on the big screen. There was murder, drugs, racism, alcoholism, obesity, oil wells, Zza Zza and inter-racial marriage.

Here are what I consider to be the highlights:
* Dennis Weaver saying that it was not his job to change fuses at a remote desert motel.
* Orson Welles saying "Lawyers? Phooey with lawyers, all they care about is the law."
* Marlene Dietrich making the most famed chili on both sides of the border.
* Janet Leigh proving once again that she has the worst motel karma in the history of travel.
* Mercedes McCambridge simply snarling and looking very butch.
* Acid being thrown on a poster of Joi Lansing's character "Zita".
* Orson Welles snarling, "English! Say it in English. I don't speak Mexican."
* Evidence that in the late 1950s everyone in border towns drove enormous convertibles with enormous fins.
* Welles standing beneath a forest of oil wells.
* Seeing Charlton Heston's "Mexican" make up in the sunlight.
* Marlene Dietrich having the last line of "Adios" and then walking into the darkness, likely off to make more chili.

Krugman the Movie

Just as many are re-examining Oliver Stone's Wall Street, it was fitting that Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize just as his warnings about the global economy came true. I've read him for quite a number of years and have been a bit embarrassed to admit to finding him to be a heart throb. The right mix of salt and pepper, intense eyes and a Nobel to boot are a good combination. Word of George Clooney now playing him in a movie may prove me to be not as wacky as I'd feared.

Most important we can hope that events of the past few weeks might finally convince people that Milton Friedman and the market driven economy might be just a wee bit, dare I say it, flawed.

Art Where You Least Expect It

Bryce Digdug and I connected this afternoon for a matinee, a Pinter play...actually it was the movie Beautiful Losers about street culture artists, many with skate boarder or graffiti style backgrounds. It was a pleasantly rambling, high energy documentary with a rocking randomness.

I'd not been up to the Polk in a while, and it seems the hooker/heroin addict count was down. Another sign of the recession?

I did encounter a few interesting signs of street life and the arts along my way. Whiskey Thieves? I'm not sure I've encountered too many of them or if they would have an affinity with Junk Thieves. But we'll see.

It was also a bit of a surprise that the San Francisco Opera is now performing over at the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theater. Hmmm, are they retrofitting the War Memorial Audiorium again?

Rise Above It

Few things are more depressing to me than feel-good, life affirming movies. I'd rank pineapples, ham, chocolate, cigarettes, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Celine Dion, Hawaii and pastel colors in the same category. So I went to see the new documentary Hats Off with some trepidation.

At 93 and 95 pounds, actress/model Mimi Weddell is, on the surface at least, one of those spunky old ladies that you could almost see Willard Scott featuring in his Smucker's birthday greetings. With a clipped, Bostonian blue-blood accent and a collection of several hundred hats, she's been seen by most of us a few times in countless bits parts in A-list movies, lead parts in B, C and D-list movies, commercials and print work. Everything from Juicy Couture to California Cheese (in which she claims to have been around so long that she knew Monterrey Jack himself).

Weddell is amazing for her physical and emotional stamina, despite a constant cigarette in an elegant holder, which allows her to go on constant cattle call auditions and put in 14 to 20 hour day shoots. She also shows some pilates routines that would be amazing for 50-year-old but one must see to believe someone past 90 can do. She is by turn grotesque and gorgeous and sometimes both at the same time.

When her husband, a descendant of the Mayflower but with no business sense, died and left her with nothng but debt, she began pursuing her acting career age 65. The day of his funeral, she got on a plane to L.A. and acted in a vampire movie.

The strength of the film is the underlying conflict between her and her two 50-something children who are both overweight and prone to deconstructive self-analysis. That doesn't seem to have brought them anymore peace or happiness. Weddell herself despises self-introspection or analysis and prefers to face adversity with her motto of "Rise above it." What's unfortunate about the film is that it does take too much of a Willard Scott approach to her spunkiness without maybe a little more delving into her dysfunctional but still loving family. After angst-filled documentaries such as Capturing the Friedmans, it is refreshing to see a more upbeat film like this with a few shades of darkness. There is much frustration, disappointment, resentment and regret in this family but no hint of deep, dark stories.

It was all worth it for me, for a finale in which Mimi indulges herself in a hoiday that she had longed for since she was 13. Seeing her on a carousel in one of her trademark hats, as she opines that even going in a circle she feels that she is going somewhere was encouraging to know that it's never too late for some dreams to be realized.

Today I've Been Watching the Films of...

Summer Viewing

Though I certainly won't be going to see the Indiana Jones, Batman or other blockbusters this summer (I'll wait until they're on the small screen of an airlines), I am compelled to go see Wall-E, despite the generally glowing reviews. Besides a brilliant repurposing of Hello, Dolly!, its first third is all about junk, for Chirsakes.

Today, I managed to go see a lesser hyped but still still heavily promoted summer film, Chris and Don. Fortunately it lived up to the hype. Though not exactly groundbreaking as a documentary, there was some interesting innovations. Seeing a tale of a 30 year relationship made me think of my own series that, in the end, mirror a bento box -- a series of compartmentalized treats that don't touch that range from sweet to crunchy to slightly nutty to fish -- most of them forgotten by tea time the same afternoon.

Hush, Hush Sweet Junk Thief

I wrapped up the silent film festival weekend with two completely unrelated films as the afternoon moved into early evening.

A restored print of Her Wild Oat discovered in the Czech Republic and starring Colleen Moore was a nice treat. I first discovered her nearly 40 years ago in middle school when I picked up her autobiography in the bargain bin. Though she was the top box office draw in 1926 and 1927, she is pretty much forgotten by non-silent movie fans. Ironically, Louise Brooks was relatively obscure at the time and considered a cheap Colleen Moore knock off. Colleen had the flapper thing going long before Louise went to Berlin to be Lulu. Perhaps because she retired fairly happily and spent the next 50 years happily married and sane hurt her reputation as a legend. Her persona was somewhere between Clara Bow and Mary Pickford. Speaking of which, the feature was preceded by a two minute techincolor screen test of Pickford having dropped the orphan-waif and looking vampish, seductive and ready to play Lulu. Her Wild Oat merged the hard working orphan with the gauche flapper with scenes at the Del Coronado Hotel that seemed the template for Some Like It Hot to ultimately copy.
Having such a light but touching comedy before Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro was not the best build up for such an intensely dark film. I appreciated that it was not a film about samurais, geishas, martial arts or an Ozu family chamber drama. Its central theme of a younger brother declaring to his big sister "I will follow you to the end of the earth" carried greater resonance after the screen faded to black, and it was all so dark -- sets painted gray and filmed at night -- with plenty of rain, blood, ash, painted hussies, a greedy old madam and a host of villains with bad teeth.

As always, this festival is the best trip to a foreign land -- the first quarter of the 20th century -- and I come away wishing I'd seen even more in the series.

Get Up and Make Us a Meatloaf -- NOW

Being just a few inches away from Guy Maddin last night, I wished I'd been brave enough to ask him when My Winnipeg will finally be screened in this cultural backwater that is San Francisco. They're showing it in Palm Springs fro Chrissakes!

I really need to see those Canadian man pageants.

Evelyn Waugh - Master of Action Packed Suspense

Although I have no opinion of the film itself at this point, the trailer for the new big screen treatment of Brideshead Revisited has me scratching my head. It starts off straight forward and predictable enough, but the music and editing in the last third of this trailer had me laughing at the screen as it made you think you were seeing the coming attractions for Die Hard 8. Maybe they wanted to avoid people dismissing it as a Merchant-Ivory clone or big screen Masterpiece Theater. Personally this was never my favorite Waugh opus, and I'd rather see something like Vile Bodies or a proper remake of The Loved One be remounted.

Out, Damned Word, Out

Tonight I went to a screening of the 1978 documentary Word Is Out that was being presented as part of it 30th anniversary and impending DVD release. I definitely remember it from its original release, perhaps having the most vivid memories of lesbian comic and military veteran Pat Bond and David Gillon, a sweet bearded guy with braces who recalled a first romance that involved daily visits traversing across Massachusetts that were never consummated with sex. Oddly, I was the only one at my debriefing dinner that related to Gillon's story back then. The others had the opposite reaction, thinking it was wacky at the time but finding it sweet today. My feelings seem to have reversed three decades on. But he does still seem sweet, albeit naive today.

The best part of the evening was seeing many of those interviewed in the film come up on the stage. At least one couple was still going strong more than 35 years into their union. They will be featured in a "where are they now" follow up video that will be a part of the DVD. Unlike so many chronicles of gay life of that era, it is encouraging to know that so many are still around.

A couple of hours after attending the screen, my reaction is similar to what it was three decades ago in that the stories stick with me and have more impact than I realized as I heard them.

Okay, I've done my Gay Pride event for the year and can now miss the rest of them without guilt.

Shh...the Silents Are Coming

Film discovery of the week was the career of Lois Weber whose 1915 The Hypocrites which is credited with being the first mainstream film to feature explicit female nudity, albeit in the Biblical visions of a troubled suburban vicar. Kino is often equal to Criterion of bringing obscure, and especially obscure American silents, to the weary DVD consumer. It's a perfect prelude to the upcoming Silent Film Festival the best of all celluloid gatherings of the year. Tickets bought, research underway. Oh, and Guy Maddin will be there.

Hollywood Regency

I am giving serious consideration to a radical make over of the Junk Plex. Although I will not part with my famed Ming Dynasty tea pots, Biedermeier chests, Catalaniste Modernisme mosaics, Burkinabe Bobo ceremonial masks or Mixtecan insect dye textiles. I've heard my motif as being described as Heidi-Mediterranean.

The new motif being considered is Hollywood Regency. I've spent a fair amount of time in Hollywood, and one of my favorite TV characters growing up was Hollywood Harry. That's not the real Hollywood Harry on the right. He had a top hat, but it was much larger, and he had a beard and tuxedo. Harry appeared every Friday on the Lunch with Ho Ho Show and was from Hollywood Corners, Oklahoma, and he always had an update on his latest projects "out on the coast". His voice was just like Paul McCartney's on "Monkberry Moon Delight". I've not been able to find any video clips of him on the show either, but here's one from a few years later when Ho Ho advanced from lunch to a show place.

About seven years ago, I was hit up by a guy whose boyfriend had just for a two year stint in Paris and he assured me that he was not looking for a one nighter but a permanent two year temp. There was something about his face that was very familiar, and as our conversation expanded to my childhood years, I learned that we did have a link. He was a nephew of Ho Ho's and had grown up in Connecticut where Ho Ho hailed from. Much as I cherished the thought of yet another Connecticut beau, the thought of waking up to see a 35-year-old Ho Ho out of make up was more than I could deal with.

I'd feel the same way if I ran into Hollywood Harry's kin too.

This whole remodel job may take a while since I'll need to sort out my investments which I've not checked lately. About ten years ago my investment adviser was concerned that I had so much of my money tied up in real estate in Carmel and Sea Cliff and diversified my assets by investing in stock in Web Van, Oldsmobile, Tower Records and Petopia. I've not checked those stocks in a long time, so I'm hoping they've increased enough to where I can afford the new decor.
So what exactly is Hollywood Regency? Two of the central components are Chinoiserie objets de arte and cove lighting. These were central to my formative years. I learned early on that nothing cove lighting makes everyone look 20 years young and 30 pounds thinner.

Central to the movement was former silent star William Haines who went on to sell his soul to the Reagans and Annenburgs. However, he had one of my favorite quotes: "I can only tell you this -- I would rather have taste than either love or money."

It's Miller Time

I bought McCabe & Mrs. Miller this weekend, prompted in part by all that discussion last week about ampersands. Tragically, the titles are all done in dower Helvetica, but that scripty, swerving ampersand in the posters is still there. Check it out in the link above to the trailer. Perhaps Altman was making a statement about a curvacious ampersand being dropped into the stark Helvetica forest frontier. Type is such an erotic thing sometimes.

It was a little hard to find. The store had it filled under "Action and Adventure", and there it was next to the Matrix. Uh, yeah.

Otherwise, I was not disappointed. It has a cool, appropriately depressing Leonard Cohen score and some hot beards and bowler hats. I sort of like the concept of a village of bearded men in the misty Pacific Northwest lonely for companionship. Though I'm essentially opposed to furs, I have to admit they are kind of hot on a still supple Warren Beatty weaving through the snow as a church burns. Oh, and seeing Julie Christie smoke opium is a barrel of monkeys too.

Film Type

When I went to see Contempt at the Castro (which I'd love to make a film about called Contempt at the Castro) recently, I was struck by how much Godard's films are about typography. I've revisiting a number of his films ever since, and this theory has proven true as he advance through the '60s, perhaps no more pointedly than in Weekend which must be 30% typography even before subtitles. They are often purposely arbitrary, abstractly concrete, concretely abstract. They demand us to look at them typographic entities, imparting mostly pointless information such as what time of day it is and how fast the car is going.

Godard figured heavily in my early film education even in junior high school when I made my sister take me to Janus films on her college campus while she went boutiquing. I started with Cocteau but was soon drawn more to Truffaut (who tending for fairly fancy but sparsely used script) and Malle. During spring break of my sophomore year, I went to see Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. during my spring break when other kids were going to South Padre Island. Sitting in a packed theater in Austin, Texas, I was agile enough in French at the time to haughtily ignore the subtitles. But it felt like an entirely new language to me, so decidedly not North American though much of it was set in Canada. I thought it even had its own smell. I've not seen it in 30 plus years, and my copy of it arrived this week, making me wonder how it will touch me all these years later. Will it have the same smell.
Around the same time I heard screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury, who was being held up as the hottest new screenwriter in Hollywood with Thieves Like Us and Nashville under her belt. Here was a writer with verve and integrity. When asked what she would write about if she had no restrictions, she said that it would be a film about nothing but a green beam of light, and the entire audience went "Ah..." with the synchronization and blast of a Godard inter-title. Tewksbury went on to direct and write Doogie Howser, M.D. and Felicity.

In Godard's Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis there is a Ford sedan that pulls up with the license plate "SHAPE 9435". When I saw that in college, I was sure that name and those numbers would hold great meaning. Perhaps they do because I remember them all these years later but don't know their meaning. I think the most important word in that film's title is précis, best understood if in stark Helvetica.