Old Yorker

  • Arthur

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steve Gordon (1981)

    What struck me most about Arthur, which I’d never seen before, was how ropy the plotting was, usually but not always for the sake of instant gags.  When the fabulously rich New York playboy Arthur Bach (Dudley Moore) first sees Linda Marolla (Liza Minnelli), the working-class waitress from Queens he falls in love with, she’s shoplifting a tie from a posh menswear store.  She takes it home for her father (Barney Martin), who puts it round his neck although he’s always shirtless as well as shiftless.  Linda looks set to be a kooky kleptomaniac but, even though it’s something of a relief that she’s not, nothing in her personality or behaviour later in the film chimes with her eyecatching first entrance as a thief (in a red and yellow outfit that’s much splashier that anything else in her wardrobe).  Arthur’s old-moneyed family wants him to marry the daughter of a brutal nouveau riche (Stephen Elliott).  What’s maddening about the lovely, dreary Susan (Jill Eikenberry) is that she’s infinitely understanding of Arthur’s dipsomania and its verbal accompaniments:  when he says exasperatedly to her, ‘You’re such an asshole, Susan’, she smiles back patiently.  Yet in the climax to the film, when Arthur jilts Susan on their wedding day, she reacts like a conventionally wronged bride – the writer-director Steve Gordon carelessly drops what had been distinctive about her.  Arthur’s warned by his father (Thomas Barbour) that he and his grandmother will cut Arthur off financially if he doesn’t marry Susan.  It would make sense if Gordon kept the grandmother (Geraldine Fitzgerald) under wraps so that she appeared just at the end of the film and overruled the father; as we see her early on and it’s clear she’s indulgent towards Arthur, her final intervention is pretty pointless.

    Watching Arthur at this distance in time has its shocking elements.  I couldn’t remember who directed it until the credits appeared; when I looked up Steve Gordon on Wikipedia I discovered he died aged forty-four in 1982 (Arthur was his first and last feature).  It’s to Gordon’s credit that he doesn’t present Arthur’s heavy drinking simply as a problem that’s cured once he finds the right girl but it’s still hard to find his sustained inebriation and his drunken driving purely, delightfully comic.  Gordon doesn’t make the mistake of having Arthur lose his fortune and end up poor but happy – yet the implication that he can carry on enjoying his great wealth irresponsibly and ostentatiously but with the love of a good woman as a bonus doesn’t make for a satisfying ending either.   Steve Gordon had done plenty of TV comedy work in the previous fifteen years and Arthur is sketchy in more ways than one.  That it’s come to be regarded as a near-classic (it’s number 53 on the American Film Institute’s top hundred comedy films) is thanks to the performances of Dudley Moore and John Gielgud, as Arthur’s valet, Hobson.  Moore’s portrait is an unusually appealing combination of comedy turn and characterisation:  although he’d already had a big success in 10 (1979), he was still relatively new to Hollywood comedy and his performance feels fresh.  As you’d expect, Gielgud is masterly in his delivery of Hobson’s caustic one-liners – some of these are unpleasantly bitter but Gielgud’s relish of the words makes them not just palatable but a waspish delight.  When it turns out that Hobson is (a) deeply fond of Arthur and (b) dying, Gielgud manages the sentimental transition with astonishing taste and control.  Although Liza Minnelli, as Linda, is more successfully subdued than you might expect, you still sense it’s a strain for her to keep the lid on and to play second fiddle:  this comes out in the lack of connection between her and Dudley Moore.  Lou Jacobi has a good cameo as a man who runs a flower shop.  The film’s hit theme song, like Gielgud, won an Oscar and it was nice to hear it again.  Christopher Cross sings the song, which he co-wrote with Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager and Peter Allen.

    28 December 2011

  • America America

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan (1963)

    ‘My name is Elia Kazan – a Greek by blood, a Turk by birth, and an American because of a journey my grandfather made.’

    This journey – by a young Greek called Stavros Topouzoglou from a poor village in Turkish Anatolia to New York in the 1890s – is the subject and the story of America America:  Kazan adapted the screenplay from his own book.  Maybe it’s because that story is so personally crucial to Kazan – a story, as he says in the same introductory voiceover quoted above, that was told to him repeatedly as he was growing up – that he doesn’t feel the need to dramatise it in the way he would a piece of fiction or even the true story of someone less essential to him than his ancestor.  Recently restored by Warner Brothers and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, the film – shown as part of the London Film Festival – was introduced by Clyde Jeavons as Kazan’s least seen movie, and also as one of his best.   It’s hard to argue with the former description but impossible to agree with the latter.   Running nearly three hours, America America is way too long – perhaps the longest American film I’ve seen in which the lead actor is so inadequate to his task.  For the most part, the picture is weak in the very areas you expect to be strong in Kazan – psychological tension, character development, the telling dramatic detail – even though there are some superbly designed and staged passages, as might also be expected from the team of people helping Kazan behind the camera:  the cinematographer is Haskell Wexler, the editor Dede Allen, the production designer Gene Callahan, and the costumer Anna Hill Johnstone.

    Kazan may have wanted Stathis Giallelis, the twenty-two-year-old unknown who plays Stavros, to be a little opaque – bringing his grandfather to life without interposing himself between the real Stavros and Kazan’s image of him.  But that’s not much good to the audience.  Giallelis doesn’t have the emotional transparency that a gifted non-professional can sometimes bring to the screen; he certainly lacks the interpretative skills a professional actor uses to build a portrait.  He’s just there.  No less problematic, at least in the early stages, is the discrepancy between the epic reality and expressiveness of the landscape (the unyielding terrain seems to reflect Stavros’s unpromising prospects) and the Hollywood-ised Europeans encountered by Stavros as he sets out on his journey – they have great faces but their acting is busy and caricatural.  Yet, from the start, the action, not least in crowd scenes, is finely orchestrated by Kazan and there’s a smooth transition from almost documentary sequences into the beginning of Stavros’s odyssey. Knowing next to nothing about the film, I’d expected it to be about the immigrant experience in America; although I was somehow disappointed that it wasn’t, the climactic scenes of the immigrants’ ship approaching the Statute of Liberty and Ellis Island are exciting (not least as an anticipation of the early sequences in The Godfather part II).

    There is some good playing in smaller roles – from the likes of John Marley as a vagabond Stavros meets en route and Paul Mann, as a Constantinople merchant.   Stavros seems all set to marry the merchant’s daughter, Thomna.  The young man’s comfortable future is mapped out for him – the idea is represented by the fully decorated apartment which the prospective father-in-law buys for Thomna and her fiancé.  Stavros doesn’t really love Thomna and finds the defined security claustrophobic.  There’s an extraordinary, extended scene between the young couple where the tensions between them mesh with the opacity of Stathis Giallelis – the fact that he gives Linda Marsh, as Thomna, so little to play off seems to increase the scene’s pressure and makes it gripping.  It’s a powerful reminder of the kind of drama Elia Kazan is famous for.  Given what he achieved in his life in America, it’s not surprising that he regarded his grandfather with such reverence, even if watching the process of commemorating his heroism in America America is itself a test of stamina.

    23 October 2011

     

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