The Marquee

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Dino

The Marquee

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Karel Riesz’ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) is a testy, petulant, balled-up-fist of a movie. It’s portrayal of a young factory worker struggling to keep his life from sliding into a sea of boredom and ennui is one of the vanguard films of what was to become known as the British New Wave in the early sixties.

Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) is a Nottingham lad who has two facets to his life. By day he labors at a bicycle factory – Nights and weekends, he’s at the pub. Albert has a definite edge to him, that’s plain to see. Watch his swagger when he hits the town in his stylish suits or the smug way he exhales cigarette smoke. He’s a likable rogue, and it’s easy to imagine women being drawn to him.

Brenda (Rachel Roberts) certainly is. She’s with him as the film opens, and if the fact that she’s married bothers either of them, it’s hard to tell. That’s the thing about the blue-collar world of SN&SM – The people are beaten down by life, and they don’t seem to give much thought to anything outside their own orbit. Arthur likes this woman, and is romantic with her, but one doesn’t get the sense that his investment in her runs very deep. For her part, Brenda gives no indication that she wants out of her marriage (to a co-worker of Arthurs) – It’s more like she just feels a bit more alive when she’s with this wild young man.

This was Albert Finneys’ first starring role, and he is electric as Arthur. The role calls for Seaton to be a charming cad, but also to be selfish and thoughtlessly cruel. That is a hard package for any actor to shoulder, but Finney pulls it off beautifully. Watch him as he woos the pretty young Doreen (Shirley Ann Field). He is almost insanely cheeky and confident as he pushes through her defenses, and by the time the conversation is done, he’s got a date with her.

The thing that elevates this film to masterpiece, however, is the world that Seaton occupies. This is working class England in 1960, and the film illustrates a country still trying to regain its footings after the devastation of World War II. Most of the guys in the factories and pubs would have been veterans, and they are realizing that the better England and better lives that they hoped to find after the war aren’t going to be there. The cinematography by the great Freddie Francis helps add shading to the feeling of societal malaise that pervades the film. Everything looks sooty and worn out.

That’s the life that Arthur is terrified of. He tries to live his life as a rebuke to all of this, and says so at every opportunity.
“That’s what laws are for. To be broken by blokes like us!”
“Think of number 1. Share and share alike’s no good.”
“I’m out for a good time – All the rest’s propoganda!”
Arthur talks tough, but it’s hard not to see that he’s an empty shell. The idea of marriage amuses him, and we already know that fidelity and loyalty are foreign to him. He lies to every single solitary person that he encounters in this film, and seems to have no guilt about it. For all his bluster, Arthur realizes that he is probably going to end up just like those poor blokes that he so despises.
The film seems to reach a turning point when Arthur finds out that Brenda is pregnant by him. His reaction is what we might expect – That she has to “Get rid of it”, and it’s in these exchanges between Arthur and Brenda that the true soul of SN&SM resides. Arthur is supportive and not completely unsympathetic to Brendas plight, but the thought of the baby fills him with dread. It’s an inconvenience.

For her part, Brenda is the films most tragic character. Send by Arthur to see his aunt about an abortion, she comes back with a pitiful tale about being told to “Sit in a hot bath and drink gin.” She has allowed herself to become close to an attractive but irresponsible playboy, made a mistake, and now finds herself abandoned by him. She also faces the prospect of going to her husband with the truth about her pregnancy. When she confides to Arthur that she is going to keep the baby and confess her infidelity to her husband, it’s a beautiful, brave scene.
Near the end of the film, there’s a line that Arthur throws out about his parents that seems heedlessly cruel and unfair. When his cousin remarks that they seem happy, Arthur shoots back “They’ve got a TV set and a pack of fags, but they’re both dead from the neck up.” - Meaning that they have fully surrendered and are just marking time until death. As harsh as that sounds it’s not really wrong for most of the people we see. When Arthur encounters Brenda’s husband near the end of the film, instead of anger and violence he gets sadness and resignation. The man doesn’t feel the need to vent on this punk who cuckolded him, and this amazes Arthur. He would have respected the man more if he had tried to fight him.
The final passage of SN&SM is quiet and reflective, and anticipates what Arthur has fought his whole life against. Arthur and Doreen walk to a grassy hillside overlooking rows of factory houses, and Arthur remarks that when he used to come up there when he was a kid, there were no buildings. As the couple talks about getting married, Arthur hurls a stone at one of the houses. Doreen admonishes him saying “That could be our house” and Arthur replies, “It won’t be the last one I throw” By now, Arthur is starting down the path to surrender himself, and he knows it. Just like the blackberries gave way to urban sprawl, his youth will ebb away, and he will be like the rest. Dead from the neck up.

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The Soundtrack

I've gotten the urge to hear David Raskins' gorgeous theme from Laura...So here it is.

My Week of Movie Watching

Topkapi – I’ve always had a thing for caper movies, and this lesser known 1964 offering from Jules Dassin is one of my favorites. Peter Ustinov plays a petty con man who finds himself swept up in a plot to steal a priceless dagger from an Istanbul museum. Melina Mercouri (aka Mrs. Jules Dassin) and Maximilian Schell star as the leaders of the thieves. The mechanics of the robbery are drawn out in detail, much like in Dassin’s Rififi, and the film greatly benefits from some splendid location cinematography by Henri Anikan. A couple of other notes: The film is always remembered for a peculiar mass wrestling match that has a definite homoerotic vibe. Images of sweaty, hulking males turned up in Dassin movies more than once. It is also cited as the inspiration for the TV series Mission: Impossible. Recommended.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail – You know those people who know entire Python routines by heart, and recite them back and forth to others?

“Bring me ….. a SHRUBBERY!”

“This is a happy occasion! – Lets not bicker and argue over who killed who!”

“I fart in your general direction!”

Sorry, I’m one of ‘em. I’ll be watching this film when they close the box on me.

Laura – Laura is always recognized as one of the great Noirs, but when you watch it, you sure can’t help but notice how many implausible plot points there are. For instance, how Detective McPherson allows one murder suspect to tag along as he interviews another one, or how when he finds the murder weapon, he puts it back in its hiding place rather than taking it. This movie might have been forgotten long ago, but for one thing – The performance by Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker. Webb as Waldo is so over the top pompous and supercilious that he is completely unforgettable, and he makes the film worth watching. That’s fortunate, because there’s not much going on with Gene Tierney in the title role or especially with Dana Andrews who doesn’t manage to inject the detective with even an iota of humanity. Not a great film, but recommended.

My Week of Movie Watching

Band of Angels – Turgid Civil War melodrama from Raoul Walsh doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. Yvonne Di Carlo is the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner who gets sold into slavery after it is discovered that she had a black mother. Clark Gable is the mega-wealthy man who buys her. A romance ensues, but the rich man has a dark past, and the approaching war threatens to destroy him. It’s impossible to not think of Gone With the Wind when watching this, and although that isn’t really a fair comparison, this film is bad no matter what you compare it to. It’s poorly acted, especially in the case of a few of the supporting roles, and Gable and Di Carlo never really strike any sparks on screen.

La Pointe Courte - Agnes Varda’s 1955 debut, and a real nice little surprise. It’s only 80 minutes long, and tells two separate stories. In one a married couple comes back to the husbands fishing village home to try to salvage their marriage. The other story follows the denizens of the village as they fight to retain their way of life against local government who has decreed that the locally caught shellfish are not fit to be sold. The film is strikingly shot on location in Southern coastal France, and is interesting because the two stories are presented in such different ways. The couple’s portion of the film consists almost entirely of them walking the area and talking about their lives. It’s very Bergman-esque, and in fact even uses a sequence in the belly of an old boat, much like in Bergmans Through a Glass Darkly. Since this predates the Bergman film by several years, one wonders if the Swede saw La Pointe Courte. The fishing village portions, on the other hand, look to be highly influenced by Italian neo-realism, and the films of men like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. This mash-up of styles works well for the material involved. The structure of the film is inspired by William Faulker’s The Wild Palms, which alternated chapters to tell a pair of short stories. The screenplay was written Alain Resnais. Check this movie out.

The Marquee

The Big Snit

Cool

David Lean

My Week of Movie Watching

Night Moves – This was my second time watching this well-regarded but underrated modern Noir. Gene Hackman plays an ex-football star turned private dick. An assignment to find a missing girl threads him through Hollywood stunt men, a nympho teenager, and a sunken treasure. I found the plot to be a bit erratic this time around. It’s hard to pin down how the various characters are supposed to be linked to each other. On the other hand, there are some good supporting performances (including a very young Melanie Griffith and James Woods). The sequence that ends the film is simply stunning, and pushes it over the hump for me. Recommended.

Bridesmaids – A raunchy comedy in the tradition of The Hangover. I liked Hangover, and I like this one a lot, too. The real discovery here is Kristen Wiig as Annie. She’s so sweet and vulnerable here, and yet so gut-busting funny, that I just fell in love with her. The scene where the girls try on wedding dresses just as they are overcome by a case of food poisoning is comedy gold. Recommended.

The Knack…and how it get it – I waited a long time to finally view Richard Lesters follow-up to A Hard Day’s Night, and I gotta admit that I was a bit disappointed. Nerdy teacher Colin (Michael Crawford) is driven crazy by the success his super-cool flatmate Tolen (Ray Brooks)has with the ladies. When sweet country girl Nancy (Rita Tushingham) arrives on the scene, it’s a free-for-all as to who will win her over. The film takes a lot of the frenetic style of HDN and gooses it even more. I liked the sharp cutting style, and the zany camera work, but I was a bit distracted by the way Lester used commentary by passers-by as a narration. Plus, it was hard to understand what the hell people were talking about. Sometimes, I felt like the film was trying too hard, in a “look at how cute I am” sort of way. There’s also a little jivey bit at the end about Nancy’s being “raped”, which is cringe-worthy to a modern viewer. Some fun things, but overall not recommended.

The Marquee

On Location

Jacques Becker checking out Dernier Atout (1942)

Sex

A little extra Natalie Wood

"Throw more brandy!!!"

Film-doms' most famous pie-fight - The Great Race (1965)

The Movies of My Life

Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) is a film that I find myself returning to every two or three years. If pressed to tell you why, I’m not sure I could. Not with any degree of firm conviction, anyway. To say that it is a comedy is correct, on the face of it, but if you watched it expecting belly laughs like you might experience with, say, Laurel and Hardy, you’d be disappointed. I have seen it at least 4 times, and I have never really laughed out loud at anything onscreen. Playtime’s pleasures are more quiet and sly than robust.

I ‘ve always had this little crazy theory lurking in the back corners of my mind that Jacques Tati got the inspiration for Playtime from an ant farm. Yeah, an ant farm – That thing with a colony of ants sandwiched between two plates of glass. That’s what I feel like when I watch Playtime: It’s an observation of a species.

Tati had already has a big hit with Playtime’s predecessor Mon Oncle, which takes a look at the impersonal modern world, as M. Hulot struggles to cope with a futuristic house. As good as Mon Oncle is, it’s view of the modern world is a tad sour. Playtime, on the other hand, can be seen as a celebration of humanity on the face of the onslaught of modernism.

The film revolves around M. Hulots experiences in a world of glass and concrete. Early in the film, he has an appointment with some bureaucrat for some reason or another. This is one of the first of the film slyly humorous scenes. Hulot waits while an elderly security guard punches numbers into a huge bank of buttons and lights. He sits and waits, and finally we start to hear the clicking of shoes on a hard floor as the camera looks down a long corridor. Finally, a speck appears at the other end, and the man walks up to meet him. To describe this scene does it no justice, but in seeing it in a theatre, the ludicrousness of the little man, the long, long hallway, and the clicky shoes is disarmingly funny. It’s a normal human being doing a normal thing in an absurd scenario.

Take the sequence where Hulot is told to wait before the guy sees him. The waiting room is a glass cube, which is funny enough, but the walls are festooned with portraits of stern authoritative types, who all seem to be looking at him. Hulot can see the world outside, others can see him, but he’s still like an ant under glass.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Playtime is just a cute broadside against the modern world. To be sure, it isn’t an accident that the architecture is presented the way it is – Cold grays and blues, and right angles everywhere. Tati compensates for this with the people that he populates this world with, however. They aren’t cold automatons, but rather a living community. The subtle message of Playtime seems to be that even in this austere world, there is poetry. Whether it’s a man doing a bizarre ballet atop a rolling office chair, or an angry man slamming a noiseless door, Tati never makes his folks less than human.

The film tradition that Tati belonged to was that of the great silent comedians, like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. More than any other characteristic of Playtime (and of M. Hulots Holiday, and Mon Oncle), I love his brazenness in essentially doing away with dialogue in his films. You can hear people talking in Playtime, like the gaggle of American women, or the little security man I wrote about earlier, but it really doesn’t matter what they say. The construction of he film is so clever that dialogue is completely irreverent.

The centerpiece of Playtime is an extended sequence at a posh new restaurant where just about anything that can go wrong, does. As the time for the party approaches, work crews are literally just finishing up the contraction, and there is a running gag about a floor tile that doesn’t want to stick. Look at the patrons of this place as they start to flow in – They are all well dressed, affluent and perhaps somewhat uptight. Being uptight just won’t do in this movie, however. Tati brings several gags to simmer simultaneously during this sequence. There’s a fish dinner that never seems to get to the correct person. There’s a waiter with a torn coat that the others come to borrow stuff off. There’s a serving window that is too small to pass a dish through. All this stuff is whirled together as a jazz band plays, and gradually you notice that everyone has loosened up and packed the dance floor. The rowdiness builds and builds until Tati finally boils it over, and then brings it all back to earth in what is probably my favorite Tati scene.

Tati doesn’t really believe in bad guys, and that helps give his films that sweet glow that they all carry. With no real rooting interest in the outcome, you just sit back and observe. This was always in evidence in Tati’s films, but in Playtime, it’s carried to its logical conclusion. Although the film ostensibly centers on M. Hulot, he isn’t really the “star”. Playtime is much more diplomatic than the earlier stuff in the way the focus is distributed. The American lady played by Barbara Dennick is essentially as important to the film as Hulot, and others get significant screen time, like a fun-loving loud American diner, and the long-suffering headwaiter.

Playtime doesn’t end with bang, either. There are no great romantic moments, no revelations, and no grand comic flourishes. After spending the raucous night at the restaurant, the people just quietly go their own ways. I couldn’t have made that ending sound more boring, but Playtimes closing passages are pitch-perfect. The tourist ladies climb into their bus, and they meld back into the city. The bus joins into a roundabout with all makes and shapes of other vehicles. It’s instructive to notice that after bathing most of the rest of the film in sterile grays and blues, that this scene is a cacophony of color and noise.

That brings home to me what I love so much about this movie, and about Jacques Tati. Even in a cold mechanical world, people are people, and they’re the best things going. You just have to look.

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Roger Eberts Great Movies

Cinema Styles on Playtimes’ color palette

My essay on the restaurant scene

Sex

Ingrid Thulin

The Marquee (Kubrick Gallery)

The Killing

Killers Kiss

Cool

Tati

My Week of Movie Watching

Stage Fright – Another Hitchcock crossed off my list. SF was made in 1950, and was the last film before Hitch began his Golden Age with Strangers on a Train. This one centers on a man (Richard Todd) hunted for the murder of the husband of his lover (Marlene Dietrich). Stage Fright is interesting for the peculiar romantic quadrilateral that develops between Todd, Dietrich, Jane Wyman as Todd’s other girl friend, and Michael Wilding as an investigating detective who falls hard for Wyman. This one is interesting for about three quarters of its length, and then it falls off the rails. Dietrich’s character spends the whole movie acting as guiltily as she can, and then the movie throws a big curve at us, and it just feels contrived. A lukewarm recommendation.

Lacombe, Lucien – This 1974 Louis Malle film centers around a young Frenchman who is seduced to join the German police at the tail end of WW2. Malle makes Lucien a blank slate – He doesn’t seem to have any great affinity for the Gestapo, he just likes the idea of carrying a gun and seeming important. The core of the film is the boys’ relationship with a Jewish tailor and his beautiful daughter. The tailor (Holger Lowenalder) has lived a comfortable life, and is quietly realistic about what his future holds. Lucien begins by clumsily trying to seduce the daughter, but begins to build a cautious friendship with the old man, as well. Beautifully acted and photographed, and a harsh indictment of French corroboration. A great film.

Dinner for Schmucks – Some pretty good laughs here, mainly from Steve Carrell. The film centers around a corporate ladder-climber played by Paul Rudd who needs to bring a guest to his slimy boss’ “Dinner for Idiots” in order to secure his promotion and get a posh new office. When he meets Barry (Carrel), whose hobby is creating dioramas out of dead mice, it seems like a match made in heaven. The performances of the two leads reminds a bit of the great Planes, Trains, and Automobiles for the way it mixes a sweet doofus with a chronic tight-ass. The film kind of goes down the trail you think it will, but it’s a fun ride, nonetheless. Recommended.

Cool

this isn't happiness

And Also Starring...

The name Mike Mazurki is not likely one you’re familiar with. The face – now that’s a different story. If you have even a passing familiarity with the film Noir era of the 40’s and 50s, you have seen him.

As with Edward G Robinson, Mazurki’s facade masked an intelligent and refined nature. The university-educated Mazurki played some football and did some wrestling in his younger days, and it was his imposing bulk and tough–looking mug that got him in the door playing heavies in the glory days of gangster movies in the 1940’s. A look at his resume shows him popping up often in the best B movies of the era. There he is as the murderous Splitface in Dick Tracy. He’s fresh-from-prison crook Moose Malloy in Edward Dmytrks’ Murder My Sweet. He’s there playing nicely to type as a carnival strongman in the great Nightmare Alley, and most notably for me, as fiery wrestler The Strangler in arguably the greatest Noir of them all, Night and the City. He also got to help George Raft send up the gangster persona in Some Like it Hot, and has a smallish part in John Ford’s last great film, 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn.

The Marquee (This 'n That)

The Soundtrack

Glen Hansard - Say It To Me Now (Once Movie) from Liam Cooke on Vimeo.

The opening credits of Once.