Sunset Gun

The new Sight & Sound features my ten-page interview with its February cover star, Quentin Tarantino, and they have graciously allowed me to excerpt a portion of the extensive Q&A here. This is a nice chunk of it, but there's so much more in the magazine, from getting to know his characters, to the Roadshow appeal of The Hateful Eight and themes in the movie, to movie violence, to Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Django, to shooting on Ultra Panavision, to his own theater in Los Angeles, The New Beverly (shout out to Clu Gulager in the issue), to his love of old film prints, to interesting thoughts and facts about his past movies, and much, much more. Dig in and read it all via the magazine (buy a copy here). For now, check out these choice moments from the interview.

“There was a whole lot of speculation from some people about this whole 70mm thing, as in, that’s really great, but it’s just this set-bound parlor piece, so isn’t it just a big old fucking waste of time and money? And, I think that’s a shallow view of how 70mm can be employed. It’s not just to shoot the Seven Wonders of the World, the Sahara desert and mountain ranges. You can do more than just shoot weather…. I’ve shot a lot of movies with Sam Jackson but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the close-ups of him that I’ve got in this. You drink in the chocolate of his skin, you swim in those eyes… And also, it becomes about the dialogue.”  – Quentin Tarantino

KM: The Hateful Eight: This is another western and, in many ways, like Django [2012] a political one. You’ve said that you originally didn’t think of it politically in terms of current times and, yet, the movie has become that. The western genre is often an effective way to explore psychological, political and cultural themes, and through the history of cinema… would you agree?

QT: I’ve always felt that actually. I’ve always felt, and, especially if you read any of the really interesting subtextual criticism on westerns, especially leading into the late 60s and into the 70s, westerns have always done a pretty good job reflecting the decade in which they were made without seemingly trying to. When westerns were probably at their most popular, during the 50s, they definitely put forth an Eisenhower-esque America. And it was also an America and an American west that was flush with American exceptionalism — having just won World War II and the advent of the suburbs. That was very important to westerns back them. And even, in an interesting way, while they weren’t bold enough in the 50s to deal with the race problem in America … they actually tried to somewhat deal with black and white issues via Indian and white issues… like [Delmer Daves’s] Broken Arrow [1950] … 

And, that followed suit with the first half of the 60s, which was basically the 50s part II. But in 1966 on, things started changing and spaghetti westerns went a long way toward doing that: the stylization, the use of music, but also the counterculture. So by '68, '69, '70 and '71, you had the hippie westerns, the counterculture westerns, whether they be Kid Blue [1973] or The Hired Hand [1971] or Zachariah [1971], things like that. The 70s, particularly in America, was one of the best times for the western. And the changes went further into the 70s; it increased as the decade went on, [in terms of] the true “anti-western.” Because so many of the different westerns at that time dealt with the Vietnam War, in one way or another.

KM: Like Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana's Raid [1972]…

QT: Yes. Ulzana's Raid is the perfect example. Most of the Vietnam metaphor movies don’t work quite as well any more because you’re thinking, “Well, why didn’t you just make a movie about Vietnam?” Ulzana's Raid actually still completely works as a Vietnam metaphor, because that was underneath it, and what was on top of it was a war movie about the American Indian wars, about the calvary fighting a nomad army, about how warfare like that is done. So it was legitimately a war movie about those times and taken seriously as a war movie in a way that most movies dealing with that subject didn’t do. But you had a situation during that era, of, 'We can’t trust our government for getting us into this war, they said it was this; it wasn’t, we don’t trust them …' all the different hypocrisies that kept rearing their ugly heads leading to Watergate.

And so one of the things that was so interesting about that new Hollywood time period, and particularly reflected from 69-74, not only did the happy ending go away, it was the vogue to have the cynical ending — the cynical, hypocritical, tragic ending. We were cynical about America and these movies just confirmed our cynicism about the subjects. And because we were cynical about America, you see movies that rip down the statues that we had built. So you see Frank Perry’s Doc [1971], which skewers the Wyatt Earp legend. And then, after everyone from Roy Rogers to almost everybody else playing Jesse James, you have Robert Duvall playing Jesse James in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) where he’s a homicidal maniac; it’s completely horrifying. And then Michael J. Pollard in Dirty Little Billy [1971]… 

KM: Billy "was a punk”

QT: [Laughs] Exactly, right. And Michael J. Pollard looking like that one famous photos of William H. Bonney, more than Robert Taylor ever did. [Laughs]. The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (is miles away from the Tyrone Power Jesse James movie. And leading to the most overt Watergate Western, Posse [1975], directed by Kirk Douglas, starring Douglas and Bruce Dern; written by William Roberts, who wrote the screenplay for The Magnificent Seven [1960]. 

KM: And in terms of The Hateful Eight, recently, in your real life politically, it’s interesting because you’ve had all of this…

QT: Brouhaha [Laughs]

KM: Yes. Brouhaha with the police, which became ridiculous. No one with any sense can be on board with their statements and methods towards protesting you — the intimidation.

QT: Oh, yeah I know. It’s been an interesting four weeks as far as that was concerned [Laughs]. The first week, everyone was piling on me. And then, the second week, I react to it and that was kind of interesting because all of a sudden, everyone on TV ended up having some sort of say about it, so I thought, “Wow, this is good that this much about police brutality is being dealt with and is in the news so much.” And then the cops do themselves no favors by issuing genuine threats. The funny part about it is, people ask, “Well, are you worried?” And of course I’m not worried. At the end of the day I don’t feel that the police are some sort of sinister Black Hand organization that singles out private citizens to fuck over. Nevertheless, a civil service entity shouldn’t even be putting out threats, even in a rhetorical nature, towards private citizens and the fact that they’re using language that makes them sounds like bad guys in an 80s action movie doesn’t help their cause any. In fact, it almost makes my cause. Almost sounds as if they’re out of touch. [Laughs] 

KM: About [Jennifer Jason Leigh's Daisy Domergue] character: It might be a bit controversial for some because she gets smacked around a lot; she’s taking it as tough as anyone else and that she’s endured this before is part of who she is…

QT: There’s an interesting aspect to that. No one’s yet to nail me personally or in person about that aspect: that she takes so much abuse in the course of the movie and I’m almost looking forward to it because I’m curious exactly where they’re coming from. You feel it ripple through the audience the first few times she gets the shit beat out of her. And you feel it in old movies too, you know, when the girl is hysterical and the guy just smacks the shit out of her: “I’m sorry honey I hated to do that but you’re off your nut.” [Laughs] But that’s different. When Daisy is really hit the first time, she’s saying rude shit: “You’re not going to let that ni**** in here?” And he cracks her skull.

KM: And the first time he hits her it follows with such a powerful close-up. Her slightly vulnerable and then, angry face. You have a lot of mixed feelings when you see that shot. You do feel for her. You’ve just met her. How despicable is she?

QT: Oh, I think it’s one of the best shots. And, yes, yes, all of those questions are left to be answered. She’s definitely a rude, hateful bitch, that’s for damn sure, but his response is so brutal. He didn’t just punch her; he takes the butt of his gun and cracks her in the skull really hard. And that close-up, yes, she’s fantastic in the close-up. And you realize just how bad he hit her when the blood starts dripping down her face. But you have this feeling of, “Ohhh… this is going to be that kind of movie” and it’s just starting off. And nobody’s not going to be on Daisy’s side after that, in some way or another, because you’ll think, John Ruth is a brutal, brutal man. And you’re right: John Ruth is a brutal, brutal man. If the movie were on John Ruth’s side at that point well, then, maybe somebody might have a more righteous pen, writing a subtextual article about it. But the movie is obviously not on John Ruth’s side at that point. And especially in the stagecoach… But then things change as they go on. It’s part of the way the story works; anything can happen to any one of these eight characters. The idea that I would give a female character some blanket coat of invincibility in that regard is just a ridiculous concept; it would be detrimental to her and to the sex of her character if I played any favorites.

KM: One thing I find interesting about the old western shows and that time in television in general, was that it was this period in television during which some seasoned, interesting directors like Joseph H. Lewis, were directing episodes of The Rifleman while newer guys coming in, like Robert Altman, was directing Bonanza.

QT: Yep. Bonanza, Combat!…

KM: And then you had John Cassavetes starring in Johnny Staccato [1959-60] and Ben Gazzara in Run For Your Life [1965-68] and then an old movie star like Barbara Stanwyck leading The Big Valley [1965-69]. And, on top of that, you’d see all these unique, particular talents with guest stars like Warren Oates, Warren Oates doing all kinds of things…

QT: Him and Bruce Dern were sidekicks in Stoney Burke [1962-63] the Jack Lord rodeo show.

KM: Yes. A show with great cold openings!  And then The Virginian [1962-71]…

QT: [Laughs] Yeah. I’m a huge fan of, in particular the William Whitney episodes of The Virginian. His episodes are really terrific because he actually had the budget that he didn’t quite have while at Republic. They were like 90-minute movies and were actually released as movies overseas. But. Sam Fuller did a magnificent episode of The Virginian ["It Tolls For Thee," 1962], which he wrote and directed. It’s a Sam Fuller episode in every way. It stars Lee Marvin as the bad guy who kidnaps Lee J. Cobb and the episode is all about that kidnapping. Marvin and Fuller wouldn’t work together again until The Big Red One. It’s Sam Fuller dialogue from beginning to end. And, I have to say; I took one line from it for The Hateful Eight. I won’t say the line in my movie but I’ll say the line from The Virginian: Lee Marvin runs an outlaw gang and then another guy in the gang, a guy named Sharkey, starts talking to the gang to try to get them to forget about Lee Marvin and Lee Marvin just shoots him in the back. Lee Marvin says, “One measly bullet and there goes the problem of Sharkey.” [Laughs]

KM: The Hateful Eight, it’s not timeless, but because there’s a sometimes-modern subtext to the characters, and timeless issues we’re contending with today, it doesn’t feel simply rooted in the past. Looking at people from the past, they often are more radical looking than we think, in terms of appearance, especially people in the west…

QT: There definitely is that. There is a spaghetti western-ish patina to the characters, for lack of a better adjective. Most of the really interesting characters in the Spaghetti Western have a comic-book feel, as if they were drawn. And the costumes themselves have this comic-book artist kind of fetishistic quality to them. Then you think of all of Leone’s films and most of Sergio Corbucci westerns were done by Carol Sini, who was the costumer designer and the production designer, and he did the props. Can you imagine the guy who came up with the Django costume and Angel Eyes’ costume and the Man with No Name costume he, also, like, found the circular graveyard in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly [1966] or that fucking rope bridge over the quicksand or the fucking muddy town in Django? I mean, what a genius! That level of work is almost unfathomable. I did show Courtney Hoffman, my costume designer, a bunch of Carlo Sini movies and she got it. The character’s costumes have to pop before the characters. With Sam Jackson that’s easy because he comes with a big personality on his own. He fills out that batwing, yellow underlining just perfect [Laughs].

KM: In terms of actors, I know that two of your favorite actors are Aldo Ray and Ralph Meeker. Is there anything about an actor, or those two guys in particular, that informs a cinematic aesthetic? Just an actor and a style, the world around them…

QT: Well, actually, literally in the case of Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction [1994] it did. What I liked about Bruce Willis is that he reminded me a 50s leading man. He still has that quality now. He reminded me of a Ralph Meeker, Aldo Ray, and Brian Keith kind of man. I went to his house and we did actually watch one print of an Aldo Ray movie, we watched Nightfall [1957].

KM: A great movie. And with an evil Brian Keith too. They have great banter in that movie.

QT: They have fantastic banter. And Brian Keith is excellent. I’m a big fan of Brian Keith in all of his Phil Karlson movies too. With the rise of the great 70s leading man, with the rise of Elliott Gould, Jack Nicholson, Donald Sutherland, Dustin Hoffman and George Segal, the one thing that took a hit were people like that Brian Keith leading man.

KM: Who are the actors you’ve most have wanted to work with?

QT: Obviously, Ralph Meeker and Aldo Ray are two of them. Michael Parks, in his day. I worked with him but in his day would have been nice. Robert Blake in his day. I would work with Robert Blake tomorrow, now would be nice too. I would have loved to work with Bette Davis in her day or out of her day. In the early 60s, in the 40s, 30s to Burnt Offerings [1976] time. All good. TV movie time. All good. I’d love to work with Al Pacino now, I just saw him in the new Mamet play and he was terrific. I might even want to work with him now more, even more than his Serpico [1973] days. I would love to have Al Pacino rip snorting through my dialogue.

KM: We’ve talked about 70s movies; where you feel like movies like that aren’t made anymore. That it really feels like it takes place in 1970. One movie from the 70s that I always find amazing that it did so well, given one famous, disturbing sequence, is Deliverance [1972] … Could anyone make that film today? Like that?

QT: Oh, I know. I saw Deliverance in 1972 in a double feature with The Wild Bunch [1969] at the Tarzana Movies, the Tarzana Six, back when it was a big deal that six theaters were in one place. And recently I’ve been writing a piece of film writing, just for my own edification, and I’ve been going through some of the films and imagery that I saw in 1970 and 71. So, in 1970, I saw, at the counterculture Tiffany Theater, at age 8, a double feature of Joe and Where’s Poppa? That same year I saw a double feature of The Owl and the Pussycat and The Diary of a Mad Housewife. In 1970 I saw Richard Harris be hoisted by his nipples in A Man Called Horse. In 1970, I didn’t see Women in Love but I saw the trailer for Women in Love that had the naked wresting match between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. And in 1972, forget about all the things I saw in The French Connection, I saw the slow motion bullet kills in The Wild Bunch only to see Ned Beatty fucked in the ass in Deliverance.

KM: Wow.

QT: That movie, rocked my world as a kid. When I saw the butt-fucking scene in Deliverance, I didn’t know what sodomy was, as a kid. What I did know was that he was being humiliated. And I did know those guys were fucking scary. That’s what I knew. Well, I was right. He was being humiliated, he was being subjugated by really scary people who were imposing their will over him. That is what it was about. It wasn’t about the sex. The one part that would freak adults out went over my head but I actually got it [what it meant]. And that made me not want to go camping. [Laughs] But then the other part of the movie that blew my mind was that, in every way shape or form, Burt Reynolds is set up to be the hero in the first 45 minutes, and he does fit that function during that encounter. But then shortly thereafter he’s fucked up and that’s it [claps hands together]. He’s completely useless.

KM: And then it’s all up to Jon Voight…

QT: It’s all up to Jon Voight. That’s still one of the best movies ever made about, for lack of a better word, masculinity.

KM: … I can’t really compare you to any director…

QT: But if you could, who would you compare to me to? In the last twenty years?

KM: I can’t think of anyone contemporary. The one director I see a brotherhood with, though, is Robert Aldrich because he could do tight smaller picture like Kiss Me Deadly [1955] and then he’d do an epic, irreverent movie like The Dirty Dozen [1967]. Like Reservoir Dogs [1992] to your Basterds [2009]…

QT: Well, I’m a student of Aldrich.

KM: You need to do a woman’s picture then [I consider Jackie Brown a woman's picture, actually] ! Like his Autumn Leaves [1956].

QT: The Killing of Sister George [1968] for me! [Laughs]

KM: What about the The Legend of Lylah Clare [1968]?

QT: Oh, I don’t like that one! That’s awful. Even I can’t get through that one and I love Aldrich. I’ve tried! I keep trying! Every time it’s on TCM I record it and I give it another attempt. [Laughs] But The Killing of Sister George I do love.

KM: When I saw the live read [my piece here], I thought about old confinement movies, like Felix Feist’s The Threat [1949] — the live read and the movie have also been compared to Ten Little Indians [1965] or The Petrified Forest [1936] which was originally a play, did those influence any of this?

QT: I didn’t watch The Petrified Forest again and I didn’t rewatch Key Largo [1948]. But, frankly, to tell you the truth, I did watch some B movies that could be considered plays. I watched Shack Out on 101 [1955],  which plays like twisted Eugene O’ Neil.

KM: These would make great stage plays. Why not remake some of these pictures at plays? Like Detour [1945] on stage?

QT: Absolutely they would make great stage plays. I watched a lot of the movies that would be terrific plays. For instance, one spaghetti western could be done on stage. It takes place at a weird middle ground between a place like Minnie’s Haberdashery and the place where they all hang out at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West [1968]. It’s called Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead [1971] with Klaus Kinksi… Or something like The Outcast of Poker Flats… But then also, as we discussed, it was very much influenced by 60s TV westerns. I also watched a lot of the TV westerns that had a home invasion kind of vibe. There’s a Virginian episode where Darren McGavin and David Carradine take over the Shiloh Ranch and hold everybody hostage… There was one line in that Virginian episode that was so fucking good. And there was no way I could have made [that line] work, but I wanted to. Darren McGavin shows up at the Shiloh Ranch, he ends up shooting a couple of people just to make his point, but one of them is the cook. And then he makes Betsy, Roberta Shore, make him some dinner. So he’s at Lee J. Cobb's table and he’s eating his food and he’s talking shit, and then he finishes and he goes, “Wow. That meal was really unmemorable. Always remember: Don’t shoot the cook.” [Laughs] That’s a great line!

There's much more to read, so check out the entire interview at Sight & Sound and buy the issue here. 

And, for further reading, my 2009 interview with Tarantino, talking Basterds, George Sanders, Meeker and more.

Pick up the February edition of Sight & Sound and read my ten page interview with its cover star, Quentin Tarantino. We get into it: The Hateful Eight, old TV westerns ("The Virginian" especially), movie violence, police brutality, Snoop Dogg's resemblance to Lee Van Cleef and a whole helluva lot more. Quentin gives good interview. From Sight & Sound:

"As The Hateful Eight hits UK cinemas and a retrospective season of Tarantino’s other movies starts at BFI Southbank, Kim Morgan visited the director at his Los Angeles home, where they sat down for a long, lively conversation that ranged over Tarantino’s career from Reservoir Dogs to today, delved deep into his love of westerns, the joys of seeing films in original format prints, the impact of seeing Deliverance as a boy, race and policing in America today and a whole lot more besides."

 

 

Shane Black makes a good cup of coffee. It’s December 21st, 2015, the holiday season, a perfect time to meet Shane Black. I’m watching Black work his coffee maker in his kitchen. He finds me cream. I find it disarmingly sweet, charming that we’re in his enormous, beautiful 1920's-era mansion, and he’s making me coffee. He’s wearing socks, no shoes. His two handsome dogs are running all over the kitchen. They jump on me, and he nicely tells them to stop. He loves his dogs and we watch one dive into the pool. Later we’ll walk around his house, check out a secret room with a delicious past and look at his libraries which includes lots of great vintage pulps with fantastic covers and countless original issues of “Doc Savage” and “The Shadow” as well as modern and classic mysteries and thrillers (some he calls “shitty” but likes reading them anyway, which is refreshing) and more and more. We talk for a long time about numerous topics and he's candid and unexpected. Endlessly fascinating, the boyish, but wise Black is honest, opinionated, pensive, incredibly intelligent, funny and self-effacing in a unique way. He’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met.

My interview with Black is for a much larger piece I will publish later. But, for now, I’m only sharing an excerpt, one that befits the holiday. Because there’s a consistent, the singular and often brilliant screenwriter and director (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man Three, the Amazon pilot Edge, and the upcoming and The Nice Guys, as well as the recently announced Doc Savage and Predator), is famous for: setting his movies during Christmas. I've written about Black's Christmas before and asked, within the piece, for him to further illuminate his Christmas fixation. When I finally met him during this holiday season, he did. And he did so beautifully.

Kim Morgan: I am going to ask you a question that everyone asks you because all of your movies take place during Christmas. What happened? Are you obsessed with Christmas?

Shane Black: I’m not obsessed with Christmas, I’m only obsessed with Christmas in movies. It grounds me, it makes me comfortable and happy to escape wherever I am into a movie that’s set at Christmas because you recognize that the hush that comes and the sort of rarified arena that it provides at that time of year [is good] for drama to take place. And also I think, the isolation people feel at Christmas is important (and also being in a blizzard is wonderful). The homecoming feel of people striving to come back to something at Christmas is important and also, just in Los Angeles, the way you have to dig for it. How, just tiny bits of Christmas exist here but they are things you have to unearth. Like, I remember walking at Christmas and seeing a little Mexican lunch truck with a broken Madonna and a candle in it. And I thought, that is as much, that is as powerful, as talismanic a bit of Christmas as the 40-foot tree at the White House. It’s like little guiding beacons to something we all recognize as a time to put things aside and focus momentarily on the retrospective of our lives; a spiritual kind of reckoning where we’ve been and where we’re all going to. All these things, I just love it in movies.

KM: And again, it can also be so incredibly lonely…

SB: Don’t make me cry [Laughs] Look around. I’ve got two dogs and a big house.

KM: Christmas in Los Angeles is very strange. When it’s absurdly hot, the decorations on Hollywood Blvd. are just sagging there, all depressed and dejected looking. It seems cliché, but it’s like all those with sagging hope and dreams, trudging around the city, trying to keep it cheery. It can be so depressing and touching. And so dark, in the light.

SB: If you like noir — the idea of little glowy bits, striving for some kind of attention in the middle of a non-snowy downtown L.A. landscape, the iconic nature of Christmas, that’s sort of blotted-out or hidden, but that still informs everything around it. Noir is about awakening from paranoia, hatred and depression to latch onto the one true thing that you have and inkling of. And that inkling sustains your faith throughout. And by the end, hopefully by the end: “I believe that one thing; everything else is falling apart, I’m shot and I’m dying but it’s for a reason because I believe one thing.” And so, to embody that as Christmas in L.A. I don’t know that it means any specific thing to believe in but it just means something.

KM: And that trying to believe, and during Christmas in Los Angeles… I mean, there’s that Scientology Santa siting there, adding to the surrealism and even darkness. That feels noir and almost Lynchian. You can feel so lost…

SB: Yes.

KM: But, then, in my neighborhood Koreatown, I’ll hear Mexican families singing and holding candles. It’s so haunting and lovely and far more beautiful than pristine decorations in Beverly Hills.

SB: Well, to me, when I was a kid it’s something that had a heavy impact, I was walking downtown Pittsburgh on a street, and it was late at night, the wind was blowing, and it was very dark, and all of a sudden down the street, for some reason the streetlight went out and there was just a woman, a fat woman, who was just sort of standing in the window looking out and there was just this one little thing of light, it was chiaroscuro, everything else was dark, and the idea of beacons, and the candles in the woods. I talk about the Robert Frost poem, being lost in a dark wood, and the idea of the secret light in the window, also seeing a light in a window and knowing that there’s a destination that’s vaguely seen or even sensed but not quite seen, and just so far off the path you can go to, and the lights that could steer you back onto the path; it’s vague and if you put those images in a movie one in a thousand people will say “Yeah, it was about being taken off the path and finding your beacon.”  But, there is that element of me that’s just… the magic underneath Christmas we are briefly, almost fleetingly, aware of a magic that could be there. If we just stopped long enough to pay attention. And the perfect expression of this, more than anything else I could ever tell you is, "The Cricket in Time’s Square." Christmas in Time’s Square with that little cricket, that’s what we’re talking about. That’s noir.

Merry Christmas. Now go watch some Shane Black. Or read The Cricket in Time's Square. And stay tuned for my longer interview with Black.

By the Sea Angelina Jolie doesn’t care if you like her. But it’s not out of snobbery, some kind of looking down on the little people; she’s too focused, too mysterious, too fascinatingly complicated for that. It’s from a yearning to express herself, to say something about her experience, about being a movie star, about marriage, about women, about the oddity that is she (or, us, by extension), and she does so by curious means: long silences, monosyllabic responses, beautifully held frames of a life so glamorous it hurts. And it does hurt — her body beautifully in repose, a beguiling mixture of painfully thin hunger and vulnerability and yet a powerful body, a center of strength that carries itself along the ocean, pushing forward this exquisite head and face, eyes and lips so full and wide it almost seems impossible. Bardot was this beautiful, Vitti was this beautiful, Hayworth, Dietrich, Lamar, but none (though they held their own uniqueness, specific to their depth and character) were as aggressively "odd" as Angelina. Her beauty is sometimes so extreme it becomes peculiar, and she acknowledges her oddity with gorgeous, pained, perplexing expressions. Unafraid of being weird, at times even creepy, she’s the bizarre, beautiful woman next door (or, rather, next door at the French seaside villa), an exquisite, wonderfully weird woman who could transform into Catherine Deneuve’s mad Carol Repulsion — possibly. Or not. She doesn’t, not that far, but at times the movie flirts with the idea that Angelina is dangerous. To whom, we’re not sure. Herself? Innocent bystanders? Well, yes. Of course she is. And by being so strangely powerful, so in touch with her own mixture of destruction and fragility, we begin to admire her. Some of us (myself, anyway) even like her, we like her very much. And I loved By the Sea. I loved it totally, tenderly, tragically

I should say that Angelina plays Vanessa, a former dancer ("I got old," she says) who is by the sea with her novelist husband, Roland Bertrand, played by her real-life husband Brad Pitt. But her playing Vanessa and Pitt playing Roland is a concoction of pointed real life, swoony fantasy and clear nostalgia. It takes place in the 70s, back when people used words like “barren” and tapped on red typewriters. Vanessa revels in her sadness and glamour, lounging all day in gorgeous satin nightwear in their stunningly golden French Mediterranean hotel room, donning a pair of YSL sunglasses that are always adjusted at the right angle when removed (routine? An obsessive adjustment by Roland when he can't adjust his wife? Should he?), pills endlessly popped and easier to obtain. And here’s an intriguing detail: Jolie’s mother’s father's name was Roland Bertrand.

In real life Angelina Jolie misses her mother just as the sweet French innkeeper, Michel (Niels Arestrup) who pours Roland’s drinks, misses his wife. Jolie-Pitt (who wrote and directed the hauntingly melancholic, almost painfully beautiful By The Sea, lest anyone has forgotten) wants people to know that one never gets over that loss. The loss of a wife, of a mother, of a good woman. And, yet, interestingly, Angelina doesn’t play her Vanessa as a “good woman” even if Roland, at the start, tells her she’s a good woman. By the end Vanessa even asks if she’s a bad person. Roland answers, "sometimes." What a refreshing response to hear in a movie —  no one is that simple, no one is that likable, and in the process of showing a woman in distress, a woman who manipulates and hurts, but one who is hurting herself most — she turns the “crazy wife” narrative into something forgivable and human.

How Jolie does this through all of this insane glamour and out-of-reach beauty is testament to her power as a filmmaker. She knows how to shoot herself and her husband, she knows what we want to look at (them, the beautiful furnishings, the clothes, the cars, the ocean, the French touches) and she knows how a languid moment and patiently-held shot can make a viewer imbue a scene with their own feelings and thoughts. The more you look at Vanessa, and her unhappy marriage with Roland, the more your mind wanders toward wondering many things, even things about your own life. In pacing, style and much of the look, Jolie appears to have studied Antonioni, Godard (Contempt, especially) and Wertmüller with By the Sea. There’s even a touch of Polanski’s Bitter Moon in here. With cinematography by Christian Berger, DP for numerous Michael Haneke pictures, and a lush score by Gabriel Yared that, at times, spikes the movie with menace (perfect for Jolie) and the music by the likes of Jacques Dutronc and Serge Gainsbourg, the picture places these American movie stars in a decidedly European art-house milieu. But to Jolie’s credit, it’s not mimicking; this is a movie all her own. Truly, you’ve never seen anything like this.

And looking is key to By the Sea. The movie rolls along: Vanessa and Roland barely speaking to one another, Vanessa staying in all day in a haze of Benzos and narcotics, Roland off to the bar to write, and never writing, Vanessa sitting on the bed crying, alone, Roland bemoaning the life of a now failed writer, with a drink, Vanessa laboring to talk to the newlyweds next door who fuck all day, Roland bonding with Michel and never fucking his wife, Vanessa walking by the water in her white skirt and enormous hat, Roland trying to touch his wife, Vanessa rejecting him… what is going on with these two? What is their sad secret? We’ll find out through more looking, but, chiefly, when they are looking.

Vanessa discovers a peephole in their hotel room and begins spying on the young couple (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) next door, freshly married, freshly in love, sweet, but, if anyone has been married or in a union for long enough, exhausting. Even annoying. Vanessa and Roland don’t seem to like them very much. Once Roland takes up looking with her, a kinky pursuit that turns them on, it’s easy to load their voyeurism with meaning: Jolie and Pitt are turning the tables on the public constantly staring at them. And then, to take it further, Jolie and Pitt want you to know that they might be beautiful but they aren’t perfect; they don’t get it on like the newlyweds next door, not anymore, not like they used to. Or maybe they just want you to wonder about it. Or not. Jolie writes and directs from both an intensely personal standpoint, and mystery – which is a large part of her own public persona. She is outspoken about causes and real issues personal to her, to her body, she doesn’t shield her children from the world, and yet, she maintains an enigma that we’ll never truly know her. That balancing act is her own brilliance and it’s fascinating to see her utilize it through her own direction making By the Sea her best film as a director.

But back to looking… Jolie directs by their looking and how they look. Vanessa and Roland look as, presumably, Angelina and Brad, mixing their real life, their movie star personas and their characters into this prying little kick. A life seen through a hole, a portal into another relationship, one at its most idyllic state, and one vulnerable to ruin from those who continue gawking. And, as they look, they do so with the knowledge of how we perceive them looking, their charisma ever-present while we look at them, looking. It’s a clever twist and an unexpected detail that takes the picture to another level.

And this is where Angelina is sly and even funny, for as dead serious as some think this movie is, Jolie also knows when the picture turns humorous. She jumps on the moment, almost anticipating the audiences breaking into a chuckle after a languorous sequence of near silence. Once Vanessa and Roland invite the couple out for drinks, with the intent of inebriation and more peeping, the picture treats us with shots of the two beauties preparing: Pitt brushing his hair, Angelina applying her lipstick, lit ciggie dangling out of her mouth, sweeping her hair into a perfect updo.

It’s swiftly edited to amuse us, and it does. They are dressed for battle, to pursue their perverse pleasure, and marching together hand-in-hand, we finally feel how together they are. And it’s funny. It’s funny in a few other moments too: Pitt stumbling on Jolie on the floor, looking guilty, pretending not to peep. It’s funny watching the two sitting side by side, eating dinner, laughing to themselves, the peephole between them. But then, that peephole is also opening up their own lives for examination, and the more they invade the couple’s privacy, the more we are privy to their personal pain, the sadness that lies underneath their marriage.

What’s fascinating is how Jolie addresses Vanessa handling her sadness. She doesn’t do it by simply breaking down with a speech (though that does happen, in some way, through a dramatic declaration Roland nearly slaps out of her; you wonder about how nice, long-suffering Roland is during that moment) it happens by committing an act that, in many movies, would be deemed unforgivable, the work of a femme fatale, a terrible woman. But when Vanessa moves to the side of destroyer, you feel yourself pained for her. I won’t reveal what she does, but it’s akin to Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, fornicating with a guest on her wedding day (not to say Vanessa does the same). But the “betrayal” feels less simplistic, it feels of desperation, even a bit spaced-out, a-sexual, clinical, something to invite a release (in this case, it’s the release of Roland’s anger and making her face her anguish). Because Jolie loads up the moment with sorrow and dysfunction, there’s too much more going on here to simply demonize the woman. On screen, that feels almost radical; the act of being understanding a complicated woman. 

A bit like Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (and there’s been no shortage of comparing this movie to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and their on-screen pairings, as I did immediately upon seeing the picture’s trailer, from Woolf, to The V.I.P.s to Boom!) Vanessa is the quieter, less braying and more beautiful Martha, the childless wife who considers herself a lousy partner. But who wants to just be a wife? The verbal dexterity of Martha reveals a highly intelligent mind and wit; simply watching Jolie lounge and pose on the terrace reveals a dancer who was surely brilliant, her bitterness also belies a sharp intellect, even how disgusted she is by bad literature. She wants more out of life, she at one time, had more out of life, and now in exasperation, she lies around, beautiful and stoned. Her sweeter counterpoint (Mélanie Laurent, like Sandy Dennis in Woolf) should be careful lest she be chewed up and spit out. But, to be fair, Vanessa chews away at herself, worse than anyone.

Its exciting watching Jolie tear into it here, albeit with an abstruse, effectively strung-out touch. It harkened back to vintage Jolie, the unafraid-of-being-unlikable, crazy, brilliant and frequently funny Lisa of Girl Interrupted, though a Lisa subdued by the Seconal Vanessa pulls out of her Louis Vuitton toiletry bag. Vanessa even wears the lighter-haired wig like Lisa and smokes with the style of both a goddamn movie star and a patient demanding her smokes – the female Randle P. McMurphy skulking around the all-girl cuckoo's nest.

That dangerous charm of a Lisa ("take one fucking step closer and I'll jam this in my aorta") is still there, and all of that feral intensity and wit, just tamped down and mature. This is Jolie’s Cuckoo’s Nest Nicholson drifting into The Passenger and it’s exciting to watch, even at a valium-addled pace. What actress ever does that? What actress is ever allowed to do that? Angelina Jolie allows it, and she had to write and direct herself to do so. And if that’s considered a vanity project (as some critics have decried, some with a sexist tone to their dismissals) well, I want more of these so-called “vanity projects.”

Given how little women are allowed to be complicated and interesting, fragile and strong, smart and fucked up and not always good people on film, this is a strange type of “vanity” Jolie is basking in. She’s a filmmaker, she’s a writer, she’s an actress, she’s going to make a film that is personal and a piece of herself. That’s not mere vanity, that’s expression and creation. And yet, of course there’s vanity. Most everyone possesses vanity; certainly almost all artists possess vanity. And, as By the Sea further proves, Angelina Jolie is an artist.

 

I was honored to present and discuss Something Wild (1961) on TCM in 2010 and both Something Wild and The Strange One (1957) with director Jack Garfein at the Telluride Film Festival in 2012 (read my piece here). If you haven’t seen these two powerful pictures, don’t miss them tonight on TCM at 5 & 7 PST with, and this is exciting, Jack there to present.

Again, don’t miss the films and don’t miss Jack discussing his incredible work – he is a fascinating artist and man.

 

I wrote a defense of femme fatales in the the Fall 2015 issue of the Film Noir Foundation's magazine, Noir City and it's now available, with contributors Meagan Abbott, Ben Terrall, Krista Faust, Renee Patrick, Rose McGowan and more inside. Make a donation and read it all here. Here's an excerpt from my much longer piece.

Taking on the topic of the femme fatale, and what she means, is as hard to untangle as the seductive inscrutability of The Big Sleep. It’s a question that can be answered simply, sure, but the answer is almost always the same and a bit boring, or open to extensive interpretation, one that goes beyond girls and guns and gams and double-crossing dames. The femme fatale is a woman, an experience, a hypothesis, a history, a story someone like Thomas Pynchon could wind into a narrative that coils into splintered theories—theories that could be interpreted ten different ways, fraught with arguments and frustration and even anger. Because nothing angers a person like a double-crossing dame. And nothing angers a woman like being called a double-crossing dame, particularly with such simplistic intent.

But, to be simplistic about it, maybe—as Martha explained to husband George while trying to decipher the name of that goddamn Bette Davis picture in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—maybe that double-crossing dame is just … “Discontent.”

Discontent.

They never do figure out the title of the picture; it’s King Vidor’s noir-stained melodrama Beyond the Forest (1949) and Martha surely understands Bette’s dilemma as a vulgar, loudmouthed, but strangely sympathetic seductress with her “what a dump” attitude. Martha discusses the movie and Bette’s marriage to a modest small town doctor (Joseph Cotten) in a scene that unravels with delicious simplicity, yet deeply embedded complexity.

It explains the idea, and answers the question of what is a femme fatale with both hilarity and a resigned crystalline clarity. Is it really that simple, Martha? No. But let’s indulge her for a moment as Martha deconstructs Bette Davis’s two-timing housewife, the porcupine-handyman-killing Rosa Moline, for her husband George, who’s clever and hyper intelligent but nevertheless the “bog” of the history department. To me, this exchange is one of most perfect distillations of the femme fatale (delivered by a woman who tells her husband, “You can’t afford to waste good liquor, not on your salary!”).

So, again, pardon my indulgence – I'm going to print the entire brilliant exchange here:

Martha: ‘What a dump.’ Hey, what’s that from? ‘What a dump!’    

George: How would I know?    

Martha: Oh, come on, what’s it from? You know! What’s it from, for Christ’s sake? What’s what from? I just told you. I just did it. ‘What a dump!’  Huh? What’s that from?    

George: I haven’t the faintest idea.    

Martha: Dumbbell! It’s from some Bette Davis picture… some goddamn Warner Brothers epic.    

George: Martha, I can’t remember all the films that came out of Warner Brothers.    

Martha: Nobody's asking you to remember every Warner Brothers epic. Just one single little epic. That’s all. Bette Davis gets peritonitis at the end. And she wears a fright wig throughout the picture.  She’s married to Joseph Cotten or something. Somebody. She wants to go to Chicago because she loves that actor with the scar. She gets sick… and sits down at her dressing table…    

George: What actor? What scar?    

Martha: I can’t remember his name! What’s the picture? I want to know the name of the picture. She gets peritonitis and decides to go to Chicago anyway.    

George: ‘Chicago!’ It’s called 'Chicago.’    

Martha: What is?    

George: I mean the picture. It's ‘Chicago.’    

Martha: Oh, good grief! Don’t you know anything? ‘Chicago' was a ‘30s musical starring little Miss Alice Faye. Don’t you know anything? This picture. Bette Davis comes home from a hard day at the grocery store…    

George: She works in a grocery store?    

Martha: She's a housewife. She buys things. She comes in with the groceries and she walks into the modest living room of the modest cottage modest Joseph Cotten set her up in.    

George: Are they married?    

Martha: Yes, they’re married. To each other. Cluck. And she comes in and she looks around this room and she sets down her groceries. And she says… ‘What a dump! (Pause) She’s discontent. [1]

She’s “discontent.” Not evil. Not a dastardly double-crosser. Not greedy. Not a bitch. Not a conniver. Discontent. 

In her own simple fashion, Martha describes what many femme fatales are struggling with in film noir—this idea that the world is not theirs for the taking, but why shouldn’t it be? Why must they be trapped in the expectations of the bonds of matrimony, why can’t they live their life as a man can? Why must they be one of the … normals? One idea consistent with the femme fatale is that these are not normal women. To me, that’s a beautiful, empowering thing. But, alas, they are punished for it. Or they punish others for knowing they’ll be punished. Or they punish themselves. More than likely they do, or try to, take everyone down with them.

A glorious example of the frustrated woman living among the normal is Gene Tierney in Leave Her To Heaven (1945). I’ve referenced this movie countless times, and I'll repeat a few thoughts here, always with a sympathetic bent towards Tierney’s diabolical but in many ways sad character, Ellen Berent. Yes, I feel a little sorry for Ellen.  Was she misunderstood and, so, murderously frustrated? She was certainly discontent.

She’s a woman trapped in an obsession, of course, an obsession with her father, but she’s also trapped within the un-permissiveness of the times. Permission for Ellen to do…what would Ellen do? Perhaps that’s the problem. This was a time when one was not allowed the strength of being… Ellen. I’m not sure when anyone is allowed to be Ellen, exactly, but she is certainly trapped by some force beyond mere psychopathology. Maybe being born so impeccable, so unfaltering, she even frightens herself? She’s not normal. And Ellen doesn’t want to be normal. Indeed, it’s impossible for her to be so. 

She tries. She yearns for marriage (to Cornel Wilde, though we’re never sure why. Perhaps because he’s normal) and a private honeymoon, but after that, it all goes wrong. She cannot stand Wild’s younger, disabled brother, who knocks on the wall after their sexy morning wake-up, and she takes the kid out on that famous swim in which she watches him drown. Well, as Walter Neff said, “that tears it.” No more normal family life after that. She does get pregnant, but changes her mind, and far too late in the game and with a solution that’s as dastardly as it disgustingly glamorous. Clad in beautiful light blue dressing gown, she throws herself down the stairs, removing one petite, perfectly matching light- blue satin slipper.

Here’s a question: Perhaps she should have remained single? I’ll defend Ellen a little because she, was, after all attempting normalcy (and I know she’s hard to defend), to fulfill a role society deems appropriate, but it’s her superiority, her looming genius that creates such problems. One could call her a narcissist, but that’s not what’s entirely what is going on. Consider that she never boasts so much as arrives—all she needs to do is walk into a room with those startlingly beautiful green eyes, flop on a couch and eat a sandwich with that perfect overbite. It’s not that she’s a mere mortal trapped in some super-human, celestial cage—she’s both sensitive and smart, maybe even a tortured genius. She may even suspect that her husband isn’t such a great writer after all (I bet you she’s got five better novels in her than he does). She knows men desire her, she’s yearned for as the ultimate trophy wife (gorgeous, smart, strong,), but in the end, what she learns is, what men really want is, yes: “The girl with the hoe.” As in, her sweeter, younger, more normal sister, played by Jeanne Crain. Ellen could never be that, swampy…

Read the entire piece in which I further discuss Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, Claire Trevor in Born to Kill, Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy, Beverly Michaels in Wicked Woman and more. Go to the Film Noir Foundation's site and make a donation to access their magazine.

[1] This excerpt is from the 1966 film version of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, adapted for the screen by Ernest Lehman, directed by Mike Nichols, and performed, famously, by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

The Fall 2015 issue of Filmmaker Magazine is out and the cover features my interview with director Todd Haynes. We discuss his newest picture, Carol, Patricia Highsmith, Karen Carpenter and more. Here's an excerpt from the interview. To read the rest, buy the newest issue of Filmmaker or subscribe to their premium content. 

“Persistently, I have the vision of a house in the country with the blond wife whom I love, with the children whom I adore, on the land and with the trees I adore. I know this will never be, yet will be partially that tantalizing measure (of a man) leads me on. My God and my beloved, it can never be! And yet I love, in flesh and bone and clothes in love, as all mankind.” – Patricia Highsmith

A key movie to first understanding Todd Haynes is his Karen Carpenter “biopic” cast entirely with Barbie dolls, Superstar. This 1987 short that, due to Karen’s brother, Richard, and music rights problems will never be released, seems to define not only Haynes’s subsequent cinema, but also how much he understands the ways in which popular culture, music and memories interweave with the struggles of being a woman, the struggles of sexuality and the struggles of controlling ourselves in a world that won’t really allow it. Superstar goes beyond Karen Carpenter, digging into our own memories and insecurities. For those who first heard of it and were curious (Barbie dolls?), the defining moment is when you realize how the movie isn’t a joke, a gimmick, or a load of Gen X irony; it’s thoughtful and disarmingly moving. Watching this Barbie doll — her face being shaved down onscreen, her plastic limbs growing smaller and smaller, her sad little voice fading off as her angry brother yells at her (“People gasp when you walk on stage!”) — you’re completely rapt. Haynes casts such a spell that you’re not even thinking about these characters as Barbie dolls; you think of them as human beings shoved into Barbie dolls as a sort of mask of supposed perfection. It’s such a brilliant way to tell the story you can’t imagine it being told in any other manner.

Haynes is a filmmaker who always reveals his intelligence. His study at Brown University, where he received a degree in art and semiotics, and his ever-curious brain, evolutions, experimentation and empathy are all apparent in movies like Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, I’m Not There and his TV mini-series, Mildred Pierce. And yet, there is nothing showy about this intelligence; it’s not overly academic, it doesn’t present itself blatantly or in inaccessible ways. There’s joy there, too, and exuberance — watching Cate Blanchett’s skinny Dylan running around a Fellini-esque Pennebaker landscape in I’m Not There is mysterious, telling and exhilarating.

In his newest picture, Carol, Blanchett slinks into a department store wearing a creamy mink coat, all cool elegance like an early ’50s David Bowie, intimidatingly beautiful and furtive all at once. She’s a vision of near perfection but, like Karen Carpenter’s shaved face, she’s going to be unmasking the pain and fear she’s enduring through that thing that nearly always breaks us — falling in love. And falling in love with a woman.

Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, the film tells the story of wealthy housewife, Carol, who falls for a younger shop girl and budding photographer, Therese (Rooney Mara), as Carol’s marriage is falling apart and she’s trying, trying to live her life, keep her own child and find happiness as a lesbian in such a restrictive society. She can’t be open about it, but Carol wants to experience young Therese, and by all rights she should be allowed to, since she’s getting a divorce. The two embark on a road trip, on which her husband Harge (Kyle Chandler) has her tailed and recorded, evidence to be used against her in a nasty divorce and custody dispute. It’s a road movie, a look at lesbianism in the ’50s and, in some ways, a thriller, but it’s also just a beautifully rendered love story, a subdued slow burn that’s universal to anyone falling in love, and one marked by exquisite period detail, gorgeous, shadowy cinematography by Edward Lachman and a stirring score by Carter Burwell. And the excellent actresses share a chemistry that is so deeply felt that, when they finally consummate their gradual, somewhat timid courtship, the passion is not just typical overwhelming movie passion, it’s layered with a sadness that perhaps… this won’t work out. But perhaps it will?

I talked to Todd Haynes to discuss not just Carol but the themes in all of his movies, how Patricia Highsmith works so well within his study of human behavior and how things aren’t worth doing unless you’re “afraid.”

Let’s start with a rather simple question: This is your second adaptation from a novel, and your first for a feature after your miniseries, Mildred Pierce, from James M. Cain. What drew you to the Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt? How did this start? 

This is probably the first film I’ve directed that I didn’t really initiate myself. It had a long history of trying to get financed and written before I came on board. A window opened up in my schedule, and I knew a lot of the key people who’d been involved with it for the last several years, namely Liz Karlsen, the producer. The costume designer Sandy Powell was attached, my dear friend who I’ve worked with twice before Carol. Cate [Blanchett] was attached. So I’d heard about it. And then, all of a sudden, I had a moment of availability, and Liz, who goes way back with [producer] Christine [Vachon], as do I with Liz, asked her, “Do you think Todd would be interested in this project?” They sent me Phyllis [Nagy’s] adaptation. At that point, I didn’t know the novel. I read it all — the script and the novel — in May of 2013. I have to say, that book floored me. I really found it to be one of the great accounts of first love. I think it took Highsmith’s acerbic, hard-bitten, unsentimental sensibility to bring all of the power of a criminal story to the panic and the uncertainty and the frailty of early love. But then, it [also was] entirely a story about the amorous experience. The whole thing was just too interesting. I couldn’t say no.

The history of the book is interesting, too. It was written under a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, and became a popular book. Also interesting is that, like your movie, you can read it as maybe having a happy ending, unlike a lot of the more salacious lesbian novels of the time. 

Absolutely. All true from everything I know about it. In the various Patricia Highsmith biographies, I read a little more about the [book’s] evolution. She didn’t always have this ending in mind, and there was a publisher or editor who encouraged her in this [happier] direction. And she didn’t write it under a pseudonym; she wrote it assuming that it might be her second novel published with Harper’s. But all of the mainstream publishing houses at the time were too scared by it, and her own professional advisors told her she should do it under a pseudonym. She was off to a very strong start as a novelist of the crime genre, and this might derail it. It did get published in her lifetime in the ’80s under her name, and, I think, the title Carol.

Did you find any parallels, when you researched Highsmith, with your own work? She writes a lot about identity, gender and sexuality, about psychological masks, hiding one’s own true self and how we create ourselves, via a character like Ripley. And I see that in I’m Not There or Velvet Goldmine or adapting your own body in Superstar. She also writes about the social constraints of trying to be yourself in a restrictive society, which you deal with in Far From Heaven.

I don’t know if I necessarily saw direct, personal affiliations with it, but when you say that, yeah, I think there are interesting lines of thinking to be developed there. I think no one could have brought [Highsmith’s work] to the cinema in a more compelling way than Hitchcock —  and this is not just true with Strangers on a Train, this is true for many of her novels — but I do love that strange sort of linking of the homoerotic and the criminal in her work. Almost always male homosexuals are the subjects of that kind of alliance, and I do find that to be really fascinating. It doesn’t paint this positivist portrait of homosexuality, at least among men. There’s an unmistakable sort of fixation on it, and a way in which covert desire has to be transformed into something else. The two themes are always running in parallel with each other and unspoken about — or almost nearly unspoken, because it’s so prevalent in the work. It bristles through the Ripley stories and, obviously, Strangers on a Train and many [others] I’ve read. That desire, that instinct to tell a story about desire always having to be disguised, a desire that at some level is antisocial — I think, in that way, even The Price of Salt has to be included in that taste or tradition of hers.

To read the rest of this interview, buy Filmmaker on newsstand or subscribe for premium content here.

 

"The sadness of our existence should not leave us blunted, on the contrary — how to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable and stay alive?" – Montgomery Clift 

 

 

Here's a nice write-up from Gary Tooze for the Kino Lorber release of Busting with a much-appreciated shout-out regarding my commentary with Elliott Gould:

"There are some good extras including a feature-length audio commentary by director Peter Hyams – which has some revealing moments – but I really enjoyed the 3/4 of an hour select scene audio commentary with Elliott Gould and film critic Kim Morgan. It's hard not to like Gould – great personality and I only wish it was longer." 

I wish too! Busting on Blu hits the streets tomorrow. Pick it up. It's a gritty '70s cop picture near-masterpiece. And, as Baretta Blake would say, "You can take that to the bank!"