The Screengrab : spellbound

Hello, Dali: Al May Play in Sal in One of Three Planned Biopics

Phil Nugent — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Jerome Taylor reports that there are three biopics about Salvador Dali in the works, a perfect storm of competing productions that might make for a much bigger payoff for whoever is the first to get a completed film to market. (Who can forget the great multiple-Truman-Capote-movies dust-up of a few years ago?) The first film to arrive in theaters will probably be Paul Morrison's Little Ashes, which stars Robert Pattison, the vampire hunk from Twilght, as the young Dali, Javier Beltrán as Federico Garcia Lorca, and Matthew McNulty as Luis Bunuel, whose first film, the immortal Surrealist short Un Chien Andalou, was co-directed with Dali and featured a cameo by the artist as a priest. Another film, simply titled Dali, is being planned, by the director Simon West, for a 2010 release and would star Antonio Banderas as the older Dali, alongside his Zorro co-star Catherine Zeta Jones as Dali's wife, Gala. Then there's the chance that we'll get to see the way older Dali played by Al Pacino in a movie based on Dali & I: The Surreal Story, a book by Stan Lauryssens. Lauryssens's book, which has been translated into some thirty languages, had its own scandalous reception when it appeared. Lauryssens, who has written award-winning crime novels, five nonfiction books about the Nazis, and boasted about his expertise at writing and selling "fake interviews" with various Hollywood celebrities, also spent some time in the poky for selling fake Dalis. The book set off fire alarms in Europe for its allegation that Dali himself had effectively authorized the sale of forgeries of his work by setting up an assembly line of "assistants" to create works that he could then decorate with his signature, which amounted to printing money. By the time Dali was in his dotage, Andy Warhol was unapologetically doing pretty much the same thing, with Jeff Koons waiting in the wings; in Warhol's case, his admirers were happy to take the whole thing as some kind of postmodernist gesture and a sardonic comment on the treatment of works of art as high-priced commodities, but even if it was a gesture, Andy still expected people to pay through the nose for the damn things. If Lauryssens's depiction of Dali's operation is accurate, Dali might have been able to talk a pretty good game explaining that he was in charge of a "surreal" parody of the art world as just another industry. Of course, by that time, Dali had long since been read out of the Surrealist movement by his former brothers, who, appalled at what they saw as his selling out and turning himself into a profitable living cartoon of a wacky artist, referred to him by the anagrammatic nickname "Avida Dollars."

Dali himself had one foot in Hollywood for much of his life, engaging in publicity stunts such as presenting Harpo Marx with a "surreal" harp strung with barbed wire and cutlery, and designing the dream sequence for Hitchcock's analytic mystery Spelllbound. (That ended up being pretty much a publicity stunt, too; Hitchcock shot some twenty minutes of film based on the material Dali gave him, but the movie's producer, David Selznick, thought that it just slowed the picture down and cut it back to a few fragments.) He also spent eight months in 1945 working on an animated short for Walt Disney; it never got beyond am 18-minute test reel in Dali's and Disney's lifetimes, but the 2003 Destino was based on Dali's and Disney artist John Hench's storyboards. Back in his Hollywood-fake-journalist days, Laurysssens embroidered on that factoid and "made up a great story about how he and Disney were working on a sort of pornographic cartoon together.” Taylor writes that "That story caught the attention of a shady investment group in Belgium who assumed Lauryssens was a Dali expert and hired him as a fine art dealer. So, at just 25, Lauryssens found himself flying around Europe buying scores of Dali paintings despite having absolutely no prior experience in the world of fine art." According to Lauryssens, “everyone knew that Dali needed close to half a million dollars a month to fund his lavish lifestyle,” which Lauryssens likens to that of "a mini-maharajah,” and fake Dalis sold better by then than Dali's own later works because his "assistants" had a better handle on how to festoon the works with such familiar Dali "trademarks" as "the melting clocks." Of course, any Hollywood interest in Dali now will be based not on any debates over the degree to which he was an artist or a con man but on how sensational his life was, and here, Lauryssens, who is set to be played in the movie by Cillian Murphy, is confident that a film based on his book would qualify as a humdinger. Taylor notes that the book "portrayed the painter and his wife Gala as two voraciously charged lovers who regularly indulged in orgies with famous actresses". But by the last time Lauryssens laid eyes on him, Dali "was balding, his stomach swollen 'and his right arm shook from shoulder to wrist'." Lauryssens says that the movie is all set to go as soon as Pacino signs on. The trick there may be postponing Al's realization that he would be playing the fat old bald guy with the tremor who gets to spend his time on screen flashing back to when Cillian Murphy was involved in all those cool orgies.

Yesterday's Hits: Duel in the Sun (1946, King Vidor)

Paul Clark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Duel in the Sun a hit?: David O. Selznick was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood throughout the 1930s, a decade that concluded with his production of Hollywood’s biggest hit of all time, Gone With the Wind. After that film’s runaway success, Selznick could pretty much write his own ticket, and he used his clout to make his dream project, a mega-budgeted adaptation of Niven Busch’s novel Duel in the Sun. Selznick spared no expense- the budget topped out at a then-unprecedented $6 million- to bring this Wild West melodrama to the screen in “Glorious Technicolor”, going through more than half a dozen directors (including Josef von Sternberg) before handing the directorial reins over to Hollywood veteran King Vidor.

In the film’s principal roles, Selznick cast a pair of hot young stars- Gregory Peck, fresh off his breakout role in the Selznick production of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and Jennifer Jones, a recent Oscar-winner for The Song of Bernadette, who took over the role for the pregnant Teresa Wright. He then backed them with a stellar supporting cast, including Joseph Cotten, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Herbert Marshall, and Lillian Gish. But perhaps the biggest factor in the film’s success was its unabashedly lurid story about a “half-breed” woman who was irresistibly drawn to a bad-boy rancher. Combining a horse opera with a soap opera and filling the atmosphere with liberal amounts of (implied) sex, Duel in the Sun stirred up no small amounts of controversy. Yet the hubbub surrounding the film (quickly nicknamed “Lust in the Dust”) ended up helping its box-office performance, and Duel became one of the biggest hits of 1946, bringing in more than $11 million.

What happened?: While Duel in the Sun was a hit with moviegoers, reviews were decidedly mixed, praising the film’s production values while criticizing its script (credited to Selznick himself) and performances. And in spite of the fact that the film eventually made money, Selznick found it increasingly difficult to make films in light of the movie’s runaway budget and extravagant (upwards of $2 million) advertising campaign. Selznick continued to work in Hollywood, but his once-prodigious output slowed considerably in the years after Duel in the Sun. On the positive side, the movie continued Gregory Peck’s steady ascent to leading-man stardom, and three years after the film’s release, Selznick married Jones, a marriage that continued until his death in 1965.

Does Duel in the Sun still work?: Not really. For such a popular genre, melodrama is difficult to pull off on film, especially in a way that ages well. Part of the problem is that melodramas were sometimes the only way to deal with risqué material under the Production Code. But while there was no shortage of controversy surrounding Duel in the Sun, most of the elements of the film that were once controversial edgy- particularly the “half-breed” background of heroine Pearl Chavez (played by Jones) and the “bad girl” urges she feels toward Peck- are dealt with in a hamfisted and uninspired manner.

It doesn’t help that Jones is all wrong for the part. Setting aside the now-politically incorrect use of “brown-face” that was utilized to make the lily-white Jones look the part, she’s simply too prim and polished to be convincing. Jones’ idea of speaking like a half-Mexican, half-Native American woman is to lower her vocal register while droppin’ the occasional “g” from the ends of words. And when even Pearl turns into a lusty, unbridled “bad girl” after falling for Peck’s Lewt McCanlies, Jones’ performance becomes almost laughable, consisting mainly of striking sultry poses and making goo-goo eyes at Peck. Jones never seems comfortable in the role she’s given, and this discomfort comes through in her performance.

Another factor was, to put it bluntly, that there were simply too many cooks. It takes a firm hand on the directorial wheel to pull off a lurid story like this one, but after going through more than half a dozen directors, Vidor was little more than a hired gun, lorded over by Selznick. But rather than allowing the story to dictate the style, Selznick overwhelmed it with production values, in a clear attempt to turn it into Gone With the Wind Goes West. Admittedly, Duel in the Sun is gorgeous, with plenty of sweeping vistas and deep orange sunsets to please the eye. However, the story becomes bogged down by the weight of the production, and many of the more emotional moments get lost in the scenery. The result is a movie that’s tamer and more bloated than any good melodrama should be. Compared to another popular melodrama of the period, John M. Stahl’s still-effective Leave Her to Heaven, Duel in the Sun is little more than an overstuffed curiosity.

That said, the one element of the movie that still works is Gregory Peck’s performance as the strapping Lewt. Later in his career, Peck became associated with playing heroes- not least in his iconic turn in To Kill a Mockingbird- so it’s fascinating to see the traits that made him such a perfect good guy used in service of an unsavory character. It helps that Peck was convincingly tall in the saddle to play a cowboy, all the better to turn the cowboy archetype- morally uncomplicated, decisive, solving problems through action- on its ear. Peck treads a thin line here, giving a performance that’s just dark enough to make the character work in this context, while simultaneously suggesting that Lewt might’ve been the hero under different circumstances. If nothing else, Duel in the Sun showed moviegoers just how commanding a performer Peck could be, even if the movie itself ultimately let him down.

DVD Digest for October 14, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of thrills on Blu-Ray and some interesting arthouse releases coming to DVD. Oh, and some guy with a whip.

Conundrum of the Week: Terrence Malick’s The New World is one of my favorite movies of all time. So why am I not more excited about this week’s release of the “Extended Cut” of the film? You’d think that I would welcome the opportunity to see even more of the film, to luxuriate in its irresistible Malick-ness. Yet I find myself torn. On the one hand, I’m encouraged by the fact that Malick re-cut the film himself, which leads me to believe that maybe he just needed more time to get his vision fine-tuned to his exact specifications (I still yearn, in vain I fear, for his 6-hour cut of The Thin Red Line). But it was the theatrical cut that I fell in love with in the first place. So why can’t the boys at Warner just do what Universal did last week and release all three existing cuts of The New World in one handy box set? Now, there would be an occasion worth celebrating. I know, I know- I’m thinking about it too much. But that’s what they pay me for, after all…

Also notable this week is MGM’s Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which contains eight Hitchcock titles from their library and features many new commentary tracks and archival material including Hitchcock being interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut. The big titles in the set are Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious, each of which went out of print on Criterion DVD a few years ago, and which are now available separately as well as in the set. Other titles in the set are The Paradine Case, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Lifeboat, and The Lodger. Other classics coming to DVD include: a new release of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (Criterion), Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (Koch), Capricorn One (Lionsgate), and the 15th Anniversary of Chaplin (Lionsgate), which features what’s still Robert Downey Jr.’s sole Oscar nomination to date.

The week’s biggest recent release on DVD is, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), a movie which I enjoyed but which disappointed a number of fans including Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But if you’re one of the Indy naysayers, check out one or more of this week’s crop of new indies: Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Genghis Kahn origin story Mongol (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Cannes-anointed The Edge of Heaven (Strand Releasing), and this year’s Golden Bear-winner at Berlin, Elite Squad (Genius Productions). Or if you’ve got a little too much cash jangling around in your pockets, you can always either buy The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie (Universal) or drive by your local Best Buy and throw $20 out of your car window, both of which produce about the same effect.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: CSI Season 8 (Paramount), Back to You Season 1 (Universal), Nash Bridges Season 1 (Paramount), and The Unit Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s releases are a fairly action-packed bunch, including thrills of all sorts. For true-crime thrills, try Eastern Promises (Universal), American Gangster (Universal), or Casino (Universal). If you’ve got a taste for blood, give Interview With the Vampire (Warner) a spin. For adventure and romance, there’s always the double feature of Romancing the Stone (Fox) and Jewel of the Nile (Fox). If you like your action spiced liberally with cyberpunk, you probably don’t need me to tell you about this week’s release of The Ultimate Matrix Collection (Warner). For some Halloween chills, check out Poltergeist (Warner). And if you don’t really care for good movies, Constantine (Warner) should satisfy your movie-watching urges just fine.

Watch It For Free: “Hands on a Hard Body”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

It’s been nearly a decade since S.R. Bindler’s debut film Hands on a Hard Body reached theaters, and the director hasn’t been heard from since. That’s about to change as Bindler’s first narrative feature, Surfer, Dude, is set to premiere this Friday in an exclusive Austin engagement and expand to more markets the following week. (Watch this space for a review.) The title may make it sound like a Spring Break sequel, but Hard Body is actually a documentary mostly confined to the parking lot of a Nissan dealership in Longview, Texas. Despite this seeming limitation, Hands on a Hard Body is a mini-epic spanning the full spectrum of human emotion. It’s also very difficult to find: used copies of the long out-of-print DVD are going for upwards of $85 on Amazon. But now you can watch Hard Body right there in the privacy of your cubicle.

The movie’s subject is the contest that shares its title, an annual endurance competition (since discontinued after one participant in the 2005 contest killed himself) with a brand new, fully-loaded pickup truck as the grand prize. The rules are simple: keep at least one hand on the truck at all times, but do not lean on the truck to support yourself. Last one standing wins the truck. If visions of Jeff Probst are dancing in your head, it’s worth noting that Hard Body pre-dates the reality TV craze by a year or two, and its elimination structure has provided the template for a wave of documentaries from the little-known Karaoke Fever to the crowd-pleaser Spellbound. If you’ve never seen it, here’s your chance: the full movie can be found on Google Video here.

Related:
Truth and Consequences in the Documentary World
The World of Lists: Documentaries Get Their Due

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Cinema, a form that makes it possible for the artist to actually devise and stage his own dreams and record them for posterity, has always had a fascination with psychiatrists, explorers of the mind who endeavor to delve into their patients' subconscious for clues as to how to better understand and regulate their conscious behavior. The new HBO series In Treatment is remarkable for how accurately it captures the droning frustration of a session with a typical modern shrink, whose concern that he not appear judgemental or nonobjective leaves him with little to do but sit there grunting noncommittally while the person who's paying for his time sits there tearing his hair out. But it wasn't always that way. As depicted in movies, psychiatry was once a dashing profession, inhabited by risk takers who jumped into their patients' lives with both feet and made a real effort to make a difference. More often than not, the differences they made were scary, destructive, and hair-raising. Still, it must have been nice for their patients to know that they were sharing their problems with someone who cared. Such as these worthies:

1. DR. CALIGARI (WERNER KRAUSE) in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919)

Dr. Caligari (Werner Krause) runs the laughing academy in the picturesque German mountain village of Holstenwall. As the film's narrator tells it, Caligari has been using hypnotism to control his charge Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and has also been trying to help the patient to find a place for himself in society by exhibiting him at the local geek show. When Caligari invites members of the crowd to test Cesare's omniscient powers by asking him an unanswerable question, the narrator's friend, being German, asks him not when Chinese Democracy is going to be finished but when he, the friend, will die. Cesare tells him that he will die the next dawn, and because the doctor has taught him that words must be backed up by action, makes sure that the prophecy comes true by tracking the fellow down and throttling him to meet the deadline. At the end of the movie, all this is revealed to a delusional fantasy of the narrator's, who is in fact an inmate in the asylum where Caligari really is chief of staff. The film ends with Caligari's happy announcement that, now that the narrator has gone to the trouble of envisioning a landmark work in the history of silent German Expressionist cinema, Caligari now has the key to his treatment. Maybe if a few more of the people in analysis had cared a little more about breaking new ground cinematically, the success rate among those in therapy would skyrocket.

2. DR. YEN LO (KHIGH DHIEGH) in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

At first glance, Dr. Yen Lo seems to be the ideal psychiatrist. He has a wife he dotes on, an easy bedside manner, an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest medical and behavioral techniques, and a quick wit. “Always with humor!”, he tells a colleague, with a beaming smile on his Chinese face. It’s only when you realize that the joke he’s just told his nervous compatriot involves using him as the test dummy on which to unleash his newly reprogrammed assassin, and that his gregarious, friendly bedside manner only comes after he has completely rewired your brain and turned you into a remorseless killer that the bloom starts to come off the rose. And sooner or later, you’re going to realize that he may have gotten you to lose weight and play a mean game of solitaire, but he’s also gotten you hooked on yak dung cigarettes. To sum up, Dr. Yen Lo isn’t the kind of doctor who is going to get a lot of referrals through the HMO. But he is, as played by omnipresent character actor Khigh Dhiegh in the immortal 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, the man who made an unstoppable, relentless killer out of war hero Raymond Shaw, and one of the most sinister psychiatrists in cinematic history. (Dhiegh specialized in portraying menacing Chinese – he was also Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-0 – but he was actually not east Asian at all, but of North African Arab origin.) It’s his jolly, disarming manner that makes his aptitude at destroying innocent men’s minds so particularly monstrous; and worst of all, he gets off scot-free in a movie soaked with bloody murder: the last time we see him, he’s tottering off to Macy’s to tick some items off of Madame Lo’s shopping list.

3. DR. LOUIS JUDD (TOM CONWAY) in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

When you think about how many overpaid chin-scratchers are using their psychiatry degrees as a license to tap into the bank accounts of people who have abandonment issues or wished that daddy had hugged them more, you have to feel a certain admiration for Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who bravely agreed to take on the more difficult case of a deeply troubled young woman (Simone Simon) who was reluctant to consummate her marriage because she was convinced that if she did, she would turn into a sharp-clawed, fang-toothed jungle cat, with dire effects for any naked man who happened to be embracing her at the time. Dr. Judd's breakthrough method of treatment for her condition--i.e., putting the moves on her--remains controversial; some feel that he violated the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship, while others, pointing out that it was the patient's husband who retained him, argue that anyone who puts his confused, hot young wife in the hands of a guy with a pencil line mustache and a family resemblance to George Sanders is begging for whatever happens. In the end, Dr. Judd surprised himself, if no one else, by establishing that if anyone hit on his patient hard enough she really would turn into a murderous jungle cat, and in his last moments on Earth he wrapped up the case by shooting his client, thus making himself a hero figure to therapists everywhere.

4. COL. VINCENT KANE (STACY KEACH) in THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

“I’m telling you, Billy, Kane is Gregory Peck in Spellbound,” says Lt. Frank Reno (who is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs) to the depressed astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw. “It’s just like that movie. He comes to take over the nuthouse and he’s nuts himself.” Cutshaw responds to this news by requesting that Reno drop out of a tree like an overripe mango, but the lieutenant is right: Col. Vincent Kane, the Marine Corps psychiatrist sent to take charge of an insane asylum staffed by disturbed Vietnam veterans, is in fact the craziest man in the joint. The actual extent of his insanity is slowly teased out over the course of this gripping, underrated movie written and directed by The Exorcist’s William Peter Blatty; it begins as a surreal, endlessly quotable comedy, and, as Kane’s madness is revealed, becomes a dark, deep philosophical drama. Colonel Kane is played by Stacy Keach in what can only be described as the role of a lifetime, and he meets it with gusto. At first, he’s full of quiet compassion and boundless sympathy, but with the right provocations and the slightest circumstance, he’s fully transformed into the raging, lethal “Killer” Kane. One of his most memorable scenes comes when his subordinate, Major Groper, cavils at having to play dress-up as part of the inmates’ role-playing therapy; demanding love and compassion from Groper, Kane morphs, werewolf-like, from an impossibly kindly shrink to a seething, hissing, screaming maniac of a Marine drill instructor who’d just as soon see someone dead as insubordinate. Groper, by the way, gets one of the movie’s funniest lines earlier in the movie: warning the men – who he considers to be goldbricking fakers – that the asylum will soon be taken over by the formidable Kane, he hollers: “Too bad, boys! Tough shit! Because guess who’s coming? A PSYCHIATRIST! The best! The best in uniform! The greatest fucking psychiatrist since Jung!” Naturally, he pronounces it with a hard J.

5. DR. HANNIBAL LECTER (BRIAN COX) in MANHUNTER (1986) and ANTHONY HOPKINS in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), HANNIBAL (2001), and RED DRAGON (2002)

In many ways, this is an atypical entry for this list, as in the four films set during Dr. Hannibal Lecter's adult life, we almost never actually see him working with patients. Yet I doubt anyone would contest his inclusion here. Formidably intelligent, impossibly cultured, and certifiably wacko, Lecter's appetites take him all over the world and into many realms of human experience. Yet even more than his taste for human flesh, what makes him truly scary is the way he uses that great big brain of his to toy with those he perceives as being beneath him. As a character explains in Hannibal, Lecter preys on what he calls "the rude," and his most severe mind games are reserved for those who offend his cultivated sensibilities. Think of the way he talks Multiple Miggs into swallowing his own tongue after Miggs insults Clarice. Or the way he drugs Mason Verger and convinces him to carve up his own face. But even when he's dealing with people he respects more, he can't help himself — consider his conversations with Clarice, in which he drops hints about the case she's working on, but in the form of riddles rather than as straightforward clues. One almost feels sorry for him after a while — after all, what else does he have left to enjoy in life but his mind?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

IDA List FUBAR

Peter Smith — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

As anyone who's perused the American Film Institute's lists can tell you, consensus is boring. Unfortunately, it's hard to get around when you conduct a poll. The International Documentary Association has asked its members to select the twenty-five greatest documentaries ever made. (They voted from a list of 700 films, but that complete list doesn't seem to be available on the IDA's website.) It reveals that documentarians are just as prone to sticking with the "new release" shelves and shying away from subtitles as the rest of us. Despite the "international" in the IDA's name, only two foreign-language films made the top twenty-five — Buena Vista Social Club landed at #20 and Night and Fog at #22. Never fear, though: Michael Moore will come to save the day, with three films on the list. While including a number of landmarks (Titicut Follies, Don't Look Back, Grey Gardens), the list leans towards high-profile recent documentaries, including major films (Capturing the Friedmans, Grizzly Man) and mediocrities (Born into Brothels, Spellbound). Any films made before 1955 are missing — so much for Dziga Vertov (without whom Koyaanisqatsi, the #14 entry, would look much different) and Robert Flaherty. A strict definition of documentary seems to have kept F for Fake and Close Up at bay. All but two films are available on DVD — I wonder if this has anything to do with Netflix's sponsorship of the poll. Still, this list isn't entirely without merit in the long run — like the AFI's, it begs to be countered and is bound to spur dialogue, as it already has in the blogosphere. — Steve Erickson