Daily Archives: Saturday, January 2, 2016

  • She’s Gotta Have It

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Spike Lee (1986)

    She is Nola Darling – young, attractive and sexually independent.  Spike Lee places Nola and a trio of male suitors within the framework of a pseudo-documentary about her.  The characters speak to camera about their life and attitudes.  The interviews are juxtaposed with scenes that show how they actually interact.  Those scenes often reveal amusing chasms between the theory and practice of their lives.  Other talking heads include Nola’s father and a woman psychotherapist.  The BFI programme note for She’s Gotta Have It comprised excerpts from Tom Milne’s review in Monthly Film Bulletin and Paula J Massood’s 2003 book, Black City Cinema.  Both excerpts compare Lee’s structure, and his intention in using it, to what Kurosawa did in Rashomon.  It’s fair enough from a cinema history perspective but the comparison made me smile – just because the two movies are in other respects so different.  She’s Gotta Have It is deftly kinetic.  Spike Lee, who shot the film in just twelve days, displays a touch both light and sure.  The cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson, lights the images so as to deepen subtly the candid sexual comedy.  The film is in black and white, except for a vividly-coloured song and dance number midway through.  The musical rhythm of the actors’ voices is complemented by a jazzy score by the writer-director’s father, Bill Lee.

    This is technically Spike Lee’s second feature; the first, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), was made while Lee was still in film school and submitted as part of his degree course.  The setting of She’s Gotta Have It is Brooklyn, where Nola (Tracy Camila Johns) works as a graphic designer; as Pauline Kael noted, the ‘basic set is Nola’s bed’.  The men with whom Nola shares it are Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), Greer (John Canada Terrell) and Mars (Spike Lee).  Nola’s refusal to be a one-man woman is the film’s comic and satirical motor:  Lee has fun lampooning various male assumptions and expectations.  (By the end of the film, all three affairs have ended.)  Jamie is affluent, conventional and rather a drag but there’s a tension in some of the scenes between Tracy Camila Jones and Tommy Redmond Hicks that makes them distinctive.  The more obviously ridiculous Greer is upwardly mobile – or so he hopes; for him, that means putting distance between his racial identity and his social status.  Mars, who is unemployed and wears spectacles that seem wider than his body, has wit and lust enough to compensate for a lack of physical advantages and career prospects.  (Spike Lee comes over like a young, jive-talking variation of the classic Woody Allen persona.)  All the players are good though none of them, with the possible exception of Lee himself, is as loose and expressive in the main action as in their appearance as part of the closing credits – the cast introduce themselves in goofing curtain calls.

    9 December 2015

     

  • Cameraman:  The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Craig McCall (2010)

    At the start, nonagenarian Jack Cardiff notices a photograph of Bogart on a shelf by his desk and remarks that ‘Bogie’s dead’.  Then he looks up at a row of his own photographs of screen beauties.  ‘She’s dead,’ he says, of each one – Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn – until ‘She’s still alive’, when he reaches Sophia Loren.    Craig McCall’s documentary was, according to Wikipedia, seventeen years in the making.  It’s not surprising that a good number of the interviewees are now dead too – Kathleen Byron, Charlton Heston, Kim Hunter, John Mills, Moira Shearer.  Cardiff himself died, at the age of ninety-four, on 22 April 2009.  McCall’s film appeared last year and was screened by Film 4 on the second anniversary of Cardiff’s death, followed by two of the most famous achievements of his long and illustrious career as a cinematographer, Black Narcissus and The African Queen.   If this all sounds miserable, it doesn’t give anything like an accurate impression of Craig McCall’s labour of love, which mixes, in a thoroughly enjoyable way, Jack Cardiff’s reminiscences with information about his life and the art of cinematography and contributions from people who worked with Cardiff or who, like Martin Scorsese, didn’t but revere him just as much as those who did.  Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s editor and Michael Powell’s widow, supplies a link that’s emotionally satisfying.  The son of music hall entertainers who made his debut as a child actor in silent films in 1918, Cardiff looks to have been a happy man, and he’s wonderfully youthful.  It’s not just that he still has all his marbles – as well as showing an excellent memory, he talks often and interestingly about his passion for art and the influence of paintings on his style behind the camera.  His light blue eyes are bright and clear.  I think it’s Kirk Douglas who says Cardiff at work always had the eyes of a young boy eager to discover more.  He still had them at the end of his life.

    McCall clearly has huge admiration and affection for Cardiff so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t ask much about Cardiff’s career as a director post-Sons and Lovers – or about the fact that the film-makers Cardiff worked with after he’d given up directing and gone back to working as a cameraman don’t compare with those whose films he photographed in the 1940s and 1950s.  Although Scorsese has good things to say about Young Cassidy (1965), a drama (which I’d not heard of) based on the life of Sean O’Casey, the pictures Cardiff made through the sixties and early seventies aren’t a distinguished list.  (Sons and Lovers is so good, however, that I’d have liked to hear more about how much Cardiff thought his ability to direct actors was innate or how much he felt he learned it from watching other directors.)   One of the last entries on his CV is Rambo:  First Blood Part II (1985); in the period before he turned to directing, he worked with, among others, Hitchcock, Welles, Mankiewicz and King Vidor – as well as the Archers and Huston.   Yet Cardiff spoke very positively about working on the Rambo film and the enthusiasm seemed quite genuine.  He gives the impression of loving his work so much that he just always wanted to keep working, and never stopped finding it worthwhile.

    23 April 2011

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