The Marquee

Desire

Merry Christmas !!!!

And don't shoot your eye out!

The Movies of My Life

I’ve always had a fascination about the pioneers of the space program, especially the men who were the original Mercury astronauts. Think for a minute about the timeline involved here. The Mercury program began in the late 50’s with the intention of putting a man into space. In a little bit more than a decade, a man walked on the moon. That is a phenomenal explosion of imagination and innovation, but it needed to have men who were willing to put everything on the line to make it happen. The Mercury astronauts were such men, brave to a level that is unimaginable today.

This was a pretty serious time in American history, and so it’s surprising that director Philip Kaufman chose to illustrate it the way he did. The Right Stuff gets the nuts and bolts right about the Mercury program, but he coats it in a thin veneer of whimsy and fantasy. A purist might blanch at this treatment of history, but in a strange way, it works.

Take the film’s opening passages, which tell the story of Chuck Yeager and the pursuit of the sound barrier. Yeager, as played by Sam Shepard, is a good ol’ boy in the tradition of Gary Cooper or John Wayne. His approach to flying is much the same as say, riding a bucking bronc. – Ya jest git on and do it. Yeager is a mythical character to the denizens of Andrews Air Force base, and in the local watering hole (Whose walls are decorated with the photos of pilots who have been killed). The sound barrier is treated like a mysterious, malevolent ghost, waiting to wrest the controls out of a pilots hands and tear his plane apart in midair. Yeager’s crashing through the barrier dispels these fallacies, and sets the stage for the second part of the film, when the space race gets underway in earnest.

Kaufman again tweaks the story with the introduction of two NASA recruiters, played by Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer. These two serve the purpose of introducing the Mercury portion of the story, but Kaufman also uses them as pure comic relief. Their narration during a presentation in the White House is hilarious. They bicker over points, and when a montage of possible candidates includes racecar drivers, the comment is “These people are adept at operating their own machinery…and they already have their own crash helmet.” There’s also a back and forth between Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) and a German engineer which is striking in it’s illustration of how two people speaking the same language can screw up a conversation.

The reason TRS is such a favorite of mine, however, is because of the astronauts. The film is mainly concerned with only four of the seven: John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gordo Cooper (Dennis Quaid), Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), and Gus Grissom (Fred Ward). Although Glenn had Nashville and Urban Cowboy under his belt, and Quaid had Breaking Away, none of these guys were big stars yet, and that helps them slide inside the skins of these well-known American heroes. Harris in particular hits just the right notes as the gung-ho Dudley Do-Right John Glenn. This character could have easily come across as hokey, but Harris somehow makes him gentle and earnest, yet as tough as nails. My favorite scene illustrates this beautifully. When Johnson tries to bully his way into Glenn’s house for an interview with Glenn’s wife Annie (who stutters badly), Glenn stands up to the Vice President, rather than let his wife be humiliated on national TV.

Pauline Kael wrote that “The scene is perhaps the wittiest and most deeply romantic confirmation of a marriage ever filmed.” Damn right. Ed Harris is my wife’s favorite actor - She thinks he’s hot. In watching him in this film, I can start to understand why she feels that way. His John Glenn is a Mr. Rogers goody-two-shoes, and is touchingly tender in his scenes with his wife, but he is no softie. When he confronts the others about their sexual indiscretions, he means business. It’s extraordinarily hard for an actor make a character both tender and tough at the same time. John Wayne could do it, but it’s hard to think of many others. Harris does it here, and beautifully. It’s a great performance.

What’s wonderful about this group of guys is the way that the job draws together men who are all strong, and all have an ego. Cooper, Grissom, and Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin) are friends going in, and they are openly dismissive of the others, especially Glenn and Scott Carpenter (“Archie and Jughead”, as Grissom calls them) There’s a press conference early on where the men are introduced, and Glenn manages to take center stage with his natural exuberance. The others recognize quickly what’s happening, and the conference subtly turns into a game of one-upmanship. All the same, when Glenn is threatened with being pulled off his flight in the scene described in the previous paragraph, the others back him up on it. Despite their differences, they are pilots, and they support each other.

The same is true of the wives. When the others meet Annie Glenn, she is shy and unresponsive to them. They don’t yet understand why, so they see her as a snob. Later, when John is in his flight, they have all banded together for support. It’s impossible to miss the fact that the women have their own group, bound together just as strongly as that of their husbands.

The truly tragic character in TRS is Gus Grissom. Grissom is the second one into space, but his flight is a disaster. The hatch blows prematurely, and the capsule is lost in the sea. Grissom always maintained he wasn’t at fault, and time has vindicated him, but the film suggests that that wasn’t the case back them. Where the others get to meet the President and have a ticker-tape parade, Grissom gets stuck in a seedy little hotel. The final blow was still to come - Grissom was ultimately killed when a fire tore through his Apollo 1 capsule in 1967.

Watch the seven astronauts during a performance by “fan dancer” Sally Rand. With her huge feathers, and a large harsh light behind her, she brings to mind Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and perished for it. These guys didn’t perish, but they did something just about as outrageous, which only this tiny group can appreciate. When they exchange silent smiles during the show, that’s what’s going on. It’s the acknowledgment that, “Hey, what we did was really special.” The camaraderie is tangible, and the differences they felt at the start are long gone. It’s a beautiful ,transcendant moment.

The Marquee

The 400 Blows

Sex

Ava Gardner

The Marquee

My Week of Movie Watching

Victim – Basil Dearden’s 1961 tale of a closeted homosexual lawyer (Dirk Bogarde) and his fight to uncover blackmailers targeting London gays. This film was sensational in its day – Homosexuality was illegal in England until the mid sixties, and Victim has a lot to say about this archaic law, and the social climate of the time. A hugely important film, propelled by a truly brave performance by Bogarde, who was himself gay. Consider this to be essential viewing.

The Lady Vanishes – Hitchcocks’1938 story of a train ride, an old lady who…vanishes, and why nobody seems to remember her ever being there in the first place. This one spent a wee bit too long establishing the characters in a snowbound hotel, but when they get on the train and get the real story going, it’s a lot better. There are a few classic Hitch touches, especially a bit with two glasses of poisoned brandy. I myself don’t consider this a must-see, but it does have a lot of admirers, so you might want to check it out anyway.

The Newsstand

March 23, 1968

On Location

Rainer Fassbinder (white sweater) and Michael Ballhaus (with camera) at work on Martha

My Week of Movie Watching

Once – I kinda got an inkling early that Once was a film I was going to enjoy. The opening image is of a street performer singing Van Morrison’s “When the Healing has Begun”. The film tells the story of said street performer (Glen Hansard) and the relationship that he develops with a young Czech girl (Marketa Irglova). The two leads are so real and so quirkily likable that you forget you’re watching a movie. The film is masterful in the way it uses musical performances as the engine for the blossoming passion between the two. Thing is, it doesn’t go down the path we think, and it is pretty up front about the fact that it won’t. Heartily recommended.

Mauvaise Graine – Billy Wilder’s first film is the story of a spoiled rich youth who falls in with a gang of car thieves. It’s billed as a comedy, but in reality, this one shows quite a few traces of what would become Wilder’s Noir-esque tendencies. Lightweight, but enjoyable.

Cool

Glenn Ford cleans his pipes