Film
What's Up Documentary?
From the awards at Cannes to the documentaries of the fifties.
THIS YEAR'S MOVIE-CROWD CRACK has been, of course, "Make a movie of Watergate? Not without the Marx Brothers." When life with its absurdities starts imitating fantasy-fiction, let alone art, the fictioneers are up against some pretty stiff competition, as the film Let The Good Times Roll demonstrates.
What documentaries of our crises become for newer generations was demonstrated recently when an eleventh grade history class climaxed their study of the McCarthy era with the 1964 Emile de Antonio-Daniel Talbot Point of Order! and found this brilliant 97-minute culling of the 1954 Army McCarthy hearing kinescopes more thrilling, more marked by drama and tantalizing characterizations than all the fictional political thrillers of their teenage lives.
For life, in the audio-visual technological advances and saturations of the past twenty years, is converted into instant-document and remains, recorded live, for the near-instant generations. And with it all comes not only instant-history but, even more interesting, instant-nostalgia. No, No Nanette? The Big Band Era? Bogey et al? That, my dear, is ancient history.
Let's take a stroll down memory lane to yesterday—and come up with Chubby Checker and I Was a Teen-age Werewolf and Elvis getting his sideburns clipped for Army service and the high school kids putting on a do's-and-don'ts fashion show to demonstrate that clinging sweaters and dungarees were to be eschewed in favor of proper dresses and neat suits, and Jersey City banning rock'n'roll concerts for the sake of public morality, let alone safety.
It's all there for you to writhe over, wallow in and twist to in Let the Good Times Roll, a splendidly frenetic high-style documentary put together by a coalition of television and film men, conceived by Gerald I. Isenberg who produced the film with 16 working cameramen, three directors and a corps of editors and technicians, all under the aegis of a group of companies, chief among them Metromedia Producers Corp and Cinema Associates. And stars? Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, Bo Diddley, The Shirelles, The Five Satins, The Coasters, Danny and the Juniors, The Bobby Comstock Rock and Roll Band, Bill Haley and the Comets.
The format is exhilarating, with the focal points performances by these stars within the past year in Richard Nader's Original Rock and Roll Revival Concerts at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, in Cobo Hall, Detroit and, in Fats Domino's case, the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. And these performances, brilliantly filmed to capture the musical mystique and the personality of the individual and presented with lush and imaginative special effects climaxing in kaleidoscopic multiple-imagery, are beautifully counterpointed, often on a split screen, with black-and-white original film of the performer in his heydey in the Fifties, providing visual, if not aural, evidence of what the revolutionary sixties have wrought in the very dress and style of even the most middle-aged among us. And in between the actual performances, not only do the stars reminisce a bit for personal nostalgia, but the filmmakers also provide excerpts from Fifties newsreels, scenes from movies (The Wild One, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Rebel without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, Don't Knock the Rock, From Here to Eternity—and that Teen-Age Werewolf bit in the gym), montages from yearbooks and of newsphotos. It's all fast and furious and fascinating.
Let the Good Times Roll, in 99 minutes, covers in pure cinematics what Grease has been doing off and on Broadway since February, 1972 with such theatrical charm. The film, however, becomes a highly subjective experience and reactions will differ almost Rorschach-test style. At the multi-generation screening I attended, everybody was taken up by the beat and the performance, but when it came to the period references, the young chortled with scornful disbelief, the twentyish crowd seemed overcome with the foibles rather than facts of their childhood ("Lowell Thomas," asserted one knowledgeable youth near me as a photo of Ed Murrow flashed by), the thirtyish crowd crooned with empathetic memories, and the rest of us—I suspect we got the rather cheering reassurance, as one does from nostalgia, that we manage to survive the worst of times as well as the best.
By contrast the week's fiction, Robert Aldrich's The Emperor of the North Pole, is hard, contrived, pointless in its thesis, repulsive in its people, singularly joyless and, above all, incredible in its concoction. Of course it has its rough-and-tumble-adventurous moments, its occasional chill and thrill and a certain stylish spirit—as one would expect from Aldrich, one of Hollywood's very top professionals. And there is a very good performance by Lee Marvin and a super-bravura one by Ernest Borgnine—as one would expect from each respectively.
The original script is by Christopher Knopf, a television writer with one previous film (The King's Thief, 1955) to his credit, and reportedly a life-long railroad buff. The last apparently inspired his plot, which involves Marvin as the king of the hoboes, described as A No.1, and the Emperor of the North Pole, who is determined to ride the rails on No.19 through Oregon to Portland in the Depression summer of 1933. Why No.19? Its vile conductor, Borgnine, is literally death on hoboes who dare ride his freight. Knopf, and the company blurbers, choose to see this as "a classic story of conflict—the free man versus the Establishment—made brutal by hard times that drove thousands to riding the rails." The message is spelled out ahead of time by one of the worst ballads yet to be imposed on a movie, a concoction by Frank DeVol with words by Hal David (lyricist is hardly the word for him, considering the lyrics he contributed to Lost Horizon) about "A Man and a Train," declaring that a man and a train are alike since they can both travel fast and climb mountains but a train's caput when it runs out of steam, whereas a man still can travel "on nuthin' but a dream."
So Marvin's dream is to outwit Borgnine and he is quite ingenious about it, even when saddled with a callow youth, a non-smoker called Cigaret (it's that kind of script) who's a cheat and a sneak and a coward and deserts Marvin in a pinch, though Marvin's tried to teach him the tricks of the hobo trade. But after a positively disgusting fight, involving two-by-fours, chains and a fire-axe, between Marvin and Borgnine, Marvin tells the young stinker that he hasn't any "class" and gets rid of him, two hours too late in this two-hour movie.
The youth is played by Keith Carradine who we know can do better, as he did as the cowboy in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Borgnine pops his eyes in excelsis, Marvin is as shrewd as he is dirty and Aldrich does what he can with near-train-crashes, leaps, jumps and brawls. But the script bogs them all, its Depression setting irrelevant (certainly to the story of a lifelong hobo), its romanticization of the bum and freeloader juvenile and its conclusion—that the better axe-wielder, rather than the free spirit, gets to ride the train for free—asinine. But I heard a lot of adolescents around me giggling—especially when Marvin practically chops Borgnine's arm off. It was enough to make my eyes, let alone my stomach, pop.
If you hedge your bets you can always be—well, if not half right, at least semi-justified. But a jury? The Cannes International Film Festival Jury has taken to hedging in a big way, splitting its Grand Prix for the second consecutive year, supplementing its major choice with a "special" jury prize and even, in 1972, with another unspecial jury prize, offering further proof—beyond the various complexities of who can enter what and how in and out of competition—that the festival's major aim is in keeping a variety of countries happy while promoting the sales of movies to various distributors.
This year's Grand Prix was all too obviously designed to keep the American and British moviemakers happy and the American distributors happiest and conservative approaches to film alive. With O Lucky Man! ignored, Warner Bros.' Scarecrow and Columbia Pictures' The Hireling shared the Grand Prix. A "special" grand prize went to France's The Mother and the Whore, just as last year's "special" went to America's Slaughterhouse-Five after the Grand Prix had gone to two Italian films, one of which, The Mattei Affair, has arrived here a year later to bore us silly. Beyond providing sops to the English-speaking nations, the double award is totally baffling; all the two films have in common is a pair of brilliant performances. Scarecrow is a rambling, derivative, maudlin movie (bound to appeal to European kulcher snobs) that serves only as a vehicle for excellent, albeit freehand and bravura, performances by Al Pacino and Gene Hackman (cited, in fact, by the jury, which then proceeded with its own logic to give the best-actor prize to Gian Carlo Giannini in Italy's Love and Anarchy).
The Hireling, however, is something else, a beautifully conceived and executed film, immaculate in its every detail and marked by brilliant performances that are, glowingly, a part of the whole. It is a taut suspenseful drama, a painful probing of personal need and fulfillment in a consideration of interclass relationships, and its triumph is its understatement of the issues at its core, the implications throughout of the turbulent emotions beneath the surface and the complete truth, therefore of their final raging eruption.
The elegant screenplay by Wolf Mankowitz is based on a novel by L.P. Hartley, published in England (but not yet, alas, in this country) in 1957, four years after his The Go-Between, which provided us with the superb Losey-Pinter film in 1971. And the novelist's awareness of social nuance, that was his hallmark, is transferred to the screen in Ben Arbeid's exquisite production and brought to shattering climax by the terse, innuendo-packed direction of Alan Bridges, who is making his film debut after a series of triumphant BBC television dramas. But it is, of course, the leading players, and Robert Shaw, in the title role, and Sara Miles, who bring the work to its fulfillment.
The period is 1923 in England recovering from the scars of World War I, its class system just a little surface-uncertain after the concerted dedication to king and country, perhaps most clearly among the "county" folk with whom we are concerned. Lady Franklin, who suffered a nervous breakdown after her husband's death, is being discharged from a nursing home and her "hireling" is the chauffeur who drives her to her mother's house. It is the chauffeur, however, and not the mother with whom she can barely communicate, who prepares Lady Franklin to return to her own home and helps her to resume the social life she has been unable to face. And it is the development of this delicate relationship that becomes a breath-bating suspense story, that engages one in a compassionate dilemma seldom offered us in such seemingly simple terms.
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