Daily Archives: Saturday, May 14, 2016

  • Pat and Mike

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1952)

    The BFI’s print wasn’t great and I probably wasn’t in the mood.  Anyway, there’s no point pretending I enjoyed it – I was getting irritated and wanting it to end a good half-hour before it did (and it runs only ninety-five minutes).  Pat and Mike is widely regarded by some as one of the very best Hepburn-Tracey comedies but the gulf between their talents and what they’re given to do is chasmal.  Even though the names on the screenplay – Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon – are legendary too, the proceedings are too innocuous and emotionally mild.  Hepburn plays Pat Pemberton, a multi-talented sportswoman, and Tracy is Mike Conovan, the slightly dodgy sports promoter who takes charge of her career – and, eventually, her heart, as she does his.  The plot doesn’t seem eventful enough, given the lack of twists and turns in the relationship between Pat and Mike.  The chemistry between Hepburn and Tracy sees them safely through in the romance department but it’s thanks to the stars themselves rather than to situations they’re faced with in the story.

    It starts promisingly, as Pat, a college games mistress, dashes from the gym and into her fiancé’s car – he’s Collier Weld, a senior member of faculty and anxious to make a good impression on Mr and Mrs E H Beminger, the coarse philanthropists he and Pat are off to play a golf foursome with.   In her very first scene in her very first picture (A Bill of Divorcement), Katharine Hepburn came running down a flight of stairs at breakneck speed; her athleticism, and the fact that she stays in character at the same time as she’s being athletic, are what’s most enjoyable about Pat and Mike.  Playing a sporting champion realises Hepburn’s physical distinction in a satisfying comic way – her high-strung wiriness makes her all the more convincing in the role.  In one of the film’s best and best-known lines, perfectly delivered by Spencer Tracy (he doesn’t quite throw it away), Mike comments that, ‘There’s not much meat on her but what’s there is cherce [choice]’.  Hepburn is splendid in the opening scenes, losing her temper with the stupidly shrill Mrs Beminger and whacking off a row of golf balls to get the anger out of her system (the rapid firing of the balls makes it feel like two sports at the same time – although it’s shooting with murderous intent rather than target practice).  But Collier, played by an actor called William Ching, is just too boring – it’s impossible to believe he and Pat would ever have got together.  He’s not even infuriatingly decent:  he’s a pompous creep – but not enough for this to be entertaining.    The running joke is that, whenever Pat sees Collier watching her golfing or playing tennis, she goes to pieces.  The idea isn’t much more than serviceable although Hepburn’s exasperated imitation of and reactions to the pressurising look are funny.  But the fiancé character becomes a drag in the wrong way:  he obviously has to be got rid of but the script isn’t inventive in how that’s to be achieved.

    Mike’s business operations float around the margins of the underworld and the BFI programme note for Pat and Mike included an interview between George Cukor and Gavin Lambert which referred to the gangster parts being written ‘with a nod to Damon Runyon’.  Maybe that was my problem with these characters – when it comes to funny hoods, I find a little goes a long way.  I love Guys and Dolls but it’s thanks to the songs and to Brando and Sinatra’s alchemical readings of the Runyon dialogue.  The same is true here of Spencer Tracy, who is infinitely expert as Mike:  he does the character perfectly, even if you’re always aware that he’s doing a character.    On the way to that opening golf match, Pat – at Collier’s request – changes in the back of the car from trousers into a skirt.  At various points of the story, both the men in her life make clear that they think they own her – personally and/or professionally.  By the end and free of Collier, Pat wins a golf championship wearing trousers and suggests in her closing exchange with Mike that she’ll wear them in their relationship too.  This outcome came as something of a relief after seeing Woman of the Year a fortnight earlier yet the film as it progresses still seems to reduce Katharine Hepburn.    After the debacle of the foursome with the Bemingers, Pat sits in the clubhouse bar, trying to collect herself.  She talks about being ‘frazzled’ and needing to get ‘unfrazzled’.   One of Hepburn’s hallmarks is her whirring emotional complexity – her feelings are in perpetual motion.  She’s marvellous in this sequence but the unfrazzling process detracts from some of her greatest qualities.

    Aldo Ray is eventually winning, in both senses of the word, as one of the lesser lights in Mike’s stable, a dumb boxer who keeps losing until he’s pep-talked by Pat.   Charles Bronson stands out among the gangsters and the Bemingers are amusingly played by Loring Smith and Phyllis Povah but, apart from the two leads, the cast of Pat and Mike is most remarkable for a group of sports stars as themselves.   The presence of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, an Olympic hurdles gold medallist before she became a golf champion, gives a nice grain of credibility to Pat’s amazing versatility.  When Pat joins the pro-tennis circuit, she plays mixed doubles with Alice Marble, Donald Budge and Frank Parker and singles against Gussie Moran. It’s interesting to watch the way that (I assume) tennis was actually played in exhibition matches of the time, although the sequences go on a little too long.  I couldn’t see anything very special in the humorous fantasy that takes over the Pat-Gussie Moran head-to-head – once Pat spies Collier in the crowd, she finds Gussie’s racquet head magnifying and her own shrinking and the net rising to an impossible height.  (Perhaps I found the imagery too familiar:  you often hear tennis players talking about how, when they’re playing well, they see the ball the size of a football.)  I did quite like George Cukor’s other extravagant visual gag, when Mike is beginning to realise how much Pat means to him, he looks at a photograph of her, and sees the face of his other favourite girl, a racehorse called Little Nell, superimposed on Hepburn’s.  The jaunty music, which gets a bit tedious, is by David Raksin.

    18 February 2010

  • Pasolini

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Abel Ferrara (2014)

    Pier Paolo Pasolini was beaten up then run over by his own car, on a beach at Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome, in November 1975.  He was fifty-three years old.  While the cause of death was clear, the motive for the murder remains, even now, somewhat murky.   Pasolini was a notoriously idiosyncratic Marxist.  He also regularly paid for sex with rent boys and it seems to have been assumed from the outset of the investigation into his killing that a rent boy was responsible.  Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old male prostitute, confessed to the murder and served nine years in prison but, in 2005, retracted his confession.  BBC news reported at the time that Pelosi claimed his confession had been made under threat of violence to his family and that ‘three unnamed men beat Pasolini to death …, shouting abuse and insults such as “dirty communist”’.   In the light of Pelosi’s statement, the Rome police reopened inquiries into the murder but, according to Wikipedia, ‘the judges charged with investigating it determined the new elements insufficient for them to continue the inquiry’.  In Abel Ferrara’s new film about the final day (or two) of Pasolini’s life, there are several young men, including Pelosi, involved in the fatal assault but they shout homophobic rather than political abuse at their victim.  Ferrara’s purpose in making Pasolini is unclear from the end product but it doesn’t appear to have been to perpetuate the mystery of the murder.

    It’s hard, in fact, to see from the film why Ferrara chose to make a drama at all.  He and the screenwriter Maurizio Braucci (whose other writing credits include the Matteo Garrone movies Gomorrah and Reality) seem not to have a clue as to how to bring the material to dramatic life.  As Pasolini, Willem Dafoe reads his lines thoughtfully and carefully, as if they were the imperishable insights of a great thinker, but he might as well be doing the voice in a documentary:  Pasolini was politically and philosophically engaged and creatively versatile to an extraordinary degree but these qualities don’t describe his personality.  We watch and listen to him as he holds court in his Rome apartment, in the company of his mother Susanna (Adriana Asti), who lives with her son, his secretary-cum-housekeeper Graziella (Giada Colagrande), the actress Laura Betti (Maria De Medeiros) and Pasolini’s friend and fellow polymath Nico Naldini (Valerio Mastandrea).  Pronouncing X a great novel, Y a great poet and so on, without explaining why he thinks them great, Dafoe’s Pasolini seems at first no more than fatuously self-important.  What he says in an interview with a journalist later in the day at least expresses some of Pasolini’s political views in more detail.   Willem Dafoe’s high cheekbones in combination with the shades he wears for much of the film give him an intriguing appearance but there’s not much he can do with the role as written – although he does, thanks to his natural actor’s appetite for finding a character, suggest something eating at Pasolini, particularly when he picks up Pelosi (Damiano Tamilia, who has an appropriate brutal indolence).  Adriana Asti, who gives Susanna Pasolini an urgently fearful quality, and Valerio Mastandrea both look ready to deliver something – but Mastandrea is given nothing to do and Asti’s big moment comes when Susanna reacts to the news of her beloved son’s death:  although she’s powerful, it’s irritating that, at this point, Ferrara and Braucci revert abruptly to familiar biopic territory.

    Pasolini begins with a shorter interview between the protagonist and another journalist (conducted in French, although it appears to have taken place in Stockholm, from where Pasolini returned on the eve of his death).  This interview is intercut with footage from Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which Pasolini was in the process of finalising at the time.  As Abel Ferrara proceeds, he weaves pieces of other dramatised material into his mostly inert narrative of Pasolini’s last hours.  Willem Dafoe’s voiceover explains that Pasolini is sending the manuscript of a novel to one friend and the script for a film to another.  Until I read (after seeing Pasolini) Robbie Collin’s laudatory review in the Daily Telegraph, however, it wasn’t clear to me that ‘a night-time assignation on a heath [or] … a high-society audience held rapt by an anecdote about an air disaster’ were ‘snatches of Pasolini’s novel’.  There are also scenes involving two actors, the middle-aged, comical-looking Epifanio and the younger Ninetto Davioli, playing men who follow a shooting star from Rome to Sodom and find that life there is largely homosexual, except when members of the gay and lesbian communities have intercourse once a year for the ‘Festival of Fertility’ – an amusing idea that’s rather dull (Salo-lite) when realised by Ferrara on screen.  The real Ninetto Davioli appeared in Pasolini films and was one of his lovers – now in his mid-sixties, Davioli plays Epifanio.  (His younger self is played by Riccardo Scamarcio.)   It struck me early on that Ferrara might be assuming a significant prior knowledge of Pasolini on the part of the audience:  it turns out that he relies on such knowledge not only in order for the viewer to make full sense of Pasolini but also – through things like the casting of Davioli (and, to a lesser extent, that of Adriana Asti, who appeared in Accattone) – to give the film emotional resonance.

    In other respects, the connections between sequences that Ferrara looks to achieve are not so much chimes as clangs.   The ‘night-time assignation’ describes sex between a group of young men and a lone ‘customer’ – a somewhat older man, who enjoys enraptured cock-sucking.  I’m not sure if the younger men are the same actors who play Pasolini’s killers but, in any case, the juxtaposition of this sequence with the eventual murder has the effect of an antique, playing-with-fire warning about the kind of sex life Pasolini led.  In a restaurant, shortly before he goes out cruising, Pasolini reads to Davioli (ie as played by Scamarcio) the concluding lines of his ‘Epifanio’ script.  If Ferrara had left it to the audience to bring these lines to mind when Pasolini dies, the recollection might have been poignant.  Instead, he puts on screen the final scene of ‘Epifanio’ and it’s merely boring to listen to the actors working through the lines you’ve already heard.  (You don’t, however, know what you’ve heard in some other parts of the film:  the subtitling of the non-English dialogue was intermittent, for reasons that escape me.)  Pasolini was screened at the London Film Festival as part of the ‘Dare’ section – defined as ‘in-your-face, up-front and arresting: films that take you out of your comfort zone’.  On the way out of NFT1, I heard a man saying to his companion, ‘I dropped off, to be honest …’

    13 October 2014

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