Old Yorker

  • High Anxiety

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mel Brooks (1977)

    Mel Brooks is sometimes accused of playing a percentage game with the dialogue he writes, of piling on the gags at the expense of shaping his scripts.  Guilty as charged:  he may be a great film fan but his scattershot approach limits his effectiveness as a genre parodist.  Jokes that don’t grow organically from the material stick out like sore thumbs in this type of comedy; discipline is essential and what Brooks almost glories in lacking.  Thanks to the title song, the opening credits sequence of Blazing Saddles hinted at greater comic control but Brooks lost concentration in no time.   There are promising signs at the start of High Anxiety too:  John Morris’s pastiche of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho music, pairs of feet struggling to get a grip on an escalator, the dizzying design of a carpet in an airport departure lounge.  But they’re almost immediately offset by Brooks’ mugging imitation of terror on his first appearance on the screen, by a gratuitous queer-flasher joke and by the realisation that the lavishly anguished strings playing Morris’s score are masking a conventional ballad tune.  Brooks will use that tune later for a big set piece – a parody of Frank Sinatra that’s a highlight of High Anxiety even though it has nothing to do with a Hitchcock spoof.

    Brooks used to limit his own time on screen to mascot-like supporting roles (there were two in Blazing Saddles) but now he’s his own star.  He doesn’t inhabit a role; he just yells that he’s Mel Brooks (and he really does yell) throughout – as if comic acting consists of being yourself with a loud voice and exaggerated gestures.  Brooks is meant to be Dr Richard H Thorndyke, newly appointed head of the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous.  Towards the end of High Anxiety, the characters he and Madeline Kahn play disguise themselves as a cutely bickering Jewish couple to get past airport security officers because, ‘If you’re loud and annoying, psychologically people don’t notice you’.  This film proves otherwise – you can’t fail to notice the performers.  Brooks’s shouting is widely infectious (though Kahn stays clear of it); he also favours leering close-ups.  His lack of interest in the technical side of parody makes him ill equipped to mimic the unease that Hitchcock’s camera movement often generates.  Shot in black-and-white, Young Frankenstein was not only Brooks’ best but also his best-looking film to date:  there was a definite visual style to imitate and the cinematographer Gerard Hirschfeld sustained it.  Perhaps it’s the embarrassment of stylistic riches available to draw on in Hitchcock that has made Brooks and Paul Lohmann so visually unambitious.  The camerawork tends to alternate between static and frenetic, and there’s nothing subliminally scary.

    In a scene in which an Institute inmate is interviewed by Thorndyke and the sartorially impeccable Dr Montague to determine whether he’s well enough to be discharged, why is Montague (Harvey Korman) oily and insinuating, then comically weak willed, then malevolent?  The answer seems to be that it’s more fun for Brooks and Harvey Korman that way.   It’s not long before Montague is revealed to be a cringing masochist but he continues to conceal the fact in later scenes – pointlessly once it’s been exposed.  Cloris Leachman is the Teutonic Nurse Diesel, an extended replay of the Frau Blücher character she played in Young Frankenstein.  Leachman gave a fascinating performance in The Last Picture Show and is charming in TV comedy parts like Phyllis in The Mary Tyler Moore Show but here she’s required to be funny for an awfully long time on a single track, and she’s soon tiresome.  Nurse Diesel’s appearance is both farcically and realistically grotesque:  she has mammoth breasts that point like weapons but also a pencil line of dark facial hair.  The strain of growling out of the side of her large, oblong mouth really tells on Leachman.  Minor figures, like Ron Carey’s dimly sympathetic chauffeur and Darrell Zwerling’s nutty academic, have just one characteristic each.

    The only interesting playing comes from Madeline Kahn, with her combination of a cool, verging-on-prudish exterior and sensual fire down below.  The lustrous blonde wig she wears as Victoria – the daughter of Arthur Brisbane (Albert Whitlock), a rich industrialist who’s being kept a virtual prisoner as a patient at the Institute – recalls Hitchcock ice blondes like Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren; her tremulous line readings send them up.   Kahn doesn’t appear until about halfway through the film but she’s by some way its chief asset – especially when Victoria is ooh-ing and aah-ing in reaction to the Sinatra routine, which also sees Mel Brooks at his best.

    The ideas in the script (Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca and Barry Levinson share the screenplay credit with Brooks) are often lazy.  Dr Thorndyke describes an Institute inmate who believes he’s a cocker spaniel as the most amazing psychological phenomenon he’s ever encountered but wouldn’t an animal more unusual than a dog be more amazing?  Plenty of people must have had canine delusions for man-thinks-he’s-a-dog jokes to be so familiar.  When Thorndyke addresses a convention of psychiatrists, there are portraits of Freud, Jung, Adler et al on the wall.  Their presence serves only to underline how weakly written the sequence is – it needs a barrage of psychoanalytic jargon to be satirically effective.   During question time after the lecture, two little girls arrive in the auditorium and ask about penis envy and toilet training.  Thorndyke’s answers, expressed in coy baby talk, don’t stand out enough from what’s he’s been saying to the learned gathering.

    The menace of birds gathering on a telegraph wire is instantly dispelled when one of them shits on Thorndyke’s head.  Those pigeons are an early announcement that Mel Brooks isn’t interested in constructing a tight, logically satisfying plot or creating sustained tension to give his jokes more impetus.  Occasionally, he manages to reference two Hitchcock films at once[1] but, for the most part in High Anxiety, he thrashes around in a style more reminiscent of daft horror films than of Hitchcockian suspense

    [1970s]

    [1] Afternote:  Not that I knew many at the time, though I did understand where Dr Thorndyke got his fear of heights from.  I hadn’t seen Spellbound.

  • Filmworker

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tony Zierra (2017)

    In the early 1970s, a young actor called Leon Vitali was becoming a familiar face on British television – in the sitcom series Please Sir! and its spinoff The Fenn Street Gang, through one-off appearances in episodes of crime dramas including Z Cars, Public Eye, Crown Court and Van der Valk, in more prestigious one-off dramas like Jack Gold’s Catholics.  In the midst of all this TV work, Vitali became involved in something artistically bigger, when he landed the part of Lord Bullingdon in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.  For Vitali, getting the job was almost too good to be true.  As he explains at the start of Filmworker, he was already an ardent Kubrick fan.  Vitali had just finished drama school when he first experienced 2001: A Space Odyssey and thought it the greatest film he’d seen.  At the end of A Clockwork Orange, he turned to the person he’d watched it with and said:  ‘I want to work for that man’.   That – to put it very mildly – is what Vitali has done, from Barry Lyndon onwards and to the exclusion of nearly everything else.  His selfless dedication to Kubrick is the subject of Tony Zierra’s film – a documentary that’s also a frequently alarming, sometimes funny and eventually moving human drama.

    Watching Kubrick work during the lengthy Barry Lyndon shoot further increased Vitali’s admiration for him and fuelled his interest in the filmmaking process.  He told Kubrick, who advised him, if he was serious, to ‘do something about it and let me know’.  (Kubrick seems to have been impressed, in the first instance, simply by how conscientiously Vitali learned lines[1].)  When Vitali landed his next film part, the title role in a low-profile horror movie, Terror of Frankenstein (1977), he asked to do some unpaid work behind the camera, as well as paid work in front of it, and the director (Calvin Floyd) agreed.  Vitali then renewed contact with Kubrick, who sent him a copy of Stephen King’s The Shining.  His contributions to Kubrick’s 1980 film of King’s book, where Vitali is credited as ‘personal assistant to the director’, included casting of the important children’s roles and plenty more.  By now, he’d put his own performing career to one side.

    Several of Zierra’s interviewees stress Vitali’s talents as an actor, implying that his decision to become Kubrick’s factotum – for the remaining twenty years of the latter’s life (and beyond) – was self-denying because Vitali thereby passed up the opportunity of acting glory.  This is one of the less convincing points of view put forward in Filmworker.  Vitali himself mentions being offered, after Barry Lyndon, a season with the RSC and work with the National Theatre but he doesn’t make a lot of this.  That could be characteristic self-effacement but Vitali wasn’t good as Lord Bullingdon and though he might have continued to get steady TV work, it’s unlikely he could have sustained an acting career in cinema.  But the range of knowledge and craft he acquired instead is nothing short of amazing.

    None of the three last feature films he made and on which Vitali was his right-hand man is among Kubrick’s best.  You wonder if Vitali regrets he was too late to work on Dr Strangelove, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange rather than The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut – until, that is, you discover how much he did away from the immediate film shoot, how much he has worked on the continuing life of all the earlier films.  Kubrick invariably tracked whatever prints of his work were about to be shown, wherever they were to be shown; Vitali took on responsibility for quality control of the visuals, as well as for dubbings and translations.  He liaised between Kubrick and Warner Bros top brass.  He was a casting director, a dialogue coach, a record-keeper, a chauffeur and a gofer.  Obeying orders in the course of their twenty-odd years together reached far into the domestic realm.  On the Kubrick estate (Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire), Vitali vacuumed dog hairs off furniture, cleaned the billiard room, constructed an enclosure in which the great man’s cats would be safe and, when one of them was sick, set up CCTV throughout the mansion to monitor the animal.   When Kubrick cast him as Red Cloak in Eyes Wide Shut, Vitali was expected, even while in costume, to continue with other on-set duties.  He was always on call.  In his case, the hyperbolic ‘working literally 24/7’ was very nearly true.

    Needless to say, his sense of vocation came at considerable cost to Vitali’s family life and personal health.  There’s no mention in Filmworker of Vitali’s marriages[2] (or, by the way, of Christiane Kubrick) but there are interviews with his adult children – all three of whom are in no doubt (and show little resentment) that Kubrick always came first.   Vitali is the film’s main talking head and he’s compelling as a camera subject, as well as to listen to.  Grizzled and bandana-ed, he has the look of an emaciated pirate though he’s clearly in better shape now than when, as he recalls, his weight dropped to sixty-five pounds.  His face and form show the wear and tear of decades of going way beyond the call of duty:  now approaching seventy, Vitali looks older, even if blue eyes and his grin still speak undiminished enthusiasm for the cause.  There are brief contributions from, as well as his children, his three siblings, recalling their own difficult father, who died when Leon was eight.  (He memorably describes the morning of his father’s death.)  While this demanding, volatile paterfamilias foreshadows the arrival in Vitali’s adult existence of another extraordinary father figure, it’s a more down-to-earth detail of his childhood that you feel best equipped him for life with Kubrick.  His father was a teacher; at the school where he worked, the whole family helped with being caretakers.

    Although the sections on the making of Barry Lyndon and the later films yield entertaining and/or instructive anecdotes from the likes of Ryan O’Neal, R Lee Ermey, Matthew Modine and Tim Colceri, Zierra dwells on these a little too long.  There’s plenty too of Stellan Skarsgård, introduced as having ‘worked with Leon on Hamlet’.  (This must be the 1985 Swedish TV version of the play, in which Skarsgård played the lead and for which Vitali has a writing credit – his sole writing credit – on IMDB.)  For the most part, the contributions of studio executives and technical experts are more telling than those of the actors interviewed although there’s a point at which Filmworker, through the successive descriptions of Vitali’s abilities and self-sacrifice, has become unnecessarily repetitive.  Zierra’s narrative regains momentum thanks to what Vitali has done, and how shabbily he seems to have been treated, especially by Warner Bros, since Kubrick’s death in 1999.  It’s all too easy to believe that much of the flak that’s come Vitali’s way amounts to, as one of Zierra’s contributors claims, to people settling scores with Kubrick.   The closing legends report that, since Filmworker was shot, Vitali has been working as a consultant to the Kubrick family on film restorations and is in the process of compiling a comprehensive Kubrick archive.    It’s painfully clear that he does it all for love but you hope he’s getting paid properly.  The mood of the film, though often sad, is lifted by its subject’s clear-sighted good humour, as well as by Zierra’s use of clips from Terror of Frankenstein to illustrate Vitali’s perilous struggle to survive and of A C Yoffe’s original artwork, in the form of cartoon representations of the same.

    Richard Brody’s concluding judgment in the New Yorker is that Filmworker ‘amounts to yet another rite of devotion in the ongoing cult of Kubrick – a cult that worked its power not just on Vitali but on all of modern cinema’.  This is a good example of a reviewer’s breadth of knowledge blinding him to the particular character of a film.  Brody sees any piece of cinema primarily as self-expression on the part of its director.  He’ll know that Tony Zierra, after meeting Vitali, decided to develop Filmworker ahead of another Kubrick project he was already working on[3] – Brody no doubt has Zierra pegged as a ‘cult’ member.  It’s true that it suits a Kubrick enthusiast to accept without demur Vitali’s estimation of his boss as the greatest filmmaker of the twentieth century.  But few coming to it with relatively limited knowledge of the subject (and a reasonably open mind) are likely to see Filmworker as eulogising Kubrick.  The documentary portrays him as a charismatic monomaniac and, in his treatment of Vitali (among others in his crews), an only intermittently benign dictator, whose demands could be almost comically unreasonable.  Richard Brody fails to see that Filmworker is about the servant, not the master, and expresses Tony Zierra’s fascination with Leon Vitali, for all that Zierra may revere Kubrick.  It would have been not only distracting but also insulting to Vitali if Zierra had used his devotion as a springboard for deconstructing Kubrick or questioning the latter’s genius reputation.

    ‘Filmworker’ is what Vitali says he’s always entered as his occupation in international travel documents.   In the closing stages, Zierra presents him increasingly as a representative par excellence of cinema’s legion unsung heroes.  This culminates in closing credits that include a list of thanks, ending with ‘FILMWORKERS’:  no other recipients of Zierra’s gratitude get the block capitals.  You accept the basic unsung heroes line without believing that Vitali is anything other than exceptional.  Beverly Wood, a senior technical executive with Deluxe, recalls an AMPAS meeting that discussed ‘who they should have an oral history with, and I said I don’t understand why you guys haven’t done an oral history on Leon Vitali’.  Academy members are presumably seeing Filmworker.  They should now go further, show some imagination and give him an honorary Oscar.

    31 May 2018

    [1]  So my particular criticism of Vitali’s performance in Barry Lyndon may be wide of the mark …

    [2]  Vitali met his first wife Kersti Gustafsson when she was working as costume designer on Terror of Frankenstein.  The marriage ended in divorce, as did Vitali’s second marriage, to Sharon Messer.

    [3]  This is SK13, a documentary about the making of Eyes Wide Shut (the title explained by this being Kubrick’s thirteenth feature), is due for release in the US in August this year.

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