DVD Review | Women He's Undressed

After a Fashion

by Thomas Delapa

In today’s dressed-down, flip-flops and uber-casual world, we seldom hear that “clothes make the man” anymore. But in classic Hollywood, fashion not only made the man—and the woman—but it made the movies too.

Where would The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy Gale be without her ruby slippers, Joan Crawford sans her shoulder pads, Marilyn Monroe less (ahem) her skin-tight gowns or Cary Grant minus those impeccably tailored suits?

Like other low-profile collaborators, especially in our grandiose age of the director as auteur, motion-picture costume directors rarely grab the spotlight and even less the microphone. Classic film fans may be familiar with the celebrated career of Edith Head, but otherwise public knowledge of Hollywood’s leading costume designers is skimpy if not threadbare.

Despite its odd-fitting title, Women He’s Undressed means to makeover that legacy, taking the measure of Australian-born Orry-Kelly, who for three decades was one of Hollywood’s larger-than-life, A-list designers. His career included a long, tempestuous stint at the Warner Bros. studio, dressing such stars as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Olivia de Havilland, and was crowned by three Oscars for costume design, the last for Some Like It Hot in 1959.

An Australian-made documentary directed by the veteran Gillian Armstrong (Little Women, My Brilliant Career), Undressed won’t win ribbons for opulence, but it does stitch together the life and times of Orry-Kelly, born Orry George Kelly in New South Wales. Armstrong’s style clashes in spots, starting with the fanciful inclusion of her subject (Darren Gilshenan) addressing the camera while paddling in a rowboat. As an allegory of his roiling ups and downs it is, well, a bit out to sea.

As a gay man in Hollywood who rarely hid in the closet—at least among his friends— "Jack" Orry-Kelly was renowned for his talents, tart tongue and artistic tantrums. He could be difficult and demanding, but he managed to navigate the treacherous shores of the studio-system fiefdoms. While most found his boss Jack Warner a tight-fisted, crass (and macho) tyrant, Orry-Kelly formed an uneasy alliance, smoothed over by his long friendship with Warner’s wife, Ann. Undoubtedly his most famous work was with the notoriously prickly Bette Davis, including the brazen “red” ball dress her character flitted about in the 1938’s black-and-white Jezebel. 

Except for that foundering rowboat, Undressed is outfitted in a conventional style, embroidered with interviews (among them, Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury), newsreel footage and photos. But it’s also spangled with fascinating tidbits about fashion design in Hollywood’s bygone Golden Age. Especially revealing are the sleight-of-hand tricks Orry-Kelly used to transform diva Davis (she of a large but “limp” bosom) that showed off the positive while cloaking the negative.

Glamour, illusion and fantasy were Orry-Kelly’s stock in trade, but his private life was bold as brass, despite begin hemmed in by a homophobic culture that threatened exposure for anyone—especially men—daring to tip-toe out of the closet. Armstrong and her writer Katherine Thomson sew the villain badge on Englishman Cary Grant (né Archibald Leach), who turned his back on Orry-Kelly once he became a matinee idol. While it is now well-known that Grant and Western star Randolph Scott lived together as roommates and more, the film speciously suggests that Grant’s subsequent marriages were strictly a cover for his homosexuality.

What’s most durable in Armstrong’s material is the flamboyant character of Orry-Kelly as both artist and survivor. Fired from Warners in 1944, he hit the bottle hard, successfully chased by rehab (“sanatoriums” back then) and surfacing in a wave of comebacks in the 1950s, culminating in the sparkling triumph of Some Like It Hot. Not only did he outfit Marilyn Monroe in those diaphanous, barely-there gowns that seared the screen, but he also dragged cross-dressing Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis into hilarious movie history.

Orry-Kelly was also a brash and oft-catty wit who was loath to keep his mouth zipped—he famously quipped that “Hell must be filled with beautiful women and no mirrors.” In old Hollywood’s bright firmament, you can still see Orry-Kelly’s twinkling reflection in the timelessly elegant fashions he created. 

 ---------------------------------

8/5/16

Film Review | Samsara

Around the World in 90 Minutes

by Thomas Delapa

In Sanskrit, samsara roughly means the "ever-turning wheel of life and death." In director Ron Fricke's meditative non-verbal documentary, Samsara translates into a mute mélange of image and music that revolves from the humdrum to the stunning.

Five years in the making, Samsara is a return trip to the New-Age travelogue territory for Fricke that marked his 1992 Baraka -as well as 1983's trailblazing Koyaanisqatsi on which he was the cinematographer. In this incarnation (or perhaps reincarnation), Fricke and collaborator Mark Magidson trekked to 25 countries spanning the globe for a sensuous and spiritual spectacle, but one that will leave some audiences hunting for a thematic road map.

Fricke calls his work a "guided meditation," and the cascade of images captures a paradoxical world of dynamic contrasts: the sacred and profane, desert and mountain, city and country, rich and poor, primitive and modern. Central to both Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, "samsara" isn't exactly an heavenly concept, but rather signifies the eternal cycle of life and death, including the infernal bugaboo of human suffering.

This odyssey starts at the birth of a new day at Buddhist monastery in India, where monks painstakingly create, grain-by-grain, a mandala sand painting. Visually, Fricke and Magidson's running motif is the human eye, whether on a resplendent Chinese dancer, a statue of King Tut or on a gallery of candid subjects staring at the camera, giving off expressions that run the gamut from disquieting defiance to inviting exoticism.

Fricke's camera also takes the long view, giving us remarkable vistas of deserts, mountains and cityscapes, often captured in revealing time-lapse. A busy downtown shimmers at night, punctuated by a moving necklace of headlights, while a river of commuters rushes through the Tokyo streets in fast-motion like so many human ants. You may feel like a stranger in a strange land as you eye these human caravans and wonder in bemusement where on earth we are headed as a species.

But confused audiences may well ask, "Where in the world is Ron Fricke?" since his globe-trotting is so fast and furious that it might make your head spin. Inner-directed spectators will take to the ambiguities and apparent incongruities of Fricke's eco-montage. Others will no doubt wish for better directions. Fricke doesn't readily connect the dots or his shots, so you'll have to DIY, folks.

Still, there is much to marvel at in this trippy New Age tour, which could be looked at as an upscale update of 1961's sensational Mondo Cane. Pessimists will think that the modern world really has gone to the dogs, especially after observing the unsavory scenes from a Chinese chicken factory, where workers in pink jump suits and masks systematically kill on a scale that would be the envy of Joseph Goebbels. Fricke never fails to remind us of evolution of mechanized man, embodied in the scary spectacle of tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers marching in robotic formation. In the frankly bizarre category, the dead winner is a Ghana coffin shop, which makes it possible for one newly departed to rest in peace inside a casket customized into a giant shotgun.

Fricke aims high in this movie (it was photographed in lush widescreen 70mm), but the results are scattershot. With no script per se, only a rough scenario, he and Magidson let the images speak for themselves. They sometimes say volumes in beauty, mystery, weirdness and wonder. Other times, they barely whisper. Samsara is 90 minutes of checkered pictorial pleasure, but it's a world away from cinematic nirvana.

------------------

9/4/12

Film Review | Casino Royale (2006)

Chips and a Dip

by Thomas Delapa


When British actor Daniel Craig was first announced as the new James Bond, hardcore 007 fans went ballistic. "Bland, James Bland," they dubbed him. In his defense, Craig told Entertainment Weekly, "They hate me. They're passionate about it, but I do wish they'd reserve judgment."

Deal or no deal, judgment day has come for Craig and Casino Royale, the 21st Bond movie extravaganza. Get ready for a flush, because this blue-eyed and blond Bond has a license to bore.

In the bygone line of screen Bondage, dating back to the nonpareil Sean Connery and the rudely retired Pierce Brosnan, Craig comes up short (literally) of even George Lazenby, the Aussie actor who had only one assignment, 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The spy who gagged me, Craig is to Connery what Mini-Me is to Austin Powers' Dr. Evil.

Gambling on Craig to carry on their billion-dollar franchise, producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli chose author Ian Fleming's first entry in the phenomenally resilient Bond series. Fleming's über secret agent was a cultural product of the Cold War (and British end-of-empire blues), but the fall of the Berlin Wall has only meant that Bond's "license to kill" was upgraded to include renegade Commies, terrorists, mad media moguls and other high-value targets.

Casino Royale deals out a losing hand, starting with the astounding absence of Monty Norman's killer theme music in the opening credits. The screenwriters (including Oscar-winner Paul Haggis) pay lip service to Fleming's 1954 book, but they've modernized it by playing to U.S. audiences in the age of ESPN, not the USSR. Most of the book involves Bond's cryptic game of high-stakes baccarat. Now 007 must go mano a mano with his foe in a made-for-TV game of Texas hold 'em poker. Yee-haw, pardner.

Yet director Martin Campbell's introduction of Bond is neither as card shark nor suave, karate-chopping spy. In a set-piece befitting Jackie Chan, not Jimmy Bond, Craig acrobatically chases an anonymous bad guy through the Ugandan jungle and up and down a construction crane. Surly and jut-jawed, Craig is not a kinder and gentler Bond. According to his exasperated and expendable boss, M (Judi Dench), he's just a blunt instrument.

It's no coincidence that Bond visits a Miami "Body Worlds" exhibit as a prelude to another no-brain chase. Craig's freakish, barrel-chested physique sculpts the new Bond as a Y2K caveman of few words. Craig doesn't even get to say, "My name is Bond, James Bond." This guy would be more comfortable ordering steroids, shaken not stirred, instead of a martini.

Bond's penultimate showdown takes place at a casino in Eastern Europe, where he faces down Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelson), a tycoon of terrorism whose evildoing is signified by his bleeding eyeball. Reluctantly bonding with Bond is a dishy British treasury agent (Eva Green) who's supplying the stakes for 007 to play.

Everything is in on the table in Casino Royale's royally dull denouement, from torture and betrayal and death in Venice to Bond's handy pocket defibrillator that could bring him back to life. Campbell and the film's gambling producers shouldn't have bothered. This 007 is DOA, though odds are he'll return to die another day.

------------
First published in Boulder Weekly, 11/22/06

DVD Review | The Deer Hunter (1978)

Deer Diary

by Thomas Delapa


After only two movies, more than a few pronounced him a directorial genius. Two years later, he underwent one of the fastest fade-outs in Hollywood history.

Following 1978’s Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino was considered a sure shot to join the growing superstar ranks of Scorsese, Altman and Spielberg—led by top-dog Francis Ford Coppola. But not only did Cimino’s colossal follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, flop, his career quickly went to hell in a bamboo hand basket.

Nominated for nine Oscars and a winner of five, including Best Picture and Best Director, The Deer Hunter was one of those incendiary epics that divided audiences along political battle lines in the post-sixties hangover, a.k.a. the 1970s. Though the movie was victorious over Coming Home—and star/activist Jane Fonda—it didn’t win the hearts and minds of left-leaning audiences; while both dramas dealt with the Vietnam War, Cimino’s epic was, in Fonda’s acerbic, pre-aerobic words, “a racist, Pentagon version of the war.”

While many critics fulsomely declared Deer Hunter to be a masterpiece (“Surely one of the most powerful films of the seventies,” trumpeted Stephen Schiff in the Boston Phoenix), others were more circumspect, even derisive. Nearly 35 years later, contemporary audiences may draw a blank, given that it’s aged only somewhat better than leisure suits and disco. If The Godfather, Jaws, Chinatown and Star Wars are still bright in our memories, The Deer Hunter crouches languidly on the endangered classics list.

With only one directorial effort to his credit (the underrated buddy drama Thunderbolt and Lightfoot), the Yale-educated Cimino set his sights on the definitive story of America’s lost, pre-Vietnam War innocence—not so unlike George Lucas’s nostalgic American Graffiti five years previous. But whereas Lucas’ bittersweet comedy was fresh and unpretentious, screenwriter Deric Washburn seemed to cut and paste from The Godfather, Deliverance, and Scorsese’s Mean Streets—along with a few dusty plucks from The Four Feathers—for his meditation on male camaraderie and bravado in wartime.

Cimino took a bead on a band of blue-collar buddies in a flinty, Russian-American Pennsylvania steel town. Enlisting right after his searing success in Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro is Michael, the group’s stoic alpha male, with John Savage, John Cazale and newcomer Christopher Walken sturdily bringing up the rear. (Terminally ill with cancer during the shoot, Cazale died months after its completion.) In only her second movie role, Meryl Streep spryly plays Walken’s betrothed, one of the women left waiting on the home front.

In the 2005 Universal DVD release, the gifted Hungarian/American cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond talks about his part in creating Cimino’s striking widescreen visuals, from the fiery blast furnaces to the golden interiors of the Russian Orthodox church, where the signature wedding scene takes place. A la The Godfather’s ritualistic bookends, Cimino frames his three-hour saga with the ironic pairing of one wedding and a funeral.

Sandwiched between the over-praised naturalism (several of the scenes were improvised by the cast), Washburn and Cimino shoot for the heights, yet their aim is scattershot. The overarching metaphor is Michael’s cryptic Spartan philosophy to bag a deer with “one shot,” and one shot only. As embodied in De Niro’s stolid, goateed machismo, Michael stands head and shoulders above his less-than-steely friends, a heroic coupling of James Fenimore Cooper and Ayn Rand.

In one of cinema’s most shocking jump cuts, we’re lifted from the airy Pennsylvania (actually Washington) mountains instantly into the sweltering jungles of Vietnam. In the first of a load of dubious coincidences, De Niro, Walken and Savage meet up as soldiers in the middle of a battle, and just as quickly find themselves in riverfront tiger cages, imprisoned by the Viet Cong. There, in the film’s most controversial sequence, the trio is forced to take part in their captors’ depraved game of Russian roulette.

Embedded within Cimino and Zsigmond’s vivid realism, this harrowing, wholly fabricated sequence can be viewed, at best, as symbolic of America’s self-destructive death march in Vietnam. At worst, it’s pernicious, booby-trapped propaganda that points the blame for the American tragedy in Vietnam squarely at sadistic, jabbering (“Mao! Mao!”) monsters who have nothing better to do than torture and kill defenseless G.I.s.

After a cathartic, shoot-’em-up escape that would make Dirty Harry’s day, the trio parts ways, their roads home emblematic of the wildly different fates of returning veterans (and intriguingly resonant of the dilemmas of the three soldiers in William Wyler’s far less bombastic The Best Years of Our Lives three decades earlier). While Michael returns die-hardened, if tempered, his brothers-in-arms face grimmer prospects. In perhaps the movie’s most poignant and authentic section, De Niro tracks down Savage to a V.A. hospital, where their friendship is re-forged in the face of crippling tragedy.

But Cimino isn’t satisfied with subtlety or even naturalism. He’s after bigger game. Back in Saigon during its chaotic 1975 fall to the North Vietnamese, Walken’s Nick has gone bananas, plunging into his own heart of darkness. Lured by a decadent Frenchman, the traumatized Nick is now the chief combatant in high-stakes backroom games of Russian roulette.

Whatever the nationality, Cimino gambles on lurid sensationalism, and it doesn’t pay off—now or then. In place of a sharp focus on the war and its victims, he aims for xenophobic myth; in place of cathartic realism, he shoots for muddled pulp. In the ambiguous—or laughable—last scene, Cimino waves the flag to the tune of “God Bless America,” betting that Academy Award voters would stand up and salute. They did.

Armed with his Oscar trophy and a bloated $40 million budget, Cimino nearly broke the bank (and United Artists) in his elephantine western Heaven’s Gate, one of the biggest disasters in movie history, which was instrumental in killing off the “New Hollywood” halcyon days of experiment and artistic risk. Cimino’s career has never recovered, in hindsight perhaps another indirect casualty of the hellish Vietnam War.

-----------------
3/11/12

DVD Review | THX 1138 (1971)

Where Were You in ‘71 and ‘72?

by Thomas Delapa


Forty years ago in a movie galaxy far, far away, George Lucas was just a bearded, bespectacled young filmmaker struggling to make it in Planet Hollywood. While today’s audiences may know that American Graffiti was Lucas’ mega-breakthrough on his road to mogul-dom, far fewer recognize that his debut feature was 1971’s THX 1138, a bleakly futuristic sci-fi fantasy that’s as distant from Star Wars as Alien is from E.T.

Lovingly restored by Lucasfilm and Warner Home Video in a two-disc DVD set first released in 2004 (and now out on Blu-ray), THX 1138 Director’s Cut Special Edition comes uploaded with stellar extras, including the director’s original student short that provided the seeds for the feature. For sci-fi fans, the film should be a revelation, not simply for a peek at Lucas’ early creative sensibilities but also for the pivotal part it played in the rise of a brave New Hollywood that would transform—and jumpstart—a stalled American movie industry.

If the meteoric path of Lucas’ career has by now entered into popular myth befitting Joseph Campbell, a review is worthwhile, if only because the Modesto, Calif.-born multi-media tycoon amazingly intended to shoot for a career as an avant-garde filmmaker. After a bumpy 1950s youth racing cars part-time, Lucas shifted gears to attend the burgeoning University of Southern California film school, where he sped into a prodigy during the premiere decade of the so-called “film brat” generation—movie-mad young turks like Steve Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, et al. Meanwhile, crosscutting to a parallel universe known as Hollywood, legacy studios like MGM and Warner Bros. were running on fumes in the 1960s, betting on elephantine old-school boondoggles like Dr. Doolittle and Cleopatra while largely dismissing the hip, youthful audiences that had hitched up to such anti-Establishment hits as Easy Rider and The Graduate.

At USC in 1968, Lucas made Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EB, an award-winning experimental short about one man’s desperate escape from a sterile, automated Orwellian underworld. While obviously a cinematic whiz kid, the shy, slight Lucas lacked at least two parts necessary to mesh in Hollywood: fearless brio and bluster. Francis Ford Coppola, a heralded young Italian-American filmmaker at rival UCLA was hard-wired with both.

After an apprenticeship with producer/director Roger Corman at the low-budget American International Pictures (famed training ground for a long list of future luminaries including Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme and John Sayles) and one audacious self-financed film (1967’s You’re a Big Boy Now), Coppola vaulted the studio moat, landing as a writer/director at Warner Bros. In one of the golden meet-and-greets in movie lore, Lucas wandered onto the set of the musty musical Finian’s Rainbow, where he so forcefully impressed Coppola that the brash young cineaste made Lucas his assistant.

Some of these bright flashbacks can be gleaned from A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope, a 60-minute documentary included in the DVD set (along with Lucas’ THX student film and a smarmy “making of” studio featurette from 1971). As ringleader in a band of rebels battling a fading movie empire, Coppola enlisted Lucas in his grandiose plan to create his own independent studio, splicing together a classic studio model with an “auteur”-centered élan inspired by the great 1960s European directors like Godard, Fellini and Bergman. Coppola dubbed his studio American Zoetrope (after a 19th-century pre-cinematic toy), based it in counterculture capital San Francisco, and managed to attract such raw USC talents as screenwriter John Milius and the gifted sound designer Walter Murch. Zoetrope’s debut, backed by a semi-bamboozled Warner Bros., would be a feature remake of THX.

Forty years later, the digitally upgraded THX 1138.2 is a widescreen eye-opener, especially enhanced by the spirited tag-team commentary of Lucas and Murch. Then-unknown Robert Duvall (one year before Coppola’s The Godfather) stars as the titular THX, just a cog in a stark-white, high-tech totalitarian society where sex is verboten and citizens are controlled by drugs and Big Brother-ish video surveillance. Using such futuristic locations as the nearby Lawrence Livermore lab and the under-construction BART subway tunnels, the 25-year-old Lucas and his guerrilla crew fabricated a striking alternate reality on a shoestring budget, with eclectic bits and pieces cobbled from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, and Godard’s Alphaville. Looking ahead, Lucas’ far-out vision appears to anticipate such dystopian milestones as Blade Runner, Brazil and The Matrix. (As in his digital tune-up of Star Wars, Lucas has slipped in stealth footage in spots, which may strike purists as a walk on the disingenuous dark side.)

Both Lucas and Murch say that the film was meant as a cautionary quasi-documentary “from the future,” which helps explain its deliberate foreignness as well as its chilly, off-putting absence of conventional plotting and character. Light years away from the warm-and-funny androids in Star Wars, THX’s black, baton-wielding robocops call up allusions to 1960s campus riots—as well as eerie flash-forwards to the incendiary 1991 Rodney King beating.

Betting on another revved-up Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde or maybe even 2001, the Warners studio suits reeled at their first look at the finished film. Far from the ultimate trip, they thought it was the ultimate bummer, demanding cuts and re-edits. Despite good critical reviews during a heady year that included such cutting-edge hits as The Last Picture Show and The French Connection, THX self-destructed in theaters, partially sabotaged by Warners’ lackluster marketing campaign.

Zoetrope’s misfire was not only a personal and professional blow to Lucas, but, worse, it caused Warner Bros. to pull the plug on Coppola’s dream studio (including a project written by Milius tentatively entitled Apocalypse Now). Yet like Star Wars’ rebel alliance, the Zoetropers would regroup to strike back against Hollywood, in both individual and collective sequels. Back at the front after a 1971 Oscar for co-writing Patton, Coppola reluctantly gave in to Paramount producer Robert Evans, who made him an offer he couldn’t easily refuse to direct a controversial novel about the American Mafia—a project that a dozen-odd elite directors had rejected. Much more the money-minded businessman than his mentor, it was Lucas who helped convince Coppola to take the job.

Over the decades in the duo’s leapfrogging rise to the top of a reborn Hollywood, Coppola has repaid his friend the favor several times over, most critically in his fronting of American Graffiti, made possible only because of Coppola’s clout after The Godfather became the biggest, baddest New Hollywood blockbuster until Jaws hit the beach in 1975. A jaunty semi- autobiographical comedy about hot-rodding teens in Northern California one night in 1962, American Graffiti was cool, fast and commercial, whereas THX was cold, grim and a black hole of humor. Riding the first crest of a 1970s nostalgia wave after a decade of tumult, the film would pass up Easy Rider on the list of the most profitable low-budget productions in history. Ever the anti-Hollywood outsider (even today), by 1974 Lucas had zoomed into the fast lane, ready to shoot for the moon—and far beyond—with cast and crew in a souped-up Millennium Falcon.

----------
1/23/12