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EdNauseum
Reviews
Putney Swope (1969)
Amateurish, Horrible, Poor Excuse for Satire
This movie is stunningly overrated. By today's standards it plays like Blaxploitation way down at the racist end of the spectrum.
And Mel Brooks is not in it. Not THE Mel Brooks. Some nobody with the same name has a bit part, so they put "Starring Mel Brooks" on the packaging.
Robert Downey, Jr.'s father was not an underground auteur. He was just an incompetent who made bad movies.
The only thing this movie is good for is to demonstrate how desperate the film industry was in the late Sixties. They had no idea how to reach audiences, so they threw money at junk like "Putney Swope." Luckily, they also threw a little money at much better films, such as "Easy Rider" and "MASH."
The Boys in the Band (1970)
Dated but Universal
I remember seeing about fifteen minutes of this many years ago, maybe in the late seventies. Back then it had that off-putting unpleasantness that repels you when you're pelted with too much information about people, language and customs that are weird and foreign. At the same time its display of a neat sociological spectrum of gay types was stagy and obvious. I expected things to get a lot creepier kissing, perhaps so I turned it off.
I should have left it on because the story is manifestly about universals, not the specifics of gay culture. It gets to this point through a kind of gay over-exposure, and I'll bet the author was keenly aware of how this would deliver the audience to an unexpected destination. The limp-wristed flailing of the queerest character had nowhere to go after two or three cringe-inducing lines, and every possible synonym for gay is flung out for our edification. This seems very dated in its pushiness, but at the same time it quickly brought me the feeling that I sort of knew these people. After cycling through every possible variety of cattiness or kindness between every combination of characters, it finally precipitated a dramatic movement with something important to say.
The way it culminated was ingenious and moving, even if I saw it coming about ten seconds before the big gasp. If a clumsy line had telegraphed this event, say, a minute or two too soon the revelation would have been corny. In the theater (which is where I wish I could have experienced this) the immediacy of live actors would likely have prevented even ten seconds of prescience. This moment was the work of a very skilled writer.
However, despite its strong resolution, the build-up was awfully repetitive. The bitchy comments were too clever by half, too on-the-nose and too frequent. Even in 1968 a thoroughly gay audience must have groaned at a lot of this.
The most dating aspect of this play/film is the absence of any discussion or worry about AIDS. Sex is either flippant or funny or an obvious concomitant of the melodrama of straight sex. It's never scary or foreboding in a life-or-death sense, but only difficult and maddening in a happy-or-despairing sense. Somebody might at least have mentioned the inconvenience of herpes or gonorrhea.
The documentary features are excellent. Interviews with Crowley, Friedkin and two actors give a lively historical context to the production of the play and the film. They are honest about the film's outdated aspects but also generously enthusiastic regarding its lasting dramatic and cultural impact.
Wikipedia says that five of the six gay actors have died of AIDS, a cruel fact that went unmentioned in the respectful but brief dedications at the very end.
Zoot Suit (1981)
Dishonest Propaganda
This movie's best feature is that it is a perfect "opening up" of a play, just enough to be cinematically compelling, but never leaving the stage behind. It was done so well that the artfulness of the storytelling almost made me forget about the evasiveness of the story being told. I kept looking for reasons to like this, until the cop out ending made me wonder if there had been a single moment of historic or sociological truth in the previous 100 minutes.
It would have been perfectly sensible to end the story with an honest and factual recitation of the subsequent crimes committed by the men who had been falsely accused and abused by the legal system. It was perfectly bizarre for Valdez to invent "let's pretend" destinies for the defendants, full of success and happiness. Am I supposed to be amused by this phony rewriting of reality? The very real evil of American soldiers, journalists and judges is laid bare, but the evil crimes of Mexican-American gang members are self-righteously minimized and sidestepped. In its trivializing of gang violence this play/film is a perfect illustration of the phoniness of Mexican-American pride. The Big Message is that double-talk and rationalizations of violence within "Chicano" communities is perfectly acceptable, so long as you can point your finger at systemic Establishment (read "White") racism. I guess that's the true nature of El Pachuco, then and now: swaggering BS.
With some self-reflective honesty this could have been a worthwhile phantasmagoria of fashion, music, ethnicity, crime and injustice. Instead Valdez squandered his talents on dishonest propaganda.
Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966)
I guess you had to be there
This film produced that "I guess you had to be there" feeling more acutely, and painfully, than for any 60's movie I have ever watched. It is almost impossible to believe that (as the vintage trailer claims) Time Magazine called this "Hilarious and poignant," the New York Times "Howlingly funny," and the New Yorker "Brilliant." I don't mind watching dated comic techniques (such as speeding up the film and music for a few seconds) so long as I can push my mind's eye back the appropriate number of decades and *imagine* how I might have reacted in 1966, or '46, or '26. I can smile at the places where an audience howled themselves to tears in an Abbot and Costello comedy. But the lame attempts at wit and slapstick in "Morgan" just left me slack-jawed in disbelief. Was it ever actually funny to watch a man act like a mere retardate, grinning ecstatically as he operates an electric can opener, imitating a gorilla in a subway station, and breaking things? At no point does any of this come across as eccentric or childlike behavior. It is simply annoying, and doubly annoying when Morgan's ex-wife responds, yet again, as though she were witnessing his infantilism for the first time.
But perhaps I am missing a "point" which was obvious forty years ago. You could also say that David Warner is doing a pretty good job of portraying the self-conscious and highly calculated intrusions of an offensive creep. He is less beefy than the Robert Mitchum character in "Cape Fear," but is precisely the same personality type. You expect everyone around him to recoil in disgust. Instead, the most we get is a huffy, "Oh, you are simply insufferable!" reaction. And then his spectacularly beautiful and wealthy ex-wife suddenly makes goo-goo eyes, for absolutely no apparent reason, and goes to bed with him. "Aha!" I would have said in 1966. This criminal mind is merely masquerading as a dolt with delusions of becoming a Karl Marx-worshipping gorilla, a peaceful animal that merely blusters violence. Aha again! He is actually a Marxist "guerilla," a dirty fighter in a class war...
Now I am thinking too hard. I am filling in the gaps where I am not laughing. I have no way of gauging the authors' larger intentions because their smaller dramatic and comic beats are indecipherable. In the middle of this Satire no one around Morgan does anything as realistically simple as changing the locks on the house doors.
Morgan's antics are supposed to be wacky and impish but ultimately aimless and poignant. Yes, there is some sort of structure of comic/tragic insanity which is barely visible here. Unfortunately, that is all that is visible.
I am so impressed by the un-funniness of this film that I would watch the whole thing again if it were shown split-screen alongside another movie showing a theater-full of people watching it in 1966. What, exactly, did they laugh at? At which gems of dialogue did they stroke their chins and nod their head to say, "Fascinating point," and "Very witty, indeed"? This screenplay was first produced for television. England's film community found the material so compelling, so necessary, so... funny that they demanded it be remade for the big screen. It won BAFTA's and launched careers. Why? I guess you had to be there.
Ad ogni costo (1967)
Too Shoddy to be Enjoyed
Did anybody fall for this in 1967? In that year I was eight years old, and I already hated this kind of crap. I would have been yelling at the screen. I yelled at the screen last night.
Perhaps this was the first heist film that used laser beams in a vault as an obstacle to thieves, but why did they do it so badly? The laser beams, which criss-cross the vault like a spider web, are done in an ostensibly clever way: translucent tubing filled with light. But when the thieves climb over the beams with a fancy telescoping ladder rig we can clearly see the laser beams sagging! Not just a little, either. Worse, we can see a connection point where two pieces of tubing were joined. It's a friggin' close-up! This kind of sloppy craftsmanship really takes you out of the film.
It gets worse. The safe is rigged with a delicate noise detector. The sound of a cigarette lighter is enough to set it off. The solution? Lift the entire safe with pneumatic lifts, stick on little wheels, soundproof the wheels with shaving cream (I kid you not), and push the safe ten feet away from the sound detectors. Then start drilling those titanium doors. Then blow it with nitro glycerin. Then silently push the safe back up the ramp and into the vault (more shaving cream), disconnect the pneumatic lines, cart away your seventy-five pounds of equipment, and close the vault door. All without making as much sound as a Zippo.
This film was co-produced by Spanish, German, and Italian film companies. Is it possible that in an audience of, say, 100 Spaniards or Germans or Italians, no one made a huge PUK-SSHHH! sound when those air hoses were disconnected? Maybe not. Maybe they were better at suspending disbelief than an eight-year-old American.
Compare this to the new gold standard for technical competence in that era of film-making, "2001: A Space Odyssey." Although history has unspooled very differently than as predicted in "2001" (no cities on the moon, no manned exploration of other planets), those cinematic predictions were very carefully executed. The craftsmanship was exquisite. If the Americans and British who made "2001" had been as clumsy as the hacks who made "Grand Slam," there never would have been any discussion about the religious or spiritual meaning of that bizarre last act. Those questions were discussed very seriously in the late 60's (and still are) because "2001" was a believable world where our powers of disbelief remained suspended for 2 1/2 hours.
Now, of course "Grand Slam" is just a heist movie. It's doesn't have any deep pretensions. Does that excuse its technical shoddiness? Of course not. Even a frothy story needs to keep us within the walls of the story, so that we can be lied to convincingly. When fundamental facts are ignored, the movie is over. The Confederate army can't wear blue. You can't drive to Australia. And laser beams can't sag.
Maybe this is why the United States was the technological powerhouse of the world in the 1960's. We cared about getting it right. And we still do. Even bad American movies are produced with a technical brilliance that outstrips the stupidity of the above-the-line talent. And web sites like MovieMistakes.com help keep our standards from flagging.
Maybe "Grand Slam" deserves credit for inspiring better films, such as "The Italian Job" two years later. Perhaps you can insist that "Ocean's Twelve" owes its dancing laser beams to "Grand Slam." But at least in "The Italian Job" when things blow up they go BOOM!, and in "Ocean's Twelve" the laser beams don't sag.