Film review

  • Touch of Evil

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Orson Welles (1958)

    Orson Welles’s film maudit is among the ‘Big Screen Classics’ in the current programme at the just re-opened BFI.  They’re showing the 1998 version, re-edited by Walter Murch in an attempt to fulfil the furious demands Welles made in the fifty-eight-page memo that he fired off to Universal in December 1957 after seeing what the studio had done to the film he’d shot.  This crime drama (with a screenplay by Welles based on the 1956 Whit Masterson novel Badge of Evil) is most famous, rightly or wrongly, for its opening three-minute tracking shot and its closing summary of the central character, the unscrupulous police chief Hank Quinlan (Welles), by brothel-keeper-cum-fortune-teller Tanya (Marlene Dietrich):  ‘He was some kind of man … what does it matter what you say about people?’  In the course of the intervening action, there are plenty more remarkable things.

    Made in black and white, Touch of Evil is widely regarded as Hollywood’s last great noir.  To this inexpert eye, it certainly looks like the last word in the expressionistic visuals and sense of moral rot associated with the genre.  The cinematographer, Russell Metty, creates some extraordinarily long dark shadows.  Quinlan finally sinks to his death in wastewater strewn with floating garbage.  That bravura opening shot – during which a bomb is planted in the boot of a car that crosses the US-Mexican border before getting blown to pieces – is a taste of things to come.  The editing (Welles originally cut the film with Virgil Vogel and Aaron Stell, though Walter Murch clearly must take a lion’s share of the credit) imparts real tension – a tension reinforced by the urgent rhythm of repeated passages of overlapping dialogue, expertly directed.  Henry Mancini’s music helps too.

    About halfway through the tracking shot at the start, two of the three main characters – Mexican Ramon Miguel ‘Mike’ Vargas (Charlton Heston) and his American wife Susie (Janet Leigh) – appear on the scene.  Vargas is a detective, well known locally for bringing drug dealers to justice on the Mexican side of the border.  When the car bomb goes off, he and Susie are on their honeymoon, which is instantly and majorly interrupted.  Charlton Heston, at this distance in time, is a double problem.  His Hispanising hair dye and make-up seem objectionable now, along with the implication that a Mexican can be heroic only if he’s a white man underneath.  (This racist aspect of the film is all the more unfortunate – and ironic – when Quinlan’s racism is part of what makes him a villain.)  In addition, Heston’s strenuous nobility is something of a drag on proceedings.  Janet Leigh is better, even if what happens after Susie, supposedly for her own safety, checks into a remote motel, inevitably evokes Leigh’s character’s fate in a similar refuge a couple of years later.  She eventually gets out of this one alive but Dennis Weaver’s elaborately creepy turn as the motel’s night manager only underlines the Psycho connection.

    The casting is nothing if not eclectic.  Reassuring faces familiar from other Welles pictures (Ray Collins, Joseph Cotten) share the screen with a weird and wonderful collection of eccentrics (Akim Tamiroff, Mercedes McCambridge et al) and guest stars (Zsa Zsa Gabor, along with Dietrich).  Joseph Calleia is good as Quinlan’s long-standing sidekick, Pete Menzies.  It may not be the most convincing moment of the story when the scales fall from Menzies’s eyes to expose his boss for the career evidence-planter that he is.  It does, though, make for an exciting climax, as Vargas fits Menzies with a wire and tracks him and Quinlan with a tape-recorder around the film’s electrifyingly depraved locale (described by Peter Wollen, in a Sight & Sound piece used as the BFI programme note, as ‘a world littered with psychopathic youth gangs, sleazy motel rooms, garish strip-joints, seedy border posts, peeling police cells, filthy canals and cheap bars’).

    Hank Quinlan is one of Orson Welles’s most memorable incarnations, the actor’s prodigious poundage seeming to express his character’s massive corruption.  There’s still a keen brain inside the dead weight of flesh, though, as Welles’s eyes make clear, whether Quinlan is working out his next malign move or reacting fearfully, when he asks Tanya to tell his future with her tarot pack, to her reply that he has no future.  (This terse pronouncement – she doesn’t even need to look at the cards – has a lot more charge than her concluding ‘some kind of man’ tribute.)   Welles’s line readings are often grimly funny.  There are positive as well as negative reasons why the main man in Touch of Evil isn’t the hero.

    18 May 2021

  • My Favorite Year

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Benjamin (1982)

    This was the third time I’d seen My Favorite Year, the viewings coming at roughly twenty-year intervals since the film’s original release.  Though it’s no great shakes in other ways, Richard Benjamin’s first feature as director boasts a strongly appealing setting and a splendid star turn from Peter O’Toole.  The titular year is 1954; the person whose favourite year it is, is Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker), a junior writer on ‘Comedy Cavalcade’, a hit weekly NBC show, built around Stan ‘King’ Kaiser (Joseph Bologna).  The programme and its leading man are based on Your Show of Shows, in which Sid Caesar starred.   The character of Benjy is supposedly inspired by Mel Brooks (executive producer on My Favorite Year) and Woody Allen, both members of the team on which Caesar, who never wrote himself, depended.  King Kaiser’s guest star for the week in which the film’s action takes place is Alan Swann (O’Toole), an aging, alcoholic, womanising Hollywood swashbuckler, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn.

    Alan Swann’s dipso reputation precedes him and he quickly confirms it, turning up at the studios dead drunk for the first rehearsal.  King wants to cancel the booking; Benjy, a fervent Swann fan, pleads for mercy; King relents, on condition that Benjy takes responsibility for keeping Swann sober in the days ahead, until the show goes out live in its primetime Saturday evening slot.  The ensuing narrative majors on the near-impossibility of Benjy’s assignment.  There are subplots concerning Benjy’s mostly clumsy attempts to woo KC Downing (Jessica Harper), assistant to the show’s producer (Adolph Green), and the efforts of gangster Karl Rojeck (Cameron Mitchell), equally cack-handed though rather more menacing, to ‘persuade’ King to stop parodying him.  The ‘Comedy Cavalcade’ in question will feature two headline sketches for King – the latest ‘Boss Hijack’ lampoon and a musketeer number with Swann that sends up his heroic big-screen persona.

    The screenplay, by Norman Steinberg and Dennis Palumbo, has plenty of good lines but seems itself conceived on TV sketch show lines:  if something doesn’t work, at least it’s not for long.  Benjy’s exchanges with KC drag because he’s not much more than annoying in them, though Mark Linn-Baker is elsewhere likeable and amusing.  The after-hours takeaway they share in the office breaks the ice (‘Jews know two things’, he tells her, ‘suffering and where to find great Chinese food’).  Steinberg and Palumbo’s script doesn’t know what to do next with the uneasy romance so it’s promptly dropped – without even a suggestion that Benjy’s hero worship of Swann eclipses his feelings for KC.  In contrast, his and Swann’s dinner at Benjy’s mother’s home in Brooklyn is an almost complete success – partly because it’s self-contained.

    Richard Benjamin’s direction is also at its best in this episode.  Aside from Benjy and the guest of honour, the other people at the dinner table are broadly drawn, to put it mildly:  Benjy’s immoderately flirtatious mother (Lainie Kazan), who rejoices in the name of Belle Steinberg Carroca; her current husband Rookie (Ramon Sison), a Filipino ex-boxer, who cooks a meatloaf with a secret ingredient (parrot); Benjy’s autograph-hungry Uncle Morty (Lou Jacobi); Morty’s wife Sadie (Annette Robyns), who tries to upstage Belle by wearing a wedding dress (‘I only wore it once before’).  Benjamin strikes a satisfying balance here:  he lets the enthusiastic performers make the most of their cartoonish characters but also gets a lovely variation of pace into proceedings.  The element that really lifts, and integrates, the scene is Alan Swann’s complaisant understanding of what’s expected of him in this company.  He returns Belle’s flagrancy with courtly good humour.  He doesn’t lose his temper when Morty grills him about ‘that paternity rap a couple of years ago’.

    Most of the TV studio sequences, though enjoyable enough, aren’t handled so well.  The pressure-cooker atmosphere of the writers’ room derives almost exclusively from the senior scriptwriter, Sy Benson.  Bill Macy expertly captures Sy’s mixture of exasperation with King’s demands and kneejerk compliance with them but it seems to exist in a vacuum; as a result, the hectic anxiety feels overdone.  Joseph Bologna plays the volatile, insecure King very deliberately.  You can almost see him working out how to be funny; the result, needless to say, is that he rarely is.  Bologna’s acting tends to slow things down, not least because Benjamin showcases it.  The other members of the writing team – Alice (Anne DeSalvo) and Herb (Basil Hoffman) – each have just the one characteristic:  Alice speaks in an emphatic monotone, Herb not at all, except to whisper to Alice.

    Herb does, finally, utter one audible line, and it pays off.  So too, more importantly, does the climactic transmission of ‘Comedy Cavalcade’, to a studio audience as well as millions of TV viewers.  Wearing a joke mobster’s suit with mile-wide shoulders, King panics just beforehand that he should be wearing the musketeer outfit first.  (This happens every week, according to the chain-smoking wardrobe lady (Selma Diamond).)   He’s actually in the right costume, though it turns out not to matter when the two big sketches collide.  Rojeck’s henchmen arrive literally on the scene – the set for the TV show – to do King over.  He slugs it out with them – two against one, until Swann rediscovers his inner swashbuckler.  From high in the studio theatre, he swings down on a rope to join forces with King on stage, and the baddies are vanquished.  The chaotic bravura goes down a storm with the audience.  Alan Swann proves to be the hero Benjy has never stopped wanting him to be.

    Who coined the adage ‘Dying is easy, comedy is hard’ remains a matter of dispute but it’s often attributed to Edmund Gwenn, in a deathbed conversation with the director George Seaton.  Alan Swann, quoting it to Benjy, credits a much earlier Edmund – Kean.  Meryl Streep also quoted the line, with reference to My Favorite Year, when she presented Peter O’Toole with his honorary Oscar in 2003.  Perhaps the hardest thing about comedy is making it look easy but that’s what O’Toole does in this film.  Swann’s sentimental backstory, around the teenage daughter he’s estranged from, is standard issue.  The pandemonium of the finale kicks off with his panicked, last-minute discovery that the show isn’t recorded and he has to perform to a studio audience – hard to believe, when Swann has repeatedly proved he’s more with it than you thought.  (Seemingly unconscious while Benjy pleads with King not to dump him, Swann hears all.  However blotto he is, he arrives for rehearsals on time.)   Thanks to O’Toole, these shortcomings barely matter.  Whether he’s doing verbal or daringly physical comedy, it’s inventive and seems effortless – from Swann’s first appearance, coming to in bed on the morning-after-the-latest-night-before, all the way through to his accidental triumph on Saturday night live television.

    9 May 2021

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