Old Yorker

  • Citizens Band

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Demme (1977)

    A commercial flop on its release in 1977, this early Jonathan Demme film was re-released in an edited version as Handle with Care but the original title is more apt – and, for much of the movie, ironically apt.  The screenplay by Paul Brickman focuses on the dogged attempts of the hero, Blaine (Paul Le Mat), to operate a voluntary rescue service through CB radio – to use it, in other words, to be a good citizen of the small Nebraska town where he lives.  The weird and wonderful jumble of personae who bump into each other over the airwaves are mostly there to indulge their particular fantasies – they hardly communicate with each other in real life.   As Blaine tries to root out these irresponsible abusers of citizens band radio, you realise it’s a fine way of publicising a private obsession while keeping yourself to yourself.  But then Blaine (aka Spider: most of the characters are known by their CB handle) discovers that he does know the people behind some of the anonymous voices (they’re people very close to him).  In the joky, celebratory finale of Citizens Band, his dream is realised.  The motley CB crew becomes a community – they all literally come to the rescue of Papa Thermodyne, who is Blaine’s absconded father (Roberts Blossom).  This is a good-natured, relaxed movie that’s also very skilful – a piece of comic art-that-conceals-art.

    The casting is inspired:  few of the actors were big names when the film was made (and few are now) but they’re all easy, natural performers with a strong core of humour and humanity.  They register many different moods without hitting any false notes.  As Harry (Chrome Angel), an interstate trucker with two wives and a girlfriend, Charles Napier is obliviously, almost chivalrously amoral:  he’s sorry if the members of his harem get worked up about his generous amorous arrangements but he calmly accepts that’s just the way that high-strung women are.  As the two wives (Portland Angel and Dallas Angel respectively), Marcia Rodd and Ann Wedgeworth are a great chalk-and-cheese double act but both are funny and touching.  Rodd’s edgy, wisecracking deadpan is beautifully contrasted with the breathy, bubbly Wedgworth (who went on to play, in a more subtly expressive style, Patsy Cline’s mother in Sweet Dreams).  Alix Elias is scarcely less good as Harry’s plumply obliging bit-on-the-side Debbie, dispensing sex and hot drinks to the world from her mobile home.  (She advertises as Hot Coffee over CB, in a cooing voice which is an irresistible – but also sounds to be an unintentional – come-on.)  Interpreting these light, sunny types, the actors never lapse into caricature:  a native eccentricity enables them to play straight and still be amusing.  The playing of the depressed characters is similarly balanced.  As the teacher Dean (Blood), Blaine’s understandably envious brother, Bruce McGill is so extremely unappealing that he wins you over.  In the role of their schizophrenic father (who snaps out of his boozy self-pity once he joins CB), Roberts Blossom not only has crack comedy timing but also suggests the fears of an old, dislocated man.  The individuality of Candy Clark, as the brothers’ girlfriend Electra, is rather more studied but she’s a striking quiet presence.  At the centre of the picture, Paul Le Mat – skinnier here than he was in American Graffiti (1973) or would be in Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980) – epitomises the charms of the cast:  he holds the story together with his unpredictable laughter, his shy tenacity and his magnetic friendliness.

    Citizens Band takes a collection of oddballs and makes them vividly, almost representatively human – even though it seems to falsify Jonathan Demme’s unpretentious approach to describe his achievement in those terms.  He chooses original, incidental details to build up a picture of the characters’ setting.  Once it’s over, the film doesn’t stay with you very strongly.  Its humour is fragile, especially when quoted out of context:  it’s hard to explain why, for example, the sequence in which Dean asks his PE class to line up and let him hear the elastic in their shorts is funny.  But while you’re watching, the director and his actors build up a great deal of goodwill without straining to be zany.  In the last twenty minutes, when Demme starts tying up the slender threads of the plot, the film loses little of its meandering charm and nothing of the strength of its characters.  They’re so impregnably alive that, in the last scene, it’s as if they’re playing along with the requirements of the medium that is presenting them – laughing at the absurd idea that their existence is coming to an end as a result of the technicality of the film’s doing so.  The photography is by Jordan Cronenweth and the music by Bill Conti.

    [1990s]

  • Carnival of Souls

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Herk Harvey (1962)

    When a car carrying three young women plunges from a bridge into a deep river the locals are surprised to see one of the passengers emerge apparently unscathed.  (The other two girls and the car sink into the sandy riverbed.)  A few days later, the wan, withdrawn survivor, whose name is Mary Henry, drives to Utah to take up a new job there (she’s a professional church organist, although not religious).  It’s en route that she sees for the first time in her car window the face of a man, even paler than her own, who flashes glittering eyes and a morbidly inviting grin at her.  After a while, Mary can’t get the man out of her sight, whether she’s playing the organ or alone in her room.  She feels increasingly drawn – and she increasingly relates the deathly man – to a deserted carnival on the local seashore.  As if this wasn’t enough, Mary also has to contend with spells during which she becomes invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world, and with the nervously lubricious attentions of the man who’s her fellow-roomer in a lodging house.   The combination of these two difficulties presents Mary with a dilemma:  although she wants to be alone (to a seemingly pathological degree), she also becomes more and more terrified of solitude.  For most of Carnival of Souls, the viewer wonders whether Mary’s weird experiences are going to yield a supernatural explanation or if the director, Herk Harvey, is using the horror movie form to provide a comically macabre illustration of the perils of being unsociable.  Because it sustains an unaccountably witty tone so well, Carnival of Souls is disappointing only when Harvey decides to resolve this uncertainty – but perhaps this emotional letdown is unavoidable.

    This remarkable black-and-white film, co-written by Harvey and John Clifford, was made for $18,000[1].   The low budget is integral not only to the design and style of the picture but also to its distinctive scariness.  Economic as well as artistic considerations dictate that the locations used by Harvey (including the large department store in the Utah town where much of the story is set) are bleakly, eerily under-populated.  Even if it’s a requirement of the genre that a lodging house shouldn’t have many guests, there are sound financial reasons for Harvey’s keeping the household down to three, including the landlady.  In addition, the actors in smaller roles are so lacking in conventional technique that they’re unpredictable:  we don’t know what they’ll do next because sometimes they don’t seem to know either.  Flatly unconvincing one moment, they are startlingly believable the next, before reverting just as quickly to uninflected woodenness:  the effect is highly disorienting.  Candace Hilligloss in the main part is more skilful but her fretful, dissociated presence makes the closed-off Mary Henry a very peculiar leading lady.  Hilligloss sometimes evokes Audrey Hepburn mannerisms and speech rhythms, sometimes Rosanna Arquette’s fey disaffection, but she hardly seems to exist on the screen in her own right.  (She’s strikingly well cast.)  The silent emptiness of Mary and of her surroundings means there’s no normal heroine or normal world for the audience to identify with – so we can’t be moved by Mary’s plight or by a loss of reassuring normality.  Yet even without any such empathy, we share her sense of being trapped and powerless.  Indeed, Mary’s weightless, zombie anonymity heightens the viewer’s feelings of alienated claustrophobia.

    Herk Harvey himself is the increasingly ubiquitous phantom.  Sidney Berger is Mary’s worrying neighbour in the lodging house.  Frances Feist is the landlady.  Art Ellison is Mary’s boss, the local minister.  The organ music is another illustration of a horror cliché transformed by the director’s imagination and his thrifty determination to make everything count.  This isn’t just atmospheric decoration:  the heavy grandeur of the organ music is expressively incongruous with the physical and spiritual lack of substance of the girl playing it.  The moment when Mary’s state of mind causes a slithering transition in the music from church into fairground mode is an alarming highlight.

    [1990s]

    [1] Information about its availability in the years following its original release and its preservation can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Souls#Preservation_and_archival_status.

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