The Screengrab : the hudsucker proxy

In Search of a Midnight Reality Check: New Year's Eve at the Movies

Phil Nugent — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Hey, happy New Year, everybody, but Josh Rosenblatt ain't having it. Rosenblatt has noticed that our attitudes towards important events in our lives tend to be colored by a template for how those events should look based on similar events they've seen in movies. "Even at my father's memorial service, I couldn't help thinking about Vito Corleone's funeral scene in The Godfather, wondering how ours looked by comparison. (Not too badly, as it turns out. A little light on gangsters and a little heavy on rabbis, but otherwise a perfect, totally depressing scene.)" And as he sees it, New Year's Eve is "when Hollywood really cranks up the fantasy quotient and goes out of its way to create the most unreasonable expectations for what a quality holiday experience – and, by extension, what a quality life – should be. New Year's movies play almost like advertisements: You too can fall madly in love with the perfect girl and commemorate the occasion with a 20-minute dance number set to a Gershwin score, like Gene Kelly in An American in Paris! You too can be blessed with economic and creative freedom at the stroke of midnight, like Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy! You too can find yourself in the middle of the perfect, fleeting romantic moment just by posting a request on the Internet, like Scoot McNairy in In Search of a Midnight Kiss! It's fantasy after fantasy, cultivating in our minds the most absurd notions of what is and isn't possible, of what we should and shouldn't expect from ourselves, on this one arbitrary night of the year."

Rosenblatt breaks "the most pernicious, ridiculous, self-defeating myths in our collective unconscious" associated with New Year's Eve down into a handful of categories. There's "the Myth of the 11th-Hour Conversion", as typified by the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Billy Crystal hies off to tell Meg Ryan that she's the one for him before the year ends, thus promoting "the happy delusion that love conquers all – space, time, disagreement, detachment, disaffection, disillusionment, late-Eighties hairdos, even karaoke – and that the love realized just as one year is turning into another is a love that will last forever. But in reality, what this movie shows us is that loneliness on New Year's Eve makes people do things they probably shouldn't." There's also "the Myth of Secular Redemption." Consider About a Boy, in which Hugh Grant lets Rachel Weisz think he's actually the father of his young chum Marcus so that she'll mistake him for a man of substance. "When Rachel finds out the truth, she dumps him, of course, precipitating an existential collapse that leads Will to the realization that without people to love, life is a spiritual vacuum. The Myth of Secular Redemption assures us that no one is beyond saving – that even the worst among us are capable of great acts of decency, especially when they fall in love on New Year's Eve. What a delightful moral for such a deviant movie to end with. Problem is, that isn't really the moral of the movie. The practiced cynical eye can see what the sad message of About a Boy really is: Lying is the perfect way to start a relationship.

Finally, there's the Myth of the Better You, as seen in The Apartment, in which Shirley MacLaine, the girl who's been screwing Jack Lemmon's mean, powerful prick of a boss (Fred MacMurray) who's been using Lemmon's apartment as his adulterous love nest, finds out, on New Year's Eve, that Lemmon has told MacMurray to take a flying leap and quit his job. She rushes to Lemmon's side, "and they play a game of bridge. Beautiful, right? The perfect New Year's movie? Love triumphs over cynicism; the nice guy gets the girl; our heroes become the most decent versions of themselves? Well, the sad truth about The Apartment is enough to make a grown film critic cry, so jaded is it in its view of human nature: She's going to cheat on him. No doubt about it. 'Shut up, and deal,' will soon sound like a thousand daggers" in Lemmon's heart. "Here's the thing," Rosenblatt writes. "Hollywood consistently paints New Year's Eve as a night of redemption, hope, and possibility, when in reality it's almost invariably a night of dashed expectations, disappointment, and anxiety." Believe me, I'm convinced. Now I just wish I could turn this guy loose on Forrest Gump.

Screengrab Salutes: The Paul Newman Top Ten (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Notable individuals die all the time, and we react with varying degrees of sadness or indifference when their names appear in the weekly obituary sections of magazines like, say, Entertainment Weekly or Time.

But every now and then, a celebrity death truly shocks us, because we really, truly thought the individual in question had already died sometime in the late ‘80s.

Occasionally, though, we react to celebrity death with the heartfelt regret usually reserved for people we actually knew. I moped around for days after heart failure claimed Glenn “Divine” Milstead in 1988, and the 2006 loss of Robert Altman felt like the passing of a beloved, crotchety grandfather.

Paul Newman outlived them both, surviving to the ripe old age of 83. In fact, by a strange coincidence, Wikipedia just informed me that Newman and Altman were both somehow born in 1925, which simply doesn’t compute in my perceptual reckoning of things. How could Newman be older than Robert Altman, or my father, or...or Robert Redford, ferchrissakes? Intellectually, of course, I knew he was old: his film career started way back in 1954 with The Silver Chalice, though I always (erroneously) associated him more with the Baby Boomer class of Nicholson and Beatty, thanks to ‘60s and ‘70s classics like The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Yet, even as Newman aged before our eyes into one of cinema’s grumpy old men in films like Twilight and Road to Perdition, it somehow never registered that he was actually old old. I mean, the man drove freakin’ race cars! How can he be gone while Cheney continues relentlessly on?

Alas...and yet, my Screengrab colleague Phil Nugent has already written a fine memorial tribute to this impressive humanitarian, salad dressing mogul and celebrated paragon of “the Hollywood Elite,” and so we come not to bury Paul Newman but to praise him, and the Top Ten films we’ll always remember him by.

10. THE LONG HOT SUMMER (1958)

This Dixie-fried melodrama, directed by Martin Ritt (who later re-teamed with Newman for Hud), is supposed to be based on the writings of William Faulkner. As a treatment of a great American author it's a soap opera, but as a soap opera it's one hell of an overripe Southern-Gothic sudser, with Newman (modeling the latest in sweat-stained wifebeaters) and a cast that includes Orson Welles, Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, and Anthony Franciosa making with the wild-eyed ravings in cracker accents that might have been delivered to the set in ten-gallon drums. In addition to its shameless entertainment value, it has a special sentimental place in Newman's oeuvre for marking the on-screen meeting of our hero and his offscreen heroine, Joanne Woodward. The plot revolves around a deal that Newman's hungry drifter, Ben Quick, makes with Welles' bloated paterfamilias, Will Varner, to win the hand of Varner's daughter, played by Woodward, who Will fears will otherwise marry poorly to a girly man played by Richard Anderson, AKA TV's Oscar Goldman. In the movie, Woodward remains stoically resistant to Newman's hard-bodied charms. In real life, not so much, and the two of them, who had met two years earlier while understudying the leads in Picnic (at a time when Newman was still inconveniently married to his first wife) reportedly spent much of the shoot making up for lost time. They would work together another dozen or so times, in co-starring gigs and in movies where Newman directed Woodward, but this is the movie that preserves the priceless and unforgettable sight of two very hot people first fully celebrating how hot they were for each other.

9. THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

One of the most amazing things about Paul Newman’s career was how long he was able to get away with working as a leading man. Well into his sixties and seventies, when most actors -- even A-list stars -- tend to be cast in father or mentor roles to nursemaid younger talent, Newman was still flashing those famous cobalt blues, attracting the women, and carrying movies on his ever-capable shoulders. Best of all, he made it work. Yet in his last two decades, Newman also took on several interesting supporting roles. He received an Oscar nomination for his work in Road to Perdition, and in his final theatrical film, he voiced Doc Hudson, the gruff paterfamilias of the town of Radiator Springs, in Pixar’s Cars (let’s forget Message in a Bottle, shall we?). But best of all was his work in the Coen brothers’ sadly under-appreciated The Hudsucker Proxy. In this Art Deco take on a Preston Sturges-style comedy, Newman might seem an ill fit for the role of Hudsucker Industries vice-president Sidney J. Mussburger, the sort of corporate fat cat that might once have been played by Akim Tamiroff. But damn if Newman isn’t a treat to watch. Having built a fruitful career on his ability to make acting look easy, here he takes the opposite tack, giving a performance as stylized as any he’s ever given. In lesser hands, it might have felt like overacting -- look no further than Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance in the same film for proof. But Newman pulls it off magnificently by somehow under-playing the role, never turning the character into an excuse to twist his (invisible) mustache. Instead, he simply turns the patented Newman charm back on itself, showing it used to an entirely different end. Who could ever forget the way he punctuates seemingly half his lines with a grunted “sure-sure”? In The Hudsucker Proxy, Newman gives us a tantalizing hint of what an irresistible character actor he might’ve been even if he hadn’t been so genetically blessed.

8. SLAP SHOT (1977)

It was asking way too much of Slap Shot for lightning to strike a third time. Hell, it was asking too much of The Sting for lightning to strike twice – and yet the second pairing of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill, following the hugely successful Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid proved to be a giant hit as well, satisfying critics and audiences alike. But Hill’s third go-round with Newman in the lead role didn’t have a William Goldman writing the screenplay, and Robert Redford probably wouldn’t have played particularly well as one of the Hanson Brothers, so the two of them went it alone. The story of the final days of a fading, brawling, largely out-of-control minor league hockey team wasn’t as successful as the previous two films, and it certainly didn’t garner the same level of critical praise. But though some great supporting performances and a funny, filthy script by Nancy Dowd played their part, it’s undeniably a testament to Paul Newman’s undying charisma and likeability as an actor that a lot of people would name Slap Shot as their favorite of all his movies. Newman (who featured as one of his most lasting traits the appearance that he genuinely enjoyed what he did for a living) is clearly having a ball as the foul-mouthed, dysfunctional player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs (a character partly modeled on the notorious John Brophy). The role even spilled over into his real life: he complained to Time, seven years after the movie premiered, that since playing Reg Dunlop, his language had been “straight out of the locker room”.

Click Here for Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Paul Newman, 1925--2008

Phil Nugent — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The death of Paul Newman cuts our movie culture's last ties to a generation of 1950s leading men. Newman himself had long since transcended his film debut, The Silver Chalice (1954), a terrible performance in a terrible movie that he, typically, loved to make fun of. A paragon of classical handsomeness and unostentatiously fit-looking, with eyes that people wrote songs about, Newman arrived on the scene at the same time as Method firebrands such as Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, though at first he looked to have more in common with such male mannequins as Rock Hudson and Robert Wagner. He wound up casting a shadow as long as any of them, and better sustaining a career than any of them, by taking his work seriously and endeavoring make it mean something. As Richard Corliss writes, ""Instead of leading his talent in weird and wayward directions, like Brando, or smashing it to pieces on a California highway at 24, like Dean, he just kept getting better, more comfortable in his movie skin, more proficient at suggesting worlds of flinty pleasure or sour disillusion with a smile or a squint." At the same time, he never seemed to be in danger of letting a little thing like being the best-known movie star and sexiest man in the world go to his head.

Newman has to have been one of the most famous movie stars for whom there is no automatically recognizable caricature version; he gave nightclub impressions few outsized mannerisms to latch onto. Newman was someone who moviegoers probably felt they knew better from his offscreen image than from any carefully maintained screen image. His image was that of a superior being who laughed at the idea that he was anything but a regular guy who'd been very, very lucky; a supreme sex symbol who, if given the chance, would probably bore you blind telling you how crazy he was about his wife of fifty years, Joanne Woodward, and his family life (""I have steak at home," Newman once famously told a Playboy interviewer who had the balls to ask him what he had on the side, "why go out for hamburger?"); a celebrity liberal who put his money where his mouth was and became a leading philanthropist, plowing hundred of millions of dollars into charitable causes, much of it generated by Newman's Own, the fantastically profitable food line that Newman and writer A. E. Hotchner began in 1982 as a joke. (Dalhlia Lithwick has a great piece about Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, the summer getaway he established for seriously ill children.) Because he was Paul Newman, and because he chose his causes so well and didn't seem to possess whatever gene creates the appearance of smugness, Newman could indulge his political urges and never seem like a polarizing figure to anyone outside the ranks of the bitterly deranged, and though the news that Richard Nixon had been so thoughtful as to have included him on his White House enemies list He is sometimes said to have embodied the "anti-hero" in such movies as Hud, and that willingness and ability to play morally ambiguous and even downright rotten characters no doubt helped him keep him seem "relevant" as the 1950s crashed into the '60s and '70s, but the truth is that Newman was a logical choice for dislikable characters because, even as he gave meticulous, honest performances in those roles, his own likability took the box-office curse off them. After Newman appeared in the William Faulkner adaptation The Long, Hot Summer as Ben Quick, the sexy lout who is ostracized after being falsely accused of being a barn burner, Pauline Kael wrote that Hollywood had figured out that a hero could burn barns all day and night and audiences would love him anyway, so long as he was played by Paul Newman.

The Long Hot Summer, notable as the first of ten features in which he and Woodward acted together, was also one of three films from 1958, along with Arthur Penn's The Left Handed Gun, in which he played Billy the Kid in the big-screen version of a Gore Vidal TV play and the movie version of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that pinpointed his transition from sincere juvenile to assurec leading man. He achieved classic status in 1961 playing the pool hustler Fast Eddie Felsen in Robert Rossen's The Hustler, a lowlife melodrama whose smoky atmosphere and acting duels between Newman and George C. Scott and Jackie Gleason retain their chewy zest more than forty-five years later. Of the aforementioned Hud, Manohla Dargis writes in yesterday's New York Times: "His lean, hard-muscled body seems to slash against the wide-screen landscape, evoking the oil derricks to come, and the black-and-white cinematography turns his famous baby blues an eerie shade of gray. The character would be a heartbreaker if he were interested in breaking hearts instead of making time with the bodies that come with them. That’s supposed to make Hud a mean man, but mostly he seems self-interested. No one is tearing him apart and Mr. Newman doesn’t try to plumb the depths with the role, which makes the character and the performance feel more contemporary than many of the head cases of the previous decade. He finds depths in these shallows." Hollywood legend has it that it was because of his success in those two movies that, in 1966, when Newman played Ross Macdonald's private eye Lew Archer, the character was re-christianed Harper so that the studio could cash in on what was apparently the sure-fire good-luck charm of releasing a Paul Newman movie whose title began with the letter "H." (Though not one of Newman's best--as in, way not--the movie was a hit, which may be why, a year later, he was rounded up to star in a Western, based on an Elmore Leonard novel, called Hombre.)

Newman's major contributions to the rebel strain of the counterculture were Cool Hand Luke (1967), in which he played a nonconformist on a chain hang who becomes a martyr figure--Christ in a sweat box--and the 1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where his performance, engaging though it is, now looks like part of a charitable enterprise aimed at making a star of his buddy, Robert Redford. He would prove devoted not just to Redford--leading to a partnership that would be dipped in gold and garlanded with Oscars in the 1973 The Sting--but to the directors of those movies: respectively, Stuart Rosenberg, with whom he would re-team for WUSA, Pocket Money, and The Drowning Pool, in which he would reprise the role of Lew Archer, I mean, Harper; and George Roy Hill, who went on to direct The Sting and Slap Shot. For some of us, these hold up less well than many of his other hits; they feel self-satisfied and smirky, with the adolescent wisecracks piling up like foam rubber peanuts. In general, a complacency seemed to settle in for Newman in this period, if not so much in his acting as in his choice of roles. There's plenty of evidence that he had grown tired of presenting himself for the camera's delectation. He had a high-profile side career as a race car driver, but he had also turned to directing. He directed six films in all, four of them--Rachel, Rachel (1968), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1973), the TV film The Shadow Box (1980), and The Glass Menagerie (1987)-- starring Joanne Woodward, and two, the Ken Kesey adaptation Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and Harry and Son (1984) starring himself. (Both he and Woodward won Golden Globes and New York Critics Cricle Awards for Rachel, Rachel.)

There were signs that he had begun to stir again when he signed on to star in two pictures directed by Robert Altman, but Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) and Quintet (1979) did not mark the finest hour for either of them. But by now Newman was in his mid-fifties and wide awake, and he seemed to enter the 1980s with a renewed commitment to his craft. Unlike some other make stars who became public embarrassments by their determination to prove that aging hadn't slowed them down or cost them a drop of testosterone, Newman seemed genuinely, and even playfully, curious about seeing just what he could do with this new state of affairs and how long he could keep it going. His performances in Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), Absence of Malice (1981), and The Verdict (1982) were as forceful and finely shaded as anything he had ever done, maybe as good as anything any star at his age had done, and the Academy Award that he received for revisiting the role of Fast Eddie twenty-five years down the line in Martin Scorsese's The Hustler sequel The Color of Money (1986) may have been even more well-deserved as it was unneeded as a confirmation of his stature.

After that benchmark, he seemed to settle in doing whatever it pleased him to do. He had what looked like a terrific time being miscast as tomcatting Louisiana governor (and secret desegregationist) Earl K. Long in Ron Shelton's Blaze, reunited onscreen once more with his wife in the Merchant-Ivory Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, indulged his taste for screwball nonsense as the capitalist villain of the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), kept a firm grip on his sex appeal even as he approached and passed his seventieth birthday in two movies directed by Robert Benton, the underappreciated 1994 charmer Nobody's Fool and the grim memento-mori detective story Twilight (1998). Some fifty years after playing George Gibbs in Our Town on TV, he returned to the play, this time playing the Stage Manager in a Broadway revival that was also recorded for television. He made his last on-camera movie appearance as Tom Hanks's gangster boss in Road to Perdition but continued to do voice work, including a role in the Pixar animated feature Cars. He also played Ed Harris's father in the 2005 HBO miniseries Empire Falls, whose cast also included Joanne Woodward. In May of 2007, he publicly announced his retirement from acting, a decision that was cause for considerable sadness among his fans. The news of his death might best be seen as cause for gratitude, both for the pleasure he gave and the example he set, and for gobstruck admiration at just how much one man was able to get right in the conduct of his life. Presumably Newman would begin any list of his achievements with the names of his children: Susan Kendall and Stephanie, from his early marriage to Jackie Witte, and, from his marriage to Woodward, Elinor "Nell" Teresa, Melissa "Lissy" Stewart, and Claire "Clea" Olivia. (Elinor appeared in both Rachel, Rachel and The Effect of Gamma Rays under the name "Nell Potts".) Newman and Jackie Witte also had a son, Scott, an actor who made his movie debut opposite his father in The Towering Inferno (1974), who died in 1978 from an accidental drug overdose. The Scott Newman Center, which seeks to prevent substance abuse through education, was established in memory.

Taverns On The Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, last week (as those of you who didn't black out may recall) we here at The Screengrab took you on a very special Pub Crawl through some of the most distinctive gin joints of celluoid.

This week, it’s hair of the dog time as we return to the world of booze (although we can stop anytime we feel like it...really!) for a survey of movies where the dives themselves may be forgettable, but not so the people (and, occasionally, vampires) who inhabit them.

So belly up to the bars and join us for another round of the finest alcoholic action, drunken destruction, boozy balladeering and sudsy seduction in cinema!

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

Sofia Coppola’s fantasia about a depressed movie star and a directionless young woman stranded in a Tokyo luxury hotel is short on plot but long on atmosphere and the pleasures of indolence...and it’s hard to think of two better people to kill time with than Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson (in what, hopefully, won’t turn out to be her career zenith). The fizzy high point of Lost In Translation takes place during a haphazard bar hop (involving strange Japanese...spud guns? Anyone?) that ends (as all the finest bar hops do) in a private Plexiglas karaoke pod high above the city, where Murray’s Bob Harris surprises Johansson’s Charlotte (and, possibly, himself) with the naked romantic yearning in his rendition of Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” leading to lots of platonic foreplay and climaxing in one of the greatest smooches in all of celluloid. (And if you think your warm, fuzzy memories of the movie would be ruined forever if you ever discovered just what, exactly, Bill Murray whispered into ScarJo's ear following that famous kiss, then for God’s sake, don’t CLICK HERE!)

AFTER HOURS (1985)

Our own Phil Nugent recently covered the convoluted history of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and the question of its true authorship. Whoever really wrote it and whoever deserves credit for it, though, it’s a deftly made and smartly directed little comedy, and plays up Scorsese’s rarely credited ability to handle comedy. Despite taking place in the wards and dungeons of Manhattan, After Hours focuses on only a few locations; but the one it gets the most use out of is the punk club Berlin, where the tortured soul Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), already punished beyond reason for the high crime of trying to get into Rosanna Arquette’s pants, must visit in an attempt to do the only thing in the world he wants to do: go home. Just getting in to Berlin is hard enough: he must confront a side-of-beef bouncer (Clarence Felder) who quotes Kafka at him. When he finally gets in the door, he finds that the price of entry is being forcibly corralled by the staff and given a Mohawk as a filmmaker (a cameo by Scorsese himself) shines a spotlight in his face and Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” blares on the the P.A. system. And even that isn’t the end: when, later in the wee hours, Paul is forced to return to Berlin to avoid the fury of a mob who think he’s a housebreaker, he finds it nearly deserted save for an avant-garde artist (Verna Bloom) who ‘saves’ him by encasing him bodily in a shell of shellac and old newspapers. For this he paid a five-dollar cover charge?

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

Look, we’ve all found ourselves in the same situation as Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes once in a while. Broke, hopeless, down on your luck; everyone thinks you’re crazy, your best girl thinks you’re a heel, and your former elevator operator is stealing your ideas. (Well, okay, maybe not that last one.) And, to make things worse, it’s New Year’s Eve, and you don’t even have a date. So the least you can do is to stumble into the nearest bar and kill the pain with a slow, steady supply of martinis. But when Norville hits Ann’s 440 – the beatnik bar favored by his gal Friday, the fast-talking Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – even that doesn’t help: Ann’s, as the exasperated bartender played by Steve Buscemi in the Coen Brothers’ screwball homage The Hudsucker Proxy explains time and time again, doesn’t serve “al-key-hool”. It’s a juice bar, with coffee drinks for the extra-adventurous, and no matter how many times Norville asks for a martini (and he asks a lot), he can’t get one, and is forced to live on the ten or twelve he’s already got percolating in his bloodstream. Finally, Amy arrives and tries to talk him down to earth – even favoring him with a rendition of the Muncie High fight song – but it’s no good; Norville flees the bar and before the night is up, he’ll end up on a ledge. Frankly, we can’t blame him; Ann’s 440 looks cool enough, but as Norville drunkenly asks, what kind of bar is it if you can’t get a martini?

FAT CITY (1972)

John Huston's comeback film is set in Stockton, California and stars Stacy Keach as Tully, an alcoholic boxer who's managed to become a has-been without ever having been much of anything in the first place, and Jeff Bridges as Ernie, a younger man who Tully takes a shine to. Tully encourages the kid to take up boxing, as if encouraging anyone to follow in his own career path counted as a favor. The movie has its fair share of scenes in rowdy, darkly lit bars full of people with nowhere else to go in the middle of the day, but its most haunting moment comes at the end, in an unnaturally bright-looking cafe bar that seems to be a hangout for dry drunks. Tully has pulled Ernie there after the kid, spurning his offer that they go out together for a drink, has agreed to grab a cup of coffee. After an exchange of ideas on the subject of the ancient looking bar man ("How you like to be him?" "Maybe he's happy." "Maybe we're all happy."), Tully looks around the place, and Huston freezes the frames to pinpoint the moment of horrified sobriety. Ernie starts to leave, only to agree to Tully's desperate plea that he stick around and "talk some," but the two men have nothing to say to each other, and the credits roll over the image of them sitting together not talking. The actors move just enough to remind you that this time the frame isn't frozen. Maybe they're happy.

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Christopher Walken earned his hoofer's stripes in this phantasmagorical Depression musical, in which he appears as Tom, a politely soulless pimp who meets his latest employee, Bernadette Peters, when she's sitting in a bar trying to recover from being fired from her job as a schoolteacher for being pregnant by a married man who she hasn't heard from lately. In the movie, the characters use music-inspired fantasies to help them get through what their lives have turned into; here, Peters, who can't think of any way to support herself besides turning tricks, is doing her limited best to deal with the awful fact that she's actually met someone who can teach her how, and Walken, who can dance like a son of a bitch, has no problem making you believe that you're seeing something that a person could only pull off in a daydream. After the number is over, Tom rudely snaps her back to reality by warning her that if he discovers she's a tease who's wasting his time, "I'll cut your face." Walken doesn't have any problem with that part, either.

NEAR DARK (1987)

"Just how old are you, Jesse?" someone asks Lance Henriksen, and Henriksen, smiling like a redneck crocodile, replies, "Let me put it this way, son: I fought for the South." Henriksen's Jesse is the father figure in a brood of vampires who look like a white trash family and travel around in a van with the windows blacked out. In the movie's money scene, they wander into a roadside bar that Bill Paxton -- the "big brother" -- declares to be "Shitkicker Heaven" and proceed to use it as their own personal buffet table. A young Adrian Pasdar plays the hero, an innocent young dude who's been inducted into the family by the bite of a winsome, lonely blonde bloodsucker (Jenny Wright) and is still learning the ropes. Once the bodies start dropping, the bartender pulls out a shotgun and blasts Pasdar in the torso. Reflexively, Pasdar reacts as if he were dying and then stops and stands there with a hole in his chest, registering his surprise that he isn't. "It's a trip, ain't it?" says Paxton. There have been a shitload of reworkings of the vampire genre in the last twenty or so years, but in few of them does the blood flow so red and thickly potent as in this scene.

Related Stories:

Taverns On The Screen - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Two)

Sweet Nothings: The Lost Words of Lost In Translation, Translated

Separated at Birth: "After Hours" and Joe Frank's "Lies"

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews of Cinema (Part II)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

JOHN GOODMAN AS WALTER SOBCHAK IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Okay, so technically, this one is a bit of a cheat. Not only was Walter Sobchak portrayed by the decidedly non-Jewish John Goodman, but the character isn’t even technically of the People; as the Dude points out, he’s a Polish Catholic who converted when he married a Jewish woman. Still, that doesn’t stop him from maintaining his Jewish identity to the point of outright hostility; he won’t roll on Shabbos, and claims that he’s “as Jewish as fuckin’ Tevye”. Nor does it stop him, in a movie not exactly known for its macho tough guys, from being the toughest guy on screen: whether it’s pulling a .45 on a burned-out hippie for going over the line while bowling, hatching a scheme to take out an entire gang of phony kidnappers, or biting the ear off of a German nihilist, the proprietor of Sobchak Security displays a toughness that borders on the psychotic. And if he sometimes flags a bit, backing off from an outraged neighbor whose car he’s just totaled, he makes up for it later by brusquely yanking a paraplegic out of his wheelchair to see if he’s faking. (Turns out he isn’t, but hey, he had to check, right?) As an aside, Walter may be the toughest Jew in the Coen Brothers’ cinematic ouvre, but he’s hardly the only one; their films are crammed full of hard-assed Hebrews. There’s tough-as-nails furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (nee Huffheinz) in Raising Arizona; steely mob moll Verna Birnbaum in Miller’s Crossing, who has plenty more guts than her conniving brother Bernie; monstrous movie producer/force of nature Jack Lipnick (played by longtime tough Jew Michael Lerner) in Barton Fink; scheming business tycoon Sidney Mussberger in The Hudsucker Proxy; and inscrutable post-modernist shyster Freddie Riedenschneider in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Sure, only one of those characters was actually played by a Jewish actor, but the Coen Brothers clearly have a soft spot for tough Jews, and Walter may be the best, but he won’t be the last.

HANK GREENBERG IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANK GREENBERG (1998)

No other baseball player could ever match the impact of Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in 1947, or go through the hell he did to achieve it. But as the 1998 documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg makes clear, the major leagues were no picnic for the first Jewish slugger either. When Greenberg got his start in the Texas League, a teammate was puzzled by his appearance; he'd been told that all Jews had horns. Things didn't improve when he made it to the show in the 1930s. Between Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, Detroit was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Chants of "kike" and "sheeny" rang out through the stands and opposing dugouts. But through it all, Greenberg was a one-man wrecking crew. He was twice voted the American League MVP and he led the Detroit Tigers to back-to-back World Series in 1934 and 1935, despite refusing to play on Yom Kippur during the pennant drive. (He did play on Rosh Hashanah, though – his rabbi found a loophole in the Talmud.) The Hebrew Hammerin' Hank was the first prominent Jew known for physical prowess and an inspiration to kids like Walter Matthau ("I was just delighted to know there was someone like Hank Greenberg around, and I didn't have to wind up as a presser, a cutter or a salesman in the garment center") and Alan Dershowitz ("He defied every stereotype – he defied Hitler's stereotype!"). He's in the baseball Hall of Fame – and now he's in our Hall of Tough Jews.

MICHAEL LERNER AS ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN IN EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

How tough was Arnold Rothstein, the only man to successfully fix the World Series? So tough that Rich Cohen, the author of Tough Jews, calls him “the Moses of organized crime”. Though the man many refer to as the most successful Jewish gangster in American history met an ugly end, getting his gut shot after he bowed out of what he claimed was a crooked poker game, he made quite a name for himself along the way: starting out as a masterful oddsmaker and proposition bettor, he rose to such prominence that Lucky Luciano credits him as having taught the Italian mobsters of the day how to act and dress, and Frank Costello claims he was the first to truly recognize the vast amounts of money to be made off of prohibition. He became fodder for no less an artist than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim on him; Damon Runyon picked up the gauntlet, writing Arnold into many of his stories under a variety of names. Along the way, he also became a legendary pool shark (providing inspiration for the marathon game in The Hustler) and made a nearly unprecedented mark on modern organized crime – so much so that another tough Jew, The Godfather Part II’s Hyman Roth, cites him as an inspiration. Oh, yeah – and he fixed the 1919 World Series and got away with it scot-free. Although the names of many a White Sox great was dragged down into ignominious disgrace (including two, Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, who were likely innocent of any wrongdoing), Rothstein, the architect of the fix and the man who made more money off of it than anyone else, was completely exonerated by an impressionable jury. In Eight Men Out, Rothstein is expertly played by Michael Lerner, no stranger to playing tough Jews (see the entry on Walter Sobchak, above); his icy, unflappable confidence and contempt is perfectly realized in a scene where, discussing with his fixer the likelihood that the best players in baseball will take a dive, says “I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. ‘Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say. ‘Sit down, maybe you'll learn something.’ Well, I learned something all right. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands.”

LEE STRASBERG AS HYMAN ROTH IN THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

By the time we meet him Hyman Roth is an old man in ill health, yet we'd never think to call him frail. His body may be failing, but his mind is sharp and his lust for wealth and power undiminished. The Godfather saga's fictionalized version of Meyer Lansky was one of the few screen roles taken on by Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg, and easily the greatest. In a few short scenes, with a handful of well-chosen gestures – the dismissive passing of a gold telephone, the raising of a plate of cake – Strasberg gives us a man in full. We may never have seen him in the full bloom of youth, but we can guess how terrifying he must have been from his "Moe Green" speech to Michael Corleone, one of the all-time great movie monologues. His gaze steady and full of fire, his breath hitching in fierce, staccato snorts, Roth lays it on the line: This is the business we've chosen.

ADAM GOLDBERG AS MELLISH IN SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) AND THE HEBREW HAMMER IN THE HEBREW HAMMER (2003)

In comedic roles from Dazed & Confused to Entourage, Adam Goldberg frequently comes across as a younger, hairier Woody Allen with his fast-talking, hyper-cerebral neurotic characters. But, even in his lighter moments, there’s always a sense of intensity and simmering anger underpinning his performances, leading my fellow Screengrabber Phil Nugent to suggest his work in 2 Days In Paris for this list (“What can I say? The guy scares me!”). But instead, I’ve chosen two of his more overtly tough screen personas, in films where his characters literally bring the pain. As the Jewish soldier Private Stanley Mellish in Saving Private Ryan, Goldberg’s character is a smart, regular guy hardened by combat and his own, very personal stake in the war. Even when his tough façade finally cracks (in one of the most harrowing, visceral depictions of impending death I’ve ever seen), Mellish, despite his fear, remains determined and clear-headed to the end. As the titular superhero in The Hebrew Hammer, meanwhile, Goldberg tweaks the popular notion that Jews are more brainy than brawny in what writer/director Jonathan Kesselman dubbed the first “Jewsploitation” movie. As Mordechai Jefferson Carver, Goldberg wears the wide-brimmed hat of a Hasidim like a pimp crossed with Clint Eastwood as he fights to save Hanukah from the clutches of Santa’s murderous, power-mad son, Damian. Non-P.C. hilarity and Jewish stereotypes repurposed as standard Hollywood action clichés ensue. Shabbat Shalom, muthahfuckers!

CHARLTON HESTON AS MOSES IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956)

It’s one of the crowning ironies in the history of religious cinema that Charlton Heston, a man who tended to project about the same spiritual qualities as a forcefully hurled brick, portrayed not only the author of the Pentateuch, but also the Pope. It’s even more ironic that Moses, perhaps the toughest Jew in history, was given his most memorable screen portrayal by a man so WASPy his first name was “Charlton”. The Bible tells us that Moses was a willful but often reticent man, a man so unsure of himself, so terrified to lead, that he asked his brother Aaron to do his public speaking; in Cecil B. DeMille’s last huge Bible epic, Heston’s Moses couldn’t be farther from that portrayal. Moses, in the hands of Chuck amok, is a primal force of nature, as intimidating as God himself; when he struts down from the Mount after having received the Decalogue, he looks less like a man awed by coming face-to-face with the creator of the universe than he does Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. His jaw jutting even beneath his pasted-on beard and his iron chest swelling outside of his robes, Heston’s Moses looks like he’s received special dispensation from Jehovah to start kicking ass and taking names, and he can’t wait to get started. When Moses sneers “Hear His word, Ramses, and obey,” he isn’t imploring, he’s demanding – let my people go, he seems to say, or I’ll take these stone tablets and flatten you right across the choppers with them. It’s no wonder this portrayal resonated with Chosen People and Gentiles alike; the goyim got to claim the actor as their own, and the Jews got to see their main man transformed from thoughtful liberationist rebbe to one-man Pharoah-stomping machine. Heston would go on to play Judah Ben-Hur, who was almost as tough a Jew as Moses, but The Ten Commandments still remains the pinnacle of big-screen Hebrew bad-assery.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Rep Report (February 28 - March 6)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Sunday, March 2 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of King Kong's debut appearance in New York City, and to honor the event, Film Forum is running the 1933 classic for two matinees, one day only. Those attending the 1:00 P.M. screening are automatically eligible to stick around and participate in the Fay Wray Scream-alike Contest, to be judged by a crack panel of experts that includes Film Forum repertory program director Bruce Goldstein, film critic Elliott Stein, and Ms. Wray's actress daughter, Susan Riskin. One lucky, leather-lunged winner will receive a two-disc DVD set of the movie, a one-year membership to Film Forum, (trust me on this — if nothing else, it pays for itself!), and a romantic trip for two the top of the Empire State Building. Jeez, you'd think it would be thrill enough just to get to be in the same room as Elliott Stein...

Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2008" (February 29 - March 9) kicks off with Claude Lelouch's Romain de gare with Fanny Ardent and Audrey Dana, introduced by the director. There are also new films by Sandrine Bonnaire, Claude Miller, Sophie Marceau, and — this sounds interesting — Fear(s) of the Dark, a black-and-white animated omnibus film that incorporates material from such comics artists as Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti.

SAN FRANCISCO: "The Unabridged Coen Brothers" (February 28 - March 2) at the Castro was apparently assembled for the benefit of anyone who's just landed here from Mars and is curious about these fellows who just won the Oscar. Of course, it might also be useful to any Coen fans who see this as a fine time to have themselves a wallow. Includes Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which, it says here, includes "Southern folklore, slapstick stunts, cinematic tributes, religious ritual, political satire, and social commentary." All that and dancing Klansmen too!

SEATTLE: The Grand Illusion Cinema brings back four of "the No-Nonsense Films of Phil Karlson in the '50s". Karlson was a specialist in hard-nosed, low-budget action noirs whose resume of grungily efficient little knuckle-busters makes Don Siegel look like Busby Berkeley. (After decades of scuffling from one small-time gig to the next, Karlson hit the jackpot with his next-to-last picture, the rabble-rousing 1973 blockbuster Walking Tall, which he had the foresight to own a piece of.) Starting February 29, the theater is showing the fifties films Five Against the House with Kim Novak and Brian Keith and The Brothers Rico with Richard Conte; on March 6, it trades them in for the Western Gunman's Walk and the newspaper melodrama Scandal Sheet with Broderick Crawford.

Face/Off: Fargo

Peter Smith — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE: Unlike our last Face/Off, when we discussed Children of Men (a film which you will be marrying next summer in a small private ceremony at the Film Forum, whereas I view it simply as the most overrated movie by one of the Three Amigos prior to the release of Pan's Labyrinth), today, we're going to talk about a movie we both really liked, albeit possibly for different reasons — Fargo by the Coen Brothers.

Specifically, we're going to talk about how the movie feels about Marge Gunderson, its main character and moral center. One of the most common critiques of the Coen Brothers as filmmakers is that, while they're technically gifted and skilled synthesists, they lack heart, soul and feeling — the humanistic qualities of the directors they choose to ape. I don't believe this is true, necessarily; while I don't think the Coens will ever be accused of Capraesque oversincerity, I think they believe, more or less, in the message as well as the medium. But I do think that the Coens are very cynical filmmakers, not calculating or phony, but with a pretty jaundiced view of humanity. I don't, in short, think they really like their characters very much.

I won't go as far as to say they hate Marge Gunderson; she is clearly a decent human being for the most part, and they don't reserve for her the contempt with which they treat Jerry Lundegaard, who doesn't even have the courage to be a bad man, or Wade Gustafson, who treats the kidnapping of his daughter like a business deal only he is competent enough to close on. But I think Marge is meant to be yet another manifestation of the dull, unimaginative "Minnesota nice" of their childhood, which they sought to exorcise in Fargo just as surely as Todd Haynes did the wealthy Southern California of his youth in Safe. There are a number of scenes in which the film's attitude towards Marge peeks out: her choice of cuisine, her reaction to Mike Yanagita, her small pleasures and simple dreams, her "police work" which so impresses Deputy Lou but which is strictly small-town. But nowhere is it more apparent than in the final scene with the blank-faced killer Gaear Grimsrud: with the murderer, captured through little more than luck, sulking in the back seat of her prowler, Marge counts down a list (incomplete, as it happens) of everyone who has died because of his crimes. "And for what?" she asks of this Nordic hulk, so far removed from her world of Arby's and postage stamps. "For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here you are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."

Indeed she doesn't. She doesn't understand it, and she probably never will. We aren't privy to the decision-making process that led someone as cloistered as Marge Gunderson to become a law enforcement agent in the first place, but her befuddlement — almost irritation — at being exposed to the ugly reality that the police must often face is less sadness than it is annoyance. We see here what we glimpsed in the scene with Mike Yanagita: Marge doesn't like being out of her comfort zone. She wants a quiet little life of sameness and simplicity, and her reaction to Gaear Grimsrud isn't one of moral outrage; when she encounters the first crime scene (which, it's easy to forget, begins with the murder of a fellow officer), she treats it with all the gravity she would a stolen bicycle.

Does this make her a bad person? Certainly not. In fact, it's perfectly normal — which is, in fact, the point. Marge isn't a heroine. She isn't a special person at all. She's resolutely normal, bland: boring. She is a very conventional, and in some ways small, woman who we are tricked into thinking is exceptional because her banality is on a different moral level than that of the other banal characters in the film. She is not someone who grows over the course of the film, who develops or transcends — and that is perhaps the greatest reason to believe that the film doesn't think much of her. The Coens, as they are about most things, have been tight-lipped about this, aside from their usual talk of how they don't seek to cause the same sort of reactions in their audience that most actors do, or how people react badly to films where the main character isn't "sympathetic in a Hollywood formula way." But the evidence is there on the screen for those who care to look for it.

And now, you will tell me why I have my head up my ass. (I trust you won't take the tack of a friend of mine, who insisted the Coens must have thought highly of Marge, since Joel Coen wouldn't have cast his wife in an unsympathetic role. I figure he must never have seen Raising Arizona.)

PHIL NUGENT: Leonard, first, let me just say that I would never imply that you have your head up your ass because of your take on Marge Gunderson. However, your suggestion that Pan's Labyrinth is overrated proves that you need professional help. I actually like the idea that Marge is sort of the butt of the movie. So far as theories that seem to me to be unsupported by the movies themselves, it may be second only to the idea that everything that happens in Minority Report after Tom Cruise is locked away in suspended animation is his dream of the what should happen while he actually remains locked away and unavenged. The fact that I have trouble buying it has nothing to do with any deep attachment I have to the idea of Marge Gunderson, Superstar. Rather, it's about what kind of filmmakers the Coens are. I wonder if, maybe out of some insistence on seeing Fargo as a hipper or more complex movie than it really is, you might not be overthinking this a little. Me, I tend to think of the Coens as surface guys who put an incredible amount of conscious planning into the physical details of their movies, and who are inhumanly aware of how they expect both critics and audiences to respond to their cleverness. It might sound as if I'm one of those people who sometimes badmouth the Coens for being 'merely' clever, but cleverness is something I'm all for; at the very least, it sure beats lack of imagination. But I do think that these guys have traditionally done their best work as flashy, surreal comedians — cartoonists, in fact — in such films as Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the underrated Intolerable Cruelty, which is the one movie where I think they actually achieved satire, a sometimes ruthlessly biting satire on the possibility that genuine romantic love might not exist as anything more than a crippling delusion. Fargo is a smart, impressive movie, but it is also a movie outside what I think of as their best range, and a movie that I think they made for the outside world, a movie pitched at the mainstream. I think that it was built to serve two purposes. One was to save their career after The Hudsucker Proxy, a movie closer to their best range, and a movie altogether less successful in every way than Fargo but, overall, I think, more interesting. It features several amazing set pieces that could only have been the work of the Coens, tucked inside a structure that's a bit of a train wreck. I don't think there's any question that Fargo was successful in that and its other goal, which was to give Frances MacDormand a juicy sort-of-leading role that would make her beloved, win her some great reviews and maybe an award or two, and take her career to another level, as a much-sought-after character lead just when she was about to reach an age when good actresses who haven't achieved more than McDormand had achieved before Fargo start to find themselves dropping off the map.

This may sound a little cold, and a lot less cool than the idea that the Coens made the movie to dump on the boring "ordinariness" of the frozen Midwest, but the Coens are very smart guys, who understand the movie business very well, and I see no reason why they shouldn't take these kind of calculations into effect while making the best movie they can, within the terms they set. After all, if they hadn't had their big mainstream success with Fargo they wouldn't have been able to make my beloved The Big Lebowski —a movie that, long before it was enshrined as an acknowledged modern classic, was initially written off as a disappointment by people like The New Yorker's Daphne Merkin because it lacked the "heart" that so many detected in Fargo. That heart pretty much comes down to McDormand, and while it was be a delicious joke if it was something that the squares were projecting onto a blank screen, I do think that the Coens mean for us to find it there, to the extremely limited degree that they mean to instill some kind of feeling in their work at all. Looking at the bill of indictment — all the specifics you cite as reason for judging Marge as, not even a "bad person" but disappointingly "ordinary" — I can't say that it seems like much of a put-down portrait to me. Is it really such a dreary thing for someone to say that they can't understand why somebody, even Peter Stormare, would kill a woman and feed someone, even Steve Buscemi, into a wood chipper? Or that, whether or not they understand this werewolf, they brought him in partly through luck? So long as he's not standing in line behind me at Wendy's, I'd be delighted if he were locked up based on a tip some cop read in his horoscope that morning. No, she doesn't like to be taken out of her comfort zone, but who does? (Extreme sports athletes and professional mercenaries may lead more physically exciting lives than some of us, but talk to some of them for five minutes and you may conclude that, rather than being driven by some wild man need to test themselves, some people just happen to have a comfort zone that includes traveling upside-down through the air at great speeds or being shot at by the last defenders of the presidential palace.)

For all her "ordinariness," Marge still manages to slap the cuffs on Dracula, and she does it while hugely pregnant and while being as gentle as possible with the crazy man in the restaurant and offering tender moral support to her husband, played by the actor who David Fincher recently fingered as the Zodiac killer. The movie gives her a well-timed entrance — we don't get to meet her until after the action has already reached a level of cutthroat scuzziness that encourages the audience to cling to her as a welcome, warm rock — and if she doesn't come across as Sherlock Holmes at first glance, by the end she seems to be solidly in the familiar mold of fictional detectives who use a mask of thick-witted blandness to throw their prey off the scent, and also to make it that much more satisfying to the audience when justice triumphs and the unassuming flatfoot proves his, or her, mettle. More than anything, though, I do think that Marge is shaped so that McDormand can win over the audience and walk off with the movie. Sure, the Coens could write an unflattering role for her; they did it years later in The Man Who Wasn't There, after this movie had done its job and McDormand, her career securely on the upswing, must have gotten a kick out of playing a femme fatale. But as Marge, she's allowed to envelope the character in a homey glow that I don't think the Coens would have tolerated if they meant for the character to inspire anything but uncomplicated love in the viewer. Ordinary, maybe. But definitely special.

LEONARD PIERCE: Like Hannibal Lecter, I must begin with first principles: if Marge Gunderson isn't the butt of Fargo, then who is? Carl Showalter? Shep Proudfoot? The Coens aren't above making even the most seemingly sympathetic characters in their films the targets of their sharpest barbs (or the least sympathetic the subject of unusual tenderness or depth — witness McDormand's role in The Man Who Wasn't There, or for a real treat, ask me about my pet theory that Eddie Dane is the moral center of Miller's Crossing.)

As for the question of what kind of filmmakers the Coens are, that's a bit beyond our jurisdiction here, but you're right that it's a central component of how to read the character of Marge Gunderson. I agree that they put tremendous amounts of planning and detail-work into their films, and that they're hyper-aware of the reaction they're likely to get from their audience — but to me, this argues in favor of my point, and against the idea that I'm reading to much into the depiction of Marge. The Coens are amongst the most economic filmmakers I can think of; at their best, hardly a frame is wasted. It's hard for me to believe that these little moments where Marge Gunderson comes across as small or unsympathetic are accidental, given the care with which her creators have approached everything else they've ever done.

Beyond that, it's hardly a secret that the Coens like fucking with their audiences, whether that means moviegoers or critics or even studio executives (for a sterling example of this, check out the uncomprehending foreword to the published screenplay of The Hudsucker Proxy, by a clueless producer who laments the deranged casting choices offered up by the brothers, clearly not realizing he was being had). Fargo is rife with this sort of thing from its very conception — it goes out of its way to draw attention right off the bat to its alleged based-on-a-true-story nature, after which it presents us with a story that is clearly anything but true. Given the level of high-stakes game-playing Joel and Ethan Coen have engaged in before, it doesn't strike me as implausible that Marge Gunderson was meant to be something more than Oscar bait, career padding, or a warm-gooey-nougat-center of "uncomplicated love" for the mainstream audience to chew on.

And while I've tried to keep this discussion civil, by gad, sir, I will not have my sanity called into question by a man who calls Intolerable Cruelty underrated.

PHIL NUGENT: I don't know that I can discuss something like this without addressing what kinds of filmmakers the Coens are. And despite your saying that the topic is "outside our jurisdiction," I think you're making your own assumptions about that when you ask who, if not Marge, is the butt of Fargo. If the film were credited to someone less famed for being knowing and sarcastic, you might not approach it with the sense that it must be meant as a joke at somebody's expense. Because the Coens are hip, it might seem fair to assume that they must be inclined to stick it to the most unhip person on the screen.

But working in the movie industry does strange things to you, especially if you're intelligent enough, as the Coens surely are, to be appalled by how much intelligence and skill go into shaping formula crap aimed at the lowest common denominator. And if you look at the Coens' work as a whole, it seems clear to me that they've never reserved their greatest contempt for well-meaning, good-hearted dummies: time and time again, in Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother Where Art Thou? and, yes, Fargo, that's the model for their heroes. With all due respect for your weird man-crush on the Dane, I think the most likable character in Miller's Crossing is the Albert Finney character, who thinks he's on top of things but who doesn't really know the score and has to be protected by the friend who's cuckolding him with his fiancée. Even Jeff Lebowski, a verbally adroit hero who has his erudite moments and has inspired something of a minor philosophic movement, appears to have read great swatches of his how-to-be-a-detective manual with the book held upside-down.

So who, traditionally, have the Coens had it in for? From the start, guys who think they're smart but have no moral compass, like M. Emmet Walsh and Dan Hedaya in Blood Simple, and Billy Bob Thornton and his pretentious windbag lawyer in The Man Who Wasn't There, and just about all the important male characters in Fargo, who at their most advanced suggest some exotic form of insect life. The all-time champion whipping boy for the Coens, even more than the William H. Macy character here who shrieks and whimpers when prevented from escaping through the bathroom window while in his underwear, may be Barton Fink, the self admiring blocked playwright who doesn't listen, who lacks the professional discipline to hack out a B-movie script, and who in the end is denied even the minor dignity that might have come with being a true victim: instead, his uselessness may have inspired the aggrieved representative of dark forces to murder his family, just to get his attention. I don't think this is the kind of cynical, sucking-up to the 'average people' in the mass audience that you see in a shitheap like Forrest Gump. Coming from guys who have had to deal with charges of being 'merely clever' since they first emerged as filmmakers in their late twenties, it smacks of self-examination, and it may be the single most striking and attractive thing I know about the Coens.

The Coens, indefatigable entertainers and reflexive smart-asses that they are, may have laid the tracks for people to suspect that Marge can't be meant to be taken straight by setting her down in a Middle America snowscape where people talk as if they're making fun of the guys in Pepperidge Farms commercials, and I think that they may have intended a corrective to that in No Country for Old Men, where a guy who's not as smart as he thinks he is but who's basically decent is pitted against an abomination, with a guy who's thoroughly decent but not as quick as he used to be as moral referee, in a Texas that never threatens to turn into Blood Simple/Raising Arizona-ville. Fargo is probably still the Coens' biggest mainstream success — however well No Country does on the year-end critics' lists, I suspect it's too cold to supplant or even join the earlier film in the popular consciousness — and that means that its fan base includes a lot of people who the Coens' real fans must hate to find themselves agreeing with about anything. It may be hard for us to believe that guys like this could come up with someone like Marge — good, competent, caring, and utterly, conventionally square — without intending for her to be snickered at. But maybe that says more about us than it does about them.

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Hudsucker Proxy

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The setup: After making a name for themselves with a series of unique and relatively small-scale crime stories (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller's Crossing), Joel Coen and his producer-cowriter brother Ethan won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with their Hollywood-themed comedy Barton Fink. Their next film saw them collaborating with super-producer Joel Silver and working with a budget of upwards of $25 million back when that still meant something in Hollywood.

What went wrong: The popular rap against the Coens is that their films are stylish but soulless, which is definitely applicable to Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance. Leigh comes off as affected even in realistic roles, and playing girl reporter Amy Archer, she doesn't so much play a role as ape Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. The mannerisms overwhelm the role, which makes sense when she's putting on a tough front for the boys, but once that front begins to fall, the character is meant to be the film's emotional center, and I wasn't feeling it. Compare Cate Blanchett's Hepburn to what Leigh's doing here and you'll see the difference between a fully-realized character and an explosion at the tic factory.

Fortunately, Leigh's misguided performance is hardly fatal, as there's a whole lot of other elements to love about The Hudsucker Proxy. Leigh aside, the performances are spot-on, beginning with Tim Robbins in the title role. As the naïve sap turned into Hudsucker Industries' puppet president, Robbins gives a comic performance that would have fight right into a Preston Sturges film, and his gangly physical presence and good-natured cluelessness recall Sturges' favorite leading man Eddie Bracken. Even Robbins' character name — Norville Barnes — could have been a Bracken character.

As usual in a Coen film, the film's supporting cast is dynamite, especially Paul Newman as the calculating vice president, forever answering questions with a gruff "sure-sure," and Jim True as the chatty, duplicitous elevator operator Buzz. Plus there's the famous stylized Coen dialogue, which might get distracting if it weren't so damned clever.

But the most notable aspect of The Hudsucker Proxy is the world the world the Coens have lovingly created, an Art Deco nightmare version of fifties New York. Norville's experiences in the mailroom wouldn't be out of place in Brazil, while the top-level offices and boardrooms owe a debt to Ayn Rand. Dennis Gassner's visionary production design, coupled with cinematography by the great Roger Deakins and a score by Coen stalwart Carter Burwell that makes liberal use of Aram Khachaturyan's "Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia," make The Hudsucker Proxy the most visually stunning of the Coen brothers' films. It's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun.

The fallout: Clueless how to market the film, Warner Brothers dumped Hudsucker into a handful of theatres to middling reviews, although the film has its share of defenders today. The Coens left Hollywood to make the more modestly-budgeted Fargo, which won back their previous critical supporters and then some. Their latest film, No Country for Old Men, opened earlier this month to ecstatic reviews. — Paul Clark

Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History, Part 4

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Hudsucker Industries, THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

The Coen brothers, being involved in the film industry, have gotten quite adept at portraying powerful and sinister men in high places. And they don’t get much more powerful (or higher — forty-four floors, or forty-five if you count the mezzanine) than Sidney Mussburger. Paul Newman’s cigar-chomping, calculating executive wants to assume control of Hudsucker Industries (best imagined as the Wham-O Corporation if it managed to take over the world), but he can’t do it unless the comically compliant board holds on to the majority of its shares. To ensure that happens, he needs a sap to take over the presidency of the company and run it into the ground, and finds one in the sincere-but-doltish Norville Barnes. Aside from the greediness of their board of directors, Hudsucker Industries’ evil nature is best portrayed in the ridiculously strict policies in their mailroom, their shady accounting practices (as seen in this clip), and the fact that they seem to employ Satan to repaint their office windows.

Initech, OFFICE SPACE (1999)

For the first brilliant hour of its runtime, before it gets sappy and turns into a fairly typical heist comedy, Mike Judge’s Office Space is perhaps the most perfect corporate satire ever made. It’s not that the data-processing outfit Initech is particularly iniquitous; they don’t despoil the environment, employ slave labor, exert unseemly influence over the government, or start wars. All they do is crush the souls of their employees on a daily basis. Office Space perfectly captures the thousand daily humiliations of cubicle life, from the pointless memos about adding a cover sheets to your TPS reports, to desperately trying to hang onto your dignity in the form of a red stapler. The beauty of Initech (and of Tchotchke’s its corporate dining partner) is that it scarcely needs to exaggerate anything, from the relentlessly ingratiating tone of manager Gary Cole to the inability of the efficiency experts to remember anyone’s name. Wherever you work, Judge says, this is your life — and short of totally rewiring your brain, there is no escape.

Connex, SYRIANA (2005)

It’s no great secret that greed fuels American interest in the Middle East, and that the same motivation helps shape U.S. government policy there (see "War, Iraq"). Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana helped us understand the domino-like cause-and-effect cycle that works over great distances in today’s international capitalist kleptocracy. In response to losing drilling rights to the Chinese, Connex, the film’s fictional oil conglomerate, uses bribes to enter into shady mergers with Kazakh oil barons and shows a general willingness to do anything that keeps a good face on their company and its significant financial holdings. When lawyer Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright), is sent to investigate them, they present him a mountain of paperwork and a stone-faced façade. Holiday manages to trace wire transfers back to a Connex employee, who's quickly scapegoated as a greedy free agent. But when this isn’t enough to satisfy the Department of Justice, Holiday receives inside information that places blame on his own boss’ involvement, absolving Connex and serving his own chances for advancement in the process. So much for the good guys. . . In the midst of contract talks and board room meetings we see sabotage, torture, political assassination, debilitating poverty, accidental death and suicide bombings, all of which trace back in one way or another to the oil giants and the decisions they make in the interest of massive profit.

Brown and Williamson, THE INSIDER (1999)

When Michael Mann told the real-life story of Jeffrey Wigand, the man who exposed cigarette giant Brown and Williamson, he created enough tension to make exciting a film that revolves around the possibility of an interview. He successfully casted Russell Crowe as a four-eyed nine-to-fiver. And he got the last restrained and respectable performance out of Al Pacino. Maybe he was inspired; it would be difficult to find a more devious or devilish corporate entity than Big Tobacco. As the film shows, in between Jeffrey Wigand’s firing and the first airdate of his infamous 60 Minutes interview he experienced verbal threats, legal threats, email threats and the not-so-subtle hint of a bullet left in his mailbox. Brown and Williamson doesn’t stop there, getting a restraining to prevent Wigand from testifying against them, threatening CBS with a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit and launching a 500-page-dossier smear campaign against Wigand. Mann does an excellent job of building the stress levels to portray just how alone this man is against a giant corporation with a very clear agenda.

The Umbrella Corporation, RESIDENT EVIL (2002)

It wasn’t enough for the Umbrella corporation to sell you your laptop and your antibiotics and your appointment at the clinic. Everyone knows real money doesn’t lie in honey-lemon lozenges. Real money lies in creating viral weaponry for the military. The problem is, you really have to do it in secret — like six floors underground. It’s also handy if nobody questions why your labs are under the city and why 500 people are now living underground, but such is the 21st century. With that kind of population, it’s best to run the whole place with a giant (evil) computer. That way it can impersonally trap everyone inside to die agonizing deaths if a deadly viral agent happens to leak out. Is it really the Umbrella Corporation’s fault that the T-Virus turned all those dead schmoes into zombies? C’mon. With a cute logo like that? Accidents happen. While we here at Screengrab endorse any role wherein Milla Jovovich kills zombies in a slip dress, and we whole-heartedly support roles where Michelle Rodriguez acts surly and carries guns, we hereby nominate the fictitious Umbrella Corporation as one sick mutated puppy.

Allcom, PAYCHECK (2003)

In Terminator 2, Joe Morton played a well-meaning scientist whose invention turned the world into a robot-run wasteland. In Paycheck, Morton played a well-meaning FBI agent tracking down a scientist (Ben Affleck) whose mercenary invention has the potential to turn the world into a nuclear wasteland. How Morton played the role without a gigantic deja-vu smirk on his face is a minor miracle. As evil corporations go, Allcom doesn't seem to have many employees besides smarmy Aaron Eckhart, notorious B-movie villain Colm Feore, and obvious love interest Uma Thurman. Nor does it seem to have a solid business plan: nuclear war would, presumably, put an end to the profits generated by the build-up itself. Two years later, Eckhart was hawking tobacco in Thank You For Smoking, a fair-enough lateral leap.

— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield