The Clown and the Kids (1967) – **½
One of my favorite DVD releases of all time is the Something Weird edition of The Wonderful Land of Oz and Jack and the Beanstalk, which we got because, despite knowing The Wonderful Land of Oz was a pathetically bad film, my father was devoted to owning every piece of Oz media available. And my favorite part of the disc was a trailer gallery of kiddie matinee films from the 50s and 60s, encompassing European kids’ films badly dubbed for the American market and some dire homegrown efforts. And one of these was The Clown and the Kids.
Doing a little research on the film, I found that it straddles the two schools of kiddie-matinee cinema. Despite having American stars and an American writer-director, it was shot in Bulgaria of all places, with a Bulgarian supporting cast who were dubbed for the American release. I also saw that it was incredibly obscure, with just 25 votes on the IMDb; the version I watched seemed to be taken from an old VHS, and God only knows if any actual prints survive.
While touring Europe, a traveling circus happens upon the town of Scragsville, not marked on any maps. The circus’ manager (Emmett Kelly) decides to set up shop, but when they head into the town square to promote themselves, the only person to show themselves is a single child, who’s quickly dragged back inside. That’s because the town is ruled by Mr. Scrag (Mikhail Mikhaylov), a sneering mill owner who keeps the town isolated from the world and under his thumb.
While the circus considers what to do, a few local children visit them and reveal Scrag’s oppression. Kelly decides to hold a free performance for the town’s children, and suggests a “foolproof plan” to ensure they’ll be allowed to attend: crying their heads off until the adults give in. They do and the show is a success, but Scrag wants the circus run out of town the following day – but Kelly has an ace up his sleeve.
Dressing himself up as “The Piper,” he teaches the children a song that he later uses to summon them to a hiding spot in the woods, where he prepares them to fight back against Scrag and his goons. Meanwhile, the anxious parents of the town and the put-upon mayor (Leo Conforti) begin to turn against Scrag, ensuring a happy ending.
Given how easily the kids outwit and outfight Scrag’s guards, you have to wonder how he wasn’t toppled years earlier. There’s room for an exploration of why and how adults tolerate bullying in the form of social order, but The Clown and the Kids has more pressing matters to attend to – like cramming eight songs into its 74-minute running time, none of which are especially good, but none of which are especially bad.
Truth is, The Clown and the Kids isn’t a good film, but it’s certainly not bad enough to be good-bad; it’s almost good enough to be surprisingly good, but not quite. The story is thin, Scrag is a flat villain (he doesn’t even get a villain song!), and his plans are so easily foiled that it robs the film of any excitement. Even the circus scenes are pretty perfunctory, though I’m guessing it doesn’t take much to amuse the children of Scragsville.
The novelty of seeing Kelly in a leading role is probably the main selling point for most modern viewers; notably, he spends most of the film not in his famous “Weary Willie” makeup, but as himself or in the Piper makeup (pointy ears and a modest false nose). He does get to do one of his Weary Willie routines – a nice bit with a broom and a spotlight – but for the most part he’s earnest and avuncular. Not memorable, but friendly enough.
Possibly because of Kelly’s age (he was pushing 70 at the time), Kathy Dunn and Bert Stratford (credited as Burt for some reason) carry much of the film as his adult children, Freny and Mark. As befitting a family film of the 60s, they’re clean-cut, frequently flash their toothy grins, and are good-natured without ever feeling authentic. (Their comic love-hate number late in the film feels especially false.) Conforti at least has an expressive face as the nervous mayor; Mikhaylov, presumably dubbed, can’t convey much beyond basic malice.
Writer-director Mende Brown worked mostly in television, and while there are a few scenes here and there which suggest a bit more of a voice behind the camera – the weird scene where the kids, singing about Scrag, dance about in slow-motion, or the shots of the acrobats – for the most part it’s pretty flatly directed. According to the IMDb, the film was shot in the picturesque town of Koprivshtitsa, but whether it’s the bland filmmaking or the low-quality print, that splendor doesn’t really come through.
As a kiddie-matinee feature of its time, The Clown and the Kids is leagues ahead of something like The Wonderful Land of Oz; it has professional actors, was made with some competence, and the songs by Anthony Velona, forgettable though they may be, are polished enough to not distract us. But compared even to second-tier Disney, it’s a throwaway enterprise with a flat moral which doesn’t exactly guard the townsfolk against another Scrag.
It’s not a good film either, but if you want to get a look at what circuses of this era were like – and see Kelly performing his iconic character – you might as well just watch The Greatest Show on Earth. It worked for Spielberg.
Score: 56
Rustin (2023) – ***½
Although he’d been in a number of films I’d seen before it – Lincoln, Red Hook Summer, The Butler – I first noticed Colman Domingo in Selma, where he played Ralph Abernathy, a colleague of Martin Luther King Jr’s. At the time, I wrote “Domingo brings a nice wittiness to Abernathy (he has a great actor’s face),” and after that I was quite delighted to see him in films like If Beale Street Could Talk, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and @zola, and disappointed to see him wasted in films like Lucy in the Sky. In any case, for him to be in a position to earn his first Oscar nomination for playing another colleague of MLK feels like we’ve come full circle. That I watched the film on King Day was just a coincidence.
The first time I can recall hearing of Bayard Rustin was in the context of his being underappreciated for his contributions to the civil rights movement on account of his homosexuality; I don’t remember ever hearing about him in school, while King, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks were household names. Granted, I’m not Black and grew up in southeast Kansas, and I think the reasons for Rustin’s comparatively modest fame go beyond his sexuality, but he certainly deserves to be better known.
The film focuses on the March on Washington in 1963, which the film depicts Rustin as conceiving of himself before showing how he had to appeal to his allies and enemies alike to make it happen; we’ve already seen how Rustin, trying to advocate for a previous march and facing the threat of blackmail from Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (Jeffrey Wright), tries to call King’s (Aml Ameen) bluff by threatening to resign his civil-rights position, only to have his resignation accepted.
He’s understandably bitter, but on seeing the in-fighting between factions of the movement – between those who believe in non-violence and those who believe in, at the very least, self-defense – he believes the march will help reconcile them. But it will take mending fences with King (easy enough) and convincing moderates like the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock) (not so easy), along with every bit of Rustin’s considerable organizational skill, to make it happen.
It also takes compromise and omission. Rustin envisions a two-day event but is forced to reduce it to one – no big deal. Dr. Anna Hedgeman (CCH Pounder) points out that the list of speakers includes no women, despite the many women whose efforts helped make the march possible – a much bigger deal. Unfortunately, the film breezes past both of these; this article goes into more detail about the role women ultimately played in the ceremonies, but suffice to say, you could make a whole film just about that.
If there’s a central weakness in Rustin, it’s that it can’t avoid acknowledging the uglier facets of its story – the attempts to blackmail Rustin over a lewd-conduct arrest and past Communist affiliations, the sidelining of women at the March – but in trying to course-correct and leave us more inspired than discomfited, it rings false. The thorny politics of the movement and the head-spinning logistics of the march are compelling enough on their own.
And Rustin himself is compelling enough, a man of great organizational skill, personal bravado, and unabashed queerness (he was about as out as one could be at the time) possessed of a strong will, a fine singing voice, and a profoundly sensitive heart that ached over the injustices plaguing his society, but never broke.
The script by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black is too brisk and tries to cover too much ground to really mine the complexities of the man – I haven’t even mentioned the subplot about a closeted preacher (Johnny Ramey) who becomes briefly involved with Rustin – and I think Domingo’s performance would’ve been even better with better material. But he’s still very good, showing the passion, the drive, the flamboyance (Domingo himself is openly gay), and the sensitivity which made Rustin an admirable colleague but a challenging friend.
The supporting cast is also fairly good, with Ameen’s pragmatic yet since King, Michael Potts’ cheerfully forthright Cleve Robinson, Wright’s sneering Powell, and Glynn Turman’s spry, steadfast A. Philip Randolph standing out, balanced by Ramey and Gus Halper as Rustin’s friend and sometime lover Tom Kahn; Rock’s turn as Wilkins doesn’t necessarily play to his strengths, but he does look remarkably like the real man. There are also a few surprise turns in smaller roles, like Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mahalia Jackson and Bill Irwin as A.J. Muste.
George C. Wolfe’s direction has its moments of style, especially when the camerawork and editing are in tune with Bradford Marsalis’ excellent jazz score, which so well conveys the anxieties of the times and Rustin’s own restless energy. It all makes for a film that’s useful as an introduction to Rustin and to how the March came to be (the film’s depiction of the march, however, feels truncated, possibly because of budgetary limits), but is hardly the final word on either.
Score: 79
American Fiction (2023) – ***½
“Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” said George S. Kaufman, so one might be surprised to see how the trailer for American Fiction emphasizes the film’s satirical elements, when the actual film is as much about the non-stereotypical struggles of a Black family as it is about the eldest son of that family – an academic, raised in material comfort – posing as a working-class fugitive who wrote a book full of Black vernacular and a full complement of violent crime, broken homes, drug use, and police brutality. In my case, I’m surprised because the family drama tends to work quite well, while the satire only sporadically cuts as deep as one might hope.
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) has problems. His novels are critically acclaimed, but don’t sell; as his agent Arthur (John Ortiz) points out, they aren’t “Black” enough. He pays the bills as a college English teacher, but after clashing with a (white) student over the use of the N-word in the context of Southern Gothic literature, he’s encouraged to take some time off and see his family – and matters only grow more complicated.
His mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) is beginning to slip into dementia. His sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) dies suddenly of a heart attack. His brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) has recently come out, and embraces his sexuality – but he’s gone through an ugly divorce (so had Lisa) and is estranged from his children. Agnes’ declining condition obliges her to move into a nursing home, and the costs are piling up.
Monk is frustrated by the success of books like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a book by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) which he sees as catering to white audiences by reinforcing their assumptions about Black America. One night, he decides to write such a book, calling it My Pafology – and if you’ve seen the trailer, you know Arthur’s able to sell it for more money than Monk ever dreamed of.
Only problem is, Monk wrote under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh,” which is put forth as a pseudonym itself for a working-class ex-con and fugitive. So Monk has to pose as Stagg and keep his authorship of the book secret, which proves increasingly difficult as the buzz mounts and Hollywood comes calling, with the attendant jabs at Hollywood’s focus on Black suffering for the sake of white audiences.
There are reasons to be happy, though. Monk begins a relationship with Coraline (Erika Alexander), who appreciates his (actual) books and is immediately embraced by his family. And Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), the Ellisons’ long-time housekeeper, begins a relationship with old acquaintance Maynard (Raymond Anthony Thomas). And between these elements and Monk’s complicated relationship with his mother and siblings (Lisa and Cliff both chastise him for being distant), I came to understand why the film spends so much time on family matters.
It’s telling the kind of story Monk feels isn’t being told: the story of a Black family with joys and griefs of their own, who have their own struggles with substance abuse (Monk drinks too much, Cliff drinks and does cocaine), violence (their father took his own life), and broken homes (Lisa and Cliff’s divorces, their father’s infidelity), but who don’t fit the stereotype, and who aren’t defined by their suffering.
And it’s in these scenes that Cord Jefferson’s direction and especially his script (from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure) tend to work best, because the Ellisons and their loved ones are depicted with empathy and insight into how families can hurt one another, often without trying, how secrets can spill out with ease after decades in the bottle, how humor can be used as both a salve and a weapon, and how quickly things change when one’s health begins to fail (the nursing home scenes hit especially close to home for me).
It helps that the acting is excellent. Wright nails Monk’s prickliness and the sensitivity underneath, and while his scenes as “Stagg” are relatively brief, he convincingly embodies the act of playing a stereotype and trying to defy it at the same time. Brown superbly depicts Cliff’s complex emotions, showing us how easily he moves between embracing his newfound freedom and resenting his parents’ failure to understand his sexuality, how he loves Monk as a brother but is exasperated by him as a friend, how he can be unrepentantly abrasive one second and gently loving the next.
Comparably fine are Uggams as the refined mother slowly slipping into oblivion, Ross as the down-to-earth sister gone too soon, Ortiz as the quietly desperate agent, and Taylor as the warm, devoted housekeeper. And Laura Karpman’s loungey modern jazz score, built around a sprightly piano, moves deftly between the dramatic and comedic elements – more gracefully, to my mind, than the script.
Sometimes the satirical elements work. When Monk is writing My Pafology and we actually see his characters (played by Okieriete Onaodowan and Keith David) and have him interact with them, it’s funny, it’s inventive, it’s cinematic. Or when he meets with a vapid Hollywood player (Adam Brody) in character as Stagg, it’s funny because Wright doesn’t go over-the-top in his charade. And when Monk argues to Sintara that Stagg’s book and her own aren’t so very different, his arguments and her defenses raise a lot of questions about artistic responsibility and who is best equipped to tell which stories.
But the film cuts their conversation short and never resumes, spending more time on relatively trite jabs at Hollywood which simply don’t ring true (Annihilation Plantation is not the name of a mainstream Hollywood film. That’s an Asylum title at best) and opting for a heavily metafictional ending that left me somewhat cold. Really, the scene where Monk asks if the white woman his father was involved with was “Brahmin white or Southie white” tells us more than all the overt satire put together, both the characters and about where the film’s heart lies.
Score: 83
All of Us Strangers (2023) – ****
In American Fiction, Cliff laments not coming out before his father’s death; when Monk notes the possibility that their father would’ve rejected him, Cliff replies “At least he’d be rejecting the real me.” As Adam (Andrew Scott) was only 11 when his parents were killed in a car accident, and was growing up in the exurbs of London in the 80s, there was little chance of his coming out to them – but in the course of All of Us Strangers, he has that conversation and many others which have dwelt in his heart for 30-odd years.
He also meets his downstairs neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), first when Harry is rather drunk and Adam declines his advances. He’s interested, however, and when they try again, they hit it off immediately, attraction leading to sex, sex leading to emotional intimacy, and soon enough Adam is really in love for the first time in his life, having closed off so much of himself after his parents’ death.
His visits to his childhood home display a strange tension between past and present. His mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell) look as they did when they died (Bell and Foy are both younger than Scott), dress as if it were the 80s (those sweaters!), and know nothing of how the world has changed since their deaths…but they know they’ve died, they know Adam has grown up, and he never questions his sanity or the mechanics of what’s happening.
Writer-director Andrew Haigh, drawing from Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers (which sounds rather different in story and tone), opts not to get into the why or how of Adam’s visits with his parents, nor does he resolve whether this is actually happening, whether Adam believes it’s happening, or whether this is part of a script Adam is writing – it’s no coincidence, after all, that he’s a screenwriter.
That’s a gamble, but it works both because Adam doesn’t question it himself and because the film is so poignant and sincere. Not only does it convey with great sensitivity what it might mean to see your lost loved ones again, but it shows, as powerfully as I’ve ever seen, what it might be like to go home again, eat your mother’s cooking, decorate the Christmas tree, have a heart-to-heart with your father, and crawl into bed with your parents on a sleepless night – even if the sight of Scott in adult-size jammies is a bit surreal.
Bell (an actor I’ve long liked) is spot-on as the loving, jokily macho father, a man well aware of his shortcomings but resolute in his love for Adam, while Foy is wonderful as the doting, sometimes anxious and self-critical, but ultimately accepting and indulgent mother. Whether they’re truly the shades of Adam’s parents or his image of them, they’re a dream of tender domesticity, played so carefully that we can’t help believing in them.
That’s one half of the film. The other half is Adam’s relationship with Harry, which is likewise a dream of passion, devotion, humor, emotion (Harry talks about his own distant relationship with his family), and excitement, especially when they go clubbing and take ketamine and the oneiric editing and camerawork really go into overdrive.
Mescal gives his own heartfelt turn as the younger, freer-spirited, but devoted and open-hearted Harry, and as in his Oscar-nominated performance in Aftersun, he gives us a man who may seem at times to be on the verge of spinning out of control, but who is ultimately grounded by the love he feels and the devotion he performs. He got a BAFTA nod (as did Foy); it’d be nice if the Academy notices him again.
And then there’s Scott, who was snubbed by the BAFTAs but recognized by the Globes. It’s a quiet, often contemplative performance; Adam, as a writer, is better at observing and reflecting than engaging and acting, and Scott plays this reservation without ever slipping into passivity or dullness. With Bell and Foy he’s earnest and a bit awkward, as one often is with one’s parents; with Mescal he’s open and tender, as one wishes to be with one’s lover. Whatever the truth of what Adam experiences in the film, Scott convinces us of his belief in those experiences.
From the opening slow dissolve of Adam watching the sun rising on suburban high-rises to the final celestial image, Haigh’s direction, Jamie D. Ramsay’s cinematography, and Jonathan Alberts’ editing make the film a lush dream of love and loss, sometimes disorienting, sometimes a bit disturbing, but always working towards Adam’s emotional journey. It’s gorgeous to look at, and thanks to Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s ambient score and some choice selections of 80s pop, it’s lovely to listen to.
If the final scenes ladle on the sadness a bit too heavily, or the scenes with the parents are so well done one wishes there were even more of them (I especially wish Bell had a little more to do), these are minor quibbles for a film that has rightly been celebrated by those who’ve seen it – but whether or not enough people have seen it to give it its proper due is another matter. Consider it recommended.
Score: 90
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