MOVIE-TV: REVIEWS
DIARY 8184
2/12/74
STONED SCIENCE-FICTION MOVIES
Seem to find that everyone's looking at me when I go down the street stoned, but it's probably a combination of paranoia and the fact that I find myself SMILING when someone on the elevator at the subway, for example, says that he's been to the Heights only in the summer, and I think to myself "I never thought of myself as living in a summer resort." Don't read on the subway to the movie, and sad to see that it started at 8:35, though the Voice announced it at 9:05, even though I WAS suspicious about a 65-minute modern movie called "Soylent Green." Charleton Heston is again the hero, but the CIVILIZATION in the movie is so POSSIBLE: strawberries $150 a jar, AGAIN he's tied up with a black woman, there's no air conditioning except for the VERY rich, no hot showers, greenish streets, and the Soylent (made from real soy) is actually from PEOPLE, and there's a MARVELOUS trip scene to Beethoven's Pastoral when Edward G. Robinson voluntarily dies (probably with LSD, but marvelously there was NO mention of that) in a GREAT lit, luxurious pleasure palace of death (novel by Harry Harrison, though probably from a STORY-idea by Arthur Clarke, among others), that actually brings TEARS to my eyes with the flowers, surf, fawns, mountains, and sunset as he dies happily, admitting his love for Thorn, as Thorn admits his love for him in a GREAT scene. "Westworld" started out very plausibly, with Richard Benjamin playing his typical nebbish-smiley person, but as it got more and more grim, with things going wrong more and more plausibly (a rattler strikes, a sword slips, robots refuse seductions), and the Shooting, Acidifying, Burning, and Breaking of Yul Brunner-robot is REALLY super spectacular. Have a Baby Ruth on going in ($2.50 for the stated $3 ticket), then a buttered popcorn and a licorice for 75¢, and almost tempted to get more, but the movie is good enough to satisfy some of my hungers. The audience smokes constantly, but thankfully the row of chattering Japanese quiet down after the too-long intermission is over. Then back to the subway, finding that I HAVE passed some peak of life-loving, which depresses me terribly, and I come home to eat more and write the note on T24, which must be one of the SADDEST pages in the DIARY!
DIARY 8207
2/17/74
LE PIANO VIVANT!
WCBS-TV's "Camera Three" again presents an excellent program moderated by Faubion Bowers with a funnily seductive Jean-Françoise Bucquet stretched out on a sofa in a mini-skirt. First is Webern's "Variations for Klavier," which doesn't even sound very NEW, now, but FIRST Webern said "Words are superfluous" and THEN gave some of the best possible words for my understanding of the piece: "Play it as you would Schubert." I'm then conscious of the LONG lines (which John said was part of the point; the expressivity of the varying attacks and the legato lines and the expression of the phrases, John said, would have been all part of the original score) and the BEAUTY of the piece without railing against the modernism of the piece. Then they introduce Xenakis's "Herma" and introduce me to the idea of ear-memory, looking at the blocks of sound as architectural blocks comprising a building, and being careful NOT to lose sight of the whole building when looking at each section as it's linearly played on the piano. Then I make another connection: Bejart loves/pushes/changes bodies to their utmost, investigating their possibilities, and since I love bodies TOO, I love and respect when he does with them. So now modern composers, who undoubtedly love (I can now agree, after long mental fighting-against) music and their instruments, are tying to love/push/change their instruments and their music, so I should at least respect THEIR rights to DO this, and maybe even let some of THEIR love rub off onto me. (1) An explanation that I can UNDERSTAND helps SO much for my GROWTH, (2) I come to see and appreciate this PUSH and EFFORT rather than staying with a decadent playing with successful formulas and turning out pleasant melody after pleasant melody, and (3) I accept the possibility of mistakes, but accepting them as part of the investigatory necessity. Last piece was Stockhausen's Klavierstuck XI, or "Games," where 19 passages are played at random until one is repeated 3 times, when the game is over. Bowers mentions "Mozart's idea of composing waltzes by means of throwing dice"!! HEY! And the lovely boy drawing a picture while listening to her play, and asking "Can you play this for me?" But the Frank Field moderation of "Research Project" afterwards on NBC MUST go!
DIARY 8214
2/21/74
BRADBURY INTERVIEW
"Day at Night" refers to JAMES Day, the moderator, I see for the first time. It seems Bradbury's been interviewed BEFORE, for his low-brow, good-natured "We gotta be open, live life to the fullest, construct what we want to do, and then go out and DO it" seems familiar. He was born in 1921, so he's currently 52, and he talks like a younger person, though he's fleshy around the face and his hands are wrinkled, and it's sad that his far-sighted eyeglasses make his eyes look SMALL, though when you can see the diminished curve of his head INSIDE the outline of his REAL head, you get the look of a small person behind his glasses, captive, speaking for the too-large façade! Born in Waukegan, Illinois, moved to Tucson at 6 and 12, graduated from the Los Angeles High School, started reading science-fiction at age 8, has written "1000 short stories, many novels, scenarios, "Moby Dick" and poetry." Mr. Electrico in "Something Wicked" is a REAL person he met, as he met Blackstone. Grimm, Anderson, Oz, Poe, Greek and Roman myths and the "Christian myths" in Sunday schools were read to him. HE says "I'm a writer of fairy tales." Graduated in his uncle's suit that he was SHOT in, and they didn't have the money to repair the holes in the suit. "Don't believe in college for writers; the intellect is a great danger to creativity. Don't think at the typewriter: feel, live." "If there's no feeling, there's no art; forget it." He mentioned Shakespeare, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Twain, Dickens, Stevenson, Poe, and rejects most of the novelists of the last twenty years. Particularly influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan and Carter, Warlord of Mars). Now the TARZAN series would be one to take on a trip! Great Book: Kazantzakis "The Saviors of God." "I like to think of myself as part of the universe waking up." And he talks about "my new book of poetry." "Basic problems of science-fiction have always been philosophical ones." Since he SAYS he can't think when he's asked a question or his mentality will take over, he tends to be glib and facile and burbly, and it becomes gradually obvious that he HASN'T gone to college at all, and IS probably as simplistic as a fairy-tale teller, or more generally a fantasist, since he doesn't even have the NUMBERS to be a SCIENCE-fiction writer! (4 daughters, one is 24; "Raising kids is a happy JOB.") Sounds like he'd be a BORE to talk to for a LONG time.
DIARY 8316
2/25/74
"SLEEPING BEAUTY": 1965 Kirov film
With a Soloviev whose calves didn't appear to be TERRIBLY much out of proportion, a Sizova who spun like a top but didn't have quite the panache a great ballerina should have, a Dudinskaya looking QUITE old and MINCE, like a flayed cadaver---or like the old woman she was whose flesh has turned to crepe, though the muscles underneath are still rock-hard, a Makarova doing nothing much as the Bluebird and Valery Panov as the other, there was a lot to recommend the film. There was a lot NOT to recommend it: seeing the parade for the final divertissements include Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, a man and a lot of little boys and not seeing ANYTHING of them, and then seeing only the INTRODUCTION to the Bluebird pas de deux and NONE of the solo variations was quite a killer. And then the stage setting was so cluttered with bushes and trees that it was almost impossible for anyone to raise an arm without getting entangled in fuchsia feathers. It must have been made for a very wide screen, because the sides were cut off in places, and the shell-boat got a large laugh from the audience. The special effects were great, having NO movement in surrounding people when witches suddenly appeared or disappeared. But the colors were too silky and pastelly to be good: pinks and purples and washed-out golds. Some of the cuts in the film made the music, not too good to start with, fidelity-wise, act like it had the hiccups. And some of the cuts of the camera were poor, as in the continuous turn on point, giving the impression that it was spliced from many takes. The camera APPEARED to be static, though there WERE some shots of feet only, or of heads only, but there was little MOTION to the film, even though it was OBVIOUSLY not intended to look like a stage at all. The idea that the Princess had to TOUCH the people to wake them from their sleep was a good one. With all the children in some scenes it was a bit over-produced, and the corps advancing with IDENTICAL curly blond wigs on women AND men produced the biggest laugh of the morning. The sunrise-head of Princess superposition was one of the nicest parts, and some of his leaps were so grand they APPEARED to be in slow motion, but I guess we'll never know.
DIARY 8318
Also 2/25/74
"PAN WOLODYJOWSKI"
An incredible film even if it WOULDN'T have been Polish! Even to the details such as the musical instruments used so pleasantly, the wooden churches, the costumes. You can SEE the progress of the battles and the strategies involved, the wheeling of the forces, the appearance of new troops, the individuals in the corps. The battles make SENSE, which is more than could be said for the various "War and Peace"s and other grander films. The heroine is quite a scrapper, running, fighting, beating her assailant and managing to escape with her own ingenuity. It had great plots and GOOD touches, like the spare horse that she could worry about, change rides to, get eaten by wolves. Great DANGER touches of LITERALLY riding a horse off a cliff. LITERALLY have the horse break through the ice! The fires in the wooden buildings in the snow were great, the tits showing of the raped women were realistic, and the blood was even convincing since it was used so sparingly. There were HEAPS of Turkish dead, great use of scenery in the battles, and GREAT MALE CHESTS. Even the DANCES looked like fun, unstaged, and well-photographed. Are there ROMAN ruins in Poland? And WHAT A TALKY POLISH AUDIENCE! Film from 1:20 to 3:50! The touch of the DRUM boomed out by four men and the tar rags lighting the slave-bloodied straw matting that spanned the moat were great. And for a death: shoving a stake up his ass, raised on the stake, blood dripping down his loin-clothed legs, and set afire. Camels and bullocks and Turkish army showed in marvelous traveling shots. Some focusing trouble, sadly. Marvelous use of hordes and hills and skylines. GREAT night battle and victory, but the SUICIDE at the end was QUITE implausible. Humor ["I can't stand an empty bottle" and not a FULL one, either], the woman and old man are SO Polish and sly and practical and roguish. Pan has a LOVELY mouth-twitch when angry or confused. The individual sketches and heroes and reactions in the battle scenes were masterful. And in the prologue feature, "the 25 years is only a crumb of history, but we toast---" is a marvelous juxtaposition of images. The winter sleigh scene was a BEAUTY. A VERY GOOD FILM!
DIARY 8319
Also 2/25/74
GURU MAHARAJI
They actually got the four parts of the "secret" of the "method" on the screen! 1) "The Light": Hold your right thumb on the outside edge of the right eye, the index finger at the place of the third eye, and the middle finger at the outside edge of the left eye, and push in, back and up slightly, concentrating on the point of light at the third eye. 2) "The Music": hold thumbs over ears, lightly cover the eyes, and join the fingers in a cap along the skull, and listen to the inside sounds. 3) "The Nectar": tongue in back of throat, may need fingers to help push it back, and the guru can put his tongue back so far it curves AROUND soft palate and UP into the nasal passages at the back of the throat! 4) "The Word": deep even breathing while pronouncing the mantra SO (as in sew) on IN and HUNG (as in Chung) on OUT. Great Abbie Hoffman quote: "If this is God, it's the God the United States deserves." I didn't know that he'd told people to quit their jobs, and there were some awful scenes around the desks at the end with people who didn't even have enough money to return to their jobless homes! And the idiot laughter of the child who got one of the flowers (which at least they were giving away rather than selling) was painful to hear, as was the BEAUTY of the guy who said that the Maharaji could love him better than his parents could to SEE. SEEING the Astrodome (and the great coincidences of the Master Bedroom, the Celestial Suite, and KO-Hou(ston)-Tek(sas)) and I know what it meant that he was sitting in front of something that looked like a sign for a gas company. The Blue Aquarius was awful, and Bhole Ji's singing even worse. And the thing cost $1,000,000, and only 20,000 attended, which made it $50 apiece! Quite a show. And the poor guy who clobbered him in the face with a shaving-cream pie had to have a four-inch plastic plate put into his skull. But maybe he WAS telling the truth in that he WANTED to bring peace to the world, and of COURSE he can say the world isn't ready for him. It ISN'T. And of COURSE every way to enlightenment is the same way, and if anyone CAN get there through his method, that's all to the good. And what ELSE is there to do a TV special on?
DIARY 8322
2/26/74
"UP THE SANDBOX" AND "THE NEW LAND"
A better pairing is hard to imagine about women's lib and the difference between REAL labor and humor and STAGED labor and humor. "UTS" is flip and she's "worked to death" fighting off her mother who wants to buy her a home in the suburbs, who has to dream about getting her husband's mistress to tell her he loves his WIFE, karate-chopping an assailant in the basement laundry room, demolishing the Statue of Liberty, being stabbed by a tribe of women-led blacks (with GREAT male drummers, however) in ACTUAL AFRICA (spare no expense!), being able to inflate her bosom at will, and having an abortion and prevented by her husband, and then at the end saying "I love you" when HE would say it, meaning "Wow, you're taking the brats off my hands and I can do what I want; I like that." "TNL" is SO slow-paced and full of action and life that it seems like LIVING a life rather than being tossed about in a Broadway production number. And the love is SO genuine that they never ONCE have to say they love each other: it's just so CLEARLY OBVIOUS. By his consideration of her childishness, by her patience with his temper, by their closeness in affection and tragedy, by their both working together uncomplaining for what they BOTH want---surely he is the head of the family, yet he listens to her, she KNOWS he's devoted to her, there's never a QUESTION of their faithfulness (they're too BUSY), and the humor comes from SMALL pleasures: a fancy hat, the surprise of a bull and a cow, the thankfulness at the completion of BUILDING (not having her mother pay for) a house, the gratitude at saving a son's life even at the cost of killing the bull to WRAP him in, the pleasure of a pregnancy; and how Liv Ullman will have another child though it KILLS her and Barbra Streisand would as soon kill HER child. What more dichotomization can there be? The RICHNESS of "TNL" with its phony dollars, the Spaniard tending the brother from sunstroke, he tending the Spaniard with yellow fever, the poisoned water and the hand buried, the horse skeleton, the Indian raid and the hanging of 36 at Mankato, the brother's ear torture and dying on the riverbank; Van Sydow in the tombstone-filled graveyard IMMEDIATELY surrounded by descendants in a family photograph---the stuff of greatness in films. To see "The Emigrants" followed by "The New Land" would be a true SAGA.
DIARY 8360
3/9/74
"ZARDOZ"
A PERFECT stoned movie: even MISSING the first series of levels where the Magistro-type says he IS Zardoz "a fake god by inclination, a magician by occupation," and it starts with the head whirling through space, Connery killing who is CLEARLY the Wizard of Oz, and then the levels begin, intermeshing VERY nicely to my stoned brain so that I can't understand WHY John would leave at 10, and I can't even BEGIN to uncover the levels: there are the Brutals, hunted for sport by the Exterminators, who wear the Zardoz masks, the Apathetics, wakened to slithery sex by the sensuality of Connery, who seems at first BELOW the Intellectuals, who are Immortal, though they can be COMMUNALLY condemned to be the Renegades, which WOULD be an awful way to spend an eternity, but Connery is called a MUTANT, and there seem to be MANY mutants, and there are gods and the hosts for gods, but the Intellectuals end up seeming some sort of rabble, and at one point Connery wakes from a DREAM, which is only proper in the nest of boxes, and it doesn't even MATTER that the mirrors and prisms aren't well used, the DIAMOND idea is great. The blows of people from their EYES, the communal blasting of a person, the avidity for sex, the FUNNY sequence about erection, Connery's willingness to be almost anyone; the POSSIBLE changing from the guy's face WITH AND WITHOUT the little painted beard---a marvelous tangle of ideas and events, a spectacular quick spurt of flame from the gas-filled balloons of the castle, the idea of the Vortex meshing so strongly with MY trip-images, the LEAF that he was given to chew that I don't know WHAT happened because of---and at this very moment I don't even remember how the film ENDED! But I WILL be seeing it again, whether it's with Sergio or someone else, thanks be to Eddie for letting me in, and let's hope there's no OTHER group of guys who chortle "she's FLAT" when the quite pretty gal comes in---and ONE of them DOES seem to have come from a higher level, and then there's the college professor BEFORE he finds the elixir of eternal life, and it's probably necessary to CHART the levels that EXIST, and mesh them with the TIMES of the story to really understand it, but I think it's a WORTHY successor to "2001," though the TRIP elements aren't nearly so much fun, the MIND-BENDS are VERY entertaining.
DIARY 8391
3/23/74
"ZARDOZ" AGAIN
The grass didn't seem to have much affect (is John cutting it with mostly the mild bidi?), but Bob doesn't want to smoke in the theater, and since no one else IS, and Eddie isn't there, I agree with him about the risk. See more of the beginning where the head "spits" guns and says that the "penis is bad, the seed is bad," and it all begins to hold together better HAVING seen it the first time: the Immortals with their great powers, with "Zardoz" setting himself up as a god to better control the outlanders, which are his bailiwick. But the PARALLELS that I'd seen only vaguely before are now quite CLEAR. Connery might be a mutant, but he STILL thought Zardoz WAS a god, and he had to come to terms with his emotions at the knowledge that HE killed HIS OWN GOD. And then the function of the TABERNACLE as the MODE of the eternal life of the Immortals: in fact they CAN die, but they're just RECONSTITUTED in the tabernacle again---seemingly with all their memories: is made clearer to me, and I can FOLLOW it when he starts his battle with the---what do you call him: Supercomputer, mass mind of the immortals?---voice from the computer, the voice from the crystal, and then he "kills" him, though "You found the flaw, Zed" is one of the weaker points of the plot, and since the Immortals have WANTED him to find the tabernacle and destroy it, THEY are killing THEIR god, too, and finding the liberation of death THROUGH it. Oh, and the BEAUTY of flashBACKS, flashes FORWARD (shooting Mai), and REVERSING time: breaking statues, UNBREAKING statues, and going off in ANOTHER time-direction! So the SYMBOLISM, looked at on THAT level, is quite a potent one, going through Christ and Frazier's "Golden Bough" and Campbell's "Masks of God." Zed also killed the Apathetics Apathy and revenged the Renegade's Age. The erstwhile immortals go off (to no one knows what, possibly a sequel without Connery) with tears in their eyes, and Zed and his wife Consuela (another odd sci-fi name like Cornelius and the Apes) live inside the head, produce a son who goes out to---one may guess---either found the human race in the FUTURE or in the PAST (and may be ANOTHER sequel), and then the rusted gun with the two handprints leave us to "wonder" about the handprints in OTHER places and wonder about a tie-in with "Chariots of the Gods." Perfectly logical, perfectly symbological, very entertaining. And we stay to see the prelude with Arthur Ohm, or whoever, but it adds nothing to the tale, except to ask who might be controlling US genetically for some purpose. The "possibility" being that HE created Zed, who created HIM in the "past."
DIARY 8430
4/12/74
"CLEOPATRA" WITH COSTUMES
Get out the book from the movie, which happens to be right there, since the records were moved quickly to leave room for the books that had to be filed on the shelves so that I could move the white bookcases in behind the desk. It says that Liz wore more than 4 dozen costumes, and I started taking track of them. 1: Red over white (RED), 2: Red and purple scarf in bath, 3: White drapery (WHITE), 4: Poison (have no idea what this means), 5: White over blue, 6: Coronation silver (SILVER), 7: Black and gold striped, 8: Blue trimmed in gold negligee (BLUE), 9: White nightgown, 10: Purple satin cloak (PURPLE), 11: Blue and silver, 12: White cloak over DARK blue, 13: Hot pink (orange?) (ORANGE), 14: GOLD in parade (GOLD), 15: Black Red and white (peasant-style), 16: yellow with white sash (YELLOW), 17: she wears #15 AGAIN?? Mainly black. ADS only at 9, 9:15, 9:30, 9:45, 10, 10:15, GOOD. Then for the second evening. 18: Red shawl over blue, 19: black, slit to the navel, gray shawl, 20: Silver-winged capelets and crown, 21: BARE in BATH (NUDE), 22: light green on dark (GREEN), 23: White sequins on boat, 24: Pink nightgown, 25: Slate green, 26: CITRON, 27: White under silver-starred blue, 28: Red under silver, 29: Gold film over white, 30: Black overgown over white, 31: Red under silver, 32: blue over yellow, 33: leopard-lined coat over blue, 34: purple over yellow, 35: ice-blue shawl over sky-blue, 36: purple brocade, 37: black over red, 38: blue terry cloth over white linen, 39: Chinese orange over white, 40: yellow over white. So there are 40, with all the OVER, however, there are 15 MORE, eliminating the nude and the repeat, which DOES amount to 55, substantially over 4 dozen. It's funny that Antony's "final" scene is with Apollidorus!! Who is quite cute and steady throughout. But Liz is quite shrill, Rex IS about the best of the lot, and I don't know why I remember the SEA scenes with such disappointment, since many of them were QUITE striking, though I can't see that the temple at Alexandria was the greatest set ever built---didn't have NEARLY as many people as GRIFFITH did in Babylon in "Intolerance." Can't tell WHAT lies the publicity department will try to foist onto the gullible public.
DIARY 8431
Also 4/12/74
NOVA'S "THE SEARCH FOR LIFE"
3.5 billion years old blue-green algae in Australia! "Blue-green algae quite SOPHISTICATED organism---and the EARTH only 4.5 billion years old!" Trilobites were 600 million years ago. Earth probably MOLTEN till 4 billion years ago! Amino and nucleic acids were the first steps---before the first, methane, ammonia, water, hydrogen and lightning to give a "primordial soup." In an experiment, amino acids were created AFTER ONE WEEK of electrical discharges. Nucleic acid carries genetic code. Amino acids dropped on LAVA rocks and dropped in OCEAN ACTUALLY PRODUCED cell-like entities---!!! These same amino acids are found in meteorites. Mariner IX found SURPRISES: (1) Volcano (2) Rift valleys, (3) DRY RIVER BEDS on Mars. Mars today is an "ice-age" Mars. It oscillates.
DIARY 8446
4/13/74
THE MOVIES
With hosts Fred Astaire, Rosalind Russell, Jane Wyatt, Rock Hudson, Jack Lemmon, Jack Nicholson, Lillian Gish, Karl Malden, and Gregory Peck.
"80 years of Hollywood filmmaking." Though Hollywood really only started in 1900, says EB. First sequence: CHASE, introduced by Jack Nicholson:
1. Teddy at the Throttle 1918
2. Cops: Buster Keaton 1922
3. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break: W.C. Fields 1941
4. For Heaven's Sake: Harold Lloyd 1926
5. Ben-Hur: Novarro 1925
6: Ben-Hur: Heston 1959
7: Bullitt: McQueen 1968 [8:30-8:45]
Charlie Chaplin in a 1915 movie about Hollywood introduces: STARS (and Jack Lemmon)
8. May Pickford as an orphan stealing a doll for a friend.
9. Charlie Chaplin as a tramp with Jackie Cooper, both eating spaghetti.
10. Douglas Fairbanks in a western jumping pigsties and leaping onto horses.
11. Rudolph Valentino doing his famous tango. [8:57}
SOUND introduced by a demonstration film of someone VE-ry dis-tinct-ly talk-king.
12. Jazz Singer: Al Jolson 1927
13. Big Broadcast: Burns and Allen 1932
14. Reaching for the Moon: Bing Crosby 1931
15. Whoopee!: Eddie Cantor 1930---in COLOR!
16. Love Me Tonight: Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier 1932
17. "The Marx Brothers": The Marx Brothers in a talent agency 1931 [9:10]
FACES introduced by an old-faced Rock Hudson
18. Sunset Boulevard: William Holden and Gloria Swanson 1950
19. Queen Christina: GARBO, looking like Greer Garson, INCREDIBLE CLIMAX 1933
20. Blue Angel: Marlene Dietrich (falling in love again) and Emil Jannings 1930
21. Rain: Joan Crawford ("and be damned to you" REALLY!) 1932
22. Goin' to Town: Mae West ("Now I'm a Lady") 1932
23. Casablanca: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman 1942
24. To Catch a Thief: Grace Kelly and Cary Grant 1955
25. Funny Face: Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire 1957 [9:27] 25 in first hour
FALLING IN LOVE (Romance) Jane Wyatt: "King Kong Died of a Broken Heart"
26. Wuthering Heights: Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier 1937
27. Best Years of Our Lives: Frederic March and Myrna Loy 1946
28. Now, Voyager: Bette Davis and Paul Henried 1942
29. A Place in the Sun: Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor 1952
30. The Lady Eve: Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda 1941
31. Cleopatra: Claudette Colbert and Henry Finlayson 1934
32. From Here to Eternity: Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr 1953
33. Hud: Paul Newman and Patricia Neal 1963
34. The Graduate: Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft 1967
35. Bonnie and Clyde: Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway 1967 [9:57]
COMEDY introduced by Rosalind Russell
36. City Lights: Charlie Chaplin 1931
37. The Women:Rosalind Russell,Norma Shearer,Paulette Goddard,Joan Fontaine 1939
38. Court Jester: Danny Kaye and Glynis Johns 1956
39. Some Like It Hot: Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe 1959
40. Born Yesterday: Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford 1950 [10:15]
MUSICALS introduced by Fred Astaire
41. The Great Ziegfeld: Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody number, OVER 7 minutes, 6 different tunes, undoubtedly the longest segment in the entire film. [10:24]
42. Hurray for Hollywood number with Dick Powell
George Cukor: Executive Producer; Bob Epstein: Special Consultant.
MAGIC and Technical Effects for the second starter (thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy) by Gregory Peck
43. The Birds (birds): Tippi Hedron 1963
44. Bride of Frankenstein (lightning): Boris Karloff 1935
45. King Kong (about 120 seconds): Empire State Building 1933
46. Wizard of Oz (flying): Judy Garland 1939
47. Day the Earth Stood Still (robot): Patricia Neal 1951
48. Phantom of the Opera: Lon Chaney's face 1925
49. The Fly (fly-head) 1958
50. Airport (decompression) 1969
51. The Greatest Show on Earth (train wreck) 1962
52. Samson and Delilah (pillars and idol falling) 1949
53. San Francisco (earthquake) 1936
54. War of the Worlds (blasting by saucers) 1953
55. 2001: A Space Odyssey (fetus) 1968 *whew* [9:13]
FIGHTS introduced by Karl Malden
56. West Side Story: Russ Tamblyn and George Chakiris 1961
57. Rebel Without a Cause: James Dean and Natalie Wood 1955
58. Patton: George C. Scott 1969
59. Spoilers: John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich 1942
60. Captain Blood: Errol Flynn 1935
61. Tarzan and His Mate 1934
62. Little Caesar: Edward G. Robinson 1930
63. Roaring '20's: Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney 1939
64. On the Waterfront: Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger 1954
65. High Noon: Gary Cooper 1952 [9:30]
66. Midnight Cowboy: John Voight and Dustin Hoffman 1969
67. The Godfather: Marlon Brando and Al Pacino 1971 (FIRST from the 70's)
68. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Paul Newman and Robert Redford 1969
69. Five Easy pieces: Jack Nicholson 1970
FINE FILMS OF TROUBLING REALITY introduced by Lillian Gish
70. Scarlet Letter (baby dies): Lillian Gish 1927
71. Grapes of Wrath (leaving home): Jane Darwell 1940
72. How Green Was My Valley (cripple walks): Walter Pigeon & Roddy McDowall 1941
73. Member of the Wedding: Julie Harris, Ethel Waters, Brandon deWilde 1953 [9:55]
MUSICALS
74. Sound of Music: Julie Andrews 1965 (with GREAT aerial shots BEFORE song)
75. The Little Colonel: Shirley Temple 1935
76. Way Out West: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy 1936
77. Song of the South (Zip-a-de-di-dah): animated and live 1946
78. Girl Crazy: Judy Garland 1943
79. A Star is Born: Judy Garland 1954(FIRST 3-TIME APPEARER not counting Chaplin)
80. Gold Diggers of 1935 (step-dance) 1935
81. Anchors Aweigh: Gene Kelly (and animated mouse) 1945 [10:15]
82. Follow the Fleet: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers 1936
83. Dumbo (Pink Elephants on Parade) 1941
84. Cabaret: Liza Minelli and Joel Gray 1972 (Money makes the world go around)
85. Funny Girl: Barbra Streisand (Don't Rain on my Parade 1968 [10:30]
BATTLE OF THE SEXES, funny and sad, introduced by Jack Nicholson
86. Philadelphia Story: Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn 1940
87. Min and Bill: Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler 1930
88. Red Dust: Jean Harlow and Clark Gable 1932
89. You Can't Take It With You: James Stewart and Jean Arthur 1938
90. Public Enemy (grapefruit in face): James Cagney 1931
91. Duel in the Sun (pie in face): Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones 1946
92. Twentieth Century: John Barrymore and Carole Lombard 1934
93. Pillow Talk: Rock Hudson and Doris Day 1959
94. Paper Moon: Ryan and Tatum O'Neal (only one from 1973, most recent year)
95. Adam's Rib: Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn 1949
96. All About Eve: Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (more than 4 minutes) 1950
97. Citizen Kane: Orson Welles 1941
98. Streetcar Named Desire: Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando for LEGITIMATE 3 1951
99. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton 1966
100. Gone with the Wind (ON TV FINALLY): Vivien Leigh & Clark Gable 1939 6 MINS!
Stills at the end: Luise Rainer in "Good Earth;" Charlie Chaplin, Karloff, Bogart, Cooper in "Sergeant York," Gloria Swanson is the FINAL face; the FINAL words are "Tomorrow IS another day." Chaplin, Astaire, Brando, Garland, ALL appeared THREE times each!
DIARY 8467
4/18/74
"WALKING TALL" AND "SAVE THE TIGER"
Both are exercises in ugliness, "Save the Tiger" more so from John Casarino's comment from a friend that the clothing business was JUST like that. Lemmon's hip-twitch was SO in character (when he was awarded the Oscar) with the PR-oriented attitudes of the character in the film that I wonder how much it HAS gotten to him. There are so many more BEAUTIFUL ways of saying you're happy than throwing a bump to an audience (or was it a grind?). And his "happiness" at the end was SO strange, watching boys play ball, with almost the implication that he could end up a dirty old man. But I remember with STRENGTH the feeling I got when I thought he was going to a ZOO, and I thought with PAIN that I haven't been to the zoo in AGES, and how much I'd like to see it. "Walking Tall" was even uglier: how a wrestler came to settle down in a Tennessee community (and it's based on truth, they say, though how anything so bizarre could be BASED on truth and not THE truth is beyond me) and "the establishment" tries to suck him into their bar and broad scene, and when he doesn't like it, they try to kill him, so he's accepted the job as Sheriff and they try to kill him a couple more times, and finally end up killing his wife, and there seems to be a bit of "people triumph" at the end when the townspeople take the law into their own hands and burn the furniture from the "den of evil." Rolling Stone considered this the best movie of the year, and for a Bing Crosby Production it has a lot of blood and violence, and the amorality of EVERYONE concerned: dirty deeds are good when practiced by a good man (such as clouting someone with a tree trunk) and evil when practiced by an evil man, and it depends only on the point of view of the narrator WHO is good and WHO is bad. I'm SURE the same sort of story could be embellished from the other side, showing the wrestler to be evil and in the wrong, since HE kills far more people than THEY kill! And then they work in blacks, and women's lib, and lots of other things, too, but basically it's an UGLY movie about UGLY people doing things in UGLY ways, and Bing Crosby is making handfuls of MONEY from such ugliness, which epitomized the CURRENT ugliness of the United States of America.
DIARY 8550
5/5/74
FILMS BEFORE 1900
Skladanowsky, dated 1879-1898, shows a GREAT ship in the ocean with filmy waves rubbing past each other, and lightning burning down a house in the mountains. Theater-Acrobatics in 1895. City scenes of 1895 Berlin, and the selection ends with his grinning bowing head. "Cabine" from 1894 is delicately sepia-red, like animation, of kids diving, people swimming, and boats. PASSION Play very "Griffithy" from 1898, and the scourging leaves scars and the thorns are put on, and it all looks quite REAL. No titles on these early things, many scenes, literally the stations of the cross, with a whited-out track for elevating during the ascent into heaven, and then it's poorly cut and pasted, and it goes back to the birth, and annunciation, Egypt, Cana, sermon on the mount and the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, and there's even the use of a double-image for the angels. Edison (1893-1901) started his first theater in 1896, and he tried his first SOUND experiment in 1896, too: a man playing a violin while two MEN danced together while a record played, and they said that was the forerunner of Vitaphone. Lumiere was the first who sent a camera "into the fields." Lumiere did the first advertising film in 1898 for Dewar's Scotch, with kilted people dancing, and thankfully the loud "Looks like they've had some Scotch" from the audience was poorly received. In 1900 the Lumiere catalog had 1299 titles, each less than a minute. 1897 was the first travelogue, and they had HUNDREDS of military-march films. The whole program lasted 57 minutes. Later, in a program called the beginnings of the British film, the EARLIEST date is 1901 for the "Funeral of Queen Victoria," and "Rescued by Rover" is 1904 for the first "story," and Edwin S. Porter made "The Life of an American Fireman" in 1903 and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1903, as well as "The Great Train Robbery" then, so to say the film started in AMERICA is just plain wrong, Lumiere and Skladanowsky being MUCH before any significant American endeavors. Another chauvinistic dream quenched.
DIARY 8646
5/31/74
BHUTAN FILM
The Consul to the United Nations speaks very slowly and deliberately, talking about how the film was made just two days before the OLD king died and the 19-year-old "Prince of Wales" was enthroned just a few days later. It took the German TV crew three years to get all the permissions it needed, including a signed letter from the King of Bhutan, so there have been VERY few visitors admitted. Monasteries are the seats of government in each valley. Rice grows to 3000 meters, grass to 4000 meters. 75% are Lamaist, after Padmasambava, of the 1.5 million inhabitants. Interesting point made that BUDDHA WAS AN ATHEIST. 4000 monks in the country. Since the 17th century, the Dzongs control the secular and religious power. Slavery was abolished in 1956, laws were first codified in 1968, the monetary system came in mainly for stamps, which furnishes half of Bhutan's income from outside: $47,000 worth in 1971. Half of Bhutan's economy goes to defense, for its 10,000-man royal army. "80% are equal peasants." 1200 km of roads built in the last few years. India built the road TO Bhutan, and is giving them millions to develop their five-year plans. Thimpu has a cinema (for Indian films) and a State Emporium for buying the handicrafts, but there is no nightlife (and they didn't show any hotels, either). The public school opened in 1965. Some of the richer children went away to school, can speak halting English, and archaically dance the twist on "camera." AGAIN came the DEEP GUTTURAL chanting which sounds more like an earthquake than a sound from a human throat. Archery is practiced as an art; dancing for ceremonies is mainly by men, some of the monks looked cutely gay, and the royal Rolls Royce had the license plate BHUTAN, which implied it to be the only one in the place. The costumes were colorful in a Tibetan way, they entertain the visiting diplomats in stately ways, and they're looking forward to being progressive while keeping Lamaism as a very integral part of their religious and total life. The Oriental impassivity of the speaker made the idea of trying the patience to SEE the country almost impossible. The audience looked well-traveled and affluent, though "there's nothing to see there, who'd want to go?" was a comment I heard as I was leaving.
DIARY 8736
7/10/74
"THE GREAT GATSBY"
Started reading the book right when I decided to go, at 1:10, and got more than halfway through by 1:45, smoking and dressing and rushing out to find that the Brooklyn Cinema is still only $1 during the day before 5 pm, and the theater was filled with mostly old ladies until a talky group came in, so it's a good way to pick up flicks, and I guess I'll wait for the "Exorcist" and the "Sting" until it comes THERE. Very convenient. Not knowing who was playing what part, and not knowing how it ended, I sort of thought Robert Redford might be Tom, and it took awhile for my stoned brain to tell me that Bruce Dern WAS doing a fairly good job with Tom, and Daisy was as effectively played as Fitzgerald gave anyone the directions to work with in the novel by Mia Farrow, though she was almost too radiantly beautiful in their re-encounter. There were some SMALL discrepancies, which I found when I got home at 4:45 and finished reading it by 5:30, such as the reporter visiting NICK rather than JAY, but otherwise it was practically faithful to the WORD about the characters and the plot, and some lines like "Where's Daddy?" which completely eluded me in the book came chillingly to life when the camera flicked to Redford's disturbed face since he thought of himself as MARRIED to her MOTHER. Mr. Wilson was about the best acting job, but the shooting was a bit phony, and I looked forward SO much to the "loving pan over his body" described in the New York Times Magazine, but he had on a top for heaven's sake, and it didn't hardly linger at ALL. But the homosexual overtones about the (added) butler conducting (and they took OUT the "owl-faced man" AND the phone call about "Slagle" that Nick got in the book) Nick TO a strangely vulnerable and likeable Jay, and even the "I think you're worth more than the whole crowd" was quite gay, and Sam Waterson can almost do no wrong. It might have been a PITY, however, that Redford's character never REALLY seemed shady as it had in the book!---he never REALLY seemed to do ANYTHING that BAD in the movie. But the beauty of the sets and costumes and lighting was palpable, and maybe there was a bit of sour grapes in the reviewers who thought the whole thing was so AWFUL. But Jordan WAS pretty bad, and SOME of the speeches and ALL the dancing CRIED of director's presence!
DIARY 8739
7/12/74
A VERY NATURAL THING
Bob's standing on line OUTSIDE, not seemingly annoyed, but some of the people around were pleasant enough for him, too. Downstairs with him to go to the john, and I'm back to see the posters (too little for $5), and I chat about the Mattachine Times with Owen Wilson, whom I compliment on his second piece, and he says the next issue is coming out on August 1, with my Pilobolus article in it, so that's nice. Up to chat with Henry Messer, who still is doing nothing with Mattachine, and Carl and two friends, and then sit with Bob just in the row in back of HIS friends, shorter but cuter than he, and when THEY laugh HE laughs! The movie starts in the monastery, goes to the Sanctuary where they meet, and then has some nice sensuous scenes, some realistic conversation that they laugh at when it hits home, and not really when it's FUNNY, and then there's too much possessiveness, always a problem, someone meets someone else and takes up more time, and of course he's never mentioned, there's a scene in front of the Cloisters, and then they break up, talked to by a friend, and there's a killing scene of a dinner party which is really too much, but it's DESCRIBED as being too much, and it DOES happen, so it's GOOD. Great filming of a scene at the baths, and another orgy at Fire Island (filmed in a house Bob stayed at one weekend a few years ago) is ALSO done very well, but it seems to me it could have been a BIT more pornographic, and then there's the meeting of a BEAUTY of a gay-pride march guy, Jason, played by Bo White, who falls very much in love with the hero, making HIM say "I love you" instead of "Smile" for the camera, in much the same way the hero had to wrestle his lover to say "I love you" the FIRST time around. The romping in Provincetown is done to GREAT music of Orff's "Entracte from William Byrd," which I want to get, and Bob Grossman cracked up when he saw the scene on the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, which we'd ridden on just about 24 hours BEFORE, and he freaked out because of THAT. The movie was QUITE good, the scene with Jason's wife was handled VERY well, and it's another step forward for the gay-movie industry. Now for the gay "Gone with the Wind," and we've got it made.
DIARY 8846
8/18/74
THE SEARCH FOR ULYSSES
Ernle Hoffman, or someone, has thought that since Schliemann thought Homer was being historical in the Iliad and went out to find Troy, HE would think that Homer was being historical in the Odyssey and find where HIS travels took him in the Mediterranean, and it surely DOES sound good to ME:
1. Sets out from Troy, which is now marked on the map. Blown way off course to some island of the Lotus Eaters, and he finds
2. Jerba, an island off Tunisia, flat, fruit-covered, unlike Greece, tropical, and the natives are smoking hash, though he says the fruit may be FRUIT.
3. Favignana (NW of Sicily) is the island from which he looks off to see
4. Mt. Eryx, I guess on Sicily, where Polyphemus, Cyclops, is SAID to have lived in one of the many very high caves, and the cliffs COULD have had the enormous boulders rolled down them to imperil the ship below. Then 60 miles NE
5. to Utica, a tiny island, VERY windy, that he called Aeolia, home of the god of the winds, and many winds meet there, then he drifts to a very distinctive harbor between high headlands through a narrow channel, very like
6. Bonifacio, in the south of Corsica, which even has megalithic burial places which could have formed the bases for the giant Lystragonians.
7. Circeo, tiny island (now joined to Italy) actually has the ruins of a palace of a goddess on a high mountain, though the goddess wasn't named Circe, there was still the legend that she changed men into beasts that she penned in her castle dungeons, and "all sailors exaggerate, don't you know?"
8. Galli Islands near Salerno are the three Siren islands, very distinctive, though this is the weakest as he tries to "hear" the sirens' song in the murmuring sounds of the winds and the waves against the cliffs. Then the
9. Straits of Messina has a town CALLED Scylla in Italy, and a whirlpool that the natives CALL Carybdis toward Sicily, lesser in force now, but still potent enough to turn large ships around in their whirlpools. South to
10. Taormina for the Kingdom of the Sun God and his bulls, and Taor is from the Greek root for bull, and there are sheep on the island there, too.
11. Malta has some name that means "hiding place" as did Calypso's island, and there are lots of caves where she could have lived. Then
12. Corfu, Ermonius Bay, has a castle which could have been Alcinous's. and it's only a short distance from Ithaca, where Ulysses finally finished his Odyssey.
DIARY 9972
9/4/74
DECADENCE AND "PHEDRE"
Jean-Pierre Bonnefous never looked so good, even with the poor TV reception, as he did in the emotional, sexually oriented (younger, to be sure, when he was still the star of the Paris Ballet), "Phedre." Arnie and I got into a discussion about decadence, which I compared SUCCINCTLY as being overripe, like a fruit (though people LIKE browning bananas and very soft peaches), which the dictionary MERELY defines as being marked by decay or decline, giving the specific example of a group of late 19th-century French and English writers tending toward artificial and abnormal subjects and subtilized style. But I extend my definition for Arnie to include sets and costumes that are so elaborate as to distract from the line of the dancing or performing, deliberately emotional and sexy plotting and costuming to permit as much showing of flesh as possible, and striving for effects through gimmicks and surprises. I tell him that this is something we're not supposed to like, and he even cites an apologetic dance critic who has to say that Baryshnikov's double turns are possibly part of the plot of "Giselle" and not technique-showing by someone who wants to appear as a STAR rather than merely as the character in the ballet. The purist-critic wants everyone to shun this decadence (I'm sure that the Harkness Ballet is one of the best examples of decadence, and I LOVE it) from a kind of snobbism, and I'd love to help bring it back into style as something that could be LIKED, though of course the purists would say that anyone who LIKES it is only being decadent themselves. Fostering even more license. YEAH! Only the dancers and singers mustn't be decadent: they must still knock themselves out to be technically even more spectacular than those of the generation before (as Maria Karnilova said that the corps at the City Ballet did things that even star ballerinas could not do in HER generation), but the AUDIENCE can lounge in the boxes of the plush Harkness, looking at the beautiful nudes on the proscenium, and hopefully being able, soon, to see a few of them on the stage, too. Decadence is FUN, charming, different, voluptuous, sensuous, invigorating (not debilitating), and I'd rather see a DECADENT, over-produced "Swan Lake" than one which is rigorously, icily, stultifyingly pure.
DIARY 8878
9/5/74
"THE EXORCIST"
Enter right near the start, where Karras is seeing his mother in the asylum and Regan comes in to piss of the floor, so that possibly the lack of continuity harms my viewing of the film, but I think there are SO many holes in it that I can't imagine how anyone could find so much to say about it except that there's nothing ELSE to talk about. I'd discussed this topic with Arnie walking back from Fire Island ferry (see DIARY 8879). First, I don't see the transfer of the medal from the old to the young priest. It seemed to me that Karras always had it, and it became important when Regan ripped it from his throat at the end, and then when I saw the beginning I found that the OLD priest had found it. And the "Ora Pro Nobis" was surely too clear for having been buried, and it explained WHAT the shadowy statue was that appeared next to Regan during the final scenes---otherwise I just thought it was DREADFULLY static special-effects for something living. Second, if Regan or her devil were so powerful to be able to crack the ceiling, the door, and throw drawers about, why couldn't they just KEEP THE DOOR SHUT when someone they didn't want came into the room? Then, why was there the red herring of her screaming that TAP water burned? And how could the bed have raised off the floor if it was only Regan's hysteria and not "actually" possession? Then I was curious why none of the reviewers that I remembered said anything about how the MOTHER was obviously hysterical, and an actress, and how Regan adored her, wanted to be an actress, and had a GREAT model, in her mother, for cursing and swearing at the least provocation? Any why was it necessary for Regan to have such AWFUL rubbery makeup on when she was possessed? The range of the spit split pea soup WAS impressive the first vomit, but could that REALLY make people vomit in the theater? And the kids in the audience thought her "Go fuck yourself" and "Your mother sucks cock in hell" were VERY funny. And why call it masturbating with the crucifix when the devil was surely just HURTING Regan? MAYBE the movie was CUT when shown there, as I thought some at the Quad might be cut? Now, I remember there wasn't even the SETUP for the fellow watching her who she tossed out of the window and, head-backward, down the stairs! And I agree with Bob Grossman, turning the head completely was a COMIC touch.
DIARY 8883
Also 9/5/74
CLARENCE DARROW THOUGHTS
Just talked to Arnie, who phoned about this.
Rintals, in his play, has set up Darrow as a modern man: for the laborer against the moneyed establishment; for free love; against shoddy presidents; against laws that don't make sense. But so many times during his excerpted summations to the jury I got the idea that he was really hypocritical, specious, and quite immoral himself. So many times his charge to the jury would be almost "I don't even want to consider whether what they did was morally right or wrong (though in general it was morally wrong, but his wanting to ignore it made the implication that he thought it was morally right, or he would have spoken about it), I just don't want to follow one murder with another."
The death penalty was struck down by the Supreme Court just recently, and already there's talk of reinstating it in the case of killing police officers. When I was very young I probably would have been against all death penalties, too, but what's the point of spending public money to keep some stupid crook alive in jail for the rest of his---probably long---life? If he could be forced to be productive, that might be different, but he sits on his ass---maybe living the sort of life I'd like to live?---is furnished shelter, clothing, food, and doesn't have to work. It might even be worth it to commit a murder for permanent social security after a bit!
Also, his constant play on the ego of the jurors "can't the state of Idaho bring itself to the moral level of the city of Chicago?" "If you are decent men you have to let these culprits go free," "unless you want to be murderers yourself, you have to free these murderers." And then the worst "I'll never ask for sympathy," but then he goes on to say "when you consider my whole life, would I break the law so stupidly?" Well, you were stupid, Clarence Darrow, if you'd misjudged who you chose and were guilty; you were smart if you were guilty and made your guilt so absurd to the jurors that they left you off without punishment.
This leads me to the idea that I have changed in the past number of years. As on DIARY 8881 I've changed in permitting myself to be emotionally dependent on John, and feeling sorrow when the dependence must end. As on DIARY 8883 I've changed in thinking there should never be an execution---"Birdman of Alcatraz" notwithstanding---in that the burden on the public might not make it worth keeping this trash alive. If a child thinks that the parents are going to forgive anything, the child will be unruly and naughty; if the child has strict parents, he might rebel in small ways, but he wouldn't dream of doing anything dreadfully wrong.
I so clearly remember my frustration with my mother when she wouldn't let me sing, or dance, or do anything that got on her nerves. I remember thinking "When I have kids, I'll let them do what they want." But now I can see that I would be even more exasperated with a kid who whistled or noodled or tra-la-laed than my mother was. I don't think I would be as rigidly pedantic about bedtimes or eating: if the child wants to be tired, let him, it'll teach him better than any of my arbitrary bedtimes.
When unemployment is growing so high, I can hardly see that benefits of the welfare state. With so many people on welfare, so many old people---what will happen when I do get to the point when every person is supporting not only himself and his family, but some other indigent family? Surely the wealth produced by a person in this machine society would cover the produce to feed and shelter the persons dependent on him, but is it right that the others shouldn't have to do anything? As someone said, there would only be a small percentage of artists anyway, so why not support the artists? But supporting the lazy and the child-ridden is another matter. I can see myself growing into a hard-bitten (because I have been bitten hard by the world) old man like Robert Heinlein: looking to preach more than to entertain.
What a perspective on people and life this gives me; what richness there is in the constantly changing kaleidoscope of life.
DIARY 8970
9/26/74
"PAPER CHASE" THOUGHTS
Sit numbed at the skill with which the movie conveys the agony of trying to keep up with classes in a difficult subject, and think of the tenet of the movie that he's "chasing after a diploma to put in a box with all the other papers: a birth certificate, high school diploma, published articles, stock certificates, and Last Will and Testament." Think how the cute hero would rather by LIVING than swatting books, arguing with classmates, trying to butter up a professor (and John Houseman has precisely one expression on his face through the whole movie, so why he should get an Oscar for acting OTHER than on the basis of his name is beyond me), and making excuses for his girlfriend, who rather too coincidentally happens to be Houseman's daughter. (Kingsfield's the name.) And I think of MY activities aside from living, and AGAIN get the swift thought that movies REALLY DON'T MEAN ANYTHING: they end up in my list, but barely do I remember how much they AFFECTED me, as this one did, with the stupidity of some ways of living life and the benefits to living life a freer way. I think again of just STOPPING reading books and going to movies, but then I WANT TO BE WITH SOMEONE, and if there's no one to be with, what do I do to fill up all the spare moments, without jerking off to satiation, so satiated that I haven't come in the past two days and have absolutely no urge to? But, in a sense, even NOW I'm not living up to my ideas (in the movie): I'm sitting in the movie NOT looking at the movie AS IT IS (though maybe I am, because at this point the excellent movie happens to be boring enough that I can turn my mind to other things), but evaluating my whole life on the basis of it. I should just sit and enjoy the movie. But I did GO to the movie, and I guess that's the first step. However, the sadness of "might have been" then comes into play: if he goofs off, he might later dream he "might have been" a lawyer, just as I, starting rather now, sort of think I "might have been" a writer, and would have been living a much richer, fuller, and monetarily richer life if I'd had more discipline and gotten myself into actual selling of writing earlier. But it's not finished (my life) yet, so I can't tell yet.
DIARY 8974
9/28/74
PARAMOUNT PRESENTS
It's so much BETTER than the 20th Century Fox one on Tuesday, and even better than "That's Entertainment," actually. Jack Lemmon can say "Son of a Bitch" in "Save the Tiger" but Timothy Bottoms was bleeped on 20th in "The Paper Chase." Paramount had a GREAT telephone-line continuity, a good sock-series, the "Ten Commandments," Hitchcock, Gloria Swanson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Marx Brothers, Crosby and Hope, "Gatsby," "Godfather," and "Day of the Locusts." 20th only had Richard Chamberlain as a host, and such "notables" as Raquel Welch, Tom Mix, "Sound of Music," Bette Davis, "Cleopatra," "Patton," "Mary Poppins," "Going to bed" series, and the spectacles of "Poseidon," "Zardoz," and "Pearl Harbor." They CUT the nose-slashing in "Chinatown," and the 92 actors/actresses who won Oscars, Paramount stars won 18 to them, or 1/5, and that leads me to the counting that I'll get into at the end. "Son of a bitch" CUT in "True Grit." What kind of consistency is this? But, sadly, there are just as many damn ads. Paramount also had a strong of silent stars, and then I totaled up the companies that had won Oscars for the best movie of the year, and came out with the following list:
MGM 9
Columbia 9
United Artists 8
20th-Cent-Fox 7
Paramount 5
Warner Bros. 3
Universal 3
RKO 2
For a total of 46 for the years 1928-1973, and I had to call the Brooklyn Public Library the next day to get the companies that made "The Sting" and "The French Connection" because I hadn't jotted them down. So whether the next Oscar is won by MGM or Columbia will decide who's on top and who's the first to win 10, after MGM was the first company to win 5.
DIARY 8976
Also 9/28/74
MOVIE WORKINGS-OUT
[Note in the back of "Don Quixote"] INCREDIBLE: Call for Olympia movie schedule: "Going Places" at 2 and 5:55; "I Could Never ..." at 4:15. So it's a four-hour movie. Dinner at Bob and Joe's planned for 7:30 pm LATE LATE LATE talking physics and trigonometry to Mark Krauss of Trans World, and get to the theater at 3:30, in despair because
1) It's partway through the continuity of "Going Places" and
2) the four-hour movie will be over at 7:30, making me late for dinner.
Enter to the rolling of CREDITS, and the placard outside says 5:35, and
1) I get in right at the START of "Going Places" and
2) the movie is only 3½ hours long, so I'll get out at 7, ON time.
FANTASTIC! Sadly, however, "Going Places" seemed again to epitomize the collapse of modern civilization: the heroes did absolutely nothing useful, but for every car they stole, every cunt they fingered, everyone they shot at or beat up or ripped off, the audience roared their appreciation, taking notes, obviously, for times when THEY will rip off cars and bicycles and trucks from their rightful owners, leaving them helplessly saying "What are THEY doing?" and everyone will applaud them for being cute, smart, practical, and heroic. It didn't seem to matter that their faces were in the paper as accomplices to a murder: the implication was that they were never caught. And the stupidities of feeding and clothing Jean Moreau (out of stolen funds, the parallel to Robin Hood was made explicit) and then having her shoot herself in the cunt was ridiculous. It was a wonder the two guys could stand each OTHER, particularly after one fucked the other, but still they put up with each other against the world, and for everyone else who was lazy, shiftless, and willing to entertain them for a good time. And then the constant "What did I do wrong?" "I was only having fun" or "What did you expect?" to excuse themselves from any pain at all---except when someone did something nasty to THEM, and then they were determined to have their revenge. Thoroughly nasty movies, portrayals, and philosophy. Maybe there SHOULD be censorship! "I could never" was funny, though it would have been more current made about five years ago---VERY old-moraled.
DIARY 9058
11/8/74
SUBWAY/HAROLD LLOYD FILMS
Subway notes jotted I the back of "I and Thou": Fellow on subway jingling half-dollars: sunken shifty eyes, long fingernails, VERY prominent nose and receding chin and forehead; puffy, pimpled face, dwarfish body and palsied, out-turned, draggy spindly legs. Everyone impinges on HIM: ordering, hating, staring, ignoring, disgusting, and HE, in his monomaniac idiocy, seems determined to impinge on as many OTHERS as he CAN.
Harold Lloyd films: he made $33 million on his films, and the World Almanac says he was born in 1894 and isn't dead yet in 1971! Maybe THAT'S why his films haven't been generally available, since most of them ARE good! The earliest show was "Why Pick on Me?" from 1916, when he was 22 and looked it; "The Flirt" from 1917; "Hey There" and "Take a Chance" from 1918; "Ask Father" and "Bumping into Broadway" in 1919; and then what must have been his seminal film of "Never Weaken" in 1921, where he does such incredible things with a building under construction, swinging off girders from corners, ducking swinging girders, hanging by his fingertips and heels. This must have been such a success that he was influenced to make "Safety Last" in 1923, where he literally climbs all OVER a building, culminating in that classic clock-face. "Girl Shy" in 1924 had the epitome of a trolley, motorcycle, horse cart, horse chase, and "The Kid Brother" in 1927 relied more on personal menace from a villain. His later films, on TV, show a somewhat fatter person, 1934 films would have been made when he was 40, and that might explain why he's not visible now: grossly old and gray and fat, enormously rich, he might be better out of sight. He was married for 46 years, Van Dyke says, and Harold Lloyd Jr was born in 1932, which adds up to 1978 if he was his first kid right after marrying. He put up a tree in 1965 that he said was not to be taken down; he'd be 80 today, and I think I would have remembered if the papers had said he'd died since 1971. So that makes the films of Helen Hayes, Mary Pickford, AND Harold Lloyd to look forward to when they finally die and relinquish their jealous control to their films that gave them the power to hold ONTO those very films.
DIARY 9178
12/27/74
"SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE"
Starting from the "perfect" marriage of the TV interview, they finally break up, ending, however, close again to each other, though married to other people, in a friend's home in the middle of the night. But the observations that even though the marriage is "perfect" the absence of problems might be a problem; the fact that passion leaves and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. He's perfect in capturing the frustrating events when one person wants sex and the other doesn't, and then the other is converted and suddenly the FIRST is tired. The thrill of an encounter with someone else is investigated, and I'm so delighted that John and I never had cause for the awful scene in which they confess that they wanted to be out of the marriage four years before, and he'd actually HATED her, thinking she'd used her genitals as a whore would, to get her own way. Then the appalling truth in the sequence of a 45-year-old woman wanting out of her marriage of 20 years because she'd never known what love was, and she still wanted to find out, having lived up to the agreement of taking care of the children until they were grown. The lovely sequence of them having sex on the office floor, she on top as she whisperingly suggested in his ear, and then the drag-out fight that seemed to characterize their entire relationship. The awful scenes of the first dinner couple who hated each other so much they could only horrify their hosts as they raked at each other much more gratingly than even "Virginia Woolf." The sweet reasonableness of Liv Ullman is constantly on the screen, making it what Bob Grossman would call a "woman's movie" but still unutterably true, and it must be a great thrill to act someone who seems so terribly alive with all the possibilities and hang-ups of a human being. The pity of the "I'm not angry or hurt or tired," when they are obviously just that, the sadness of the many "Nothing" responses to "What's wrong?" or "What can I do for you?" The greater part of the richness, the sadness, the triumph and pain of a relationship are all there, and it's no wonder that Bob doesn't want to see it, since he seems to be dead-set against any permanent relationships at all.
DIARY 9280
2/5/75
"LACOMBE, LUCIEN"
The first I heard of it, it was the "greatest film ever to come out of France," with the longest lines, biggest grosses, and most positive reviews. Then it came to the States and got equally grand, marvelous reviews, with lots of comparisons to "The Sorrow and the Pity" (which should have given me my first suspicions, since I didn't care very much for THAT). Then it played and rather quickly faded from sight, which should have given me my second suspicions. Then Bob didn't want to see it, which made me think that it would be great. Then it opened with that totally out-of-the-blue character-setting-shot of him killing a bird with a slingshot, obliterating any kind of sympathy that might have been felt for him scrubbing the neat hospital floors. Then his character was systematically downgraded through the rest of the film, so that after the first hour I checked my watch to see how much time would elapse before he "got his." Then the Horns, the tailor and his daughter France and his mother, the only sympathetic person in the whole film. When she didn't like someone, by damn she let them know. Lucien LAUGHED only twice in the whole film, and both times were so pointed up that it was OBVIOUS they wanted to be pointed up: once when he sprayed the champagne all over the place, the second when France got bitten by ants crawling up her legs. The Horns were awful, the Gaullists were awful, the Nazis were awful, everyone was stupid and silly and thoughtless and unlikable. I sat through the film looking at my watch, and FINALLY admiring some of the settings toward the end when they tried to flee to Spain, and grinned at the Grandmother's wincing not at ALL to hear her granddaughter's laughing in what was obviously a prelude to sex. And then that stupid nude shot of France washing, staring at Lucian, doltishly lying with a straw stuck in his face, with the final subtitle that he was arrested, sentenced and killed. I felt like APPLAUDING. What kind of catharsis this could give the incredibly MASOCHISTIC French EXCEPT for the Masochism, I can't think. Not even very well filmed, with no IDEA of how much time elapses between scenes, and most of it shot in terrible darkness and gloom. Souleilac (shot in Figeac) seems like a nice place, but the whole life-style seems so totally TEDIOUS and DRAB.
DIARY 9435
4/18/75
THE MOVIE OF "TOMMY"
Wished I was stoned when I sat down, but when Ann-Margret seemed to hog the first frames, and Bob kept shouting that she was so UGLY, until he agreed with me---with Oliver Reed having to ACT to come out ugly---that she was a perfect choice for the role, and that Tatum O'Neal was obviously the pattern and paragon of Sally Simpson. Paul Nicholas was much too beautiful to be the sadistic leather-number of Cousin Kevin, and the blacking out of the screen for Keith Moon's Uncle Ernie's sexual assault was a copout. The appearance of the father, scarred, was far more frightening than whatever the kid saw of the motherly bed (or even the killing of the father) to make him blind deaf and dumb, and a few too many close-ups of the blank kid's face were the first sign of tedium. But then there was Roger Daltry, in his rough-hewn beauty, and quickly they showed his Max Factored body in the silver hypodermic mummy, and even Bob had to admit that his bumpy-ripplies were humpy. But there was a lot of ugliness there: Tommy floundering in the fire hose spray by Cousin Kevin, the painful jumping off wrecked cars when he found his first pinball machine, the eye-closed, breathless groveling of Ann-Margret in the beans and the chocolate, and the beating up at the end. There was no real REASON why the parents should have been killed by the crowd that left HIM alive. Then the ending got very tedious until FINALLY it was clear that he was climbing the same hill to appear in the same sunrise his father had set in. The added music, being unfamiliar, struck everyone as not as good as the original; Bob hadn't even HEARD the original! Arnie and we agreed that if the whole thing had been MORE excessive, it wouldn't have appeared excessive, but the TEMPERED excessiveness was poor: the outrage of the Marilyn Monroe religion was the best scene, the realism of the pinball wizardry was a turnoff: the crowd in the audience was too REAL: it should have been more surreal. Gimmicks looked too MECHANICAL: the dreams should have been more effortless, and the snakes in the skeleton were both so CLEAN they were more pretty than disgusting. Tina Turner, even, wasn't very good in large doses, and the jerk-off scene was marred by her FACE. Probably won't see it until I can get VERY stoned for it on TV, in a very few years.
DIARY 9621
5/23/75
"THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH" (MOVIE)
Maximillian Schell takes all the first act to establish a persona that has no audience sympathy at all, and I wonder why the whole thing's been done like that. The idea that he has the "Garden of Delights" by Bosch from the Prado is more ludicrous than indicative of unending wealth, and there's no reason given why he kicks his wife's urn until his foot bleeds, either. The scene where he gets the atrocity shots and sets them up against the wall before burning himself under the arm with a candle is more pornographic than gripping. Then the second act reveals that he's NOT really a German, and I suspected that from his long tirade of "Am I a Jew?! Am I a JEW?!" which could only have as an answer "Since a Jew is the only person in the world that would answer such a question in such a way, of COURSE you're a Jew!" Then he goes catatonic when he's asked the all-important question WHY?, and he tries to assume his fifth crucifixion attitude within the glass booth and dies before he can answer. Surely there's something there about his wanting to be Christ, and acting as a sacrifice, but again, WHY? Even the tenderness of the touching of the hands through the glass with the only other "person" in the play, his valet Charlie Cohn, played by Lawrence Pressman, didn't suggest that he might be gay. I thought there might be something in the WRITER'S head to want to evoke such emotions of HATRED that are then DASHED, but he could HARDLY be saying that "You hate the Germans, but if you really get into them, they can't be hated at all because they weren't really at fault." But if they weren't at fault, were the Jews themselves; and the answer seems to be "No" when it was asked, and it was cogently explained that some DID try to be courageous, and they died, and other tried, and they died along with their families, and others tried, and they died along with whole villages, so finally they stopped trying. They didn't think it could happen to THEM, and they were so degraded that when they REALIZED it could happen to them, they couldn't do anything about it. But the still-posed question of "WHY?" hangs over the play, seeming to imply that it was flawed, because not only don't you KNOW why, you really don't that frustratingly CARE why.
DIARY 9645
6/4/75
"THE DARK ANGEL" (MOVIE)
Silly beginning with an 11-year-old Merle Oberon running out to two boys, experiencing a "quick wind," and then seeing HER running through the EXACT same routine. The servants serving breakfast in bed, breakfasting, gardening, carting people around, all without SHOWING servants, didn't start it off too well. Then the ABSURD scene where Merle Oberon and Fredric March decide in a MINUTE that they've loved each other deathlessly and have to get married tomorrow, the very DAY they have to be back at the front! Then SHE decides to "marry him" in a Romeo-Juliet kind of "I marry you, here, now," and then the stinking friend sees him taking up flowers to dinner with a woman, and tells Herbert Marshall about it. Of course, March can't say it was HER and can't say he WASN'T with a woman, so it's all "stiff-upper-lip and honor." Then March is "killed," Marshall and Oberon get engaged, and it turns out that March is BLINDED, wants to live alone, doesn't get out of the train when he "returns," and immediately makes a fortune writing children's books. They find each other, he tries to make them think he can see, but SOMEHOW they come back and are still in love. The MODERNITY of the touch that she WOULD go off with him, but all the SENSELESS "We didn't know for 20 years, but now we have to get married NOW," "You've got a girl up here, haven't you?" "TELL me, tell me, I MUST know," and "Me? No, I'M not blind." Attitudes just seemed so SILLY after the talk that Rolf and I had the same morning about what IS what, and current ideas about the needlessness of morality (though Eiseley came up with a GREAT point that the development of the human brain demanded a long childhood, with a corresponding increase of the need to be "faithful to a family." But not to the DETRIMENT of an individual, and the Israelis, at least, seem to have the idea that the COUNTRY is a family, and children can be raised even BETTER in a collective group by people who LIKE children, leaving parents who DON'T like children free to NOT destroy their children's lives.), and the datedness of the script by Lillian Hellman, of all people, and Hall Mordaunt, or someone, and the rich settings without any EFFORT, and his crazy ease of becoming a children's author---all painless, all without knowing what Herbert Marshall DID for a living!
DIARY 10115
10/13/75
"THE DUCHESS OF MALFI"
Take a list of the "nothings" in the play, and a couple of other notes because I'm so impressed with the play. Check Bartlett, and HE has "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young." "I stand as if a mine beneath my feet were to be blown up," is a surprise so long ago. "Throat slit with diamonds, drink gold, shot with pearls" is a marvelous set of deaths and lines. "We were TWINS" is even MORE a jolt after the Duke's glad to see her dead. The audacity of "Why did you not PITY her?" to Bosola, who killed her because the DUKE told him to. The first 8 people in the cast are ALL killed during the course of the play, which seems better than "White Devil."
(1) Bedroom scene, Act III (?) Duke to Duchess: "Thou art a name, and NO essential THING" sounds marvelous Kantian. Later in the same scene:
(2) You have shook hands (exited) reputation and made him INVISIBLE."
(3) (At the death of the duchess) Cariola: "What do you think on?" Duchess: "Of NOTHING." Cariola: "Do you dream?" Then the Duchess, her two younger children and her maid "quick with child" are killed, all strangled.
(4) Duke:---my shadow." "You are angry at NOTHING." Then Julia, the Cardinal's mistress, is poisoned by a cross on a bible by the Cardinal.
(5) At the castle: Antonio: "Lose all or nothing." Then everyone else is stabbed and stabbed and stabbed, the Cardinal, for instance, by Bosolo AND his mad brother, and the Duke says "Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust." A marvelous line. And then, finally, Bosolo, stabbed, says
(6) "Life, from a broad base, should end at this LITTLE POINT." And Rolf thought it might have been filmed at Yale, but it turns out to have been filmed in some castle in England, and I'm amazed that some company in New York hasn't done it already, since it's surely better than "The White Devil" or even "Edward II," which the City Center does with some such thing about it being "a masterpiece" and they don't even bother to tell anyone that it's gay. But pity poor John Webster, who EB says is noted for only TWO plays, though that's probably because they really can't WITH SURETY point to others that are certainly his, so he has to suffer because of modern lack of scholarship.
DIARY 10137
10/19/75
LOUIS MALLE CONVERSATION
Incredible what I fall into: turn on Camera Three and there's Susan Sontag "interviewing" Louis Malle, but it seemed so obvious to THEM she wasn't interviewing him that THEY decided to call it a conversation. That was my first reaction: she wouldn't question, she'd made STATEMENTS, and then look at him in such a way that he was forced to say something back. But she always spoke from CONCLUSIONS, from her POINT OF VIEW, while he responded with openness, with flexibility, with suggestions of OTHER points of view that HE might not necessarily have, but as ideas which might make the conversation RICHER---and I got the definite image of HER as COLLECTING facts and organizing them and scrutinizing them and making her point of view narrower and narrower, and insisting that OTHERS AGREE with her point of view (or at least, if they said anything that surprised her, she had to immediately FIT it into her point of view, as she seemed actively to be doing a couple of times); while Malle explicitly stated that he kept getting RID of preconceptions, plans, data, information, narrowness: he knew more when he was 25 than he does now: the whole IDEA for "Black Moon" came when he was editing scenes with the German actress Terese Gieser in his film "Lacombe, Lucien" and saw her dying in HIS bed in HIS house, and he tried making a film of her as a formerly famous person who REFUSED to die, so the people who came to see her, to pay homage to her, were "trapped in the kitchen doing ridiculous things like cooking"---but that probably sounded a bit too much like Bunuel and he changed into a fantasy in which the animals talked and in which Joe D'Alessandro and his "sister" were androgynous, could have been one or both and probably incestuous, and anyone could take it the way THEY wanted to, because HE was probably more innocent of meaning in it than the people who SAW it, particularly Sontag. THEN she stated that the habit of getting all the PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS of motivations and actions and meanings came in in the 19th century with Chekhov and Ibsen (two playwrights that I PARTICULARLY dislike), and I immediately added Dostoyevsky as one of these psychological root-cultivators, and he said that this WAS a localized, in time, phenomenon and that it wasn't true for Shakespeare, for example, where people acted from passions and convictions of the moment (and you could see Sontag thinking the opposite because she'd ALWAYS LOOKED at the opposite, but maybe reading more in than the PLAYWRIGHT put there), and then he added the Vinton-statement that he thought THIS civilization was dying and that we're going into something different, and he, for one, though it was good. I'll state HER my thought that it would be AWFUL to know and talk to and live with Sontag, but it would be MARVELOUS to know and talk to and live with Malle. He said that people better get OUT of the idea of seeing traditional things, because things are going to get LESS traditional, and I immediately thought of the journal that I'm writing, how THAT would agree with HIS view of doing things freely, without bothering about psychological roots, just SAY WHAT HAPPENED (whether factual or fantastical), and that this might be the wave of the future. I would welcome that wholeheartedly, since that would seem to open up a market for the type of writing that I do, giving me more a chance than has been true in the past. Amazed by the simple turning on of a TV program with someone interesting that would give me so much to think about and write about (and talk about, if I had anyone to talk with it about---though how much is my TALKING about it and thinking about it the FREEZING of it into my system---but the system is so free-form, it might be more positive if I thought of it as FREEING myself from the associations brought up in my mind about THIS program, getting it down on paper so that I can REFER to it in the future if I want to, but that it frees the THINKING part of my mind totally so that it can be taken up with something ELSE). But this type of action is a LIABILITY in PHILOSOPHY and COSMOLOGY, because no sooner do I read ONE book that "has the answers" SUCH AS Krishnamurti or Evans-Wentz or Watts or Ram Dass that I go into OTHER books and forget about the original---except that all those UNDERLININGS are there for future reference as helped me out so well last week when I was doing my EB research, and I guess I'll NEVER want to get rid of my EB copy, needing it for REFERENCE.
DIARY 10159
10/24/75
CARTOONS AT DONNELL
"Animal Farm" I'd seen back in 1957, but I hardly remembered ANY of it: the idea that Napoleon kept the dog-pups to become a Praetorian guard, that Old Pig sounded much like Churchill, that Boxer the horse had an awful death in the glue factory, and that the style of the cartooning was quite perfect. The socialistic overtones are a bit too heavy, and the sequences with the pigs taking over and the animals suffering are a bit too long, and the end is overly simplified, simply "the common animals" revolting again, but the cycle is bound to repeat of the leaders exploiting the lead. But good flick.
"Collector" I'd seen before, with its psychedelic butterfly and the flying-haired freak who collects them being sucked dry and pinned to the wall himself.
"Venus and the Cat" is by Bourek of some middle European country, but the soundtrack is in Italian. This "adult cartoon" has lots of tits and ass and even heavy black cunts as a Venus-statue inhabits a cat who becomes a woman who eats a bird while the man rubs tits, freaks out, and changes shapes in a greatly psychedelic backdrop of shifting colors. A real TRIP, and one that I'd like to have myself, even with its rampant heterosexuality.
"David and Goliath" is the opposite: good style but its 13 minutes seemed AT LEAST three times longer than Venus's 15 minutes. Draggy and boring and the point is made again and again, and even the Klimt-colorings and Salome-positionings of the characters isn't interesting enough to keep the attention.
"Just One Stop" is a better IDEA than FILM, with two clay-creatures looking in at a Bronx couple about to leave to tenant patrol. Some cute things happen, like the thumb-printed mouth-chewing of various items, but the awfulness of the Bronx couple really makes the FILM awful---draggy 10 minutes.
"Composition in Blue" by Fischinger from 1934 first of all has the good music of Nicolai's "Merry Wives" to work with, and the red squares, yellow lipstick-cases, blue steps, and varicolored sunbursts that change in size and go marching across are excellently reminiscent of the best parts of "Fantasia," and the print quality is so good that this LOOKS the best though it's by far the oldest. Even the noisy crowd (and smelly) didn't dent the excellence of this program, and Arnie and I are glad we went.
DIARY 10222
11/9/75
GRIERSON DOCUMENTARIES
"Grierson" is a 57-minute biography, rather boring, except that it reveals that the prestigious National Film Board of Canada (who made this one of their least interesting films in 1973) was first headed by this charismatic person whose eyes were always remarked upon, and he showed himself as self-actualized, in Maslow's terms, by saying that you must be "dedicated to something OUTSIDE yourself." He was born in 1898, but they said only that he was living in 1972 and dead before the film was made in 1974, so it's only supposition that he died in 1973. HE made the movie "Drifters" in 1929, and started documentaries (inventing the term) talking about common people, which was quite a turn then, and no one in the establishment liked him for that---though from the films that followed, Robert Flaherty got much more INTEREST out of his studies of the lives of the common people. 1964 was the 25th anniversary of the NFBC, so it was founded in 1939, and Grierson retired from it in 1945, so he didn't have THAT much to do with it except to give it its basic SHAPE. He didn't actually MAKE many movies, just set up the framework for others to do them so he could "produce" them.
"Song of Ceylon" is 40 boring minutes starting in the forest and ending in the forest, ignoring Sigiriya, showing Buddhas from Anuradhapura and Pollonaruwa without identifying where they're from, and laboriously toiling up Adam's Peak without showing the oversized Buddha's footprint on the summit. The dancers were vaguely interesting, but Arnie slept through most of it and it didn't matter much to him. Didn't get his "skillful" natural sound, either.
"Night Mail" was slightly more interesting in its 25 minutes, with a rather impressive trio of "Cavalcanti/Britten/Auden" for Sound, Music, and Poetry. HE seemed much more interesting than his films, and I copied two more quotes: "Who chooses the teachers of the teachers?" to show that THEY really rule the society in which their students will grow to live in, and "All things are beautiful as long as you've got them in the right order." He may have realized that HE couldn't do this very well in films, and then stopped to let others have the chance, like the unique Norman MacLaren, whom he helped.