I never look through the camera. The cameraman knows me well enough to know what I want -- and when in doubt, draw a rectangle and then draw out the shot for him. You see, the point is that you are, first of all, in a two-dimensional medium. Mustn't forget that. You have a rectangle to fill. Fill it. Compose it. I don't have to look through the camera for that.
When I made PSYCHO, I made it in black and white for the very simple reason that I didn't want to show the red blood flowing down the bathtub into the drain. The whole shower scene was shot as a concept imagining this woman's being stabbed to death. But if you examine the film frame by frame, you'll find that no knife ever touched the woman's body.
(Alfred Hitchcock)
A script clerk is a completely frustrated person with Hitchcock because Hitch doesn't care what people say, he looks at it visually and if the thing makes sense to him, and he hears what they say, that's it.
(James Stewart)
For THE AFRICAN QUEEN [1951] we were shooting on location in Africa, way down out of Penteville in the Belgian Congo. I had played the first scene, in which I bury Robert Morley. And the next morning, John Huston came waltzing up to my hut. I said, "I hope you're not planning to have breakfast with me every day, because I rather prefer to eat alone." And he said, "No, no. I'm just coming in for a minute." Now you know, I've a sort of hollow face and a sort of jaw, and my mouth goes down, and when my face is serious it is very on the down side. If I can smile I've got a lot of nice teeth. I can cheer everything up quite a lot. So John sat down, and he just said, "Did you ever see Mrs. Roosevelt visiting the soldiers in the hospitals?" And I said yes, I did; I did see that movie. And he said, "Well, think of her a little bit as Mrs. Roosevelt." Then he drifted off. Well, it was the most brilliant suggestion. Because she was ugly so she always smiled. So I smiled. Otherwise he said very little to me on the set. But it was an awfully clever piece of direction, wasn't it?
(Katherine Hepburn)
It's not often that I look through the camera. I know what lens they're using, and I know what it's going to look like... I direct actors about as little as possible. The better the actor, the less I have to direct. I want to get as much out of the actor himself as I can. Because wonderful accidents occur. I guide an actor rather than direct; expand a performance or reduce it. So far as the mechanical element goes -- why that's just being a traffic cop... The very best actors, the ones that fill me with admiration, are those that furnish surprises. You don't know -- I doubt that they do either -- where it comes from. They reach down into some remote cavern and come up with something that reveals a principle, something mysterious and new.
(John Huston)
So much of what Huston does isn't to do with words, but with feelings. He makes you, as an actor, feel very comfortable, also very concerned with every facet of the character you're playing. He gives you tremendous freedom, but is always watching out so that you don't go over the top. Most of all, however, is the fact that he's concerned with positive energy. He's very open, and he needs to feel that he's not stifling other people's creative energies, which, I think, is the mark of a good director. He has a great love and a passion for detail, and I love that. And he takes little incidents in life and thinks, and treats them, as though they are no less significant than the big ones... FAT CITY [1972] was probably the most productive relationship that I've had with a director in the sense that we discussed the alternatives for a scene. We never made any hard and fast resolutions. I think there's an important point a lot of directors get stuck on. A lot of them think there's one and only one possible way for a scene to be done, and that can produce a feeling that's so airtight it's almost stultifying. I think it's better to give the actor alternatives so that something can happen spontaneously during a scene that is not the manifestation of a rehearsal. But Huston does rehearse a lot. He walks through the scene many times and works with the cameraman and the actors. But he sort of lets the actor stage the scene himself. He brings the camera in and lets the actor show him. Then he'll bring in his suggestions -- something that might spice up a moment or change the tempo of a scene. It's a real collaboration in the best sense of the word.
(Stacy Keach)
Renoir arrives on the set [of THE VANISHING CORPORAL, 1962]. We have the impression that he does not know anything about the story, about the film, nothing. "Bonjour. You slept alright? What do we do today? Sit down and read the script." "We've learned the lines." "No, no, sit down and read it like a telephone directory." We sit down and read it, flatly, without acting. "My friends, please, it's fantastic. Marvelous. We shoot immediately. Put the camera here." We shoot only 3 or 4 hours afterward, but no one knows why. We change everything and you have the impression that you change it, but it's him. "Maybe it's better if you're here. You don't think so? No, no, stay there." Afterwards you go here but it's exactly a game, and when we shoot, he puts his hat off. He never says "Action." He says, "Messieurs les comedediens, s'il vous plait." And you act, and at the end he never says "Cut." The first time we did the first scene of the film and we finished the scene and [Renoir said] nothing. And with Claude Brassuer we continued, and suddenly it's "What a pity we have to stop." And we look at him and he's crying. "Thank you, thank you. Just once more for pleasure. For my pleasure." And we played it. And we were in love with this man all the time.
(Jean-Pierre Cassel)
I don't really believe in the idea of an actor being required at a given moment to incarnate a particular character. I never try to get a virtuoso performance out of an actor in an attempt to make him express something which, on the human level, on the level of his own personality, I know is just not him... I never make the mistake -- for I think it is one -- of making the actor enter into a character. On the contrary, I always try to do the opposite, namely to let the character take on the color of whatever actor I have available for the part. One of the things I really try to do... is to make friends with an actor before starting work. Naturally, this is not a method that I can recommend to everyone, and even for me making friends can be difficult enough... The definite casting of minor roles, or indeed sometimes even the main ones themselves, is for me one of the agonizing moments. Because I fall in love with everybody. For example, I see the character as bald, slurring his r's, nerveless, and with hairy hands, and I see him clearly; I saw him vividly when I was conceiving him. And I start looking round to find that physical presence which will embody my character. And then there comes to see me a man who is thin, with a lot of hair, with long artist's hands, and a perfect pronunciation. By the very fact that this is someone alive, speaking and looking at me, somebody who has a particular accent, who breathes, who lights his cigarette in a certain way, all this makes him so much more alive than my own imagined character that I say to myself, "Instead of looking for that particular type, maybe I could use this one." And then I see it will work out just as well, better perhaps, and everything is in the melting pot again, making it all more harassing than ever. Then a second man turns up, not very thin, an average chap, and now I find this one, too, could bring to my character the authenticity of his own life, of his presence. So you see the casting of a character becomes a real drama, because they would all be good -- they all communicate something to me. Any real living person moves me, influences me, stimulates my imagination...
(Federico Fellini)
Fellini is one of the few directors who really likes actors, and an actor feels this and responds to it -- in other words, he is happy. And he is convinced that every time he opens his mouth he is saying everything splendidly. That is a great secret. Fellini is very crafty in his dealing with actors, very crafty indeed. I say this because, when I have been with other directors who, like Fellini, really direct the acting, I have always been afraid of going wrong, but with him I always feel I am being marvelous... the truth is that I have never worked so happily as in LA DOLCE VITA [1960]. I have never enjoyed myself so much, and I really mean enjoyed. For six months I really felt that I was an exceptional man, so that everything was bound to go right.
(Marcello Mastroianni)
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Acting
I am good-natured when I work, and I do not mind working very hard. I do a lot of dubbing for my pictures. For example, I dubbed my own English for TWO WOMEN [1961], which was made in Italian. When you dub, you do not have as much feeling as you had when the movie was originally shot, and it is hard work. After I have been dubbing, I eat and then go to bed right away, because it is so tiring. I never rehearse a part in front of a mirror. It is phony I think, to do that. I want to get it the way it should be when I am on the set, in front of the camera. Before I start to work on a part, I read the script, but when shooting starts, I like improvisation right on the set. Even when I'm not consciously thinking about a part, I'm really thinking about it all the time. When I get to the set, I sometimes know suddenly what I will do. I didn't rehearse at all for TWO WOMEN.
(Sophia Loren)
All actors are different, of course. For instance, I don't agree with the notion that the best acting comes from the first few takes. But Spencer Tracy is violent on that. He said that the first 2 takes are always the best, and I think that they were with him. But I think I can still go pretty well on that 23rd take. And you know, it's interesting that all the times Spencer and I worked together, we never rehearsed together before shooting. Never.
(Katherine Hepburn)
The surprising aspect of their joint success was that they were so different. Kate's working method and approach was opposite to Spencer's. She is a careful, thorough, analytical, concentrated artist. She reads and studies and thinks. By the time she was ready to begin shooting THE LION IN WINTER [1968], for example, she knew enough about Eleanor of Aquitaine to write a master's thesis on the subject. She loves to rehearse and practice and try things and make just one more take. Spencer, conversely, was an instinctive player, who trusted the moment of creation, believed it was possible to go stale by over-rehearsing, and usually did his best work on the first take. He was a firmly rooted subjective artist. [When pressed on his opinion on acting] "It's taken me forty years of doing it for a living to learn the secret. I don't know that I want to give it away." Urged, he relented. "Okay, I'll tell you. The art of acting is -- learn your lines!"
(Garson Kanin)
What impressed me most about [Clark Gable] was his sturdy "pro" mentality. Every morning at the stroke of 9:00 he entered the set, knew his lines to perfection, nodded to the director's suggestions, never disputed them, and carried them out. His contract stipulated that he could go home at 5:00. At 5 minutes to 5 he would glance at his watch and call out a calm, firm, "Five more minutes, boys!" into the air, not caring if anyone heard him or not. On the dot of 5:00 he would get up and leave. Sometimes we were in the middle of a take, and I pleaded with him to let us finish, but he shook his head. "If I stayed on for a couple of minutes just one single time, that would be the thin end of the wedge. I work eight hours a day, like everybody else. No more."
(Lilli Palmer)
I think an actor like Brando can give you certain moments that have nothing to do with any director, have nothing to do with any script, have nothing to do with anything aside from his own talent. When you work with Marlon, you have only one job: release him, get him moving, get him unafraid -- get him functioning. Now that doesn't mean you simply let him go. You must stay within the confines, heading toward an objective. Marlon is a fascinating man. Like many great actors, he is also a very suspicious man. He likes to test his directors. In the first 2 days of shooting, he will do 2 takes that may seem identical, but one is full and one is only technical. Then he will watch which one you decide to print, and on that decision lies your whole subsequent relationship with him, because if you don't know your job as well as he knows his, you've had it. In those performances where you've seen him just walk through a film, he made the test and the director flunked it.
(Sidney Lumet)
I don't like Mr. Brando. I'll never forget, or forgive, what he did to me on ON THE WATERFRONT. We were doing that now-famous taxi scene. I did the take with him, when the camera was on him, but when it came time for the camera to be on me -- he went home! I had to speak my lines to an assistant director. It must have burned him up that we came out even in that scene -- despite what he did.
(Rod Steiger)
Jerry [Lewis] never rehearses. Just one take and that's it. You rehearse with Jerry and you'll die. So you can't really do anything interesting with the camera -- his habits dictate your style. Sometimes when I have to repeat a scene, he'll change it around and do something completely different. And that's his charm, you see -- you never know what he's going to do next. He doesn't look at his dialogue until he walks on the set, and then he never sticks to the lines anyway -- usually he makes them better. I just tell him roughly what the scene is and he does it, kind of hit-and-run, and it's very successful. But you get no credit for doing a Lewis picture.
(Frank Tashlin)
I would certainly say that the theater is a much better medium for the actor than film, if for no other reason that he goes through at one fell swoop the whole plot, so that he doesn't have to chop things up into little things. And there are other reasons. The mechnical business of sticking a camera into your face, if they're going into a close-up, and you have to concentrate on the scene, and it's devilish and difficult to try to make yourself believe that there isn't a camera in your face. And you're talking into a lens and you're supposed to be talking to another human being and you know bloody damn well you're talking to a lens. And to be able to so metamorphose yourself into the sense of making yourself believe that it's not so, is a tough job. You try to do it, but you succeed only partially.
(Paul Muni)
(Sophia Loren)
All actors are different, of course. For instance, I don't agree with the notion that the best acting comes from the first few takes. But Spencer Tracy is violent on that. He said that the first 2 takes are always the best, and I think that they were with him. But I think I can still go pretty well on that 23rd take. And you know, it's interesting that all the times Spencer and I worked together, we never rehearsed together before shooting. Never.
(Katherine Hepburn)
The surprising aspect of their joint success was that they were so different. Kate's working method and approach was opposite to Spencer's. She is a careful, thorough, analytical, concentrated artist. She reads and studies and thinks. By the time she was ready to begin shooting THE LION IN WINTER [1968], for example, she knew enough about Eleanor of Aquitaine to write a master's thesis on the subject. She loves to rehearse and practice and try things and make just one more take. Spencer, conversely, was an instinctive player, who trusted the moment of creation, believed it was possible to go stale by over-rehearsing, and usually did his best work on the first take. He was a firmly rooted subjective artist. [When pressed on his opinion on acting] "It's taken me forty years of doing it for a living to learn the secret. I don't know that I want to give it away." Urged, he relented. "Okay, I'll tell you. The art of acting is -- learn your lines!"
(Garson Kanin)
What impressed me most about [Clark Gable] was his sturdy "pro" mentality. Every morning at the stroke of 9:00 he entered the set, knew his lines to perfection, nodded to the director's suggestions, never disputed them, and carried them out. His contract stipulated that he could go home at 5:00. At 5 minutes to 5 he would glance at his watch and call out a calm, firm, "Five more minutes, boys!" into the air, not caring if anyone heard him or not. On the dot of 5:00 he would get up and leave. Sometimes we were in the middle of a take, and I pleaded with him to let us finish, but he shook his head. "If I stayed on for a couple of minutes just one single time, that would be the thin end of the wedge. I work eight hours a day, like everybody else. No more."
(Lilli Palmer)
I think an actor like Brando can give you certain moments that have nothing to do with any director, have nothing to do with any script, have nothing to do with anything aside from his own talent. When you work with Marlon, you have only one job: release him, get him moving, get him unafraid -- get him functioning. Now that doesn't mean you simply let him go. You must stay within the confines, heading toward an objective. Marlon is a fascinating man. Like many great actors, he is also a very suspicious man. He likes to test his directors. In the first 2 days of shooting, he will do 2 takes that may seem identical, but one is full and one is only technical. Then he will watch which one you decide to print, and on that decision lies your whole subsequent relationship with him, because if you don't know your job as well as he knows his, you've had it. In those performances where you've seen him just walk through a film, he made the test and the director flunked it.
(Sidney Lumet)
I don't like Mr. Brando. I'll never forget, or forgive, what he did to me on ON THE WATERFRONT. We were doing that now-famous taxi scene. I did the take with him, when the camera was on him, but when it came time for the camera to be on me -- he went home! I had to speak my lines to an assistant director. It must have burned him up that we came out even in that scene -- despite what he did.
(Rod Steiger)
Jerry [Lewis] never rehearses. Just one take and that's it. You rehearse with Jerry and you'll die. So you can't really do anything interesting with the camera -- his habits dictate your style. Sometimes when I have to repeat a scene, he'll change it around and do something completely different. And that's his charm, you see -- you never know what he's going to do next. He doesn't look at his dialogue until he walks on the set, and then he never sticks to the lines anyway -- usually he makes them better. I just tell him roughly what the scene is and he does it, kind of hit-and-run, and it's very successful. But you get no credit for doing a Lewis picture.
(Frank Tashlin)
I would certainly say that the theater is a much better medium for the actor than film, if for no other reason that he goes through at one fell swoop the whole plot, so that he doesn't have to chop things up into little things. And there are other reasons. The mechnical business of sticking a camera into your face, if they're going into a close-up, and you have to concentrate on the scene, and it's devilish and difficult to try to make yourself believe that there isn't a camera in your face. And you're talking into a lens and you're supposed to be talking to another human being and you know bloody damn well you're talking to a lens. And to be able to so metamorphose yourself into the sense of making yourself believe that it's not so, is a tough job. You try to do it, but you succeed only partially.
(Paul Muni)
All That Jazz (1979)
Okay, what we're doing here is important if you want to understand or work in show business. It's also illegal. If Columbia or Fox get wind of this, we're going to jail. I grabbed a bunch of copyright infringing screen shots that are loading at the bottom of this post while we chat for a while about Bob Fosse's over-budget, intensely honest 1979 masterpiece, ALL THAT JAZZ.
A long time ago in Hollywood, when I was an impressionable chump, actor Lonnie Stevens told me privately that we all have exactly one great story to tell -- our own. He probably said that to all the girls. Yet I think it may be true, and Fosse's one great personal story is so complex and comic and candid that it stands as a high water mark in cinematic art, if you view moviemaking as a narrative medium. Qua entertainment, ALL THAT JAZZ won four Academy Awards including Best Music. It has astonishing dance sequences, directed and choreographed by Fosse, easily the greatest of all sculptors who gave flight and heat and meaning to physical human clay.
But there's more. Infinitely more. It has Fosse himself, portrayed by Roy Scheider under Fosse's challenging creative direction, with the living reference of Bob Fosse right there on the set to illuminate what depth of heaven and hell lay beneath a thick layer of bullshit and burlesque.
Acclaimed and hated for revealing his personal story, Fosse shows us the seduction of Death as an exit, the ultimate painkiller and problem solver, portrayed romantically and with stunning confidence by Jessica Lange in surreal clips that punctuate the film from beginning to end, as Fosse lays out his past, present, and future. ALL THAT JAZZ was Fosse's swan song, after suffering a massive coronary and bypass surgery. That's in the movie, too -- clinically, shockingly, maddeningly -- the last thing one would expect to make sense in a musical. As illness claimed Fosse's life after ALL THAT JAZZ was completed and hailed by a jealous industry that hated him for truth-telling, so too, his alter ego autobiographical character, director-choreographer "Joe Gideon" is zipped into a body bag in the film's final shot, to the bawdy schmaltz of Ethel Merman belting out There's No Business Like Show Business. Roll end credits. A brilliant, almost incomparable New York cast and crew, driven to the limit of their individual and combined talents by a driven creator who paid with his life.
Driven by what? Good question. Not money or fame or love. Not happiness. Perfection. The thing no one can do. "Never beautiful enough, never funny enough," Gideon shrugs in confession to the Angel of Death. "When I look at a rose, that's perfect. It's perfect! I want to look up to God and ask, how the hell did you do that? And why can't I do that?"
I understand this movie -- and Bob Fosse's predicament -- not because I had a tenth of his ability or achievements (Best Director, CABARET, 1973); not because I grew up in the Golden Age of show business or tap danced as a kid or faced the intense competitive pressure of working on Broadway. My stuff was shit compared to Fosse. But I understand him.
Drinker. Drug addict. Womanizer. Workaholic. Chain-smoker. No loyalty to anyone or anything except the misery of working with crap to make a miracle, the perfect rose. Feeling barren. Incompetent. Everybody staring at me, full of expectation and respect, willing to do anything I ask as their creative guide, the director -- the one who earned it by walking a tightrope and has to do it again to keep his job -- a job like no other. God on earth, maybe for an hour or two, maybe a minute, a few seconds that send us to heaven and hell and astounds by being original and exquisite.
Joe: "Oooo, I don't think they [the producers] liked it."
Audrey: "I don't know about the audiences, but I think it's the best work you've ever done -- [then, with anger and agony] You son of a bitch!"
Since there's no best place to discuss this, I want to emphasize the scope of achievement Fosse the filmmaker attained in ALL THAT JAZZ. A single example, one among many, is inadequate but typical of Fosse's command of the potential in a motion picture. Having conquered the insanely difficult job of conceiving and staging the dance numbers, Gideon convenes a first reading of the play's book [spoken lines] with the full cast. It's stupid and trite, worse than the awful music he struggled to adapt. After the first line of rehearsal -- a dull joke that everyone laughs at -- Fosse the filmmaker fades everything from the sound track except Gideon's internal experience: tapping his fingers on the table, crushing a cigarette, lighting another, walking away while the reading goes on, tapping his fingers on a pipe, walking back to the table, lifting his hand to rub his face with a ticking wristwatch, toying with a pencil behind his back, snapping it in half, broken pieces bouncing on the floor. His awareness opens to hear the sound of others as Audrey reads the last line and flops her script shut. Applause. Stupid bullshit applause by ordinary people who want it to be good, who want to cheer each other and celebrate the fact that they've been cast in a Broadway show directed by Joe Gideon. Five quick narrative-laden shots later, Joe's in the ICU. His perfect Angel of Death is waiting for him in the wings. Anger, denial... and visitors.
The Stand-Up: "I'm telling you, Gideon, I got real insight into you. There's a deep-seated fear of being conventional."
The Cardiologist: "You are foolishly and childishly flirting with disaster."
I won't spoil the movie by telling you too much. It's an incredibly rich tapestry of a great man's testament to the challenge of directing or living or dying or whatever the hell it is that makes us stop, look and listen with wonder in a darkened theater. "It's show time!" Joe says in the mirror each morning, another battle to survive the blur of past and present. His ex-wife hates him. She's the star of the show. His daughter needs him. Never enough time. His girlfriend loves him, and Joe's incapable of loving anything or anyone ever again. He hates himself with all the passion he feels for his art.
See this film for any reason that turns you on. It's sexy, funny, bizarre, richly photographed and edited, unique in cinematic history. The DVD has commentary by Roy Scheider and clips of Fosse on the set. If you like dance, it's a gold mine of insight, the real deal.
A long time ago in Hollywood, when I was an impressionable chump, actor Lonnie Stevens told me privately that we all have exactly one great story to tell -- our own. He probably said that to all the girls. Yet I think it may be true, and Fosse's one great personal story is so complex and comic and candid that it stands as a high water mark in cinematic art, if you view moviemaking as a narrative medium. Qua entertainment, ALL THAT JAZZ won four Academy Awards including Best Music. It has astonishing dance sequences, directed and choreographed by Fosse, easily the greatest of all sculptors who gave flight and heat and meaning to physical human clay.
But there's more. Infinitely more. It has Fosse himself, portrayed by Roy Scheider under Fosse's challenging creative direction, with the living reference of Bob Fosse right there on the set to illuminate what depth of heaven and hell lay beneath a thick layer of bullshit and burlesque.
Acclaimed and hated for revealing his personal story, Fosse shows us the seduction of Death as an exit, the ultimate painkiller and problem solver, portrayed romantically and with stunning confidence by Jessica Lange in surreal clips that punctuate the film from beginning to end, as Fosse lays out his past, present, and future. ALL THAT JAZZ was Fosse's swan song, after suffering a massive coronary and bypass surgery. That's in the movie, too -- clinically, shockingly, maddeningly -- the last thing one would expect to make sense in a musical. As illness claimed Fosse's life after ALL THAT JAZZ was completed and hailed by a jealous industry that hated him for truth-telling, so too, his alter ego autobiographical character, director-choreographer "Joe Gideon" is zipped into a body bag in the film's final shot, to the bawdy schmaltz of Ethel Merman belting out There's No Business Like Show Business. Roll end credits. A brilliant, almost incomparable New York cast and crew, driven to the limit of their individual and combined talents by a driven creator who paid with his life.
Driven by what? Good question. Not money or fame or love. Not happiness. Perfection. The thing no one can do. "Never beautiful enough, never funny enough," Gideon shrugs in confession to the Angel of Death. "When I look at a rose, that's perfect. It's perfect! I want to look up to God and ask, how the hell did you do that? And why can't I do that?"
I understand this movie -- and Bob Fosse's predicament -- not because I had a tenth of his ability or achievements (Best Director, CABARET, 1973); not because I grew up in the Golden Age of show business or tap danced as a kid or faced the intense competitive pressure of working on Broadway. My stuff was shit compared to Fosse. But I understand him.
Drinker. Drug addict. Womanizer. Workaholic. Chain-smoker. No loyalty to anyone or anything except the misery of working with crap to make a miracle, the perfect rose. Feeling barren. Incompetent. Everybody staring at me, full of expectation and respect, willing to do anything I ask as their creative guide, the director -- the one who earned it by walking a tightrope and has to do it again to keep his job -- a job like no other. God on earth, maybe for an hour or two, maybe a minute, a few seconds that send us to heaven and hell and astounds by being original and exquisite.
Joe: "Oooo, I don't think they [the producers] liked it."
Audrey: "I don't know about the audiences, but I think it's the best work you've ever done -- [then, with anger and agony] You son of a bitch!"
Since there's no best place to discuss this, I want to emphasize the scope of achievement Fosse the filmmaker attained in ALL THAT JAZZ. A single example, one among many, is inadequate but typical of Fosse's command of the potential in a motion picture. Having conquered the insanely difficult job of conceiving and staging the dance numbers, Gideon convenes a first reading of the play's book [spoken lines] with the full cast. It's stupid and trite, worse than the awful music he struggled to adapt. After the first line of rehearsal -- a dull joke that everyone laughs at -- Fosse the filmmaker fades everything from the sound track except Gideon's internal experience: tapping his fingers on the table, crushing a cigarette, lighting another, walking away while the reading goes on, tapping his fingers on a pipe, walking back to the table, lifting his hand to rub his face with a ticking wristwatch, toying with a pencil behind his back, snapping it in half, broken pieces bouncing on the floor. His awareness opens to hear the sound of others as Audrey reads the last line and flops her script shut. Applause. Stupid bullshit applause by ordinary people who want it to be good, who want to cheer each other and celebrate the fact that they've been cast in a Broadway show directed by Joe Gideon. Five quick narrative-laden shots later, Joe's in the ICU. His perfect Angel of Death is waiting for him in the wings. Anger, denial... and visitors.
The Stand-Up: "I'm telling you, Gideon, I got real insight into you. There's a deep-seated fear of being conventional."
The Cardiologist: "You are foolishly and childishly flirting with disaster."
I won't spoil the movie by telling you too much. It's an incredibly rich tapestry of a great man's testament to the challenge of directing or living or dying or whatever the hell it is that makes us stop, look and listen with wonder in a darkened theater. "It's show time!" Joe says in the mirror each morning, another battle to survive the blur of past and present. His ex-wife hates him. She's the star of the show. His daughter needs him. Never enough time. His girlfriend loves him, and Joe's incapable of loving anything or anyone ever again. He hates himself with all the passion he feels for his art.
See this film for any reason that turns you on. It's sexy, funny, bizarre, richly photographed and edited, unique in cinematic history. The DVD has commentary by Roy Scheider and clips of Fosse on the set. If you like dance, it's a gold mine of insight, the real deal.
In A Lonely Place (1950)
As you can perhaps appreciate, it is extremely rare that I recommend a movie, especially one that came as a complete surprise to me -- an educated guess in the video rental shop that turned out to be shockingly good, a film that Columbia had no business making, except that director Nicholas Ray (REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE) wanted to do it and Bogart's production company financed it.
Humphrey Bogart made a long list of great pictures, notably KEY LARGO, THE AFRICAN QUEEN and THE MALTESE FALCON. But Nick Ray's adaptation of a pulp novel by Dorothy B. Hughes is Bogart's best performance by far, a role that blended completely with the man himself. Known for his intellect, courage and combativeness, Bogart the man inhabits IN A LONELY PLACE so fully that we're confronted with one of the very few Objectivist dramas ever made. Nicolas Ray was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and a contemporary of Ayn Rand, so there's not much doubt that her influence was strong in this uniquely talented filmmaker. Ray's wife, the beautiful and brillliant Gloria Grahame co-starred opposite Bogart. In a word -- fabulous. No one else could have done it, and it's her picture just as much as his, with equal screen time and equal weight of plot.
The plot? Purely Ray, who transformed a trashy novel about a deranged serial killer into a deeply layered portrait of a genius wrongly accused of murder. In screenwriter Andrew Solt's second draft, the genius cracks and kills the woman he loves. Ray shot it that way, then threw it out and made one of the most memorable endings in motion picture history -- the hard truth of lost trust.
Audiences hated it and critics pegged it as film noir. I found it life-giving, frighteningly real, almost un-cinematic. Completely absorbing. So starved are we for an example of art that it shocks to see such a well made, seamlessly compelling film. Sony's digital restoration was excellent. Supporting cast is great. Photography and editing are above average. Ray's conception of screen montage -- his composition and sequence of shots -- is nothing short of stupendous. He makes Billy Wilder (SUNSET BOULEVARD) and Robert Altman (THE PLAYER) look like a clumsy amateurs whose synthetic tales of Hollywood dissolve like cheap candyfloss compared to real filmmaking by a truly great American director.
I never cared much for REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, although I recognized in it a snapshot of my own travail and the airhead society which I stupidly struggled to transcend. IN A LONELY PLACE gave me back my soul, a validation and salute to the best within us and how fragile we are as human beings. Keep in mind the context if you watch this movie. War is hell, and warriors come home with demons and dragons to repress and manage heroically and imperfectly.
Humphrey Bogart made a long list of great pictures, notably KEY LARGO, THE AFRICAN QUEEN and THE MALTESE FALCON. But Nick Ray's adaptation of a pulp novel by Dorothy B. Hughes is Bogart's best performance by far, a role that blended completely with the man himself. Known for his intellect, courage and combativeness, Bogart the man inhabits IN A LONELY PLACE so fully that we're confronted with one of the very few Objectivist dramas ever made. Nicolas Ray was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and a contemporary of Ayn Rand, so there's not much doubt that her influence was strong in this uniquely talented filmmaker. Ray's wife, the beautiful and brillliant Gloria Grahame co-starred opposite Bogart. In a word -- fabulous. No one else could have done it, and it's her picture just as much as his, with equal screen time and equal weight of plot.
The plot? Purely Ray, who transformed a trashy novel about a deranged serial killer into a deeply layered portrait of a genius wrongly accused of murder. In screenwriter Andrew Solt's second draft, the genius cracks and kills the woman he loves. Ray shot it that way, then threw it out and made one of the most memorable endings in motion picture history -- the hard truth of lost trust.
Audiences hated it and critics pegged it as film noir. I found it life-giving, frighteningly real, almost un-cinematic. Completely absorbing. So starved are we for an example of art that it shocks to see such a well made, seamlessly compelling film. Sony's digital restoration was excellent. Supporting cast is great. Photography and editing are above average. Ray's conception of screen montage -- his composition and sequence of shots -- is nothing short of stupendous. He makes Billy Wilder (SUNSET BOULEVARD) and Robert Altman (THE PLAYER) look like a clumsy amateurs whose synthetic tales of Hollywood dissolve like cheap candyfloss compared to real filmmaking by a truly great American director.
I never cared much for REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, although I recognized in it a snapshot of my own travail and the airhead society which I stupidly struggled to transcend. IN A LONELY PLACE gave me back my soul, a validation and salute to the best within us and how fragile we are as human beings. Keep in mind the context if you watch this movie. War is hell, and warriors come home with demons and dragons to repress and manage heroically and imperfectly.
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