Monthly Archives: June 2021

  • Buffalo Bill and the Indians (or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Altman (1976)

    In the mid-1980s, four consecutive Robert Altman films were adaptations of theatre pieces (Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982); Streamers (1983); Secret Honor (1984); Fool for Love (1985)).  Until then, Altman had made only one movie based on a stage play – Buffalo Bill and the Indians (or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson), inspired by Arthur Kopit’s Indians (first staged in 1968).  I remember looking forward to watching Buffalo Bill in the 1970s, especially because Joel Grey, whose post-Cabaret screen appearances were rare, was in it.  I don’t remember passing up the opportunity to see the film at the cinema then or, during the decades since, on television or in previous BFI retrospectives.  It was, according to IMDb, released in Britain in 1976 but maybe didn’t get far beyond London.  It certainly can’t have set box offices on fire:  Buffalo Bill is determinedly uncommercial.

    The centre of the film, as of Kopit’s play, is William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody’s Wild West show.  The famed soldier and bison hunter’s spectacle, with its white-washing, travestied re-enactments of events in the frontier and Indian wars and various circus-like elements, toured America (and Europe) from the early 1880s until late in the first decade of the new century.  I’m guessing that Indians consists almost entirely of the company’s offstage interactions.  They account for a fair amount of Altman’s movie too but the screenplay (by Alan Rudolph and the director) also opens things out to show the show, or parts of it.  Exchanges involving Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) and his entourage are often entertaining.  The performance bits are thoroughly convincing – a rendering of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (years before it became the American national anthem) has the band and the singers perfectly out of sync – but that’s not enough to stop the extravaganza getting tedious, except for a couple of the sharp-shooting routines involving Annie Oakley (Geraldine Chaplin) and her in-the-line-of-fire manager (John Considine).  The film’s opening titles are an amusing spoof of greatest-show-on-earth hyperbole.  By halfway through, though, you’re dreading the next illustration of what audiences were flocking to see a hundred and forty years ago.

    Nashville, this picture’s immediate predecessor in the Altman filmography, critiques American politics as a form of show business.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians applies similar treatment to American history, and its definitions of the hero.  Buffalo Bill, wistfully reflecting on the magnitude of General Custer’s celebrity, laments that ‘My father never saw me become a star’.  When Bill, the show’s producer (Joel Grey) and its publicist (Kevin McCarthy) recruit Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts) as a guest performer, the audience’s first reaction is one of derision: he isn’t the fearsome savage of popular imagination but a small, dignified, human figure whose conduct repeatedly exposes the showmen’s bombastic fraud.  After Sitting Bull’s death, his colossal interpreter William Halsey (Will Sampson, fresh from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) replaces him in the company.  Impersonating his Chief, Halsey doubly satisfies expectations – he’s willingly vanquished in the gladiatorial combat with Buffalo Bill that becomes a show highlight, and he looks the part.  Giving the public what they want, instead of more challenging reality, anticipates the enduring traditions of Hollywood casting in the century to come.

    Paul Newman is probably miscast.  He doesn’t have the braggadocio that seems essential to the film’s conception of Buffalo Bill.  The presence in the cast of Burt Lancaster (as Bill’s biographer, Ned Buntline) keeps reminding you of this – I don’t mean to deprecate Lancaster but he did have a gift for combining grandeur and hollowness.  On the other hand, the film would likely be more tiresome with a crudely flamboyant protagonist and Newman is never not interesting in the role.  As a different kind of master of ceremonies, Joel Grey, with his startling quick movements and lightning changes in mood, is impressive.  Harvey Keitel (in the same year that he appeared in Taxi Driver) seems uncomfortable as Cody’s eager-to-please nephew who keeps saying and doing the wrong thing.  One of the best vignettes is a presidential visit to the company by Grover Cleveland (Pat McCormick) and his first lady (Shelley Duvall).  I could have done without the succession of glamorous opera singers for whom Bill has a weakness, coloratura-maniacs to a woman.

    The whole thing is clever and coherent but it doesn’t seem to build much.  That said, I must admit my attention wasn’t fully engaged:  I was still too thrilled by the result, just over an hour before the BFI screening began, of the Epsom Derby.  It was won by Adayar, a son of the great Frankel, whose progeny I follow.  Having taken so many years to catch up with Buffalo Bill and the Indians, I may have half-wasted the opportunity of finally watching it but you can’t argue with emotional priorities.  It brought another smile to my face to discover, as I read up about Altman’s film afterwards, the name of the director of the first Broadway production of Arthur Kopit’s Indians.  Gene Frankel.

    5 June 2021

  • Moonstruck

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Norman Jewison (1987)

    Sally and I saw this Norman Jewison film on its original release and must have watched it two or three times since.  It had been some years between the last viewing and this one but Moonstruck feels as good as new.  It’s among Hollywood’s most penetrating, as well as enjoyable, romantic comedies.

    John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the screenplay, is an Irish American from the Bronx.  Moonstruck’s principals are Italian Americans in Brooklyn.  Dean Martin sings ‘That’s Amore’ over the opening titles; the story that follows is fuelled by a medley of Italianate tropes, cultural and temperamental – Puccini opera, food and drink, people who are voluble, volatile and have a strong streak of fatalism.  It sounds a commercially cute package, and I suppose it is, but Moonstruck is richer than that and increasingly so.  Each of the main characters – there are at least half a dozen – has good lines and different sides and, thanks to the first-rate acting, is vividly individual.  The ensemble playing, admirably orchestrated by Norman Jewison, is a delight.

    Thirty-seven-year-old widow Loretta Castorini (Cher), who works as a bookkeeper and lives with her parents in their Brooklyn Heights brownstone, accepts a proposal of marriage from her long-standing beau, the middle-aged worrywart Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello).  He then immediately departs for Sicily to be with his dying mother.  Johnny asks Loretta, while he’s away, to invite his younger brother Ronny, a baker, to the wedding:  there’s been bad blood between the brothers since Ronny lost a hand in a workplace accident that he blames Johnny for.  Loretta’s father, Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), is a plumber – as someone from a different world will later remark, that’s how he can afford to own ‘a whole house’ in Brooklyn Heights.  Besides, Cosmo looks after the pennies – he refuses to pay for his daughter’s forthcoming second wedding.  He doesn’t like Johnny anyway.  Loretta does but she doesn’t, as she tells her mother Rose (Olympia Dukakis), love him.  Droll, rueful Rose is relieved:  ‘When you love them they drive you crazy ‘cause they know they can’.  She’s well aware her husband has a mistress.  This is Mona (Anita Gillette) – only slightly younger but with a (mutton-dressed-as-lamb) vivacity that Rose has lost.  She looks to be in mourning for her romantic past.

    The Castorini household is completed by Cosmo’s ancient father (Feodor Chaliapin Jr) and his many dogs.  Rose’s brother Raymond (Louis Guss) and his wife Rita (Julie Bovasso), who run a local store, are regular visitors to the brownstone.  Over dinner there, they remark on the previous night’s bright, full moon – it reminded Raymond of a moon that shone once when Rose and Cosmo were courting (‘When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie’, etc etc).  Loretta is not at this gathering but at confession.  Within an hour or two of meeting angry, hungry Ronny (Nicolas Cage), she was in his bed.  (In the confessional she slips in ‘I slept with the brother of my fiancé’ between a couple of minor sins; the priest asks her to repeat ‘that second thing you said’.)  After telling Ronny they can never see each other again, she grants his supposedly last request of accompanying him to the opera – La bohème.  Their visit to the Met – where the audience includes Mona and Cosmo, startled to be caught red-handed by his daughter during the interval – inevitably reinforces Loretta and Ronny’s mutual ardour.

    Johnny proposes to Loretta in an Italian restaurant.  Their fellow diners include a forty-something man and his much younger female companion – they have words, she throws water at him and storms out.  On the night of the opera, Rose dines alone in the same place.  At the next table is the same man, Perry (John Mahoney); he’s with a different girl but suffers the same, embarrassing fate as before.  Rose takes pity and asks if he wants to join her for dinner; Perry, who teaches communications at NYU, enthusiastically agrees.  The water-throwers were both recent students and the professor talks at length about his failed relationships.  Rose sadly concludes that, ‘What you don’t know about women is a lot’’.  He walks her home; on the way, they bump into dog-walking Grandpa Castorini, who instantly gets the wrong idea.   When they reach Rose’s house, Perry asks if he can come in.  Rose says no, sparking an exchange that, as well as a particular favourite of mine, is typical of John Patrick Shanley’s sharp, sympathetic dialogue (perfectly delivered by John Mahoney and Olympia Dukakis):

    Perry:               People at home?

    Rose:               No.  I think the house is empty.  I can’t invite you in because I’m married and I know who I am.  You’re … shaking.

    Perry:               I’m a little cold.

    Rose:               You’re a little boy and you like to be bad.

    Perry:               We could go to my apartment.  You could see how the other half lives.

    Rose:               I’m too old for you.

    Perry:               I’m too old for me.  That’s my predicament.

    Shanley went on to write, most notably, the stage play Doubt: A Parable and the screenplay for the 2008 film adaptation, which he also directed, but Moonstruck, unassuming as it is, is the finer  achievement.  I found plenty of the lines had stayed with me – I was saying them inside my head as they were about to be spoken.   There are enduring images too – especially Cher, done up for her night at the opera:  Loretta goes to the hairdresser then impulse-buys a burgundy-coloured dress and matching high heels.  It’s not only Ronny’s breath she takes away when he meets her outside the Met.  Her early-next-morning walk home, still in her Cinderella-at-the-ball outfit but distractedly kicking a tin can down the street, is memorable too.

    The closing scene takes place in the capacious kitchen of the brownstone:  getting all the main characters together for this climax, as might happen on stage, reflects Moonstruck‘s well-made-play quality.  Ronny arrives, then Johnny, then Rita and Raymond.  Loretta means to break her engagement but her fiancé gets there first.  His mother, on her deathbed, suddenly revived at the prospect of Johnny’s impending wedding; ‘If I marry you,’ he explains to Loretta, ‘my mother will die’.  Loretta can go ahead and marry his brother.  Sheepish Cosmo agrees to pay for the wedding.   Rose asks her daughter if she loves Ronny.  ‘Yeah, Ma, I love him awful,’ replies Loretta.  ‘Oh God, that’s too bad,’ her mother says.

    Everything works – not least the eclectic soundtrack.  Even Vikki Carr’s interminable lovelorn ballad ‘It Must Be Him’ is effective as used here:  Cosmo has it playing ad nauseam.  The nicely modest original music is by Dick Hyman.  Most of the cast members, however many other roles they’ve played, are chiefly associated with their Moonstruck characters:  Olympia Dukakis, Danny Aiello, Vincent Gardenia, Louis Guss, Feodor Chaliapin Jr, Anita Gillette – and, even if she’s not primarily thought of as an actress at all, Cher.  The only exceptions are Nicolas Cage, John Mahoney (who would be the father in Frasier) and, perhaps, Julie Bovasso (John Travolta’s mother in Saturday Night Fever).

    There’s a lot to do with death.  Woken by her husband during the night, Rose, the second she comes to, asks, ‘Who’s dead?’  When she later asks both Perry and Johnny the question ‘Why do men chase women?’ she already knows the answer:  ‘Because they fear death’.  Ronny makes an impassioned carpe diem appeal to Loretta.  Grandpa Castorini and his dogs pay a visit to the cemetery where the old man’s wife is buried.  There’s also, of course, the volte face at death’s door on the part of Johnny’s mother (Gina DeAngeles), which her overgrown mummy’s-boy son declares a miracle.  Moonstruck is a survivor too.  It may be concerned with mortality but this film was built to last.

    3 June 2021

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