In The Company Of Glenn

The glass-half-full view on Ansen

The internet is abuzz on Newsweek movie critic David Ansen's acceptance of a buyout from the magazine, and tea-leave readers see yet another indication of bad things for movie criticism in the print world. Probably so. But close reading of the accounts of David's not-yet-imminent departure from the pages of the mag indicates the move is a pretty good thing for David.

Newsweek's buyout offer, which was accepted by over 100 staffers on both the biz and edit side, is one of the sweeter ones I've ever heard of. Two year's salary—hell, that's enough to get engaged twelve times!—plus health coverage up to age 65, improved pension, etc. And in Ansen's case, he's on staff until year's end, whereupon he signs on as a freelance contributing editor, a perch from which he can still be in the game, writing, albeit away from the grind of weekly movie reviewing, which the 62-year-old critic has been doing at Newsweek for, like, 30 years.

Good for him, I say. David and I aren't close pals, but he's a droll, companionable fellow, always a good face to see on the festival circuit. He was part of the giddy gaggle (now it can be told!) that bonded over the nitrous-oxide-like effects of Julie Taymor's Across the Universe at last year's Toronto Film Festival. The after-screening dinner—with David, fellow vet Leonard Klady, my buddy Tom Carson of GQ, and the peripatetic Elvis Mitchell—was a welter of hilarity, and Leonard and David had the best stories. David will be missed, absolutely. But he's not quite gone just yet.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'The Phantom Carriage: KTL Edition'

"Where has this movie been all my life?" That's what I'm thinking as I'm watching this gem of a DVD, featuring a beautifully tinted and scrupulously transferred version of a 1921 picture directed by and starring the great Victor Sjostrom. The Phantom Carriage is as striking and haunting a vision of the supernatural as Murnau's Nosferatu or Dreyer's Vampyr. And yet I don't recollect its being mentioned in what was my first movie Bible, Carlos Clarens' An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films (and I can't check, because the book's in a box at the office, awaiting a move to another floor). How often do you feel a film taking its place in a pantheon as you're watching it?

So there's that, to begin with.

Livin' in the future...

There's a fun web-only feature over at Popular Mechanics' site, citing ten of the most prophetic sci-fi movies ever. Because it's a PM piece, its approach is more particular in its wonkiness than other movie lists. Here aesthetic criteria are eschewed in favor of considerations of prescience. (This is probably the only way that a potboiler such as The Running Man or comedic sci-fi dreck like Short Circuit could end up on any ten best list.) Writer Eric Sofge enumerates, with considerable wit, what a given film got right, got wrong, and what's still up in the air. Musing on the cannibalism theme of Soylent Green (aha! the Richard Fleischer reassessment trend continues apace!) he notes, "Corporations can sometimes be vile. And human beings, on rare occasion, eat other human beings. But the urge to dine on the so-called "long pig" is a private matter, reserved for plane crash survivors and the criminally insane. To think that any corporation is capable of planning, orchestrating and keeping a lid on an operation as massive as Soylent Green is to have a conspiracy theorist's view of human competence." Good stuff. I'm currently checking out a restoration of Fritz Lang's final silent feature, Frau Im Mond (Woman on the Moon) and pondering how it is that a rocket scientist of considerable note is living in a Berlin garret. Lang and co-scenarist Thea von Harbou clearly had a unique view of the economics of such engineering back in the day.

PM, by the way, is thriving under the stewardship of my old friend and former Premiere editor-in-chief Jim Meigs, who used to urge me—when I was editing one of Premiere's "Shot-by-Shot" features, say—"Give it more of Popular Mechanics approach." This year PM has garnered three National Magazine Awards nominations, including one in the much-coveted General Excellence category. Congratulations and good luck to them.

(But then...not to get off topic too much...National Magazine Award nominations are often all over the place. PM's are clearly deserved. Still, one cocks an eyebrow sometimes. This year, in the reviews and criticism category, my friend the great Tom Carson (at GQ) and New York's estimable film critic David Edelstein are both nominated, and competing against...Caitlin Flanagan, a smug clod whose work descended to rank self-parody at the precise point when she was published for the second time. The other two nominees in the category are The Nation's William Deresiewicz and The New Yorker's Louis Menand, author of the Quixote. I'll bet all four fellows are thinking the same thing: "I don't mind losing, but please, don't let me lose to Caitlin Flanagan...")

Adages for cinephiles

I've been batting around book ideas recently, and I've come up with a quite uncommercial one: a collection of adages, observations, koans, what-have-you for the elucidation of the cinephile rather than the cineaste. In other words, a version of Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer for film lovers rather than film makers. Here's an adage that occurred to me pretty much out of nowhere this morning:

Never trust a filmmaker who says he or she is "putting a mirror up to" something.

That would hold up by itself. Others, such as a perennial favorite of mine, Never count an auteur out, might need a bit of explication (Bunuel is the obvious illustration here, although others might want to cite any number of Woody Allen's "return[s] to form), but the point would be to remain as terse as possible.

Rather than a book, this might make a good comment thread...

Widmark, for real.

One of the great cross-cultural misunderstandings of our time...well, of my time, although I wasn't there...occurred at the 19823 Telluride Film Festival, where one night a dyspeptic Andrei Tarkovsky was honored. Via his de facto translator, the Polish director Krystof Zanussi, Tarkovsky denounced the cinema as a whore. "When she learns to give it away, she will be free."

The next night's honoree was Richard Widmark, then in his mid-sixties. "I want to name you some pimps," he said in the drollest tone he could muster, which Widmark fans know was very droll. "Hitchcock...Fellini...Bergman...Orson Welles..." (Here's Roger Ebert's account, from which I crib.)

Tarkovsky was a genius who was capable of being a real, well, jerk; Widmark was a largely more gracious and relaxed fellow. They ought not have been at odds. After all, hadn't Tarkovsky's first film, as a student, been a tentative adaptation of Hemingway's short story The Killers, in which Tarkovsky himself appeared, as an assassin, whistling the tune "Lullaby of Birdland"? That's a part that would have been just up Widmark's alley back in the day. And didn't Widmark have the kind of face, the kind of classically sculpted, stoic face, that could weather it through any and every thing a Tarkovsky vision could throw at it? Think of Tarkovsky's greatest leading men: Anatoli Solonitsyn, Aleksandr Kajdanovsky, Erland Josephson. Great, great actors all. But they have not got anything that Richard Widmark did not. Tarkovsky and Widmark should have been allies. They really did stand for the same thing, finally.

Oh, well. A commenter below believes Widmark's portrayal of the Dauphin in Preminger's Saint Joan is homophobic. I never saw it that way. The Dauphin is silly, frivolous, uninformed; he has an epicene quality. Widmark's performance and Preminger's camera take his ignorance for what it is; what torments him in later life is his coming to terms with that ignorance.

Oh well, again. What we have to look back on is his lifetime of wonderful performances, and that unforgettable visage...a one-man rejoinder to Norma Desmond's line about having faces then...

As the desperate Harry Fabian, coming to the end of the line in Jules Dassin's 1950 Night and the City...

As slick pickpocket Skip McCoy, dipping into Jean Peters' purse in Samuel Fuller's 1953 Pickup on South Street...

Finally, breaking his back chasing the goddamn hood who took off with his gun, in Don Siegel's 1968 Madigan...

Each of these pictures is well worth seeking out and watching. Tonight. Don't even get me started. And if you can find Hell and High Water or Warlock, so much the better for you. Widmark never gave a false performance. Not even in The Swarm. Not that I'm recommending you watch that.

Widmark.

Richard Widmark died on Monday, age 93.

I've been thinking about him the past couple of days, because I was just watching him as the Dauphin in Preminger's Saint Joan, and delighting in the eccentric expresiveness of his performance. The Dauphin's a kind of head-in-the-clouds man-child, a little effeminate even, and effeminacy's not a quality you often associate with Widmark. Except—that high-pitched unceasing laugh of Tommy Udo, that's got a hint of sick girlishness to it, no?

Widmark had a lot more in his performer's kit bag than his tough-guy rep took into account—not that his tough-guy turns were anything to sneeze at. I could watch footage of the guy paring his nails and be riveted and beguiled.

I am, alas, bouncing between screenings and meetings and other appointments and can't right now do the post he deserves and I want. Consider this a place holder...

Preview of coming attractions.

I just finished writing my review of a film opening this Friday:

Visually ugly, morally non-existent, and a complete black hole in the departments of insight and wit, Chapter 27 is quite possibly the most godawful, irredeemable film to yet emerge in the 21st century.

I'll let you know when the whole thing's posted; hopefully it'll go up some time Wednesday. In the meantime, discuss if you like. I mean, can you just not wait?!?!?

'Bonnie and Clyde' on Blu-Ray

If you're a Blu-Ray player owner who happens to lurve classic cinema—the two categories can be mutually exclusive, for reasons I won't go into here but many of you no doubt already understand—today's a good day, as the Blu-Ray edition of Bonnie and Clyde from Warner Home Video hits stores. It's gorgeous; from the shots in the opening scene of Faye Dunaway's Bonnie applying lipstick in the mirror, she in particular has never looked better on home vid.
There's a fair amount of controversy around the intertubes concerning just how good a high-definition video version of a movie ought to look. Jeffrey Wells loved the DVD of Sunset Boulevard that Paramount put out a couple years back, which was restored and mastered so as to pretty much remove all the film grain from the picture, replacing it with a certain sheen. Jeff believes that any filmmaker who could concoct a film picture wholly without grain would do so; whenever he climbs on that particular hobbyhorse, his ever-entertaining commenters have a two word response. Yes, that, but also: "Stanley Kubrick."

My own preference, always, is for the video version of the film to approximate as well as possible the experience of witnessing a pristine print projected at the proper brightness and correct aperture. Is that too much to ask? Many times, yes. The thing is, I'm not necessarily sure I saw Bonnie and Clyde, or The Wild Bunch, or Bullitt, to name three films which Warner has done a spectacular job of putting on high-definition disc, under optimum conditions the first time around. En route to the movie palaces of New Jersey, prints got scratchy and faded a bit. I'm sure the projector bulb at the Palace Theater in Dumont was not always 100 percent. Etcetera. So most of the time this ideal exists only in our memory or imagination...but isn't memory, most of the time, some combination of the actual thing recollected AND imagination?

I'm sorry, where was I?

One thing I get a bit annoyed with is when a reviewer of a hi-def disc of an older film calls the film's look "anachronistic" and complains that this wasn't fixed somehow in the mastering. I came upon that once in a review of the HD-Disc of Bullitt, which I thought was about perfect in terms of putting the film across. In any case, the new Bonnie and Clyde is in that league. I don't have the capacity to do screen grabs off Blu-Ray at the moment, but DVD Beaver does, and that sterling site's review, with select images, is here.

Three Faces of Larry Tucker

Between 1961 and 1963, one Larry Tucker racked up a cinematic trifecta not to be sneezed at, essaying three unforgettable portraits of three deeply creepy characters in three exceptional films.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Saint Joan'

Between the two major bios of the man recently published—Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King by Foster Hirsch is meaty, informative, smart and fair-minded; I'm only just starting Chris Fujiwara's Otto Preminger: The World And Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger, a critical bio, but I'm already revelling in Fujiwara's exquisite aesthetic sense and eloquence—and the superb retrospective at Film Forum recently (not to mention the recent excellent DVD of Daisy Kenyon, which I mull over here), I'd say a genuine Preminger revival is GO!, and I'm all for that. Alas, a lot of Preminger is not easily accessible. Fox, which has put out excellent DVD versions of some of Preminger's gems for its parent studio, Laura, Fallen Angel, and Kenyon among them, still sits on The Fan and the notorious Linda-Darnell-starrer Forever Amber. The notorious Skidoo has been rather widely bootlegged...but this oddity deserves an authorized special edition of its own. The late work much of it critically reviled, also deserves to be seen—as Hirsch points out, even Preminger's failures seem in some ways ahead of their time.

This being the case, the temptation to seek out domestically absent Preminger on foreign DVD is substantive. I was much looking forward to revisiting Preminger's 1957 adaptation of Shaw's Saint Joan, a fascinating picture on any number of levels. What other picture from this master of poetic objectivity opens with a dream? (Preminger and scenarist Graham Greene shift Shaw's coda of the Dauphin's dream of Joan to the front, which substantially effects the dramaturgy...and not for the worse, for my money.) Then there's the matter of Jean Seberg's casting, and her much-underestimated performance, and more.

Alas, though, for the first time in the history of the Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD report, I must issue a caveat emptor. The Spain-issued DVD of Saint Joan, on a label called Manga Films, is not even close to being an ideal video vehicle for a reassessment of Preminger's film. The above screen cap tells the whole story: Georges Perinal's silkily gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is here rendered with all the detail and contrast of a 16mm print that's been gnawed on by beavers after being washed through a mud bath. Which is all that counts—if the image were halfway decent I wouldn't mind so much that the Spanish subtitles appear to be unremovable when you're watching the film with the English-language soundtrack. The thing is so slack a production I wonder that it's not a bootleg itself, except it's got the Spanish-language version of that annoying "You wouldn't steal a car" ("How do YOU know," I always ask when it comes on) anti-piracy warning at the beginning. Not that that proves anything...

I won't link here to the spot where I bought it, as I'm not recommending. But I hope the still-extant Otto Preminger Films, now run by Preminger's daughter, has better plans for this fascinating film. (Incidentally, Manga also has put out a version of Preminger's Production-Code-challenging The Moon Is Blue, which I haven't looked at yet. I don't have high hopes...)