June 2020

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (2017, TV)

     It took me awhile, but I finally watched the third season, shown on Showtime and now on Netflix (but not for streaming), of David Lynch’s Earth-bound sci-fi series about the murder of a small-town high school girl.

     While the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death was “solved” by FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), the door remained open concerning the strange goings-on in the area around Twin Peaks, Washington, after the series’ second season on ABC ended in 1991. Lynch’s 1992 feature, “Fire Walk With Me,” offered some answers to this bizarre world from Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, but was mostly head-scratching.

     Even though season one of “Twin Peaks” may be the most imaginative, audacious and creepy drama ever aired on network television, I wasn’t exactly pining for Lynch to return to the story. But he clearly sees the story’s frame as the perfect vehicle for his flights of fancy into a world just beyond what’s known.

      The 18 episodes of season three spend plenty of time (maybe too much) among the oddball characters of Twin Peaks: the crew at the Double R Diner, Hawk (Michael Horse) and Sheriff Truman (now the brother of the original, with Robert Forster filling in for Michael Ontkean), the Great Northern Hotel and the oddball Horne brothers, the log lady and the Roadhouse, a small town hipster hangout, where Lynch returns to end each episode. But the focus of the mystery is on Cooper, who has split in two.

     The dark side of Cooper is a ruthless killer looking for a way into the Black Lodge, abetted by two comical assassins played by Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh. While much of actions of this Cooper, who can’t be killed by ordinary measures, are unexplainable, the “other” Cooper is just as baffling.

     That Cooper, known as Dougie Jones, is a Las Vegas insurance agent with a gambling problem who magically wins tens of thousands at a casino and then becomes pals with the erratic Mitchum brothers (Jim Belushi and Robert Knepper), who own the joint. His wife (Naomi Watts) seems to barely notice his behavior—he’s like a newborn, unable to talk or do the simplest of tasks—and takes this new Dougie in stride.

     Tracking all this strangeness is FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (Lynch himself) and his team: Albert (Miguel Ferrer), Cooper’s ex-partner Diane (Laura Dern), and newcomer Tammy (Chrysta Bell).

     For the first four or five hours, I wasn’t sure this was going anywhere, but I put my trust in the twisted brilliance of Lynch and was eventually rewarded with a thrilling finale that brings Cooper back to Twin Peaks.

    There must be 100 characters in this series that are given a scene or two to leave their mark on Lynch’s dark, mysterious world, including Don Murray (who deserved an Emmy as insurance chief Bushnell Mullins), Harry Dean Stanton, Ashley Judd, Russ Tamblyn, Tom Sizemore, Amanda Seyfried and Candy Clark.

       Though acting in a Lynch film or series is a different art than what’s called for by every other creator, by any measure MacLachlan is astonishing as the two Coopers, making them almost unrecognizable as the same man. Watts, Dern and Forster, as you’d expect, are all memorable, but it’s Lynch himself as the deaf, corny Gordon, who serves as the anchor to most of the story while giving the audience just enough bread crumbs to keep us on the right path.

      Almost as integral as the plot to making this series so memorable is Peter Deming’s (“Mulholland Drive”) cinematography, especially the black and white interiors and nighttime desert landscapes, along with the visual effects, which are as disturbing as one would expect from a Lynch work.

     Like most of Lynch’s films, there are plenty of loose ends that never get tied up, but that’s of little concern. It’s an “Alice in Wonderland”-like journey, with the absurd diversions—both hypnotically fascinating and repulsively frightening—along the way that that grow curiouser and curiouser.

     Not surprisingly, a bizarre turn takes place to conclude the series, questioning the relativity of time and space, and taking the plot down another rabbit hole. Lynch hasn’t finished with these characters.

     He’s hooked me again: I’m looking forward to another visit to Cooper’s dream room, with the checkerboard floor and thick red drapes and the little man who speaks backwards and the unimaginable strangeness that will follow.

DA 5 BLOODS (2020)

    Once upon a time, Spike Lee was one of the best filmmakers in American cinema, creating “Do the Right Thing,” “Mo Better Blues,” “Jungle Fever,” “Malcolm X” and “Crooklyn” in a six-year period. Almost singlehandedly, he made movies about African Americans a part of Hollywood mainstream.

    Now, he’s turned crusader who prefers to offer cinematic history classes, turning his dramas into agenda-driven fictions that hammer home worksheet bullet points, using characters and stories as merely jumping off points. 

   In “Da 5 Bloods,” streaming on Netflix, Lee jams so many stories and lessons into the picture that it almost plays like a complication of clips from other films.

    It begins with great promise as four Vietnam War vets reunite to unearth and bring home the remains of the leader of their Army unit, Norman, an outspoken advocate for social justice.

       Meeting up in Ho Chi Minh City, Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clark Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—purposely, I’m sure, the names of the original members of the Temptations—hit the clubs (including the ironically named “Apocalypse Now”) and hire a local guide, playing tourists before venturing out into the jungle. The group becomes a quartet when Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors)—another Temptation name—arrives unexpectedly, worried about his father.

      The film also reveals, in flashback, the other reason they have returned to Vietnam; after a brutal encounter with the North Vietnamese, they discovered a large cache of gold bars and buried it for future recovery.

      At first, I was convinced that the 1968 scenes were a stylized fantasy because the actors actually portray their younger selves. Only Norman, who didn’t make it out alive, is played by a young actor (Chatwick Boseman) in the war flashbacks; watching these retirees pretend to be 20something took me right out of the story.

      The film is on surer footing when it returns to present day, but the journey soon turns contentious as Lindo’s Paul grows more and more belligerent (he’s a proud Trump supporter, which Lee uses to designate him as the angry outsider), turning the initial bonding of old friends into a nonstop bitch session. Taking a page from the classic film “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Lee and his co-writers examine how greed changes relationships. 

      It seems that the only reason David is brought in, disrupting the symmetry of four returning vets, was so Lee could have the old guys offer nuggets of black history to educate the youngster, which the director punctuates by inserting still photos of whatever legend they are speaking of.  At times, I felt like I was watching a Power Point rather than a feature film.

    The second half of the film becomes an action picture, with the vets turning into “Rambos” to fight Vietnamese thugs who also want the gold. There is also a clumsily inserted plotline about a team of volunteers working to remove old landmines.

     There are plenty of compelling scenes and discussions in this overlong, scattershot work, but it fails on the most basic levels: telling a coherent story and providing characters with believable emotional reactions. Strangely, when death inevitably revisits this band of brothers it is treated as collateral damage rather than friends losing friends.

     The film’s disregard for age really bothered me; it seems to be a symptom of Lee’s lack of care for the fictional integrity of the script. And not just in using the old guys in the flashback scenes.

     In a scene near the start of the film, Eddie reconnects with the Vietnamese woman he had an affair with when he was a solider a half-century earlier. When he meets the child they had together, she’s not even close to 50, but a woman in her late 30s.

     To appreciate recent Lee films—including his acclaimed 2018 film “BlacKkKlansman”—you can’t get hung up on his mixing of fiction and documentary-like material or his disinterest in story details. I can’t fault Lee for what he sees as his mission to educate moviegoers on the systemic racism of America, but I think he’d be more successful doing it with traditional storytelling. No one goes to the movies to be lectured to.

THE STRATTON STORY (1949)

    I’ll argue until there’s no vodka left in the house that James Stewart is the greatest film actor of them all, but why did anyone think he should play the young baseball phenom Monty Stratton?

    Stewart looks younger than his 39 years but not young enough to play a 22-year-old. That’s how old Stratton was when he left his Texas farm and earned a spot on the roster of the Chicago White Sox in 1934. And it’s not like this was some little-known player from long ago: in 1949 almost everyone knew the story of Stratton. 

    Almost as crazy, his sharp-tongued mother is played by Agnes Moorehead, who was born just three years before Stewart.

    Stratton was just hitting his stride as a pitcher—he had won 15 games back to back years—when he lost his leg after accidentally shooting himself during the 1938 off-season.

    With the unceasing support of his wife (played in the film by June Allyson), Stratton returned to professional baseball and had success at the low minor leagues. Though he never returned to the big leagues, it remains an inspirational story.

     For an A-level picture, Sam Wood (“A Night at the Opera,” “The Pride of the Yankees”) offers lackluster direction, especially when the film shifts to the baseball diamond. Not for a second does Stewart look like a pitcher who could get anyone out.

   The film features a few major leaguers, including Yankee Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey, but that’s where the authenticity ends.

    Stewart does his best, but he can’t help but look more like one of the coaches than a kid off the farm trying to prove himself.

THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW (1992-1998, TV)

     For the past month, I’ve been re-watching “The Larry Sanders Show,” to me one of the Top 10 sitcoms in television history. Just as fresh 22 years after it went off the air, the talk show sendup remains the funniest and most insightful look at the production of a TV show and the privilege of celebrity. (with a tip of the hat to Carl Reiner’s “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” which could only go so far in the 1960s)

     Sadly, two of the stars have died within the last few years. Garry Shandling, who died of a heart attack in 2016 at age 66, was one of the most important comic figures of the last 40 years. After a standup career that culminated with guest host spots on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” he created “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” in 1986, a Showtime sitcom that mixed reality with fiction that included Shandling talking directly to the audience.

     Then, in 1991, having been passed over for the best late-night host jobs, he started “Larry Sanders” on HBO, playing a host interviewing real stars playing themselves, but showing the chaos behind the curtain. He brought a nervous, ego-centric manner to his characters that, though never transferring successfully to film, worked brilliantly on TV.

     Rip Torn, who played the show’s producer, was 88 when he died last July after a long career in both film and television.

      As entertaining as Shandling’s Larry; Jeffrey Tambor’s Hank “Hey Now” Kingsley, the clueless, sycophant sidekick; and all the highly original characters and priceless guest stars are, it’s Torn’s Arthur that keeps me coming back to the show. 

       Some great actors don’t have great careers—in Torn’s case because he was a pain in the ass and a drinker who gave headaches to more than a few directors and producers. But he was unquestionable one of the great talents of his generation and his portrayal of Arthur stands as one of the finest supporting performance in the history of television.

    As the producer of the fictional late night TV show, he changes his opinions on a dime to agree with temperamental star Sanders, regularly puts cloying Hank in his place and keeps the guests content before the show starts taping. Arthur stands in for all the behind-the-scenes pros who were there at the beginning of TV and continued to contribute into the 1980s and ‘90s.

     While the show lifts the curtain on the making of a talk show (Sanders is in competition with David Letterman, Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall at a time when the cut-throat world of late-night talk was at its height) offering juicy, embarrassing, highly offensive portrayals of both host and his staff, it also provides a heartfelt look at the first generation of TV creators, like Arthur, who ran things by the seat of their pants.

      No one delivers off-handed rejoinders like Arthur as he fends off temperamental guest stars, unhappy staffers (usually Hank) and network executives (“I killed a guy in Korea that looks just like her”). Arthur somehow manages to maintain his integrity while unceasingly kissing up to Larry; he loves him like a son and knows when to kick his butt.

     When Larry goes back to his first wife, Arthur is incensed: “Are you insane? That woman smashed your People’s Choice Award. So you cheated on her. Why take it out on the People’s Choice Award?”

     Torn, who was 61 when he took the “Larry Sanders” role, had been giving memorable performances since the mid-1950s, starting on stage and live television, winning a Tony Award for his supporting role in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth.” He repeated the role for the 1962 film while continuing to work mostly in TV.

     Among his best work in film are roles as the sniveling crime boss in “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965), notorious writer Henry Miller in the censorship-provoking “Tropic of Cancer” (1970), the cruel, egotistical country and western singer in “Payday” (1973), a humble turn-of-the-century rancher in “Heartland” (1979) and, earning an Oscar nomination, as a neighbor of “The Yearling” writer Marjorie Rawlings  in “Cross Creek” (1983).

     On television, in addition to dozens of series guest appearances, he starred as Richard Nixon in the acclaimed 1979 miniseries “Blind Ambition.”

     After “Larry Sanders,” which earned Torn six straight Emmy nominations, winning once, he scored the high-profile role as Will Smith’s and Tommy Lee Jones’ boss in the first two “Men in Black” films. This century, he was the veteran dodgeball trainer in “Dodgeball” (2004), Louis XV in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” (2006), part of an old-guys road trip in “Three Days to Vegas” (2007) and also had a reoccurring role on “30 Rock,” earning another Emmy nod.

     In his best late-career role, he played a legendary record producer with a discontented, much younger Russian wife, and an adult son he can’t connect with in “Forty Shades of Blue” (2005).

     One of the most infamous incidents of his career concerned a role he didn’t get. While the details are disputed—and were the subject of a lawsuit—Torn lost a chance to play George Hanson in “Easy Rider,” which his replacement, Jack Nicholson, build his career on, after heated words (and maybe a knife and certainly fisticuffs) were exchanged with director Dennis Hopper. 

    Hollywood stories about Torn abound, most involving alcohol, though probably only half of them are true. Though he was charged with breaking into a bank later in his life.

     There is plenty of that “one-time wild man” in his Artie on “Larry Sanders.” The character would have little chance to survive the current PC world of entertainment, but just because we don’t approve of everything about a character shouldn’t mean they disappear from fiction. Torn, and the superb “Larry Sanders” writing team, gave us one for the ages. 

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958)

and THE UNDERWORLD STORY (1950)

      At least once a month, TCM’s Noir Alley introduces me to a low-budget crime picture I had never seen; often, never heard of. These two recently aired films surprised me with their high-quality performances and original storylines.

       I never would have imagined that a film starring Vince Edwards, the bland TV actor best known for his 1960s series “Ben Casey,” could be as intense and brutal as “Murder by Contract.” Edwards’ character, Claude, is a strange loner who, unexplainably, presents himself to a local crime boss in hopes of becoming a hit man.

     The mobster makes him wait for a month before he offers a contract and it’s during that stretch that it’s clear why Martin Scorsese has cited the film as an influence. Claude nervously paces around his small room, exercising and waiting for the call. There is more than a little bit of Travis Bickle in Claude.

     After he pulls off a couple of hits, creatively impersonating a doctor and a barber, the boss sends him to Los Angeles to knock off a witness in a mob trial.

In L.A., the script, by Ben Simcoe, takes an odd turn, when an awe-struck Claude demands that his handlers (comically played by Herschel Bernardi and Phillip Pine) take him to see Southern California sites. Then, when he finally gets around to focusing on the job, he freaks out when he learns the witness is a woman (Caprice Toriel, impressive in her only screen role).

    The last act drags a bit as Claude stalks his well-protected prey, but that just adds to the film’s quirkiness. Edwards is very effective, showing a steely demeanor and determined independence that makes the character much more interesting than your usual noir anti-hero.

   Irving Lerner, who later directed many of the “Ben Casey” episodes, isn’t much of a stylist—the film looks more like a TV show of the era than a feature—but he doesn’t shy away from the psychotic nature of Claude nor does he offer moral judgments.

    “The Underworld Story,” which more accurately should have been re-titled “Journalist on the Loose,” is all about morals. Dan Duryea plays Mike Reese, an ethically challenged newspaper reporter who is fired from his big-city job in the opening scene. As pushy and arrogant as any lead character in a film—even a low budget noir—Reese cajoles his way into the editorship of a struggling small- town paper run by a young woman (Gale Storm). In addition to his rudeness, he’s a classic mid-century sexual harasser.

    Not unlike Billy Wilder’s examination of journalistic avarice, “Ace in the Hole” (1952), this film explores the way different newspapers twist the news to sell papers. In this film, another newspaper publisher’s daughter-in-law is murdered, and her African American maid is accused. (Needless to say, this film takes a very dim view at American journalism.)

     In addition to Duryea, the acting highlights of the film are provided by Howard da Silva playing the high-spirited, sadistic mobster Carl Durham. The veteran character actor’s career (“The Lost Weekend,” “They Live by Night”) was derailed when he was blacklisted in 1951 and didn’t work for the next eight years. The same fate damaged director Cy Endfield’s career, who was forced to move to England soon after this picture to keep working, eventually making the classic British war film “Zulu” (1964).

   One of the oddest aspects of “The Underworld Story” is the casting of Mary Anderson, a white actress, in the role of the black maid. Reportedly, it was done to avoid being banned in Southern states, but African Americans had been playing small roles in films since the silent era. She doesn’t wear blackface, but she’s shot in shadows to make her look like a light-skinned black woman.

     In most other ways, the film is progressive in that the newspaper publisher and Reese, to a lesser degree, refuse to accept the official version of the murder at a time when blacks rarely received justice. But the offensive casting undercuts the film’s message.

     For those who live in Southern California, it’s worth noting that the film contains one of the few movie appearances of the Los Angeles Times’ Globe Lobby, standing in for a fictional “big city” newspaper. Though shot 70 years ago, the lobby and the entrance onto First Street, which Duryea walks through, remain unchanged even as the paper has relocated.    

GIRL CRAZY (1943)

     The final eight minutes of this by-the-number, childishly idiotic musical will make you forget that you just sat through more than 90 minutes of Mickey Rooney playing a pompous society kid brought down to earth at a small college way out west.

     George Gershwin’s crowd-pleaser “I Got Rhythm” is given the full MGM treatment, a set-piece that may be choreographer-director Busby Berkeley’s finest work. (He only directed this sequence; he was replaced by Norman Taurog.)

      With the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, brought in for the college’s Wild West Rodeo, backing up Judy Garland, along with close to 50 dancers in cowboy attire, the scene has almost all of the Berkeley trademarks—moving camera, severe closeups, fast pull-a-ways, perfectly aligned dancers—except an overhead shot.

    Garland’s voice is at its peak, as is her command of the stage, especially when she and Rooney lead the entire troupe in a tap dance segment worthy of Astaire and Rogers. The only musical finale that can match this is another Gershwin masterpiece, the “An American in Paris” ballet sequence.

    The only other scene worthy watching happens just a few minutes before “I Got Rhythm,” when Garland sings the heartbreaking ballad, “But Not for Me.”

    If there is ever a category for best ending of a bad film, this is the winner.