Charles Foster Kane: This is Mr. Leland...our new dramatic critic. I hope I haven't made a mistake, Jedediah. It is dramatic critic you want to be, isn't it?
--Orson Welles, demonstrating a deep interest in critics in Citizen Kane.
Showing posts with label Orson Welles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orson Welles. Show all posts
Friday, November 11, 2005
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
How Orson Welles Saved the Siren
So remember when the Siren said she was taking some days off to untangle some things? She was being inauthentic with you. The reality was, she was taking the Landmark Forum. And now she is enrolled in a new realm of possibility. The possibility of realizing she went to a for-profit New Age outfit, knew it was a for-profit New Age outfit, spent the whole time realizing it and thinking, "wow, this is a for-profit New Age outfit," and still damn near got taken.
Several things saved her. There was her longtime suspicion of evangelical life-changing experiences. There was her background in business journalism, which means she knows corporations will try anything to separate you from your money. There was the influence of her late father, whose passion for the English language would have had him walking out of the room when the leader used a nonword such as "impactful" or "ongoingly" (each time the Siren heard that second one, she found herself hand-to-forehead as if to ward off a physical blow). There was her basic cussedness.
But what probably saved her, as much as anything else, was Orson Welles and Citizen Kane.
Settle in, folks. This will be a long post.
For some forty hours over the course of three days, the Siren was in a room with a bunch of total strangers and heard some things they probably haven't told even their best friends. She even got up to the microphone herself. She made a handful of nice and probably useful discoveries about herself. She is presently trying to incorporate some of those into her life. Which wasn't bad before she took the Forum, but needed some improvement in some areas. Once she gets her head screwed back on straight, she will continue to work on those areas.
But the Siren is also majorly, majorly pissed off. The Landmark Education Forum is run on a pyramid model. Think of it like the old shampoo commercial. "So I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on ..." as the screen divides up into an infinite number of models with great hair. Only Landmark isn't selling shampoo. Landmark is selling "transformation." But (here's the beauty part) if you want transformation, you have to transform other people, who show up to your "graduation" with credit cards and also invest in transformation by signing up for the Landmark Forum (C$500 including sales tax). And they tell two friends with credit cards, and they tell two friends with checkbooks, and so on, and so on, until the screen is filled up with an infinite number of transformed people with smaller bank balances.
As an alumnus of the world of capitalist journalism, I have to admit it's one hell of a business model.
Back in New York City, I encountered some people who took this thing. More than I really wanted to encounter, to tell you the truth. The hard-core Forum acolytes spout a lot of stuff about how it will change your life. That is pretty much all they spout, which is why conversations with them tend to be dull. But they're thin on the details. They say you have to experience it to understand it.
I hope most of my patient audience will agree that you don't have to experience everything to understand it. Why else do we go to the movies? I have never experienced desperate poverty, but when I watch Pather Pachali I understand perfectly well that it is horrible. Let the Siren save you C$500 (I think it's about $350-$400 in the States). Here's the Forum, blow by blow.
You settle in with about 150 other transformation-seekers. You hear a lot of rules. The three sessions run from 9 a.m. to anywhere from 10 p.m. to midnight. You get two half-hour breaks and one ninety-minute meal break. Why does it take so long? According to your energetic Forum leader, because it does. Say hello to tautology, tell it to pull up a chair and get comfortable.
You get the dictionary definition of integrity, then you're told it's really about keeping your word ("being your word," in Forumspeak). You're told to be on time (okay, not a problem), not to take notes (some of this stuff looks mighty goofy written down, as the Siren's readers are about to discover), not to talk amongst yourselves (familiar from grade school, also has the advantage of stopping any "wow, that's mighty goofy" conversations).
So here's the talk.
1. All meaning is derived from language. Life is empty and meaningless.
2. Because all of life is meaningless, events have no intrinsic meaning. There is what happened (your mother beat you, your wife ran away with the mailman, your children haven't spoken to you since the Reagan administration). And there is your interpretation (your mother was an abusive cow, your wife was a slut, your children are ungrateful brats). People collapse the events with their meaning. We are meaning-making machines.
3. People deal with life by developing persistent complaints, or "rackets." Your racket reinforces your need to look good, your need to be right by making other people wrong. You are inauthentic with people. You don't tell them what's really happening.
4. If you can look at the events as simply events, you will be free of them. You call a new and powerful mode of existence into being. And you can enroll other people in those possibilities. You do it by getting them to hand over their money and go to the Forum.
Are you still awake? The Siren was nodding off, but pay attention. We've been told that meaning is derived from language. But have you noticed that Landmark is creating its own language? Landmark is a neologism-making machine. And you have to love the fact that they took the great word racket, meaning a dishonest business, and instead coupled it to the little things that drive you crazy about life. Landmark isn't a racket. Landmark is freeing you from rackets. Either you "got it," and understand the concept, or you are being "resistant."
So that's the gist. It gets repeated over and over again, until your ass is numb and your mind is reeling. There's some other stuff, like an exercise in which you are supposed to close your eyes and be afraid, of the person sitting next to you, of everybody in the room, of everybody in Toronto, then everybody in Canada. This did nothing for the Siren because try as she might, she couldn't see anything frightening about Canadians.
Anyway. During the Forum, you are encouraged to call people that you are "incomplete with," Landmarkspeak for "pissed off at" or "have wronged." You're encouraged to tell them you have been inauthentic, and "share the possibility" that you could create a new phase in your relationship.
Why, that's sweet, isn't it? How is that sinister? It isn't. Except, that isn't the whole story.
When you call, you're also supposed to share the Forum experience. And later on you're supposed to share it with bloody everybody you've ever met.
The interesting part of the Forum doesn't come from listening to your leader yack. The interest comes from seeing people get up and "share" about their lives. And pretty awful some of them are, too. It's amazing how much suffering one room can contain. And, the leader told us Sunday night, look at it now! It's gone! isn't that amazing? How do we know it's gone?
Because we say it's gone. It was just a story. Your interpretation of events.
Got that? The Siren almost got it. She was sitting there Sunday afternoon, actually wondering if she should go to the "graduation," though the real purpose of the evening is to bring others to sign up for the Forum and maybe sign up for more Landmark stuff yourself, at steadily increasing prices.
Then the leader brought up Citizen Kane.
How many people had seen Citizen Kane, he asked. A gratifying number of hands were raised (the Siren was worried about that). He proceeded to summarize the movie. The opening death scene, Kane uttering the single word "Rosebud," the globe falling from his hand and shattering. The arc of Kane's life, as he goes from lonely little boy to newspaper magnate endlessly acquiring things and objects. The magnitude of Kane's failure. Then, the great shot where the camera zooms in and reveals the sled Kane had ridden long ago, the one he threw at the man who came to take him away to school. The camera lingering as the fire in the furnace consumes the sled. The leader said, here the audience realizes that Kane had spent his entire life trying to recapture a moment from his childhood. Kane's life had been empty and meaningless, the leader said.
Okay. Welles himself described Charles Foster Kane as "a hollow man." But the Siren snapped to attention and said to herself, wait a minute.
Citizen Kane is a tragedy at its core, meant to evoke pity and terror. The Landmark Forum certainly can cause terror, although that works better in Toronto if you're scared of Canadians. But there's no pity. What happened to you, to anyone, is a story. The Forum leader would have looked at Kane, after the wrenching scene where he trashes Susan's room, and said, "She left you. That's what happened. Your rage and pain is just a story. It doesn't mean anything. The meaning is just what you attach to it." All the feeling, all the compassion the movie has for its characters, is impossible in a Forum-ized world.
And there's more.
Yes, after this scene the audience finds out what Rosebud means. But the reporter Thompson is still right. You can't reduce the mystery, poignance and failure of Charles Foster Kane to one word. Kane wasn't all about getting back to Rosebud. There was a great deal more to him, more than anyone could ever know. The complexities of human beings can't be reduced to one word. They can't be reduced to a bunch of "powerful" "possibilities" and jargon, either.
So the Forum leader viewed one of the pinnacles of American art, and missed the whole goddamned point.
And the Siren said, there's no way I am going to my "graduation."
Last night, I spoke to a dear friend as I tried to decompress from the whole Landmark experience. I told him that one of the most outrageous aspects of Landmark, to me, was the presence of volunteers at the Forum. Volunteers? At a for-profit company? I told my friend that I liked some of Ang Lee's movies, but that doesn't mean I am going to go down to his set and volunteer to do stuff like hold the door open.
My pal chuckled. "But you'd hold the door open for Welles," he said.
"After this weekend," I replied, "you bet I would."
Several things saved her. There was her longtime suspicion of evangelical life-changing experiences. There was her background in business journalism, which means she knows corporations will try anything to separate you from your money. There was the influence of her late father, whose passion for the English language would have had him walking out of the room when the leader used a nonword such as "impactful" or "ongoingly" (each time the Siren heard that second one, she found herself hand-to-forehead as if to ward off a physical blow). There was her basic cussedness.
But what probably saved her, as much as anything else, was Orson Welles and Citizen Kane.
Settle in, folks. This will be a long post.
For some forty hours over the course of three days, the Siren was in a room with a bunch of total strangers and heard some things they probably haven't told even their best friends. She even got up to the microphone herself. She made a handful of nice and probably useful discoveries about herself. She is presently trying to incorporate some of those into her life. Which wasn't bad before she took the Forum, but needed some improvement in some areas. Once she gets her head screwed back on straight, she will continue to work on those areas.
But the Siren is also majorly, majorly pissed off. The Landmark Education Forum is run on a pyramid model. Think of it like the old shampoo commercial. "So I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on ..." as the screen divides up into an infinite number of models with great hair. Only Landmark isn't selling shampoo. Landmark is selling "transformation." But (here's the beauty part) if you want transformation, you have to transform other people, who show up to your "graduation" with credit cards and also invest in transformation by signing up for the Landmark Forum (C$500 including sales tax). And they tell two friends with credit cards, and they tell two friends with checkbooks, and so on, and so on, until the screen is filled up with an infinite number of transformed people with smaller bank balances.
As an alumnus of the world of capitalist journalism, I have to admit it's one hell of a business model.
Back in New York City, I encountered some people who took this thing. More than I really wanted to encounter, to tell you the truth. The hard-core Forum acolytes spout a lot of stuff about how it will change your life. That is pretty much all they spout, which is why conversations with them tend to be dull. But they're thin on the details. They say you have to experience it to understand it.
I hope most of my patient audience will agree that you don't have to experience everything to understand it. Why else do we go to the movies? I have never experienced desperate poverty, but when I watch Pather Pachali I understand perfectly well that it is horrible. Let the Siren save you C$500 (I think it's about $350-$400 in the States). Here's the Forum, blow by blow.
You settle in with about 150 other transformation-seekers. You hear a lot of rules. The three sessions run from 9 a.m. to anywhere from 10 p.m. to midnight. You get two half-hour breaks and one ninety-minute meal break. Why does it take so long? According to your energetic Forum leader, because it does. Say hello to tautology, tell it to pull up a chair and get comfortable.
You get the dictionary definition of integrity, then you're told it's really about keeping your word ("being your word," in Forumspeak). You're told to be on time (okay, not a problem), not to take notes (some of this stuff looks mighty goofy written down, as the Siren's readers are about to discover), not to talk amongst yourselves (familiar from grade school, also has the advantage of stopping any "wow, that's mighty goofy" conversations).
So here's the talk.
1. All meaning is derived from language. Life is empty and meaningless.
2. Because all of life is meaningless, events have no intrinsic meaning. There is what happened (your mother beat you, your wife ran away with the mailman, your children haven't spoken to you since the Reagan administration). And there is your interpretation (your mother was an abusive cow, your wife was a slut, your children are ungrateful brats). People collapse the events with their meaning. We are meaning-making machines.
3. People deal with life by developing persistent complaints, or "rackets." Your racket reinforces your need to look good, your need to be right by making other people wrong. You are inauthentic with people. You don't tell them what's really happening.
4. If you can look at the events as simply events, you will be free of them. You call a new and powerful mode of existence into being. And you can enroll other people in those possibilities. You do it by getting them to hand over their money and go to the Forum.
Are you still awake? The Siren was nodding off, but pay attention. We've been told that meaning is derived from language. But have you noticed that Landmark is creating its own language? Landmark is a neologism-making machine. And you have to love the fact that they took the great word racket, meaning a dishonest business, and instead coupled it to the little things that drive you crazy about life. Landmark isn't a racket. Landmark is freeing you from rackets. Either you "got it," and understand the concept, or you are being "resistant."
So that's the gist. It gets repeated over and over again, until your ass is numb and your mind is reeling. There's some other stuff, like an exercise in which you are supposed to close your eyes and be afraid, of the person sitting next to you, of everybody in the room, of everybody in Toronto, then everybody in Canada. This did nothing for the Siren because try as she might, she couldn't see anything frightening about Canadians.
Anyway. During the Forum, you are encouraged to call people that you are "incomplete with," Landmarkspeak for "pissed off at" or "have wronged." You're encouraged to tell them you have been inauthentic, and "share the possibility" that you could create a new phase in your relationship.
Why, that's sweet, isn't it? How is that sinister? It isn't. Except, that isn't the whole story.
When you call, you're also supposed to share the Forum experience. And later on you're supposed to share it with bloody everybody you've ever met.
The interesting part of the Forum doesn't come from listening to your leader yack. The interest comes from seeing people get up and "share" about their lives. And pretty awful some of them are, too. It's amazing how much suffering one room can contain. And, the leader told us Sunday night, look at it now! It's gone! isn't that amazing? How do we know it's gone?
Because we say it's gone. It was just a story. Your interpretation of events.
Got that? The Siren almost got it. She was sitting there Sunday afternoon, actually wondering if she should go to the "graduation," though the real purpose of the evening is to bring others to sign up for the Forum and maybe sign up for more Landmark stuff yourself, at steadily increasing prices.
Then the leader brought up Citizen Kane.
How many people had seen Citizen Kane, he asked. A gratifying number of hands were raised (the Siren was worried about that). He proceeded to summarize the movie. The opening death scene, Kane uttering the single word "Rosebud," the globe falling from his hand and shattering. The arc of Kane's life, as he goes from lonely little boy to newspaper magnate endlessly acquiring things and objects. The magnitude of Kane's failure. Then, the great shot where the camera zooms in and reveals the sled Kane had ridden long ago, the one he threw at the man who came to take him away to school. The camera lingering as the fire in the furnace consumes the sled. The leader said, here the audience realizes that Kane had spent his entire life trying to recapture a moment from his childhood. Kane's life had been empty and meaningless, the leader said.
Okay. Welles himself described Charles Foster Kane as "a hollow man." But the Siren snapped to attention and said to herself, wait a minute.
Citizen Kane is a tragedy at its core, meant to evoke pity and terror. The Landmark Forum certainly can cause terror, although that works better in Toronto if you're scared of Canadians. But there's no pity. What happened to you, to anyone, is a story. The Forum leader would have looked at Kane, after the wrenching scene where he trashes Susan's room, and said, "She left you. That's what happened. Your rage and pain is just a story. It doesn't mean anything. The meaning is just what you attach to it." All the feeling, all the compassion the movie has for its characters, is impossible in a Forum-ized world.
And there's more.
Female reporter: If you could've found out what Rosebud meant, I bet that would've explained everything.
Thompson: No, I don't think so. No. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything. I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. A missing piece.
Yes, after this scene the audience finds out what Rosebud means. But the reporter Thompson is still right. You can't reduce the mystery, poignance and failure of Charles Foster Kane to one word. Kane wasn't all about getting back to Rosebud. There was a great deal more to him, more than anyone could ever know. The complexities of human beings can't be reduced to one word. They can't be reduced to a bunch of "powerful" "possibilities" and jargon, either.
So the Forum leader viewed one of the pinnacles of American art, and missed the whole goddamned point.
And the Siren said, there's no way I am going to my "graduation."
Last night, I spoke to a dear friend as I tried to decompress from the whole Landmark experience. I told him that one of the most outrageous aspects of Landmark, to me, was the presence of volunteers at the Forum. Volunteers? At a for-profit company? I told my friend that I liked some of Ang Lee's movies, but that doesn't mean I am going to go down to his set and volunteer to do stuff like hold the door open.
My pal chuckled. "But you'd hold the door open for Welles," he said.
"After this weekend," I replied, "you bet I would."
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Turkey Trot: The Naked Jungle (1954)
Mathematicians are often huge movie buffs, did you know that? The Siren didn't, until she worked for a number of them as a secretary in the late 1980s. One professor in particular (a genius with his name on many theorems) loved to drop by and have a chat or lob a trivia question at me. He came in one day to tell me his cable company had added American Movie Classics. This was, of course, back when that was still something to celebrate. "That's great," I said, "now you have a chance to see so many old movies."
"I'll tell you what I've discovered," he said. "A lot of old movies are dreadful."
Which brings us to The Naked Jungle.
Oy. Where to start? I bought the DVD for a famous perfume scene (a minor obsession of mine) and because it had the underrated, underdiscussed (and still living) Eleanor Parker. She got an Oscar nomination for her role in Caged as an innocent corrupted by a hideous prison system, and in the classic, beloved Scaramouche she played the sultry paramour of Stewart Granger. Obviously she had splendid range, but what happened here? She seems to have confused being ladylike with ramrod posture, swishing your skirts around as much as possible and confining yourself to three facial expressions (sympathy, indignation, and startled unease, the last being used to react to both marauding ants and Charlton Heston's attempts at lovemaking).
Parker plays the mail-order bride (yeah, right) of Charlton Heston. The year is 1901, and Heston has a plantation in a vaguely Amazonian region of South America. Here he merrily mows down the rainforest and grows who knows what, whilst bringing civilization to the aboriginal inhabitants lucky enough to toil in his fields. Now, the Siren does make allowances for time period. You just have to, or you wind up watching nothing made before about 1965. But some movies are easier to allow for than others. This flick's attitude toward the natives makes Gunga Din look like Cheyenne Autumn.
Anyhow, Heston has been here making a fortune since he was 19, and what with building a big villa and taming the Naked Jungle and all, by his own account he never got around to taming any Naked Wimmin. Now, male readers, ponder this question from the Siren. You have been more than a decade in darkest South America. You scorn to make whoopee with the local women. ("They have a name for the white men who go into the villages at night," snarls Heston. He doesn't elaborate, but that must have been some name.) Finally, your lawfully wedded wife arrives, and what a dish she is, in fact, she's Eleanor Parker. She greets you in her lace-trimmed period nightie, snowy bosom heaving. At that point, you
A. Hang out the "Do Not Disturb" sign and let your newly civilized native workers take care of the farm for oh, about a month.
B. Introduce yourself politely, then proceed as above.
C. Eye her suspiciously, clench your jaw, call her "Madam" about a hundred times, interrogate her about her past, pitch a total hissy fit when you find out she's been married before, and stalk off into the night.
If you answered "C," congratulations. You're ready for that Charlton Heston film festival.
This was the part where I decided to go ahead and finish watching the thing, because obviously we had left Reality Station and things could only get funnier. I did enjoy the rest of it, though I have might have a different attitude if I hadn't bought it on sale at Amazon.
So when Heston finds out that Parker is a widow, his jaws start working more furiously than ever while he talks about the piano he had brought up the river. It's a special piano, doggone it, nobody has played it before, he was SAVING IT and he wanted his woman to be the same way. Parker puts on her indignant expression and tells him, "If you knew anything about music, you would know that the best piano is one that's been played." Having delivered the best line in the movie, she swirls those skirts around and sweeps up into the bedroom.
The next few scenes are a lot of to-ing and fro-ing betwixt Parker and Heston. Heston gets more and more hot under the collar when Parker is around, until one night he asks her what perfume she's wearing. Is it one of the ones he brought upriver for her? "It's my own," she informs him. Swirl, swirl, exit. Heston drinks some brandy, clenches (even his temples get in on the act this time), then busts open Parker's doors a la Rhett Butler. "Why don't you wear the perfume I bought you?" he yells. He grabs a bottle and dumps about half of it on Parker. IMDB informs me that this was Heston's own bit of improvisation and Parker didn't realize he was going to do it. That must be why she pulls away from his embrace in a manner far more suggestive of a woman trying to avoid someone's halitosis than one who fears she's about to be ravished.
Chuck comes to his senses and leaves. Next day he announces that Parker has to go. He plans to take her to the riverboat himself. Unfortunately, when they embark on this journey they start encountering evidence that "marabunto," or soldier ants, are on the march and headed right toward the old homestead. The local commissioner (played by a positively svelte William Conrad) tells Heston, "You're up against a monster twenty miles long and two miles wide! forty square miles of agonizing death! You can't stop it!"
Of course, what a sensible person could do is get the hell out of the way, but this is a movie, and our man Chuck abruptly shifts gears from Charlton Heston, Man of Repressed Passion, to Charlton Heston, One-Man FEMA Squad. He has to stick around, you see, for the sake of the natives. If Heston abandons them, "they'll go back to the jungle and be just as they were when I found them!" he says. Gracious, we can't have that. Why would you want to be running around a tropical paradise practising native folkways when you could be picking crops?
After this we're in standard disaster-movie mode, and the dialogue and motivations get more ridiculous, and I don't want to post spoilers but is there anyone on the planet who thinks a studio is going to let Charlton Heston get eaten by ants in the final reel? No, not even if the producers have had enough of watching him act in the dailies.
At this point in his career, Heston was supernally handsome, and the cinematography was pretty. More than anything, however, The Naked Jungle gave the Siren even more respect for the genius of William Wyler and Orson Welles. The performances they got out of Charlton Heston in The Big Country and Touch of Evil are not disappointments at all; they're miracles.
"I'll tell you what I've discovered," he said. "A lot of old movies are dreadful."
Which brings us to The Naked Jungle.
Oy. Where to start? I bought the DVD for a famous perfume scene (a minor obsession of mine) and because it had the underrated, underdiscussed (and still living) Eleanor Parker. She got an Oscar nomination for her role in Caged as an innocent corrupted by a hideous prison system, and in the classic, beloved Scaramouche she played the sultry paramour of Stewart Granger. Obviously she had splendid range, but what happened here? She seems to have confused being ladylike with ramrod posture, swishing your skirts around as much as possible and confining yourself to three facial expressions (sympathy, indignation, and startled unease, the last being used to react to both marauding ants and Charlton Heston's attempts at lovemaking).
Parker plays the mail-order bride (yeah, right) of Charlton Heston. The year is 1901, and Heston has a plantation in a vaguely Amazonian region of South America. Here he merrily mows down the rainforest and grows who knows what, whilst bringing civilization to the aboriginal inhabitants lucky enough to toil in his fields. Now, the Siren does make allowances for time period. You just have to, or you wind up watching nothing made before about 1965. But some movies are easier to allow for than others. This flick's attitude toward the natives makes Gunga Din look like Cheyenne Autumn.
Anyhow, Heston has been here making a fortune since he was 19, and what with building a big villa and taming the Naked Jungle and all, by his own account he never got around to taming any Naked Wimmin. Now, male readers, ponder this question from the Siren. You have been more than a decade in darkest South America. You scorn to make whoopee with the local women. ("They have a name for the white men who go into the villages at night," snarls Heston. He doesn't elaborate, but that must have been some name.) Finally, your lawfully wedded wife arrives, and what a dish she is, in fact, she's Eleanor Parker. She greets you in her lace-trimmed period nightie, snowy bosom heaving. At that point, you
A. Hang out the "Do Not Disturb" sign and let your newly civilized native workers take care of the farm for oh, about a month.
B. Introduce yourself politely, then proceed as above.
C. Eye her suspiciously, clench your jaw, call her "Madam" about a hundred times, interrogate her about her past, pitch a total hissy fit when you find out she's been married before, and stalk off into the night.
If you answered "C," congratulations. You're ready for that Charlton Heston film festival.
This was the part where I decided to go ahead and finish watching the thing, because obviously we had left Reality Station and things could only get funnier. I did enjoy the rest of it, though I have might have a different attitude if I hadn't bought it on sale at Amazon.
So when Heston finds out that Parker is a widow, his jaws start working more furiously than ever while he talks about the piano he had brought up the river. It's a special piano, doggone it, nobody has played it before, he was SAVING IT and he wanted his woman to be the same way. Parker puts on her indignant expression and tells him, "If you knew anything about music, you would know that the best piano is one that's been played." Having delivered the best line in the movie, she swirls those skirts around and sweeps up into the bedroom.
The next few scenes are a lot of to-ing and fro-ing betwixt Parker and Heston. Heston gets more and more hot under the collar when Parker is around, until one night he asks her what perfume she's wearing. Is it one of the ones he brought upriver for her? "It's my own," she informs him. Swirl, swirl, exit. Heston drinks some brandy, clenches (even his temples get in on the act this time), then busts open Parker's doors a la Rhett Butler. "Why don't you wear the perfume I bought you?" he yells. He grabs a bottle and dumps about half of it on Parker. IMDB informs me that this was Heston's own bit of improvisation and Parker didn't realize he was going to do it. That must be why she pulls away from his embrace in a manner far more suggestive of a woman trying to avoid someone's halitosis than one who fears she's about to be ravished.
Chuck comes to his senses and leaves. Next day he announces that Parker has to go. He plans to take her to the riverboat himself. Unfortunately, when they embark on this journey they start encountering evidence that "marabunto," or soldier ants, are on the march and headed right toward the old homestead. The local commissioner (played by a positively svelte William Conrad) tells Heston, "You're up against a monster twenty miles long and two miles wide! forty square miles of agonizing death! You can't stop it!"
Of course, what a sensible person could do is get the hell out of the way, but this is a movie, and our man Chuck abruptly shifts gears from Charlton Heston, Man of Repressed Passion, to Charlton Heston, One-Man FEMA Squad. He has to stick around, you see, for the sake of the natives. If Heston abandons them, "they'll go back to the jungle and be just as they were when I found them!" he says. Gracious, we can't have that. Why would you want to be running around a tropical paradise practising native folkways when you could be picking crops?
After this we're in standard disaster-movie mode, and the dialogue and motivations get more ridiculous, and I don't want to post spoilers but is there anyone on the planet who thinks a studio is going to let Charlton Heston get eaten by ants in the final reel? No, not even if the producers have had enough of watching him act in the dailies.
At this point in his career, Heston was supernally handsome, and the cinematography was pretty. More than anything, however, The Naked Jungle gave the Siren even more respect for the genius of William Wyler and Orson Welles. The performances they got out of Charlton Heston in The Big Country and Touch of Evil are not disappointments at all; they're miracles.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
The Long Hot Summer (1958)
The June heat wave, and our temporary lack of a bedroom air conditioner, caused the Siren to wake up thinking of this movie.
Paul Newman is and probably will remain the definitive movie God of Sweat. Even Brando in his prime couldn't touch Newman. Opinions differ as to which film showcases Newman's glow the best. There's Hud, but he's playing a heavy. There's Sweet Bird of Youth, but despite Newman's having the best ab-exercising scene in Hollywood history that's really Geraldine Page's movie. There's Cool Hand Luke, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and he even glistens nicely in the endless, bombastic Exodus. I'm going to plump for this one, however.
From the opening scene Newman's special ability to shine is apparent, as he stands glowering while on impromptu trial for barn-burning. Off he goes, cast out of the town, and then you get the fabulous Alex North/Sammy Cahn theme song, crooned by Jimmie Rodgers. I can still sing parts of it: "The long, hot summer, seems to know what a flirt you are ..."
Allegedly this movie is based on The Hamlet and "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner. Don't go reading those, however, thinking you will find anything remotely resembling this movie. It's more like someone cobbled together Tennessee Williams' first drafts, then threw in a dash of Oklahoma! and Picnic for good measure. Despite this weird pastiche of Southern, Western and Midwestern folkways, the script is very good indeed, full of dry humor and biting asides. The acting is pure 1950s High Method, except for Orson Welles, who steals everything but the wallpaper in a role that probably should have gone to Burl Ives.
I never fail get to a huge kick out of The Long, Hot Summer. Newman gets most of the best lines, such as when a potential lynch mob is approaching him and he says, almost plaintively, "Story of my life. Why don't nobody ever wanna talk to me peaceable?" The scenes with Joanne Woodward are full of sexual energy and incredibly romantic. The Cinemascope photography looks great, if you can see it letterboxed instead of the scan-and-pan travesties they usually show on American Movie Classics.
Despite the bizarrely happy ending, the film has a quality of sadness about it, perhaps because the countryside it shows us, before the hideous sprawl of strip malls and subdivisions took over, shrinks day by day.
Paul Newman is and probably will remain the definitive movie God of Sweat. Even Brando in his prime couldn't touch Newman. Opinions differ as to which film showcases Newman's glow the best. There's Hud, but he's playing a heavy. There's Sweet Bird of Youth, but despite Newman's having the best ab-exercising scene in Hollywood history that's really Geraldine Page's movie. There's Cool Hand Luke, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and he even glistens nicely in the endless, bombastic Exodus. I'm going to plump for this one, however.
From the opening scene Newman's special ability to shine is apparent, as he stands glowering while on impromptu trial for barn-burning. Off he goes, cast out of the town, and then you get the fabulous Alex North/Sammy Cahn theme song, crooned by Jimmie Rodgers. I can still sing parts of it: "The long, hot summer, seems to know what a flirt you are ..."
Allegedly this movie is based on The Hamlet and "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner. Don't go reading those, however, thinking you will find anything remotely resembling this movie. It's more like someone cobbled together Tennessee Williams' first drafts, then threw in a dash of Oklahoma! and Picnic for good measure. Despite this weird pastiche of Southern, Western and Midwestern folkways, the script is very good indeed, full of dry humor and biting asides. The acting is pure 1950s High Method, except for Orson Welles, who steals everything but the wallpaper in a role that probably should have gone to Burl Ives.
I never fail get to a huge kick out of The Long, Hot Summer. Newman gets most of the best lines, such as when a potential lynch mob is approaching him and he says, almost plaintively, "Story of my life. Why don't nobody ever wanna talk to me peaceable?" The scenes with Joanne Woodward are full of sexual energy and incredibly romantic. The Cinemascope photography looks great, if you can see it letterboxed instead of the scan-and-pan travesties they usually show on American Movie Classics.
Despite the bizarrely happy ending, the film has a quality of sadness about it, perhaps because the countryside it shows us, before the hideous sprawl of strip malls and subdivisions took over, shrinks day by day.
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