Alan J. Pakula | All the President’s Men / 1976

the thriller you’ve already read

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Goldman (screenplay, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward), Alan J. Pakula (director) All the President’s Men / 1976

 

For Christmas this year (2015) I bought a DVD of a movie Howard and I have seen numerous times, Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men. Howard presumed that we already owned it, lost among our rather large library of movies, for we both think of it as one of our favorites.

     Seeing it again yesterday, I felt it was nearly as fresh as the first time we saw it, although I am sure it seemed more immediate in 1976, since we had lived in Washington, DC during the very years of the events portrayed.

     Although after living in Los Angeles for many years, I have grown quite accustomed to seeing familiar building and sites in the movies we attend, at the time of All the President’s Men it was somewhat breathtaking to see so many of the film’s locations that were so very familiar to us. We knew the apartment building, wherein the film’s Bob Woodward lives; I’d several times visited the news room of the Washington Post on my way to see book editor William McPherson; and I’d spent long hours in the Library of Congress; we’d attending so many theater and concert events in the behemoth Kennedy Center; we had visited friends staying at the Watergate Hotel. Pakula uses dozens of noted governmental buildings that anyone who has even visited our nation’s capital city immediately recognizes. So the film put me, as well as a great many other viewers, on familiar ground.

     And yet, the story it told of high government intrigue and a series of mysteriously labyrinthine acts of deceit and conspiracy seemed to come from some other world, as if we were being told an unbelievable story about my own family and friends. And it was this sense of displacement, the simultaneous feeling of intimacy and strangeness about what the news reporters were telling us that created for me—and I am sure for many others who knew this city so well—a sense of awed horror, as if it had been hinted that my uncles and aunts had been involved in some vast conspiratorial criminal act that was threatening the lives of the entire family if we dared to tell anything we had known about.

     Washington is a small city, and if you have lived there for any amount of time (Howard and I lived there for 16 long years) when involved in any governmental role (the Hirschhorn Museum where Howard worked was part of The Smithsonian conglomerate) you felt like you were, unintentionally a member of the administration, no matter how much you disliked the officials currently in charge.

     We were not supporters of President Nixon,* and certainly did not ever think of him as a friendly uncle; indeed I wanted him, as I believe the film intends, to get caught—just as we know from the outset of this mystery-thriller he will be.

     In fact, there is very little mystery about the events the film portrays. I had read The Washington Post daily during the events the film covers, sharing the gradual revelations that All the President’s Men reveals to us. Yet every time I see this film I grown tense, am impatient with Pakula’s steady, slow pace as the two young reporters, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) work to find a chink in the wall of secrecy that greets their every question.

     The plot sends them into the vast reading room of the Library of Congress as they flip through book requests to no avail; Bernstein flies to Miami, only to cool his heels in a waiting room ruled by the icy secretary (Polly Holliday); and time and again, doors are slammed in their faces. Even “Deep Throat” (Hal Holbrook) isn’t telling, as he merely confirms or metaphorically steers Woodward down a different road from one he is traveling: “Follow the money trail.”

     Through much of this “thriller” absolutely nothing happens. Is it any wonder that Bernstein is ready to jump to easy conclusions? I mean, we know they are right in their suspicions. In short, much of the tension of this film develops is out of a sense of frustration. And I’ve noted each time I watch it that I begin to shiver—not just out of disgust that I feel about the nation’s leaders and their institutions, but simply in anticipation. I can hardly wait for the truth to be fully revealed.

     Every time they fine one clue, the world-be heroes must seek out yet another, a third. Or they discover the questions they’ve been asking were not expressed simply enough. Almost as a joke, William Goldman’s excellent script sends them suddenly into a home where a woman who, appreciative of their writing, is completely read to talk—only to reveal a few moments later that she is an employee in the department store Garfinkel’s, and not the government worker they sought.

   Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards, Jr.) at time stands almost as a roadblock, at other times, amazingly encouraging his hungry reporters to keep searching, while permitting them to move ahead with the story that, if they’d gotten it wrong, might put the entire journalistic world and the First Amendment into jeopardy. Somewhat like an overprotective father, he pushes and pulls the entity he calls “Woodstein” into a pattern that reiterates the rock rhythm of their reportage: on step forward and two steps back.

     Yet today’s newscasters are far less courageous. When Woodward and Bernstein finally get the goods on Nixon’s administration, not matter what the viewer’s political values, there is such great relief that the truth has finally been outed that he has little choice but to cheer or break out in tears for the failure of American governance.

     The subject of this film, accordingly, is not at all what it pretends to be: who was behind the Watergate break-in to the offices of the National Democratic Party. Rather, the real object of this film’s intense investigation is not so much political as it is a search for truth, for a reality that within those long governmental halls seems seldom to exist.

    

*If Nixon was a paranoic monster—and he was—at least he pretended to play by the rules, unlike our current President who makes clear that even the US Constitution not apply to him. What Nixon did was game playing in comparison with the totally corrupt and mad autocrat in that position today. The sad thing is that the very newspaper which revealed Nixon’s corruption has now bowed down to Trump’s dictates, destroying any possibility of fair and open reportage.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015).

 

Alexander Hall | Here Comes Mr. Jordan / 1941

the corpse hunters

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Buchman and Seton I. Miller (screenplay, based on the stage play by Harry Segall), Alexander Hall (director) Here Comes Mr. Jordan / 1941

 

Alexander Hall’s 1941 film, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, begins with one of the oddest plot contrivances of all time: the film’s hero, boxer Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) dies in the crash of a small plane he is flying. Told he is dead by angelic Messenger 7013 (Edward Everett Horton), Joe refuses to believe him, particularly since he still has his lucky saxophone in hand, demanding to be taken to the man in charge, which happens to be Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), an oddly dressed manager of the removal area of souls to heaven, a space that appears to be a normal 1940s airliner.

     When Joe refuses to board, Jordan checks things out, only to discover that the Messenger has intruded, removing Joe’s soul before his actual death, discovering that in the book of fate Joe is evidently scheduled to live 50 years further into time. What to do?

     Return him to his body, of course, and put him back into it. Not so quick! When the small hunting party returns to the site of the crash they find that the body has already been removed and, soon after, we discover, cremated by Joe’s boxing manager, “Pop” Corkle (James Gleason). How Corkle has already discovered the news of Joe’s accident and whisked his body away so quickly is never explained. But that somewhat absurd plot wrinkle requires that Joe, the Messenger, and Jordan immediately go on the search for a new body that might fit Joe’s soul.

     There is not only something fairly ghoulish about their search, but in seeking a male body out in such good shape as Joe has kept his—Joe refuses hundreds of corpses as not being appropriate to his body type—the trio is also performing, whether you want to admit it or not, a kind game of speed gay-dating in the manner of Rock Hudson’s later cinematic attempt in Send Me No Flowers (1964), when he struggles to find the perfect man to become his wife’s husband after his imminent death. No one is quite good enough to fit the man of Joe’s dreams, in this case himself. This is a lost Narcissus in search of his own face.

      They finally show up at the doorstep of the wealthy, crooked banker and investor, Bruce Farnsworth, about to be drowned in his bathtub by his wife Julia (Rita Johnson) and Farnsworth’s secretary Tony Abbott (John Emery), an evil couple about to kill off their husband and employer in order to reward them one another in marriage and to receive his substantial wealth.

      These supposedly heavenly messengers slip Joe into his body, startling the two would-be murderers and saving the day for Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes) who now shows up to demand that Farnsworth return the money he has swindled from her innocent father.

      By this time the plot is so luridly whacky that the fantastical tale has surely caught our attention if nothing else. In Hall’s version, even if the murderers are astonished, they fade, nonetheless, in the background (unlike, the increasingly delicious terrors experienced by the duo, Charles Grodin and Dyan Cannon, in Warren Beatty’s and Buck Henry’s 1978 remake Heaven Can Wait) as Joe, now Farnsworth quickly moves forward, behind the scenes righting all the evils Farnsworth has committed and attending carefully to his new physique. The latter requires him to bring back his trainer and the necessity of proving to him who he “really” is by blowing a few sour notes upon his sex, an instrument he loves but cannot really properly play.

     As I mention above, in the remake the giddy acting of the guilty couple and their over-the-top hysterics, help to detract from the body-hunting plot. But in Hall’s version we hardly get a change to blink before Joe is told he’s going to have to change bodies again since the wife and secretary are about to make another go-round in Farnsworth’s murder, which, after all, Jordan reminds us, was destined in the first place!

     Joe just has time to look into Bette Logan’s eyes and warn her that she should remember his deep gaze just in case she might later run into a boxer who doesn’t look like he does now.

     Off he flies to be refitted into another new corpse, that of his boxer friend, Murdock, who has just been shot in the middle of a match by crooked gamblers who had demanded he throw the fight. All I can say, is that it’s always nicer to get inside the body of a good friend instead of some distant stranger.

     Evidently, Murdock’s death, quite inexplicably, was not destined; for Joe, now in Murdock’s body, slowly rises and wins the match, firing Murdock’s equally crooked trainer, and taking on, once more, McCorkle, who having spotted Joe’s golden saxophone at ringside, has already hurried off to the site of the match. McCorkle and Joe are the real married couple in this movie, much like Hudson and his neighbor played by Tony Randall in Send Me No Flowers.

    This time, Joe’s memory is wiped clean by the inconsistent Mr. Jordan, and, accordingly, he doesn’t recognize Bette Logan, who also mysteriously shows up in the dark halls of the boxing locker rooms. But it doesn’t matter, since both Joe, now Murdock, and Bette seem to recognize something in each other’s eyes (surely a brief memory that they’re supposed to be acting in a heterosexual comedy) and toss out the necessary banal metaphors of surrounding the notion of vaguely remembering having seen someone before—no we have not yet entered the sublime halls of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad—deciding to discuss it over dinner. At least Joe has a boxer’s body which he can now inhabit for the next 49 years or so! And will probably have dozens of kids with Bette. Jordan sends him away with the salutatory, “Goodbye, Champ!” No voyage to the next French garrison for them!

      Montgomery suffers the trials and tribulations of reincarnation with bland impatience, whole the producer’s original choice for the lead actor, Cary Grant, might have played it with a far better and more appropriate series of flummoxed comic gestures; and surely we might have found the shifting of bodies, given Grant’s graceful exterior, a far great curse. Certainly the selection of bodies might have played out quite differently in the hands of a gay man.

      But in the end, none of this truly matters since everything has been put into Rains’, Hortons’, and Gleasons’ affable and capable hands. Given Rains’ suave elocutions and friendly, if slightly ironic smiles, Horton’s blundering comic confusions, and Gleason’s grumpy loyalty to his friend, we know that no matter where this corpse-robbing voyage will take us, we’ll have some fun along the way before being brought safely home into normative heterosexual reality.

     Yet given the abuse of all those dead bodies along the way, we might want to reconsider joining the Neptune Society (which assures its members of prepaid cremations) to be sure our bodies are not used, as Mr. Jordan describes them, simply as “outer cloaks”—unless you really do want to get into another friend’s skin. But then, beware of Dr. Frankenstein.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2015; revised April 6, 2026

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015) and My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).

    

Sam Scott Schiavo | Un chant d'amour (nouveau) / 2012

who will buy?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Scott Schiavo (director) Un chant d'amour (nouveau) / 2012 [5 minutes]

 

Described as an homage to Jean Genet’s 1950 film A Song of Love, Un chant d'amour (nouveau) is the kind of movie that results from dealing only vaguely with the images of a previous film without really comprehending or even investigating its true message. Director Sam Scott Schiavo, born in Philadelphia, but who has lived for much of his adult life in Europe, is a photographer who hasn’t a clue what Genet is attempting to convey in his 1950 movie.

     Schiavo turns what in Genet’s film is the only method of expressing desire and communication, sharing cigarette smoke through a tiny hole (itself a kind of sexual emblem) into what might basically be an advertisement for a new shaving lotion, the central characters (Patrick Hollensteiner and Patrick Melech) with their slightly unshaven cheeks sharing in this version a smoking session through open bars. Except for getting a drag off each other, these boys seem far more interested in stroking themselves than in touching one another, although in this case all they have to do is reach out.

     In Genet’s prison world, sight and touch were forbidden, all there was were smoke and mirrors—the imagination of what might exist on the other side of the wall. Here, it’s just pretty boys with slightly besmudged T-shirts taking a cigarette break. The desire here is truly Narcissian, without much left over in their empty faces except the pout of further expectations.

  Don’t be fooled; this film has nothing to do with Genet and everything to do with selling a product, whatever that product turns out to be: the boys themselves or the pictures of their pouting, puffing cigarette-holding lips. In either case, I’m not buying.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).