Andrew Haigh | All of Us Strangers / 2023

ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Haigh (screenwriter, based on Strangers by Taichi Yamada, and director) All of Us Strangers / 2023

 

I loved Andrew Haigh’s first gay film, Weekend of 2011 and very much appreciated his next two movies, 45 Years (2015) and Lean on Pete (2017), neither of which were LBGBQ oriented; so I very much looked forward to seeing his 2023 movie, All of Us Strangers, which along with his TV series Looking, brought him back to gay themes.

     In this new film, two men alone seem to inhabited the towers of a new London high rise, a tower block—not so very different from the isolated world in which the hero of Weekend lived. But here, instead of regular tenants or even friends who might possibly surround him, the central figure, Adam (Andrew Scott) has no one to console him in his more than morose condition. He meets, quite by accident, the only other renter in the empty towers, Harry (Paul Mescal) who recognizes Adam as a possible sexual friend who approaches him, a bottle of tequila in hand, to suggest they might get together, if for no other reason than to escape the utter emptiness of the new apartment buildings and, metaphorically, of course, the emptiness of both of their lives.

 

    Adam, although clearly interested, basically shuts him out, preferring instead, at this strange juncture of his life—and it is clear is a juncture, a long-awaited moment in which he has suddenly discovered himself—wherein in this utter loneliness he is ready to confront his childhood and his painful past.

      Although viewers might immediately recognize Adam is making a big mistake, the movie moves on to focus on this handsome young man’s attempt—why at this moment is never explained—to delve into his deep childhood trauma which emanates from the fact that at twelve years of age he experienced the death of both of his parents in a car accident. His father died immediately. After his mother suffered a long dying, the child Adam was at the time was sent off to live with his aunt, not evidently a totally pleasant experience.

     Throughout most of this film, Adam imaginatively, so we presume, revisits his parents, now almost their own age, returning to a world of the 1970s and 1980s to his truly loving young folks who, at first, readily greet him back into their lives, happy to have him return and explain what has happened in since their deaths—perhaps to even explain their own deaths and possible suffering of which they have no knowledge.

       The parents, amazingly, are a lovely 1970s couple, open to his emotional needs, and as time progresses even able to assimilate his announcement of his gay sexuality, his mother primarily worried about the loneliness it might result in, Adam assuring her things have changed. His father basically able to accept it even apologizes for any bullying his son must have suffered through his friends and his own attitudes.

        What Adam, in his attempt to explain how things have changed, doesn’t reveal is that he is indeed very lonely. He has not assimilated fully to the contemporary gay world available to him, and he is totally caught up with a past that could never have been.

        The movie, meanwhile, proceeds as if he is living in the contemporary world, as he finally meets up with Harry, joining him at a gay bar where they share drugs before joining one another in bed and developing a relationship. That relationship, however, seems rather one-sided, with Harry providing the friendship while Adam continues in his visits of his childhood home where his parents still reside (actually the childhood home of director Haigh), and at one point a kind of breakdown, which Harry attempts to resolve.

          The visits into the past suggest something different: a man obsessed with his difficult past that doesn’t permit him escape from it. Even his parents—particularly when he crawls into bed with them, a full adult still attempting to resolve his suffering through their deaths—insist that it is time he leaves them, arguing that he should return to the “Harry” guy whom they, as ghosts, encounter when Adam attempts to take Harry on one of his returns “home”—this time Adam

discovering the doors locked, the windows frosted over. But even then Harry, his living spectre, seems to catch a glimpse of the past to which Adam is committed. And when Adam communicates for the last time with his ghostly parents, they admit to having seen Harry and insist that their son attend to him instead of themselves and the past.

 

         Even Adam’s subconscious, in short, tries to tell him that he must return to the living, finally ridding himself of his ghosts. But we already suspect that he cannot. And we gradually realize his numerous sexual encounters with Harry are also imaginary.

         When he finally does settle with his own past, and visits Harry at his apartment, the smell of death is overpowering. As Adam enters the room he discovers his “imaginary” lover dead, the bottle of Tequila he had in had on the first night, some weeks ago, still in hand.

          He is now confronted with a new ghost, who tells him that the night they first met he desperately needed a friend, Adam perhaps finally realizing that he has failed him in the present, busy as he was with his own past.

         But hardly a beat goes on before Adam embraces his dead love, taking him back to his own room to gently assure him he will now never be alone. Clearly, Adam is used to living with dead folks, able to embrace them in a love which he can never properly direct to anyone living. Indeed, by film’s end we have to wonder whether Adam is himself a ghost.

         Haigh’s emotionally powerful film ultimately is not about human beings expressing their deep feelings of love, but about the dead, and how the living imagine they might possibly have provided them what they were missing. I can hardly imagine any LGBTQ person not confronting a dead parent in their attempt to once more explain their lives, to help their parents, their loved

ones understand how they came to be who they are and to reassure them that their choices were not only the right ones but the only choices they could have made. But most of us know that is pointless, a fantasy we cannot fully embrace.

        It is difficult, accordingly, to watch a human being who encounters even a living human being desperately needing love whom he rejects because they were too busy focusing on an exculpatory world of the past. This is Narcissus, looking into the frozen rivers of ice, not a welcoming being who pretends to invite the lover into his dark bed. Ghosts are not a comfort for those who need love in order to survive.

       And in that sense, I was not comforted by the “strangers” of Haigh’s new movie. As film critic Donald Melville Wingrove commented, despite its excellent reception, “I was underwhelmed by this film”

 

Los Angeles, February 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Quentin Tarantino | Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood / 2019

false news

by Douglas Messerli

 

Quentin Tarantino (writer and director) Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood / 2019

 

My husband Howard had to do some insistent coaxing to get me to see Quentin Tarantino’s film Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood; although I’d seen a number of his films previously, I’ve never been a great admirer of his bad-boy macho heroes who spend a great deal of time on screen torturing, murdering, and quite literally torching anyone who they don’t much like.

      Yet, I am quite happy that Howard insisted, this time round, and I agreed. Once Upon a Time is also quite violent at moments, but is also a paean to the “golden” days of Hollywood, even while the “hero” of the movie, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), lives next door to Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and Roman Polanski, celebrating with her hairstylist Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch) and the heiress Abigail Folger (Samantha Robinson), all of whom, in real life, were killed by members of Charles Manson’s clan on the night in which the movie ends on August 8-9, 1969, which Tarantino hints brought an end to that golden/hippy era.

      Most of the movie attempts to recreate what it was in those days, diving into the legendary Muso and Frank Restaurant, famed drive-in movies, studio shooting sites, the popular El Coyote restaurant near where Howard and I live (one of the very worst restaurants in which I’ve even eaten), and other popular venues, such as the Playboy Mansion and the Westwood movie theater in which Tate’s absurd film, The Wrecking Crew, was showing, as well as, most importantly the Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth, where Dalton had previously filmed many of his sessions of his popular series Bounty Law, and which the Manson clan have now taken over, much to the stoic reaction of Cliff Booth, Dalton’s loyal stunt-double, as he challenges their right to be there, seeking out his former director friend George Spahn (Bruce Dern).

      But the true focus of this meandering film, fortunately, is not on the terrifying Manson group (showing up in one sequence in full force a bit like a terrifying clan out of a science fiction film), but upon the bromance between Dalton and his stunt-man, Cliff Booth (wonderfully performed by Brad Pitt), who drives the now declining actor Dalton throughout the magical city in a way that you can only wonder what their relationship really is, a close friendship, maybe a little less than a marriage, but clearly something which in Hollywood doesn’t much get talked about—or perhaps is far too much hinted, a gay relationship that isn’t entirely sexual.

      The more than average well-written essay on Wikipedia declares that Booth’s and Dalton’s relationship was “inspired” by a vast array of actors who, after becoming famous for their films, quickly lost their mojo as the 60s, moved forward into new territory: including Burt Reynolds (who would have been in this film had he not died shortly before filming), and who had a close relationship with his stunt-double, the role Cliff Booth plays.

      In our early days of living in Los Angeles, all of the gay producers we met proclaimed that Reynolds, who openly toyed on film with the idea of being open to male/male relationships, was dying of AIDS. He most definitely wasn’t, but I think his image of a macho man who also eyed his fellow actors for their beauty, made him open to such speculations. Other “influences” include Ty Hardin, George Maharis, Edd Byrnes, Tab Hunter, Vince Edwards, and Fabian Forte, most of these figures who were known to be gay or at least rumored to be. This is clearly no accident—there are never real “accidents” in Tarantino’s films—and the relationship between the violently macho Booth and Dalton is nearly inexplicable if there isn’t a sexual frisson between them. It is even suggested that Booth killed his wife, although we’re never given a full explanation of why and how he escaped arrest.

 

     But his friendship with Dalton is clearly deeper than what he might have recognized in any connubial relationships the two may have had. The two not only drive together around town, often sleep in the same rooms, and drink together, even after Dalton marries an Italian hottie, preferring his stuntman’s company to hers. If these two men never have sex, it’s quite apparent that, as somewhat mirror-images of one another, they’re in love. Fortunately, Dalton’s new wife, after his last round of film-making in Italian Spaghetti Westerns, is a kind of narcoleptic figure who, even after their house is attacked by the Manson group, takes enough sleeping-pills to keep her quiet and out of the picture.

       I have now given away, of course, something that Tarantino begged critics not to reveal at his movie’s Cannes showing. Spoiler alert: Tarantino, as usual, despite his careful study of the time and events, loves to re-bend history. As in his film Inglorious Basterds this director warps time in order to reclaim the horrors of our history. Hitler is destroyed long before he actually was. And instead of the horrific stabbing and killing Sharon Tate and her friends at their 10500 Cielo Drive address, the confused Manson gang attempt to kill Booth and Dalton, after a night where Booth has smoked an acid-laced cigarette and Dalton is cooling out in his pool.

       Yes, there is more Tarantino violence, some of it almost unbearable to watch, but these are, after all, monsters who deserved to be destroyed, even by a huge flame-thrower towed out of Dalton’s garage. It’s hard to feel sorry for the Manson murderer’s death, or even more Hitler and his associate’s inferno in a movie-theater.

       In Tarantino’s films history is never dead, but gets replayed, re-perceived, and completely altered. He gives us an alternative history we might better endure. But, as our current President keeps shouting, it is truly false history. Even if we might love it, it “ain’t the facts jack.” And there is something dangerous in its myths. Booth, wheeled off in an ambulance, is a false hero, despite the former Viet Nam survivor he might have been, a figure only in the fictions of film mythology which Tarantino so loves. The question this director never truly confronts is the reality we all need to face.

       The Manson monsters were not stopped. They killed actually many more people. Dictators and blindly selfish leaders are not killed before their time. Trump still lives, and so too Vladimir Putin, Kim Jo-Un, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro and so many others. Tarantino’s works are wonderfully quirky myths that, alas, do not satisfy my reality.

       And perhaps, even more importantly, despite the deep love of Booth and Dalton, it could never fully exist in their time due to the general homophobia of the society which surely these two shared.

 

Los Angeles, August 22, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2019).

Andrei Tarkovsky | Offret (The Sacrifice) / 1986

waiting for something else

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrei Tarkovsky (screenwriter and director) Offret (The Sacrifice) / 1986

Compared with the epic works such as Andrei Rublev and even Stalker, Tarkovsky's last film seems narratively simpler. His roving and constantly shifting images become, in the hands of cinematographer Sven Nykvist (also Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer), a series of longer and more focused scenes; in a film of 149 minutes there are, reportedly, only 115 shots.

 

    Also because of its Bergmanian and, particularly, Chekovian influences, the narrative shifts from Tarkovsky's emblematic method of story-telling in his previous films to a more traditionally Western story-line—although Tarkovsky often purposely thwarts the more normative dramatic results.

     Isolated on Bergman's island of Gotland, the family at the center of this film live, as does the family in Chekov's The Seagull, in what might be described as a summer house, this located by the sea instead of a lake.

     Their home, a place that seemed to call out to both Alexander (played by Bergman actor Erland Josephson) and his wife Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood) upon their first encountering it, is something they both still love and yet is a container for all their hurts and pains. Dressed almost as turn-of-the-century women right out of Chekov, both Alexander's wife and his daughter (Valérie Mairesse) quietly spar with each other. Indeed, something seems to be sickening all the inhabitants of this house. The young son, nicknamed "Little Man," has just undergone some sort of throat operation, and is mute throughout most of the film. Alexander, a former actor, and now, a successful aesthetician, journalist, and professor, is undergoing a kind of existentialist crisis, and is unable to find meaning or belief in his life. Alexander's behavior alternates between long philosophical monologues and self-consumed silence. As his friend Otto chides him, like a Beckett figure he is one of those desperately "waiting for something else." 

      Otto, a part-time postman, collects strange incidents and falls into temporary faints. The Icelandic maid, Maria, to put it simply, is most strange. Yet, as their doctor friend and visitor, Victor later reveals, it is Adelaide and her incessant attacks on her husband and her outspoken dismissal of those around her that most makes this house an unbearable place in which to exist. By film's end, Victor is determined to leave it for Australian, as well, apparently, is their daughter.

     The day in which the film begins is Alexander's 50th birthday, and all have gathered here to endure a celebratory dinner. At this point, however, Tarkovsky turns the tables, so to speak. What has been a Chekov-like family comedy-drama is suddenly transformed into an international event as the radio and television, in blips of static, report that the world is on the throes of another great War, with the certainty of a nuclear holocaust.

     Adelaide lapses into a fit of terror, screaming out for the men "to do something," as Alexander retreats to his room upstairs, pondering the unbearable wait of the next few hours. This, he is suddenly certain, was what he was waiting for, a call to action. Although he has previously described himself as a nonbeliever, he now intensely prays to God, insisting that he will give up everything he loves, his son, his house, his life, if only the holocaust can be averted.

     While we hear the roars of jet planes flying overhead, the family, some now sedated by Victor, quietly wait out what is suddenly a real tragedy, reiterating their personal pains and failures. Otto, who has previously left, climbs secretly through a second-story window to ludicrously reveal to Alexander that he must go to the house of the Icelandic maid—who is a witch, but of the right kind—and lay with her through the night in order to save the world.

    Suddenly we begin to suspect that Tarkovsky is pulling out the rug from his story once more. Just as we might have imagined that the original comic-tragedy has reverted into an allegory of horror, by now combining pagan acts with Christian prayers, we begin to see another kind of comic potential in this work.

     In his essay "Zarathustra's Gift in Tarkovsky's Sacrifice," Gino Moliterno convincingly argues that Tarkovsky is reiterating in his film Nietzsche's Zoroastrian notion of the Eternal Return that Tarkovsky intimates at the beginning of the movie with a reference to Zarathustra's dwarf. Alexander, he argues, who has come to the crossroads of his life (like Tarkovsky, who himself was dying of cancer at the time of the filming), is by film's end willing to say, "Is that life? Well then, once again!"

     I argue that Tarkovsky purposely combines both the pagan and the Christian worlds, symbolized by the gentle drama of the turn-of-the-century combined with images of the horrors of 20th century wars. What some critics have complained as a murky mix of paganism and Christianity or seen as a narrative incongruity, is, in fact, a kind of delicious pot au feu in which Tarkovsky's character pluckily mixes religions of the present and the past represented by various dramatic genres in order to transform the present into another kind of reality, pointing up both the past and the potential, different future. The witchcraft of Maria weaves its spell, just as the Christian moral choices of abstinence motivates Alexander's acts.

     Waking the next morning, the electricity has returned, and all seems like it was earlier the day before. The other figures quietly share a breakfast table, seeming to have forgotten what they have undergone during the night. Was it all just a dream, a horrible nightmare spawned by Alexander's troubled mind?  In some ways, it does not matter. The house is still sick, the patients still in need of a cure, even if the world at large has been salvaged.

     Tricking them to take a morning walk, Alexander dances and trots around the house, almost comically snacking on tabletop leftovers as he prepares a fire which, once he has set, quickly creates an inferno.

     As family and friends come running back to the burning pyre, an ambulance miraculously arrives to cart off Alexander, a man apparently gone mad. Such a truth-teller must be put away immediately. Whether or not he has redeemed their lives or has managed to resurrect the lives of his family and friends, he has redeemed his own life; for once he has acted instead of passively waiting for the end.

     Tarkovsky's brilliant film closes with a scene in which "Little Man," a future Alexander, lays under a tree which the two of them have planted in the very first scene. The child, in his first and only lines of the film, speaks: "In the beginning was the word...why is that, papa?" If Alexander is determined to spend the rest of his life in silence, to give up all that life has meant, the boy will continue to speak in a dialogue with and for him in the next generation with its new possibilities. The magic, Christian or pagan, has been accomplished.

     When I first saw The Sacrifice, I was immensely moved by it, and had the feeling that when I fell asleep that night that I dreamt the movie all over again, as if it had somehow rewound itself in my head. I did not know at that time that Tarkovsky had had a somewhat similar instance occur during the work's filming. When they first attempted to film the burning house, the camera jammed, and they lost the crucial shot. At great expense and time that Tarkovsky, ill during the shooting, did not have, they rebuilt the house and filmed the scene again with two cameras. Moliterno points to this ironic situation that might have reiterated one of Tarkovsky's themes: "Is that life? Well then, once again!"

 

Los Angeles, April 15, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2010).       

Robert Bresson | Mouchette / 1967, USA 1970

without a shadow

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Bresson (screenwriter, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, and director) Mouchette / 1967, USA 1970

 

Robert Bresson’s 1967 film Mouchette (released in the US in March 1970) is one of his most despairing of his oeuvre, but yet is one of his most celebratory of life. Based, like his Diary of a Country Priest, on a novel by Georges Bernanos, Mouchette, almost without plot, is the story of a fourteen-year-old school girl (Nadine Nortier) who lives in a dilapidated farm house with her dying mother, her alcoholic father, brother, and a new-born baby brother, for whose care she is responsible. Unhappy at home, mocked by her school-girl peers, and unable to participate—both financially and spiritually—in any the limited joys available to her, Mouchette, as Bresson himself described her, is “evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations.”

     Like most of Bresson’s suffering figures, she nonetheless is more than resilient, ignoring and battling her schoolgirl companions and the neighborhood boys in their taunts. In a stunning scene at a weekend carnival, Bresson reveals the possibilities of her life through the movement of Dodg’em cars: at first her car is simply hit by others again and again, but gradually, as she spots and starts to flirt with a handsome boy in another “auto,” manipulating her car into position to successfully crash into his and others’ cars. Later, as she begins to trail after the young man, she is quickly pulled aside by her ever-watchful father and struck in the face.

     Bresson films this young woman’s abuse with an almost abstract, “flat” directorial eye, allowing his non-actors (he chose evidently an entirely amateur cast) to reveal their own stories in action, since they are quite clearly a people of few words. Yet the actions in which they engage are anything but uneventful. Luisa, the local bartender is courted by the gamekeeper Mathieu, but is obviously more attracted to the small-time poacher Arsène. Like Mouchette, who occasionally helps out in the bar to earn her family a few more coins, Luisa’s life is one of repetition and boredom, but in her role as the dispenser of what all the men seek—wine and liquor—she is a woman of power, while Mouchette has so little choice over her life that she hardly casts a shadow.

     As in his other films, Bresson employs the images of hands in this work—the camera follows Luisa’s hands over and over as she pours out the drinks, lingers over Mouchette’s attempts to soothe and heal her mother and to hold and change the diaper of her baby brother, and mocks her father’s bedtime antics of driving a car—but it is the legs and feet of his characters that dominate: the embarrassing slap of Mouchette’s clogs against the earth as she arrives late to school and the later loss of one of those shoes in a storm; the angry crush of dirt into the carpet of an old woman, who late in the film, demands Mouchette ponder her own death.

     What also gives this film such power is the oddity of its few events, particularly the scene beginning with her journey home from school through the woods. In these woods we have already observed several battles—similar to that of Renoir’s Le Règle de jeu—between gamekeeper and poacher, between the pheasants and rabbits inhabiting the place, and those who would take their lives. Caught up in this struggle, Mouchette is forced to take cover under a tree during a rainstorm. Meanwhile, Mathieu and Arsène encounter one another, a fight-in-the-brewing for some time. At first Arsène seems conciliatory, willing to give up his trap. But when it is refused, he pushes the other into a stream where they briefly fight. Yet it is a ludicrous battle they perceive, and it ends with them laughing at each other as they share the wine in Arsène’s cask.

     By the time Arsène comes across Mouchette, however, he is so drunk that he believes he has killed Mathieu. At first he appears solicitous of the young girl, determined to help her find his missing clog, and to have her help him with an alibi. They briefly take cover in a small hut, but after hearing two rifle shots—shots clearly coming from Mathieu’s gun—Arsène insists that they wipe away all evidence of being there and takes her to his own house.

     Again, he seems caring of her situation; but suddenly, in one of the strangest of cinematic events, he undergoes an epileptic fit. As she has previously nursed her mother, Mouchette holds his head, wiping away the blood and spittle that issues from the poacher’s mouth. It is as if she can find no other role in her life but that of caregiver; little is ever offered in return. And with Arsène’s revival comes the inevitable. She now fears for her own safety and, somewhat lamely perhaps—given both her need for love and her expectations of the abuse—attempts to fend him off before finally, as he begins the rape, accepting him in an embracing hug. In short, it is the very “strangeness” of these scenes that make them appear to be so inevitable, as if these events were too odd to be anything but the “truth.”

     When Mouchette finally returns home, the baby is bawling, her mother near death. She cannot even find a match in the house to warm the milk. In the night la mère dies.

     The next morning, she is determined to go for the baby’s milk. But this time she encounters, briefly, people who seem willing to help. A grocer offers her coffee and a croissant, but as she attempts to place another croissant into the girl’s pocket, Mouchette backs away—now terrified, evidently, of even human touch. A customer accusatively stares at her as the camera makes apparent what the women observe, the top button of her dress is missing. “Slut,” one of the women hisses.

     Checking up on Mathieu, Mouchette is surprised to see him still living; seeing her there he insists she come into his house to reveal what has occurred during the night. As the gamekeeper and his wife begin to interrogate her, she resists, but ends up by declaring Arsène is now her lover.

     An old friend of the family invites her in to present her with a shroud for her mother and some dresses for the girl herself. But Mouchette is indignant. What can those things mean to her now? Why didn’t the woman help out during her mother’s life? The “friend” is, quite obviously, inured to the dead (“I am a friend of the dead”) rather than to those who are alive.

 

    In world such as Mouchette’s, love and life is squandered, creating a vacuum that offers only a mean death. As she once again crosses the woods on her way home, Mouchette pauses, checking out one of new dresses of the “gift”; like all of her other clothes, it too is quickly torn in the brambles. Wrapping herself in it, Mouchette rolls down the hill toward the stream, but her body comes to a standstill as it reaches the bushes at water’s edge. With new determination, with a will that represents her attempt take back her own life, Mouchette repeats the act, rolling in her new “shroud” down the hill once more, this time hitting the mark, her body falling like a stone into the water from where it will never rise.

     Has the renowned Roman Catholic director now advocated suicide? some viewers asked upon the film’s release. I cannot speak for Bresson. But in such an immoral world, perhaps even self-murder can be seen as a spiritual act.

 

Los Angles, February 28, 2000

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2011).

Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen | The Kid Stays in the Picture / 2002

the kid is gone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen (screenplay and directors, based on the memoir by Robert Evans, with Evens as the narrator) The Kid Stays in the Picture / 2002

 

Robert Evans must have been the most likeable narcissistic bastards in the world. First, he has the looks of a male movie-star; Norma Shearer spotting him in the Beverly Hills Hotel’s swimming pool immediately demanded that he play her husband, Irving Thalberg, against James Cagney in Man with a Thousand Faces. She was a woman who immediately recognized a handsome man.

 

    And even before that break, he’d been a child actor in pictures, worked extensively in radio, and helped, with his brother, to develop the women’s fashion company Evan-Picone, introducing women to pants suits and other casual wear.

     Although even he admits he was not a very good actor—at least not in front of the camera—soon after his portrayal of Thalberg, he was hired by another producer-baron, Darryl F. Zanuck, to portray the handsome young matador in Hemingway’s film version of The Sun Also Rises. He was evidently so bad that actors Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Eddie Albert, and writer Hemingway himself wrote a telegram to Zanack that Evans had to be fired or the film would be a disaster. I believe that film was a disaster, but not because of Evans. But the imperious Zanuck flew down to Mexico where it was being filmed, watched Evans perform, and through a bullhorn announced: “The kid stays in the picture,” the name of Evans’ own autobiographical tale and in 2002 the documentary directed by Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen.

 

     Made up mostly of still color photos mixed with scenes from the many great movies which Evans was later to direct, this work, on the surface, is not a great piece of film making. Yet the story of how Evans turned from acting to suddenly become the head of the 9th largest studio in Los Angeles, Paramount, is absolutely fascinating. The studio was bought up at bargain-basement price by Gulf & Western by Charles Bludhorn, who knew absolutely nothing about movies, and who suddenly decided to hire the has-been actor as the Head of Production based upon a newspaper piece regaling Evans’ brash style and career successes.

      Evans, charming as he might have been, was also a determined newcomer and not so stupid. He realized even before he was courted by Paramount, that if you wanted to be a producer, you had to have property instead of actresses and actors, quite the opposite perspective from most of Hollywood producers at the time. He’d already acquired the rights, with the help of his journalist friend (who actually read scripts and the books upon which they were based), to The Detective, and quickly produced a series of Neil Simon movies for Paramount, including Barefoot in the Park and Plaza Suite (neither of which this documentary recalls). These films all resulted in great successes for the studio, but Evans also clearly had more serious things on his mind with Rosemary’s Baby (directed by the man he keeps describing as his “little Pollack,” the great Polish-born director Roman Polanski), whose later independent Evans-production of Chinatown would make him and his studio even more famous.

       Rosemary’s Baby would have not survived, given Sinatra’s determination to end his wife, Mia Farrow’s career, had not Evans taken her aside to show her an early edited version which he suggested would make her a shoo-in for the Academy Award (she didn’t win that, but did win The Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year, which certainly did help her career).

     And, then, of course there was his somewhat contentious connections with “the intellectual” Francis Ford Coppola, whose The Godfather 1 and 2 sent the floundering studio off the charts, bringing it from 9 to number 1. Coppola also credits Evans with making important changes to his masterworks.

     Along the way in his rising career were other, often sentimental hits, such as Love Story—whose central actress, Ali MacGraw, Evans married, one of seven wives—none of the others even mentioned in this documentary; the directors claimed that to do so would simply slow down the narrative. Maybe, in fact, Evans’ high-charged story might have benefited by a slightly slower telling pace. I feel we never truly get to know the man who cannot, clearly, ever live with a woman for very long. Why was a truly handsome man, described throughout his life as a most eligible bachelor, never able to sustain a relationship? This documentary only hints at some of the problems.

      The fact that Evans wanted his friend, Alain Delon, rumored often as being a closeted gay man (despite his somewhat homophobic comments) to play the role of Charles "Lucky" Luciano in The Cotton Club, which, when he couldn’t hire Delon, he replaced him with the former gay porn star, bi-sexual Joe Dallesandro, is just a peak into a very complex man. Despite his endless relationships with women, Evans was continuously rumored to have been bisexual, although there has never been any credible evidence.

      Yet despite his obvious bluster, Evans’ sentimental side is well-revealed, particularly in his love for the flower and fountain-obsessed home, which he purchased soon after his quick rise to sudden fame, the former home of Shearer and Thalberg. Those were the days you might buy paradise for $290,000. And it was a kind of paradise that you could never imagine a blustering Trump or other studio heads of the day even able to appreciate. There is something so beautiful and peaceful about that small home that it truly makes you look at Evans anew. If he can describe his former wife Ali as a snot-nosed bohemian, if he can stare down some of the most brutally unsmiling executives in the world, you realize that Evans has heart and a comedic sense of himself which surely does not define any of the other Hollywood moguls.

      Evans, unlike Zanack and so many others, lived for the script, not for gloriously glamourous figures who populated film history. That is also why one so loves this documentary. If it is often a kind of gossip sheet, telling us what we don’t (and sometimes do) want to hear, it is also a tragic tale in which the golden hero falls because of his own hubris.

      The most important thing that brought Evans down was cocaine, which, apparently nearly every wealthy person on Los Angeles’ Westside, in those days of the late 1960s and the decade of the 1970s, imbibed. I get no kick from cocaine (champagne is another issue), but evidently so many of those who could afford that habit did it to excess. And it brought Robert Evans into a freefall in a rather tragic way.

      Trying to raise money for his film, The Cotton Club, after much indecision (Evans himself first wanted to direct it), directed by Coppola, Evans was introduced to the would-be impresario Roy Radin by his cocaine dealer Karen Greenberger. A deal was worked out, although Radin was probably not wealthy enough to later sustain Evans’ and Coppola’s ambitions. Greenberger, paid $50,000 for her connection in the deal, was highly unsatisfied with the money, and worked with others to kill Radin. The lawyer: Robert Shapiro!

      Evans was never charged with any involvement, but his refusal to testify (he claimed the 5^th Amendment) and his very connection with the murder trial—as well as the failure of the film at the box-office—brought him his comeuppance. As he, himself, declares: “No one was taking my calls.” He lost his career and his beloved home. Approaching suicidal feelings, he locked himself into a clinic, from which he basically needed to escape in order to survive.

     Even Evans, narrating this film, seems surprised that he did survive, turning sober and providing airtime to proclaim the need to stay away from drugs. Although he had sold his lovely paradise of a house to a wealthy French millionaire, he realized that in order to come back into life, he needed it and its rose gardens badly. He was, after all, a true sentimentalist. His good friend Jack Nicholson flew to Paris, “getting down on his knees,” so the voice of Evans proclaims (surely another sentimental exaggeration), to make him sell it back to Evans. It clearly was sacred ground.

      The would-be Thalberg had about $37 in his pocket.

      But just as he needed the spotlight, so Paramount still needed him, and he made a final pact to produce a small number of films for them. A few, Marathon Man, Black Sunday, Popeye, were successful, but others, including another Neil Simon re-do, The Out-of-Towners, and even worse fare were failures.

      In watching The Kid Stays in the Picture for the second time the other day, I was delighted and tearful for this somewhat innovative thinker to Hollywood producing. I certainly did not like all of this “entertainments,” but many of them represented the best of late Hollywood filmmaking. Had the strange business of Los Angeles film gone further in some of the directions that Evans promoted—an emphasis on the script instead of the stars, a commitment to challenging psychological and even sometimes experimental cinema as opposed to the readily accessible standards of movie-making—films might not be in downward spire, which Martin Scorsese, in a recent The New York Times essay declared them to be. I’m not sure I agree with Scorsese. Lots of good films are still being made, and I believe they matter. But Robert Evans, perhaps always “a kid,” obviously truly loved a world in which narrative and acting came brilliantly together.

       I don’t think I might have liked the man, too macho for me, but I do love the attitude and many of his values. And I was disturbed to read of his death, at the age of 89, on October 26^th of this year.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).