RESPECT
(2021)
In
recent years, Hollywood has fallen in love with musical biopics—"Rocketman,”
“Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Straight Outta Compton,” “Jersey Boys,” “Judy” and “Get
on Up,” to name a few. It’s hard to go wrong when portraying a popular
performer; as long as there are plenty of songs and the usual quotient of
tragedy, filmgoers don’t seem concerned if the filmmakers fudge on the details
of the musician’s life.
The latest in this genre, “Respect,”
chronicles the life of Aretha Franklin, whose stunning voice earned her the title
of “The Queen of Soul” even before she hit her prime in the late 1960s.
The film comes to life along with
Franklin’s career when she is signed by Ahmet Ertegun’s Atlantic Records
(neither are mentioned in the film, I assume for legal reasons) and paired with
visionary record maker Jerry Wexler, played by an excellent Marc Maron, the
podcaster and sometimes actor.
Wexler records her at the Muscle Shoals, Alabama studio Fame; finally, the movie shows Aretha’s musicianship as she interacts with studio musicians who understand R&B. At Atlantic, she became a pop superstar with a string of hits, including "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)," "Respect," "(You Makes Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," "Chain of Fools" and "Think."
While the film does a pretty good job of portraying her career arc (though I wasn't pleased that the film left the impression that Franklin wrote her signature hit "Respect," when in fact it was a cover of an Otis Redding song), it fails to elevate Franklin above the cliché of talented victim. Her father and then boyfriends/husbands (most notably Ted White, played by Marlon Wayans) control her as if she's a child. It's frustrating to see her stand up for herself in one scene and then go back to becoming a victim in the next. Maybe that reflects reality, but it didn't ring true to me.
The emotional complexity of the film's Aretha is in the script--written by Tracey Scott Wilson and veteran screenwriter Callie Khouri--but Hudson struggles to find the character. Too often she plays important scenes with a blank face, failing to communicate what is going on with the film's central character. Theatrical director Liesl Tommy, making her feature debut, fails to give the film a consistent tone.
Astonishingly, for a two- and a half-hour film, the story ends in 1972, with the filming of her return to her gospel roots for a documentary and live album in the church of her mentor, the Rev. Dr. James Cleveland (a nice turn by Tituss Burgess). She lived another 46 years, dying in 2018 at age 76, but never had the recording success again, instead taking on legendary status.
Even with its faults, "Respect" is better than most biopics and benefits from the great music. Though it does make the too common mistake of showing the real performer at the end of the film. Seeing Franklin perform "A Natural Woman" at Carole King's Kennedy Center tribute (King wrote the song) in 2015 is so powerful that it nearly erases everything you've just experienced in the film.
MANDALAY
(1934)
This obscure picture of exotic romanticism was
the 60th film of director Michael Curtiz I’ve seen. Yet that’s only a bit over
half of his Hollywood movies.
The Warner Bros. stalwart helmed about
100 films between 1926, when the Hungarian moved to Hollywood, and his final
movie, “The Comancheros,” in 1961. Too easily dismissed by critics and
historians because he was so prolific—despite directing such classics as “The
Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Angels With Dirty Faces,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,”
“Casablanca,” “Mildred Pierce” and “White Christmas”—Curtiz was a master of
camera movement and placement, managing crowd scenes and getting the most out
of every performer. By all reports, he was a dictator on the set, but the
results are hard to argue with.
Born in 1886 in Budapest, he began his
directing career in 1912, using the name Kertész Mihály, and then later Michael
Kertész, making over 60 films before heading to America. By 1930, the director,
now Michael Curtiz, was given such high-profile assignments as “Noah’s Ark”
with Dolores Costello and, in 1931, “The Mad Genius” with John Barrymore. One
of his early hit films was “Mystery at the Wax Museum” (1933), with Fay Wray.
While “Mandalay” is hardly among his best
pictures, it features one of the era’s biggest stars, Kay Francis playing a
woman living in Rangoon, Burma. She is sold to a sleazy nightclub owner (Warner
Oland) by her boyfriend (Ricardo Cortez) to cover his debts. She becomes Spot
White, the singer/hostess at the club who ends up being forced to leave the
city. During the trip upriver, headed to Mandalay, she meets an alcoholic
doctor (Lyle Talbot), bonding with him as they both try to forget their pasts.
The studio-styled exotic surroundings and the pre-code sexually charged storyline are supplemented by Curtiz’s flashy direction. Various scenes find his camera shooting from above a ceiling fan, behind curtains as the actors enter a room and travelling shots not often seen in early talkies. The scenes inside the nightclub foreshadow the director’s superb direction inside Rick’s in “Casablanca.”
Curtiz’s most famous collaboration was
with action star Errol Flynn; the pair worked together 12 times, creating such
first-rate entertainments as “Captain Blood” (1935), “The Adventures of Robin
Hood” (1938), “The Private Life of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939) and “The Sea
Hawk” (1940).
By the 1950s, his films lost the energy
of his earlier works, getting stuck with dreary material that resulted in “The
Jazz Singer,” “The Egyptian,” “The Vagabond King” and “The Helen Morgan Story.”
But he made three terrific pictures that were released in 1950.
“Bright Leaf,” the story of the American
cigarette industry, with Gary Cooper as the tobacco mogul, tries for a “Citizen
Kane”-like study, and almost succeeds, while Kirk Douglas portrays a
temperamental musician in “Young Man With a Horn,” a film that deals with a
collection of outsiders trying to find their place in the world (both films
co-star Lauren Bacall).
But the best of his output that year is
“The Breaking Point,” with John Garfield as Ernest Hemingway’s conflicted
tough-guy Harry Morgan, in this superbly realized adaptation of “To Have and
Have Not.” A sharp script by Ranald MacDougall (he also adapted “Mildred
Pierce” for Curtiz) that improves upon the original novel, maybe Garfield’s
best performance and Curtiz’s dynamic direction combine to make this a great
film and one of the least appreciated.
Not surprisingly, this industry lifer worked
right up to the end, passing away a year after his last film was released.
SUMMER
OF SOUL (…Or, When the Revolution
Could
Not Be Televised) (2021)
In July 1969, about a month before
Woodstock, another multi-day music festival was held in New York—this one in a
park in Harlem. The Harlem Cultural Festival also featured an impressive lineup
of musical performers but was soon forgotten by all but those who were there.
The film of the shows, discovered still in
the basement of the festival’s producer Hal Tulchin (he failed to get a deal
for a concert movie in 1969), has been edited, along with current interviews
and clips from the turbulent times that led up to the event, into a powerful
statement about a crucial period of African American life and its soundtrack.
Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer of the band Roots, seamlessly combines
this “lost” footage of the performers with the world these artists were part
of.
Among the inspired performances delivered
during the festival are Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight
and the Pips, the 5th Dimension, B.B. King, the Chamber Brothers, Nina Simone
and the Staples Singers. The high point of the film is a soaring duet by gospel
legend Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Introduced
by Jesse Jackson, he explains that it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite
song.
The death of King, just 16 months earlier,
hangs heavily over the event, making the festival as much a healing process as a
musical gathering.
While it’s disappointing that it took more
than 50 years to get this concert to the big screen (the producers became aware
of the footage while doing the documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?”), I
wonder if its impact will actually be greater in 2021 than it would have been a
half-century earlier. If it brings underrated performers like Sly Stone, the
Staples Singers and the 5th Dimension the attention they deserve and
proves to be a Black Lives Matter touchstone, it was worth the wait.
BLACK
WIDOW (2021)
Unlike most action pictures, there’s never
a shortage of dialogue in the Marvel Universe. Detailed explanations of every
aspect of the plot, along with long discourses on the emotional failings of
each character, seems as essential to these films as robotic warriors firing
lasers from their wrists.
Yet all these words just serve as little
more than noise the audience suffers through to get to the next over-the-top
fight or impossibly spectacular, CGI-enhanced escape. The latest entry, much delayed and
anticipated, offers the origins of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), who
as Black Widow, is part of the superhero Avengers troupe.
The tale begins with her Ohio childhood,
the night when her parents are somehow identified as Russian spies. They manage
(even when mother Melina is wounded by gunfire) to pilot a small aircraft to
Cuba—in a sequence laughably unbelievable—where Natasha and her sister Yelena
are whisked away for indoctrination, never to see their “parents” again.
But 20 years later, sister Yelena (Florence
Pugh) draws her famous sister into her obit as she tries to destroy a Russian
network of female assassins, all chemically controlled from a vaguely explained
secret headquarters called The Red Room. Yes, it does sound like a plotline
from a “Man From U.N.C.L.E” episode.
No one doubts Johansson’s acting skills (for
evidence see “Marriage Story,” “Lucy” and her three films for Woody Allen), yet
she doesn’t bring much to her Black Widow character other than looking great in
a white jumpsuit that never seems to get stained. In the Marvel world (this is
her eighth), she always seems to be playing Scarlett Johansson.
The directors in these MCU pictures seems
interchangeable and that seems true for “Black Widow.” Cate Shortland, an
Australian who previous directed a few indie films fails in the non-action
scenes, providing little to unpeel these characters’ love/hate relationships.
But most egregiously (spoiler alert!), two
of the films’ most reprehensible characters are allowed to live while hundreds
of foot soldiers on both sides die anonymously. That, for me, was more
jaw-dropping than most of the computer-choreographed chases.
LORD JIM (1965) and NATIVE SON (1951)
While there are numerous examples of great
literature being turned into great films (“The Grapes of Wrath,” “Great
Expectations,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” come immediately to mind) more often,
attempts to turn insightful writing into screenplays has resulted in
disappointment.
Not sure why I had never seen “Lord Jim,”
starring Peter O’Toole and directed by one of the best directors of the 1960s,
Richard Brooks, but time has only made this adaption of Joseph Conrad’s epic
more embarrassing.
O’Toole, fresh off his breakthrough role
in “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) and brilliant work in “Beckett” (1964) with
Richard Burton, plays Conrad’s title character, a 19th Century
British naval officer who, along the rest of the crew, reluctantly abandons a
troubled ship, leaving the passengers, Islamic religious pilgrims, to die. When
they make it safely back home, Jim is stripped of his naval rank.
Seeking to redeem himself, he ends up
attempting to aid a local uprising in the imaginary Southeast Asian country of
Patusan, where he becomes a hero of sorts, living with a tribal leader’s
daughter.
But he ends up being tested again and
again, first by an Asian warlord (the very non-Asian actor Eli Wallach) and a
murderous pirate (James Mason). Conrad’s critique of European incursion into
Eastern culture is lost in the muddled plot populated by characters whose
motivations are unexplainable. Even as the white man’s place in this part of
the world is questioned, Lord Jim displays resourcefulness that seems beyond
the natives’ abilities.
But the biggest drag on this picture is
O’Toole, one of the great actors of the 1960s and ‘70s. Throughout the film, he
goes through the motions as if he’s a George Romero zombie, reciting his lines
expressionless while attempting, I guess, to show a man who has given up on
life. It’s more like an actor whose given up trying.
In fact, O’Toole is an interesting study
of an actor who earned his reputation early and then seemed to cruise through a
career. Looking at his post-“Lord Jim” career—from age 33 to his death at
81—there are few highlights.
He gave another Oscar-nominated
performance as Henry II, the same character he played in “Becket,” in “The Lion
in Winter” (1968); played an insane dilettante in “The Ruling Class” (1972);
and then, in the 1980s, played two arrogant showbiz characters, the heartless
director in “The Stunt Man” and the Errol Flynn-type Alan Swann in “My Favorite
Year.” No actor has been nominated more times, eight,
without winning, but also few acclaimed actors have given so few memorable
performances in a career lasting more than 50 years.
Yet
he was a legendary drinker and raconteur, which became more important than his
actual acting career.
The rarely screened film version of Richard
Wright’s landmark novel of race, “Native Son,” isn’t nearly as bad as “Lord Jim,”
but it’s quite an oddity as the 43-year-old author plays the twentysomething protagonist
Bigger Thomas. Not sure whose decision that was, but the casting undercuts the
story of a young man hired to drive for a wealthy white family who accidentally
kills the family’s daughter after she has befriended him.
The film, directed by French director
Pierre Chenal and filmed in Argentina, clearly some producer’s lark, doesn’t do
a bad job of capturing the horrific conditions of Chicago slums, but once the
young, white, well-to-do couple start trying to “enlighten” their Black driver,
the heavy-handed issues overwhelm the human story.
Bravo to Eddie Muller for screening the film
on TCM’s Noir Alley, but I wasn’t buying his argument for the movie’s value as
a noir (I love the show, but Muller does tend to oversell some second-rate pictures.)
Co-star and victim Jean Wallace also played
Richard Conte’s girlfriend in the noir classic “Big Combo” (1955).
ROCK
‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)
At the same time that innovative directors
were reshaping the American cinema, the popularity of drive-in movies spurred
an explosion of cheap, amateurish films about high school life.
In my town, where there wasn’t much to do
for a high school student, summer meant drive-in movies. Weekly, pictures like “The
Pom Pom Girls,” “Porky’s,” “Malibu Beach,” “The Van,” and “Cheering Section”
offered outrageous classroom behavior we’d never dare attempt, clueless
administers we immediately recognized, plenty of cute girls and, if we were
lucky, a dash of female nudity. The king of this underbelly of the movie
industry was Roger Corman (still around at age 95) who has produced hundreds of
films starting in the 1950s and served as mentor to such future legends as Jack
Nicholson, Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard,
to mention just a few.
“Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” abides as one
of the masterpieces of the genre, primary
because the band featured—there’s almost
always a band—is the Ramones, the essential performers of punk and the most
influential post-60s American rock band.
They became the house band of the New York
club CBGB in 1974 and two years later the group’s debut became a critically hit
and ignited the punk movement.
The movie takes place at Vince Lombardi High School where spunky high school girl Riff Randell (P.J. Soles, who was a B-movie presence through the 1980s, including in “Stripes”) is obsessed with the Ramones and determined to pass along a song she wrote to the band. When the Ramones are scheduled to play the Roxy, Riff skips school and stands in line for three days to buy for tickets for her classmates.
Back at Lombardi High, Principal Togar
(cult film actress Mary Woronov) has just taken over the school with the
mission of stopping any interest in rock ‘n’ roll. Of course, it’s ridiculous,
but Woronov, one-time member of Andy Warhol’s Factory, gives a great comedic
performance, channeling a Nazi prison commander as she directs a pair of
sycophant hall monitors to carry out her orders. The other prominent adult is
Paul Bartel, another cult film legend, as the music teacher who learns to love
rock ‘n’ roll.
There are the usual romantic complications
(Dey Young and Vince Van Patten) and even a student love counselor (an
enthusiastic Clint Howard), who gives advice from his “office” in the boys’
restroom.
But it’s the stage performance of Joey,
Dee Dee, Johnny and Marky that makes the film a must-see. Director Allan Arkush,
who convinced Corman to drop the original plans for “Disco High School,” hoped
to feature more interaction between the band and the actors, but the musicians’
off-stage shyness made it impossible.
The quartet do make an appearance at the
high school for the explosive finale, when Woronov delivers the classic line:
“Do your parents know you are a Ramone?”
Today, more serious, realistic movies give
a truer picture of high school life, but contemporary teens are missing out on
what, back in the ‘70s, was a rite of passage and an early lesson in the
hypocrisy of adults.
