This is it, the absolute apotheosis of insane 70’s Bollywood film tunes. A sublime and ridiculous Frankenstein of Sketches of Spain, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Wild Thing and I Feel Love, this may be even better than Let’s Dance for the Great Guy Bruce Lee. As with said tune, this was a mainstay at the late, great Jac Zinder’s Fuzzyland clubs in early 90’s Los Angeles not to mention a really easy song to do half-hour cover versions of. Dig that tape echo slathered all over the whole mix. Tasty !
Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? is expat American in Paris, William Klein’s satirical look at the mid-60s world of fashion. In my opinion, it’s one of the best shot movies of all time. Notice in these clips from the film, just how much Klein is cramming into each meticulously arranged wide-angle shot. His composition is nothing short of breath-taking, up there with the very best cinematographers of world cinema. Who Are You Polly Magoo” will be dissected frame by frame by film aficionados (and music video directors), probably forever. This film was incredibly difficult to see until Criterion put if out as part of the excellent DVD box The Delirious Fictions of William Klein in 2008.
Original movie posters for WIlliam Klein’s films are scarce and can cost a pretty penny (say $1000). I searched for a reasonably priced 60s vintage Polly Maggoo poster for some time before opting for a Japanese reissue poster with the top image here printed on mirror-like mylar. It looks amazing and only cost $20!
Mike Nichols’s film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened 44 years ago today during a summer of tumult. Not only were massive protests against the Vietnam War hitting Washington DC, but the last trouble-free marriage sitcom, The Dick van Dyke Show, had just aired its last episode. It was on.
Screenwriter Ernest Lehman ingeniously situates George and Martha’s relentless turning-point fight in a well-lit parking lot, giving Taylor the pacing space to sprawl out the argument across the psyche of tortured married couples across America. The pair’s agreement on “total war” seems almost chilling in its self-indulgence in the context of President Johnson’s escalating the horrific bombing of North Vietnam at the time.
There may be a short film that’s quite as vivid, courageous and intense as poet Forough Farrokhzad’s Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House is Black)—her 1962 portrait of a leper colony in the northwest of her native Iran—but I can’t think of it. Farrokhzad was a Tehran-born female poet born in 1935 to a career military officer and married off to the satiric writer Parviz Shapour at age 16. Farrokhzad divorced Shapour two years later and lost custody of her one-year-old child.
As much as it surfaces the sufferings of a rejected population, the 22-minute Khaneh… (excerpted below) clearly but subtly reflects Farrokhzad’s own attitude about autocratic Iranian society’s disapproval of her as a strong woman poet. The twenty-something scribe weaves her verse in voiceover throughout the footage, and her raw editing style moves agilely between long studies and quick cuts. The film would inspire the Iranian New Wave in cinema that flourished starting in the late’60s.
Farrokhzad would eventually adopt the child of two of the patients in the colony. Unfortunately, she died in a car-crash five years after the film was released, at the age of 32.
Here’s a rare and probably fleeting chance to see what’s routinely called one of the worst films ever made: The Phynx (1970). Essentially a musical comedy vehicle for a cavalcade of stars such as, ahem : Dick Clark, Xavier Cugat, Ed Sullivan, James Brown, Richard Pryor, and (wait for it…) Colonel Sanders ! The synopsis : An athlete, a campus militant, a black model, and an American Indian are picked by a female-shaped computer to form a rock group and go on tour in Albania where American show biz people have been kidnapped by Communists. Natch ! You can watch the whole thing in pieces on the ‘Tube from the same user, but I’ve selected this astonishing early scene in which a Spector-esque record producer guides the band through the recording of their first sure-fire hit: A hilariously clueless attempt at hipster rock written by none other than Lieber and Stoller. A bad trip is guaranteed for all !
Then came Johnny Guitar, On Dangerous Ground, and, most recently, Criterion‘s bang-up resissuing of 1956’s Bigger Than Life. James Mason plays a milquetoast school teacher, who, thanks to the “miracle drug” Cortisone, releases with near-tragic consequences his inner Übermensch. You can watch a great, Mason-hosted trailer for the film here.
If you haven’t seen Bigger Than Life, please do—it remains one of the more scathing critiques of the “American Dream” ever committed to film.
After dying 31 years ago this month, Nicholas Ray popped up again in yesterday’s NYT. During the years preceding his death, Ray devoted himself to his experimental film, We Can’t Go Home Again.
Made in collaboration with his college students at the time, segments of the film pop up in Lightning Over Water, but now Ray’s widow, Susan, in honor of what would have been her husband’s 100 birthday, is assembling a full print of We Can’t Go Home Again for next year’s Venice Film Festival:
“It was an experimental film, a difficult film and I think a visionary film that is particularly important today,” Ms. Ray said from her home in Saugerties, N.Y., where she has also been organizing the storehouse of original scripts, notes and movie storyboards for a sale. Ray worked on the project from 1972 to 1976 with students he taught at Harpur College at the State University of New York at Binghamton. An early version was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray continued to revise, reshoot and re-edit it until his death. The film employs what Ray called “mimage” (short for multiple image), in which a number of camera images are simultaneously projected on the screen.
In certain respects his ideas were ahead of their time. On screen Ray and the students play versions of themselves, a conceit that smoothly fits into this era of reality television. Today’s digital techniques would also make it easy to create the effects Ray painstakingly tried to achieve on a shoestring budget. Ray and his students, for example, used Super 8 millimeter and 16 millimeter formats and early video technology, projected the images onto a screen and then refilmed these multiple images using a 35 millimeter camera.
Jean-Luc Godard famously called Ray, “the camera,” and for a man whose conflicts—bisexuality, drug and alcohol abuse—always seemed on the verge of overwhelming his talents, it’s not surprising the director’s life was the subject of more than one documentary.
What follows is another look at Ray, ‘74’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself. Directed by David Helpern Jr. and James C. Gutman, the doc covers Ray’s Harpur College teaching years, and features several sequences of Ray working on We Can’t Go Home Again. Remaining parts follow at the bottom.
In light of Dennis Hopper’s recent passing, it’s also definitely worthwhile checking out Wenders’ The American Friend. Hopper plays Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, and Ray, in the opening scene, contributes a small but impactful cameo as a painter who’s faked his own death. That scene, restaged with a frail and sickly Ray, opens Lightning Over Water.
I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Part II, III, IV, V, VI
Today marks the half-century anniversary of the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which—along with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opening earlier the same year—used the artform of cinema to hold up the cracked mirror of compulsive desire to Western civilization.
Movies, of course, would never be the same. Who better to drive the point home than our friendly neighborhood Lacanian critical theorist from Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek, from his excellent 2006 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema?
