The Weekly Gravy #3

Apparently the movie theaters are going to start reopening soon, though how much they’ll actually be able to show—and how much I’ll be able to go—remains to be seen. Until then, I’m going to keep working my way through the movies I need to rewatch and the movies I need to see for the first time. And here are five more of them.

Bullitt (1968) – ***½

When you think of Bullitt, you think of the chase, and with good reason. For 10 minutes, Bullitt in his Mustang Fastback pursues two hitmen in their Dodge Charger at breakneck speed through the hills and suburbs of San Francisco, weaving around other cars, clipping barriers and tossing hubcaps, until finally Bullitt is able to force the hitmen (who’ve begun shooting at him) to crash, with fiery and fatal results. It’s a magnificent sequence, superbly edited by Frank Keller and almost certainly the reason he won the Oscar for Best Film Editing (and why the film was nominated for Best Sound). And yet, it’s just one part of the film—it’s not even the climax.

But how often do people go back and watch the whole thing? They should, because it’s quite good, but they should know that most of the film, unlike the chase, is a slow burn, a restrained police procedural which finds as much suspense in waiting for a vital fax as it does in the actual climax, a game of cat-and-mouse in and around San Francisco International Airport which features Bullitt sprawling on the runway and covering his ears as a taxiing jetliner rolls overhead. And it was done for real, like the driving was done for real.

It’s got style to spare throughout. Peter Yates’ direction is sharp and observant, treating the action with a certain detachment but never indifference. William A. Fraker’s cinematography is key in achieving this, his use of telephoto lenses allowing for many sequences where we observe the action from a distance, often from behind windows and windshields, enforcing the film’s paranoid atmosphere. And although it’s used sparingly, Lalo Schifrin’s score is great; jazzy and tense, amplifying the sense of cool nervousness throughout—but most of all during those awesome opening credits.

It’s the writing and the acting where the film falls short of true greatness. The plot, about Bullitt trying to figure out who killed the witness under his protection whilst dealing with the interference of a smug politician, allows for some neat commentary on the intersection between law enforcement and politics, rich with that particular brand of late-60s anti-establishment cynicism. But it’s a bit too thin and the characters are decidedly too shallow to measure up to the superior filmmaking on display.

As for the acting, Frank Bullitt might have been one of Steve McQueen’s most famous roles, but he allows McQueen too little room to play the smart-ass rebelliousness that was his greatest strength. McQueen does a solid job—he communicates a great deal of Bullitt’s frustration and tension with his eyes and mouth—but the character is a bit too much of a stoic cypher to be really compelling. More compelling is Robert Vaughn as the aforementioned politician, using every bit of his unctuous mid-Atlantic voice to slyly cajole and/or threaten everyone around him (he even earned a BAFTA nomination). On the other hand, Jacqueline Bisset is stuck with a wholly extraneous role as Bullitt’s engineer girlfriend, and gets a really ridiculous scene where she chastises Bullitt for his detachment; it’s almost as if she doesn’t know what he does for a living.

These issues aside, Bullitt has more than enough going for it to be worth seeing at least once (I almost forgot a very solid early small role from Robert Duvall as a hyper-observant taxi driver) and the chase scene multiple times. But if you want McQueen at his best, The Great Escape is the way to go; there’s more character in Hilts’ chucking his baseball against the inside of the cooler than in anything Bullitt does.

Score: 83

Pinocchio (1940) – ****

If I hadn’t seen Snow White in close to 20 years, it had been even longer since I last watched Pinocchio; I found myself remembering a few iconic moments and the broad scope of the story—and, of course, the songs—but I’d forgotten many of the details. I’d forgotten that Pinocchio’s nose only grows in one scene, that Honest John and Gideon are responsible for Pinocchio’s going to Pleasure Island (or that they were hired by the Coachman), that it takes a full 16 minutes for Pinocchio to come to life, that there were saucy lady marionettes in the “I’ve Got No Strings” number…it felt a lot like I was seeing it for the first time.

And I’d also forgotten that Jiminy is the real star of the film, with Cliff Edwards’ wonderful vocal performance and his folksy quips throughout (“Mind if I cut in?”). But then, he’s our narrator, the story is told mostly through his eyes, and he kicks the film off by singing “When You Wish Upon a Star,” which ultimately became the theme song of Disney itself. Pinocchio may have the most visible arc of the story, but Jiminy is no perfect conscience, and has to grow and develop himself; consider how many times he’s ready to leave Pinocchio to his own devices out of sheer petulance.

But it’s that extra bit of depth that arguably pushes it above Snow White; that story had no real lessons for the viewer, whereas Pinocchio is full of them, even to a fault (let’s be honest, it’s just a bit preachy at times). But Snow White also had fairly one-dimensional characters, at least outside of the Queen, whereas Pinocchio has personalities to spare: the avuncular Jiminy, the sweetly naive Pinocchio, the lovably addled Geppetto (“Because you’re dead, Pinocchio. Now lie down.”), the adorably irascible Figaro, the graceful Cleo, the oily Honest John and the block-headed Gideon, the slimy Stromboli and the sneering Coachman, the obnoxious Lampwick (a jackass well before he becomes a donkey), the sheer force of nature that is Monstro, and of course, the Blue Fairy, who was rotoscoped rather than fully animated to give her a suitably otherworldly air.

And of course, there’s the animation, which really triumphs in the settings: Geppetto’s workshop with all those wonderful clocks and toys, the storybook village where he lives, the anarchic hellscape of Pleasure Island (wouldn’t you like to go?), the bottom of the sea, and the cavernous belly of Monstro (who seems to be short on internal organs). That’s not to slight the character animation, which is excellent (how can you not love drunk/high Pinocchio trying to play pool?), but it’s the world those characters inhabit which really fills the eye.

And of course, there are the songs, not just the instant all-time classic “When You Wish Upon a Star” (which won an Oscar, as did the score), but the infernally catchy “I’ve Got No Strings,” the giddy “Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee,” and the sprightly “Give a Little Whistle.” There are really only four songs of note here (unless you want to count “Little Wooden Head,” but do you?) but they’re all classics.

Pinocchio isn’t faultless; I find some of the supporting characters too broad and overbearing (Stromboli especially), and I have no idea where Pinocchio even learned how to lie, given that he’s maybe a day old. But it’s a classic, has been for 80 years (fun fact, it opened just eight days before my dad was born), and will be for the foreseeable future. Whatever you may think of Disney at present, there’s no denying the greatness of their greatest films.

Score: 90

Loving (1970) – ***½

Brooks Wilson is the kind of character George Segal excelled at playing: irritable, self-destructive, snarky, obnoxious, and yet fundamentally human; if not likable, at least sympathetic in his struggle to find fulfillment—despite not seeming to know just what that would look like for him. He’s an advertising illustrator, struggling to land a major account despite his dissatisfaction with his work and the pompous objections of the client (Sterling Hayden), and he has a habit of drinking too much and saying the wrong things to the wrong people, much to the chagrin of his agent (Keenan Wynn).

His personal life is just as troubled; his mistress Grace (Janis Young) is getting fed up with his failure to tell his wife Selma (Eva Marie Saint) about her, and is quite ready to move on, while Selma, whether or not she knows of Brooks’ infidelity, is trying her best to hold things together, even as the cracks are beginning to show. And he seems to view his two young daughters (Lorraine Cullen and Cheryl Bucher) more as irritations than anything else. But as always, Brooks is his own worst enemy, and when he and Selma attend a neighborhood party with both Grace and Nelly Parks (Nancie Phillips)—who has designs of her own on Brooks—in attendance, he might just bring his whole world crashing down.

Loving has a lot going for it. It was shot by the great cinematographer Gordon Willis, and it captures the wintry atmosphere of New York and its suburbs as well as it conveys Brooks’ detachment and emotional isolation. It’s smartly directed by Irvin Kershner, contemporary in its trappings but rather timeless in its objective observation of Brooks’ life and behavior; it also has one of the earliest uses I can think of of CCTV as a plot device. It has a really good score by Bernardo Segall, combining the slickness of mid-century lounge music with a melancholy undercurrent befitting the anomie on display.

And it’s quite solidly acted, not just by Segal (who had a hell of a year this year, also appearing in the bizarre Where’s Poppa? and The Owl and the Pussycat), who doesn’t sugarcoat Brooks’ obnoxiousness, but also by Saint, who strikes the right balance between supportive spouse and frustrated individual, by old pros Wynn and Hayden (whose appearance is all too brief), and by the supporting cast, who avoid caricature in their depictions of bourgeois shallowness.

So why doesn’t it rise higher for me? Probably it’s Don Devlin’s script, adapted from John McDermott’s novel Brooks Wilson Ltd. (a better title); it has clever and insightful scenes throughout, but on some level it never quite adds up to a satisfactory whole, especially with the abrupt ending (coming after a rather amusing climax). We never quite get enough insight into Brooks’ character or why he’s so unhappy and self-destructive, nor as to what the women in his life see in him. And he’s just a bit too unlikable for the film’s own good; you can’t help but feel that he deserves the lumps he takes in the film’s final scenes.

Still, it’s a very well-made little comedy-drama, a fairly brisk 90-minute watch with enough class in its imagery, enough wit in its direction, and enough strength in its acting to be worth checking out. It’s a bit like a softened version of Appointment in Samarra, or a middle-aged version of The Graduate.

Score: 80

The Window (1949) – ***½

The premise is an iconic one: a boy with a habit of telling tall tales witnesses a murder. But his parents don’t believe him, getting upset when he insists it’s the truth. And the police don’t believe, thanks to a chance coincidence which undermines a piece of evidence right in front of them. But the killers believe him, and manipulate circumstances so they can get rid of him—but he’s not so easily thwarted. It’s based on the Cornell Woolrich story “The Boy Cried Murder,” but it hearkens back to the fable of the boy who cried “wolf,” even quoting the fable at the very start.

The stories Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll) tells aren’t quite as harmful—well, he does almost get his family kicked out of their apartment when he claims they’re moving, but that’s really on his landlord taking hearsay as gospel—but his parents (Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale) are starting to get fed up with them, and can’t believe that their upstairs neighbors, the Kellersons (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman) are murderers. And the more he insists, the more they believe he’s actually mentally ill—which is in of itself quite frightening.

But when the Kellersons are able to get Tommy in their clutches, having murdered a man for his money and hidden his body in an abandoned building nearby, the terror is cranked up to a whole different level, with an especially terrifying scene where he manages to get the attention of a cop—only for the Kellersons to convince the cop he’s their son, and that they’re going to punish him for his bad behavior. The cop even voices approval of this, saying:

A good lickin’ never hurt anybody, boy. My old man used to give me enough of ’em when I was a kid. Hey, still in all, I never thought of callin’ the cops when he did.

It’s a chilling rationalization of child abuse, one which is all too often echoed whenever people argue for spanking these days, usually with the refrain “I turned out just fine.”

The Kellersons are able to set it up so that Tommy will have an “accident,” falling from the same fire escape from which he witnessed their crime. But he’s able to get away and lead them on a cat-and-mouse chase throughout the same building where the body is hidden, one which shows off the film’s grittily effective use of real Manhattan locations and all the tricks director Ted Tetzlaff learned from working as Hitchcock’s cinematographer on Notorious.

This wasn’t Tetzlaff’s first or only film as director, but it was by far the most notable, his experience as a cinematographer showing in the fine noir cinematography by Robert De Grasse and William O. Steiner. It wasn’t Oscar nominated, nor was Roy Webb’s effective score, but it did earn a nod for Frederic Knudtson’s tense editing, which keeps the pacing tight across the film’s brisk 73-minute running time.

The writing and directing aren’t quite on the same level as the direction, but they’re good enough. Driscoll won a Special Juvenile Award at the Oscars for this film and So Dear to My Heart, and he’s not bad, but he’s just a bit too polished to be completely believable. Better are the adults: Kennedy as the loving but work-weary father, Hale as the exasperated mother, Stewart as the cold-blooded husband, and Roman as the nervy wife. None are brilliant, but are all solid.

The script is a bit wobbly when you get past the great premise—the murder itself and what, exactly, the Kellersons are up to are glossed over, while the degree to which the Woodrys refuse to believe that Tommy might’ve at least seen something strains credulity. But it serves to create that nightmarish sense of paranoia and helplessness which the film pulls off very well indeed.

Score: 79

Lilith (1964) – **½

Robert Rossen, for a writer-director who made a Best Picture winner (All the King’s Men) and two films regarded as classics to greater (The Hustler) or lesser (Body and Soul) degrees, has never had an especially strong reputation; maybe it’s because he named names for HUAC, or maybe it’s because he didn’t really have a distinctive style, his best films being noted more for the acting and writing than the directing. This was his final film, a troubled production thanks to his conflicts with its demanding male lead, and it was poorly received when it first opened (in America—when it opened in France Cahiers du Cinéma put it on their top 10 list). It has its defenders nowadays, but I’m inclined to say the original critics were right.

A troubled veteran (Warren Beatty) goes to work at a private mental asylum; he’s haunted by his experiences in the war, has a drinking problem, and has no real direction in life, so the prospect of helping others appeals to him. He forms a bond with Lilith (Jean Seberg), a schizophrenic patient, and it soon develops into an obsessive sexual relationship, which naturally leads to tragedy, especially when another patient (Peter Fonda) with a crush on Lilith gets his heart broken, though under what circumstances I’ll leave you to discover if you’re inclined to care.

But you might not be, because Beatty’s character is frankly just kind of an SOB (and a stupid one—anyone with a shred of sense would never have let things get as far as they did), because Lilith’s illness is the kind of movie mental illness which makes her lustful and enticingly manipulative and causes her to act out only in the most decorous ways, because the staff of the asylum are so taken with Beatty and his work that they let him get away with murder, at least as much as the plot requires, and because it’s all so melodramatic that you can’t take it seriously.

The performances are decent, at least; Beatty is okay, but I never quite bought him as haunted or traumatized. Seberg is also decent and actually got a Golden Globe nomination, but the role is too contrived in its conception and she (or Rossen) never quite seems to have decided just how in control of the situation Lilith actually is; she does a lot of devious smirking, but that’s an affectation, not character development. Better are the supporting players, especially Fonda, who’s boyishly likable, Jessica Walter in an early role as Beatty’s forlorn ex, and Gene Hackman in his first credited role as her boorish husband; he and Beatty would reunite three years later with much greater success. René Auberjonois also makes his film debut in a small role.

The film also has very good cinematography by Eugen Schüfftan, who’d won an Oscar for his work on The Hustler and here crafts some handsomely dreamy monochrome images, making especially good use of the mist on a lake Lilith wades into, and the textures of the various settings. It also has an excellent score by Kenyon Hopkins (really one of the more underrated film composers of the era), with its wind-heavy themes to suggest innocence contrasted with its string- and bass-driven themes to suggest experience. And Rossen’s direction at least suggests he was trying some new things, even if it doesn’t really pull them off; it’s a fairly daring film for its time in its intimation of lesbianism and incest.

Ultimately, however, Lilith is something of a failure, too problematic and too shallow to really work. I don’t know if the failure was Rossen’s or if it lay in J.R. Salamanca’s novel, but it has the overall air of a film that never quite came together, right down to the profoundly unsatisfying ending, which either depicts an act of personal growth at odds with everything which precedes it, or a breakdown which is hardly suggested by the acting or the writing, and in any case is hard to care much about.

Score: 59