Old Yorker

  • What Happened, Miss Simone?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Liz Garbus (2015)

    It’s not unusual nowadays – when, say, a celeb gets a 10 on Strictly or an Ordinary Person wins professionals’ plaudits on Masterchef – for the happily incredulous recipient to ask/exclaim, ‘Like, what happened?!’  The question that gives this Netflix documentary its title is neither rhetorical nor euphoric.  Part of a quote, used by Liz Garbus as an epigraph, from a 1970 Maya Angelou essay, the question really means, ‘What went wrong?’  It’s an apt title, for two reasons.  First, plenty of viewers (this one included) will start watching Garbus’s film with an idea that Nina Simone (1933-2003) belongs in the artiste maudit category but with only a vague idea as to why.  Second, the generous supply of interviews with Simone featured in What Happened, Miss Simone? is enough to make viewers feel the question is being addressed to the woman herself.  The several answers to it that the film supplies, come from various other talking heads but also, in no small part, from Simone’s own seeming candour in these interviews.

    Born in North Carolina, the sixth of eight children, Eunice Kathleen Waymon played piano in church in her early years and showed precocious talent.  At her first classical recital at the age of twelve, she refused to continue playing until her parents, who had been made to give up their seats for white people in the audience, were allowed to return to the front row.  Eunice developed an ambition to be recognised as the first female African-American classical pianist, a keen awareness of racism and, related to both those things, a sense of isolation from both Black and white contemporaries.  Although her family was poor, funds were raised locally to allow her to pursue her musical studies, at high school and, for a short time, at Juilliard, where she prepared for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.  She was always convinced that Curtis rejected her application on racist grounds and always disappointed not to fulfil her chief ambition:  she was big enough to play Carnegie Hall but still regretted she wasn’t playing Bach there.

    Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone when she got a job playing piano at an Atlantic City night club in the mid-1950s.  Her new name – the ‘Nina’ from Spanish for ‘little girl’, the ‘Simone’ in honour of Simone Signoret – was primarily a disguise:  she was playing ‘the devil’s music’ and knew her parents would disapprove.  The night club management insisted that she sing, too.  Thanks to her extraordinary contralto voice, her career as a jazz and blues performer soon took off:  her first hit single in the US, in 1958, was her version of ‘I Loves You, Porgy’.  What Happened? doesn’t make clear exactly when the Waymons learned about their daughter’s new identity or what they thought of it.  There’s no mention either of her short-lived marriage to a white man called Don Ross but her second husband, an African American, is a major figure in the narrative.  When Simone first met Andrew Stroud, he was an NYPD vice squad officer; soon after they married in 1961, he became her manager – a resourceful, energetic manager, to put it mildly.  Stroud claims in the film that it was he who made the 1963 Carnegie Hall engagement happen; Simone claims that he overworked her.  There’s no doubt that he also beat her.

    The couple’s only child, Lisa, born a year after her parents married (and an executive producer on the film), recalls an incident in their car when her father smacked her mother in the face and made her head bleed.  Interviewed in 2006 (he died in 2012), Stroud breezily explains that the head wound was caused by his ring; when they got home, he patched his wife up and the wound healed after a day or two – he’s rather proud of his first-aid skills.  He got increasingly fed up, though, with Simone’s passionate involvement in the Civil Rights movement and its growing influence on her music, including ‘Mississippi Goddam’, the song she wrote in response to the racist murders in 1963 of Medgar Evans and of the four Black girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings in Birmingham, Alabama.  Al Schackman, her long-serving, highly valued guitarist and loyal friend, recalls that Simone told Martin Luther King to his face, ‘I am not non-violent!’  Garbus leaves open the question of how much this propensity for aggression was fuelled by rage at white American racist brutality, how much a kind of compensation for Andrew Stroud’s abuse of her.  What clearly emerges is that Lisa, particularly in her teenage years, was on the receiving end of verbal and physical violence from her mother.

    Malcolm X and his wife Betty Shabazz were the Stroud family’s neighbours in Mount Vernon, New York (Garbus interviews two of the Shabazz daughters) and Simone, largely through her involvement in Civil Rights, rubbed shoulders with the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes et al.  Becoming part of this Black cultural elite was surely gratifying, given her original musical aspirations; at the same time, her uncompromising politics and some of her public behaviour turned Simone into a property too hot for the conventional entertainment world to handle.  She was in effect exiled from the rewards enjoyed by soul sisters of the next generation like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, from a degree of security and a status that, according to Andrew Stroud at any rate, Simone continued to covet.  Her financial situation wasn’t helped when she and he divorced in the early 1970s.  She asserts in one of the interviews that, as her manager, Stroud held the purse strings and left her with nothing.

    Al Schackman remembers that, from very early in her professional career, before marriage or political activism, ‘something was eating at’ Nina Simone.   What that something was, is a mystery that persists for most of the film.  In the mid-seventies, after leaving for good what she now called ‘the United Snakes of America’, Simone lived in Liberia; she describes her time in Africa as the realisation of a dream but it didn’t last long.  From her early forties to the end of her days, she made her home in Europe – Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, France again.  What Happened, Miss Simone? begins with footage of her performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976 – or on the verge of performing.  She waits until the packed house is completely silent before she’s prepared to begin; as she gazes out at the audience, she seems both disengaged and disoriented.  By the time Garbus reprises this sequence, at the appropriate point in her chronologically ordered narrative, Simone’s attitude on the Montreux stage is just the latest example of her bizarre behaviour or remarks.  Following MLK’s assassination in April 1968, she speak-sings an elegy, in which she asserts that ‘they are killing us one by one’.  The ‘us’ include, as well as King and Malcolm X, Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry.  Since both the latter died of cancer, it’s a puzzle as to who ‘they’ are.

    It’s not until the early 1980s when Simone is at her lowest ebb – musically, financially and psychologically – that another loyal friend, a Dutchman called Gerrit de Bruin, takes her in hand, setting her up in a new home in Nijmegen.  A doctor diagnoses bipolar disorder and prescribes Trilafon.  While it’s fair enough for Liz Garbus to delay this important medical revelation, she downplays some of Simone’s other demons to the point of omission.  Watching the film, I was struck that the protagonist didn’t seem to have what you think of as the usual drink-and-drugs dependencies.  You don’t need to Google for long to discover that in fact she did – that booze in particular was behind some of her eccentricity as a performer:  in Paris in the early 1980s, says Wikipedia, she was ‘Often … too drunk to sing or play the piano properly’.  Lisa Simone’s testimony notwithstanding, Garbus also downplays what Wikipedia euphemistically terms Nina’s ‘volatility’.  There’s nothing, for example, about an ‘incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she’d already worn’ or the suspended jail sentence she received in 1995,  when ‘while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor’s son with an air gun after the boy’s laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults’.  Even so – and even though Liz Garbus’s film-making isn’t formally imaginative – the assemblage of archive footage, photographs and music is more than enough to ensure that What Happened? is always compelling.

    In 1987, Simone’s popularity unexpectedly revived, thanks to the Chanel advert accompanied by her version of ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’.  With the notable exception of the air gun incident, her last years seem to have been relatively pacific even if her medication was a mixed blessing.  Gerrit de Bruin and other friends who made sure she kept taking Trilafon knew it would gradually impair her motor skills and cause slurring of her speech.  Two of What Happened, Miss Simone?’s highlights are her piercing, exhilarating renditions, both from the late 1960s, of  ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ (Simone’s own composition, named for a collection of Lorraine Hansberry’s writings) and ‘Ain’t Got No, I Got Life’ (which Simone devised from two numbers in Hair).  It’s a shame to think that, on an emotionally more even keel, she eventually lost her startling ardency as a performer.  It’s something of a relief, too, though, if Nina Simone herself felt less wretched, and less angry, as a result.

    30 April 2024

  • Carrie (1952)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1952)

    Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy was the source material for George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), one of Hollywood’s most celebrated dramas of the early post-war era.  Just a year later, another Dreiser novel – his first, Sister Carrie – was adapted for the screen.  William Wyler’s Carrie isn’t nearly as well known as A Place in the Sun (or as Carrie‘s 1976 namesake) but this is a powerful romantic tragedy, one that sees Laurence Olivier at his best.  Watching bits of his famous Richard III (1955) on television the other week, I found Olivier, not for the first time, ridiculous.  As Richard, his delivery and diction, though technically formidable, are excessively stylised, and his movements (the limp and so on) erratic; because his line readings make clear the thoughts behind the words, Olivier’s confidential looks to camera are a tautology.  The experience of Carrie couldn’t be more different.  This is great screen acting, in the same class as Olivier’s Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer (1960).

    Sister Carrie was first published in 1900 and the film’s action is contemporary.  Jennifer Jones is Carrie Meeber, who leaves her family home in rural Missouri to make her way in Chicago.  She’s following in the footsteps of her elder sister Minnie (Jacqueline deWit), already living in the city, but Carrie knows she can do better than Minnie – ‘I went through school,’ she informs Charlie Drouet (Eddie Albert), the affable travelling salesman who chats her up on the train journey to Chicago and gives her his card.  She moves in, as their rent-paying lodger, with Minnie and her husband (Robert Foulk), who live, barely above the breadline, in rooms on the South Side.  Carrie is soon frustrated.  She slaves long hours and with growing resentment as a machinist in a shoe factory until she injures a finger at work and is promptly fired by the sweatshop foreman (Charles Halton).  Although immediately suspicious of Charlie Drouet’s smooth talking, Carrie is now desperate enough to look him up.  Hearing her tale of woe, he hands her a ten-dollar bill and invites her to dinner at Fitzgerald’s, a high-end restaurant and bar.  Arriving early, before Charlie, Carrie is directed from the bar, where women aren’t allowed, to the adjoining restaurant.  The man who directs her there is George Hurstwood (Olivier).

    When he’s not wearing eccentric disguise on screen, Laurence Olivier is a naturally classy presence – a quality reinforced, perhaps especially in America, by his own public persona:  by the end of the 1940s Olivier was not only a beautifully spoken English gentleman but a knight of the realm.  I’m not sure if Carrie immediately realises George Hurstwood is the manager of Fitzgerald’s rather than one of its upper-crust patrons; I have to admit this viewer didn’t realise it at first.  Whatever, socially ambitious Carrie does instantly see in George a man who’s a cut above.  She tried to refuse Charlie’s ten dollars and, after Minnie chides her for not succeeding, turns up at Fitzgerald’s only in order to return the money.  Charlie soon arrives and the dinner goes ahead though it’s a moot point whether he or George Hurstfield is the reason Carrie changes her mind.  Even so, she ends the evening in Charlie’s apartment and, jobless, stays there.  When the neighbours gossip and Carrie uneasily asks about getting married, Charlie fobs her off by inviting George, who he knows impressed her, to the apartment.  What neither Charlie nor his kept woman realises is that George, an unhappily married man and father of two grown-up children, has already and irrevocably fallen for Carrie.

    She soon reciprocates his feelings but doesn’t know George is married until Charlie tells her.  When she consequently breaks off from seeing George, he tricks her into believing that Charlie’s in hospital and that he’ll take there; she agrees and George virtually abducts her.  It’s accidental that he finds himself in possession of $10,000 of the restaurant owner’s money (George accidentally locks a timed safe as he’s cashing up for the night); but when he learns that Mr Fitzgerald (Basil Ruysdael), under pressure from George’s shrewish wife Julie (Miriam Hopkins), is planning to pay his salary direct to her in future, George absconds to New York, with the takings and Carrie.  She doesn’t know about the theft until long after a bond company agent (Ray Teal) dispatched by Fitzgerald turns up at their apartment to demand the money back.  In a culminating falsehood, George assures Carrie that Julie has divorced him, and they marry.   Carrie is pregnant when she learns the bigamous truth.  She miscarries.

    This sounds a melodramatic sequence of events but it doesn’t play out as such.  That’s no surprise, of course, with William Wyler at the controls and a screenplay by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, who had worked to great effect with Wyler on The Heiress (1949).  Laurence Olivier is in every sense the star of the show, though.  George lies or fails to mention things to Carrie in order not to lose her; Olivier depicts brilliantly the combination of desire and desperation that dictate his deceptions.   As a young stage actor, Olivier was celebrated for, as well as his extraordinary vocal qualities, his athletic invention and daring, and his physicality as an actor endured.  You see it in late work like his deathbed scene as Lord Marchmain in the Granada television version of Brideshead Revisited (1981).  You see it in mid-career bloom in Carrie, too.  When George first kisses Carrie, he’s hungry, animalistic.  The wonder of the performance is that, in the climax to the story, when George is destitute and ill, Olivier’s movements are powerful in effect but controlled in execution – not at all theatrical in the pejorative sense.

    The plotting becomes more mechanical and less convincing in order to set the stage for the tragic finale.  George can’t get a job, however menial, supposedly because it’s (very!) common knowledge that he stole money.  Julie eventually agrees to a divorce, in exchange for George’s agreement not to ask for a cent of the proceeds of the couple’s house sale.  Living in virtual poverty with him, Carrie decides to try for work in a chorus line and, to her amazement, gets it.  (To the amazement of the audience, too:  the auditions are one of the film’s weakest sequences.)  George reads in the society page of a newspaper that his son (William Reynolds), who has made a rich marriage, is returning with his bride from honeymoon.  Carrie encourages her husband to go and meet George Jr; he turns up at the docks only to feel consumed by shame and hide  his face as his family walks by.  (Olivier does even this well.)  When George returns to New York, he finds a goodbye note from Carrie, in which she says that she isn’t good for him.  Years pass … She becomes a successful actress while George is homeless.  He hangs around outside the theatre one night and speaks her name.  They talk in her dressing room; she orders food and gives George money, eager to put things right:  Carrie blames herself that he sacrificed his comfortable life for love of her.  While she’s out of the dressing room, George briefly contemplates the gas burner on a stove.  He returns the paper money to Carrie’s handbag and removes from it just a quarter coin before disappearing into the night.

    Although Olivier dominates, the acting is strong nearly all the way down the cast list:  Walter Baldwin, as the heroine’s father, regretfully buying his daughter’s one-way ticket to Chicago at the local station in the brief first scene, sets the tone; Ray Teal, emphatically one-note as the bond company man, is an exception.  Eddie Albert, a year before his best-known collaboration with Wyler on Roman Holiday (and three years before he played another ingratiating salesman in Oklahoma!), is terrific as Charlie Drouet.  Albert is such a naturally likeable and empathetic actor that you can’t help rooting for questionable Charlie (who does show Carrie kindness in the process of exploiting her).  Miriam Hopkins is less satisfying; her if-looks-could-kill interpretation of bitterly vindictive Julie would work better if Hopkins managed more than the one look and was able to suggest that the Hurstfields’ marriage may not always have been as bad as it has become.  Jennifer Jones appears (as the opening credits point out) by agreement with her movie-mogul husband David O Selznick but, in Wyler’s capable hands, delivers one of her best performances, particularly in the early stages.  In the first Chicago scenes, Jones’s Carrie, anxious to do better for herself, is far from likeable though her vulnerability takes the edge off her prickliness.  This means that, although Carrie’s eventual burgeoning theatre career is a plot requirement, it makes emotional sense:  you believe the young woman who so resented working in a shoe factory would be determined enough, once she gets her chance on the stage, to stick with and make a lasting success of it.

    In the home straight, Wyler and the Goetzes manage to muffle the creaking plot machinery with a few echoes that ring true.  In the early part of their relationship, Carrie and George love theatre-going together and he encourages her to try her hand at amateur acting; you remember these things when she becomes a pro.  George’s refusal to take dollar bills from Carrie in the closing scene recalls Carrie’s reluctance to accept Charlie’s ten bucks gift/loan/bribe.  David Raksin’s score is only occasionally a bit much:  for the most part, it serves the narrative well.  Carrie wasn’t a success at the box office or with many critics at the time of its release.  According to Wikipedia, Wyler felt in retrospect ‘that the film was too depressing during a time when American audiences wanted escapist entertainment to take their minds off the Cold War’.  Telling an ‘immoral’ love story couldn’t have helped either.  But Carrie has aged very well indeed.

    25 April 2024

Posts navigation