Lenny
Bob Fosse (1974)
Julian Barry’s screenplay is adapted from his own theatre piece but the look and structure of Lenny are decidedly cinematic. Bob Fosse’s biography of Lenny Bruce takes the form of a mock documentary about him. Shot in black and white by Bruce Surtees, the narrative switches back and forth between interviews with three people close to the protagonist (Dustin Hoffman), scenes from his life with them and others, and excerpts from his night-club routines. The trio of interviewees are Bruce’s ex-wife, Honey Harlow (Valerie Perrine); his mother, Sally Marr (Jan Miner); and Artie Silver (Stanley Beck), his agent and, unlike the two women, a fictional creation. We first see Lenny Bruce performing as an uninspired stand-up comic-impressionist in a Baltimore club, where Honey is a stripper and the main attraction. Over the course of the film, he becomes the satirical, scatological ‘conscience of America’, in the words of the picture’s earnest prologue, as well as a drug addict and a passionate defendant in court appearances, following repeated arrests on obscenity charges. He is finally, at the age of forty, a naked corpse.
In spite of its technical sophistication, Lenny is, in some ways, a familiar biopic. The scenes from his offstage life, as well as illustrating the protagonist’s personality, demonstrate how he drew on his own experiences for his act – rather as the story of a famous singer will connect their biography with their onstage mood and the lyrics of the songs they perform. Fosse’s movie is also part of biopic tradition in the sense that a sizeable part of its audience was, and still is, likely to admire the film because of their admiration for its subject – something which the director knows and which, by intention or in effect or both of these, he exploits. This is no less true of Lenny than it was a few years later of a formally more conventional hagiography like Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982).
My teenage obsession with Cabaret led to eager anticipation of Lenny, as Bob Fosse’s next film. The notes about it that I’ve kept from the mid-1970s include the following, transcribed from the monthly magazine Films and Filming:
‘People loved Lenny Bruce. It’s sometimes hard to understand why people remember people. With so much going on these days we have trouble enough remembering ourselves. Bob Fosse remembered Lenny and loved him, enough to make a film about his life. I don’t know why you watch movies, but I generally go to learn something, maybe about people who are remembered. Just sitting in a cinema … it’s dark and the images are flashing up in front, the sound wanders around and the tale unfolds. There’s Lenny telling us about ourselves and bringing it from the back of our heads so we can let it out; analysing large audiences without even having met most of them …telling it like it is and not how we’d like it to be, like it is. He tells us how hard it is to get to the people who are locked in prisons of their own making. Lenny was very human, enough to lose a struggle with himself over what he wanted more in life. In us all is the truth, if we look in enough, we know we cover it over. Lenny couldn’t keep it hidden, whatever the cost, for him it was now and couldn’t be denied, though some fearfully shrink from it and persecute others. He was arresting … nothing else to do but listen to his words. Sometimes he would speak the language of the underground, without suppression. For what he said was right to say, and needed to be said, and yet many could not take the truth conveyed in his language. So Lenny was persecuted by minions of power, who wielded their strength like child-mages inexperienced in magic. There are so many prisoners in so many prisons. He fought with everything he had to open our eyes, but he lost the struggle to stay on top of drugs and succumbed to their graces. Yet every moment of his life was an experience for all who listened, and realised.’
According to my jottings, this appeared in Films and Filming in a preview of Lenny – before, that is, its arrival in British cinemas in November 1975, a full year after its American release. By coincidence, the BFI programme note for their screening of Lenny, as part of this summer’s Dustin Hoffman retrospective, was Gordon Gow’s Films and Filming review, dated July 1975 and presumably part of the same feature. I’m not sure if Gow was also responsible for the words quoted above but the hyperbole in both pieces is strikingly similar. Parts of the ‘People loved Lenny Bruce’ eulogy, especially the last sentence, echo verses from the first chapter of St John’s Gospel[1]. The Gow review reproduced by BFI doesn’t quite match this for religiose fervour but concludes with: ‘That [Lenny] exists at all is enough for me: I rate it high among the greatest movies of all time’. While these Films and Filming pieces are a pretentious example of mixing feelings about Lenny Bruce into assessments of Fosse’s movie, it would be wrong to suggest that all critics reacted in the same way. My recollection is that the common feature of pieces about Lenny in British broadsheets and weeklies was rather that the reviewer always claimed to know plenty about Bruce – and was at pains to ensure their readers realised that. Critics who found that the film confirmed their prior understanding of what Bruce was about were naturally likely to think better of Lenny than those who felt it contradicted their views.
Perhaps I noticed this more because my interest was in Bob Fosse rather than Lenny Bruce – an interest that also probably helped guarantee that I was very taken with Lenny when it eventually made it to the York Odeon or ABC (I don’t remember which). I next watched it on video, some fifteen years later. Distance in time lent a bit of disenchantment to the view in the early 1990s but I was keen to see the film again at BFI this year. It turned out to be an interestingly disappointing experience. More than forty years on, one of Lenny‘s remarkable features is how soon after Lenny Bruce’s death – from a morphine overdose, in August 1966 – it was made; how soon too it was possible for the people who made it to acknowledge, in their preachy introduction, that the film’s audience might find it hard to understand why Bruce was so controversial a figure. It clearly wouldn’t have been hard for Bruce’s near-contemporaries, such as Bob Fosse and Julian Barry, to understand this – that opening acknowledgement is an indication of how much Lenny was aimed at younger audiences. (The antique implication of the monochrome photography – again, for younger viewers particularly – also helps to set the story definitely in the past.) Another remarkable feature of the movie is how dated its fancy structure, which seemed hip in 1974, seems now, and this is only partly because fragmented, non-linear storytelling has become less unusual in American cinema in subsequent decades.
There are passages in which eyecatching technique upstages everything else on the screen. Late on, a drugged-up Lenny stumbles onto a club stage, his words dry up and he stands there, alone and cut off from the audience. The whole, interminable sequence is captured in a single, distant shot of the stage; the daringness of the shot is all that you take from the scene. The faux-documentary style also has the counterproductive effect of increasing your awareness that the people on screen are actors – not least because they’re acting in different styles. Of the three interviewees, Jan Miner seems effortlessly naturalistic; Valerie Perrine, trying harder to be the same, succeeds intermittently; Stanley Beck’s caricature of a showbiz opportunist is incongruous in a documentary context. Beck is presumably doing what the director wants, though, and his playing is certainly in keeping with the writing of his role. At the end of his interview, Artie Silver is talking about making a film about Lenny and no doubt money from the enterprise. The mercenary ring of the agent’s name tells us all we need to know about him even before he opens his mouth.
You’re equally conscious thst Dustin Hoffman is acting although that isn’t solely the result of the documentary approach: Hoffman often pushes viewers into noticing his histrionic skill. His performance here is highly accomplished yet somehow lightweight. Lenny Bruce is reputed to have revelled in the scandalising power of his words onstage. Hoffman too has a zeal for performance but he’s an essentially ingratiating performer. When he delivers Bruce’s routines to live audiences, Hoffman communicates his pleasure in getting laughs but doesn’t convey the thrill Bruce allegedly got from shocking people into silence. The real Bruce, when he began to take himself seriously as an anti-establishment voice in the wilderness, became increasingly obsessed with the legal details of the court cases he was embroiled in – he devoted much of his time on stage to reciting passages from law books, exasperating as much as alienating those who’d paid to see him. This doesn’t come across in the film because Hoffman is neither well equipped nor willing to bore. (His delivery of Bruce’s courtroom tirades is particularly impressive: Hoffman’s voice is very suitable for expressing Bruce’s choked frustration with the legal system he’s fighting.) The characterisation certainly develops – from the lightly self-mocking fellow in the Baltimore club, telling bad jokes that he knows are bad, to the solemn martyr of the film’s climax. But the casting immediately gives away Bob Fosse’s determination to present Lenny Bruce as an underdog victim, whose offensive weapons are purely verbal. Because Dustin Hoffman is simpatico, the issue of whether Bruce was looking to convert or to outrage audiences becomes blurred.
Valerie Perrine as Honey Harlow is more satisfying to watch, though there are times when you resent the camera’s ogling of her. Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles was no great shakes as a singer or dancer until Fosse and Liza Minnelli transformed her. Something similar happens with the leading lady in Lenny: Honey, supposedly, was never the headline stripper she’s presented as. The difference is that in Cabaret the artistic rationale for Sally’s metamorphosis was entirely persuasive – her performances reflected her fantasy of possessing star quality. Within the relatively realistic framework of Lenny and without a similar justification for elevating Honey, you’re conscious of watching the striptease flair not of the character but of the actress playing her. Even so, there are other good things in Valerie Perrine’s portrait. In the early scenes with Lenny, she has a spirited, resonant laugh and gets across Honey’s delight in her sex appeal. Later on, Perrine is very touching in a phone call that Honey, in custody for drug offences, makes to her husband. When he visits her in prison, she radiates, as well as childlike winsomeness, an almost joyful penitence.
Gary Morton, oozing ambiguous bonhomie, registers strongly in the small role of Sherman Hart, an elder statesman of stand-up who believes that pandering to the lowest common denominator is the height of showbiz altruism, and who seems organic to the seedy club world the film recreates. This was a world Bob Fosse, from personal experience, knew inside out and which he’d already shown, in Sweet Charity as well as Cabaret, an exceptional talent for realising on screen. His ability to make tawdry razzle-dazzle attractive and repellent at the same time is undiminished here yet, as Lenny goes on, you get an increasing sense that Fosse is indulging himself in showing off this speciality. The seedy faces of audience members are, as they were in Cabaret, well chosen but they’re much more in evidence this time. Fosse cuts to ugly mugs so regularly in Lenny that the device becomes voyeuristic – but with the effect of making the viewer feel coldly removed from, rather than uneasily complicit in, the voyeurism. Something similar results from the camera’s rapt attention to unclothed female bodies, on and off stage.
As I got up to leave at the end of Lenny, applause was rippling through NFT1. Half a century after Lenny Bruce’s death, it seems that his reputation as a martyred freedom-of-expression fighter is undiminished but I can’t help thinking there’s a double standard at work in a politically correct audience’s reverence for his memory. I wondered what the people who applauded were thinking at the point in the film when Lenny calls out members of his audience as ‘niggers’, ‘kikes’ and so on, claiming that using such words freely renders them innocuous, that it’s only the suppression of bad language that allows it to retain offensive power.
28 June 2017
[1] ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. …He came unto his own, and his own received him not. … But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.’ [Verses 10-12]