Something I’m figuring out about Roberto Rossellini is that the guy defied labels as much as anyone this side of Bob Dylan. He’s known as the father of neorealism, a claim less true than it is received as true, and even if it were true it’d still be confining him within the relatively small box of his early career, pretty much like describing Joyce as a master of the Bildungsroman. The first sign that he had bigger ideas in mind came in 1948 when he made L’Amore smack-dab in between Paisan and Germany Year Zero. It consists of two short films, both totally removed from the world of Nazis and both starring Anna Magnani. Cocteau’s A Human Voice is a one-woman show: it’s Magnani, a telephone, and her ex-lover’s dog. The ex-lover calls two or maybe three times, and the movie consists of Magnani’s increasingly hysterical attempts to either lure him back or make him leave her the hell alone so she can get on with whatever is coming next. We can’t hear his side of the conversation, but we can read enough in her responses to know what line of bull he’s feeding her at any given moment. That leaves us pretty much with her. Magnani was a magnificent looking woman but here she’s had all the life drained out of her, and she slogs from bed to chair to window wrapped in an old shawl and pours her heart out into a plastic prop for 30 minutes. If Rossellini’s great theme is, as I increasingly see it, the need for us to get over our own shit, and to get outside our eternal fascination with our piddling little selves so we can join the world outside, then A Human Voice is his Inferno.
The Miracle, on the other hand, might be his Paradise, if not your typical one. At first glance Magnani’s character here doesn’t have much of an edge on Miss Lonelyhearts. Oh, Nanni lives in a scenic little town and spends her days traipsing the mountains with a herd of goats, but she’s apparently homeless, she’s probably a little cracked, and she’s definitely alone in the world. One day she chances upon a handsome stranger played by a very young, very blond Federico Fellini (who also happened to write this chapter.) He doesn’t say a word, and really does nothing beyond repeatedly press his wine bottle on Nanni; Nanni, however, coming from whatever fractured mental state she lives in, takes him for St. Joseph and opens herself up to him. When she wakes up alone on the mountainside with her dress in need of realignment, “St. Joseph” has quietly moved on down the trail.
Nanni’s knocked up, of course, and that’s where the film really begins; with her descent back to her village the townspeople hear her story, and the predictable results follow in close order–the bottom comes when a mob openly pursues her in the street and forces her to don robes of rags and a chamberpot for a crown. (Nobody does abasement and emotional pain quite like Magnani did.) Nanni’s flight from the town nearly kills her but it winds up taking her to an unexpected oasis from the storm–a mystical place that may not exist outside her head, but where she can at least bear her child in peace. When The Miracle came out in the U.S., the Church thought so little of it that it tried to have the movie banned, and the case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, which held that movies are entitled to all the same First Amendment protection that the press is. This crazy idea that came out of little Freddy Fellini’s head…
Also, All That Heaven Allows. You’d think after something like L’Amore a Rock Hudson picture would seem like coming back to Earth, but, um, no. Even though Heaven has its nutty aspects–Hudson stole Elmer Fudd’s hunting jacket for his role and he talks to everyone in the slowed-down monotone of a stage hypnotist, and his “nonconformist” friends would fit right in at one of Broadway Danny Rose’s Thanksgiving dinners–the totality of its visual design makes it a fairly haunting experience. The characters come and go repeating all the typical bland ’50s dialog, but everyone is so extraordinarily lit that I couldn’t wait to see what was coming next. And as an all-out assault on American values–Jane Wyman’s kids turn out to be monsters, her friends turn out to be Gorgons, and the town’s menfolk turn out to be alcoholic sex-fiends, while everybody thinks Jane would get over her Thoreau-reading gardener and be a good pod if she’d just buy a goddam TV set–it’s pretty hot for 1955.
Posted by Tom Block as Uncategorized at 9:54 PM PDT
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During the last PBS pledge drive I found myself staring at one of those 60-minute bios with tinkly piano music about Dean Martin, and it mentioned this movie Career that Dino hoped would help establish him as a serious actor in people’s eyes. It’s not bad, but it’s not a Dean Martin picture—it’s a Tony Franciosa picture. I never could cotton to Franciosa—too many teeth, too many twinkles—but he actually turns in a full-bodied performance here, even if half of it consists of the most lifelike Burt Lancaster impersonation you’re ever going to see. That’s only fitting, though, since the movie itself is straining for the rarified cynicism of Sweet Smell of Success. When we first see Franciosa, he has some chalk in his hair and he’s carrying people’s steaks to them at O’Malley’s on Broadway, and then in a long (long) flashback we get the whole dirty history of how one day, way back when, he got on the train from Lansing, Michigan, to “make it big” as an actor in New York, only to experience all the cold-water flats, cattle-calls, and heartbreak you can imagine. Along the way he gets hooked up with a rising director and power-player (Dino), an alcoholic nymphomaniac whose father is the biggest producer in town (Shirley MacLaine), and an agent who’s the hottest-looking spinster you’re ever gonna see (Carolyn Jones), yet even with all these contacts the guy can’t catch a break. It’s not that he’s a bad actor—everyone agrees that he’s great—it’s just that Fatty Arbuckle had better luck than Sam Lawson does. If it’s not one damn thing, it’s another—backstage politics, a loveless marriage, a back-stabbing old friend, even the blacklist—to the point that when Sam’s called up for Korea on the same day that he finally lands a breakout part, even he has to laugh at what a sick joke his life has become. (Cue footage of Franciosa in army gear and spitting dirt out of his mouth somewhere in the San Gabriel Mountains.) This all probably sounds pretty agonizing, and the damn thing did seem half an hour longer than its running-time, but I respected Career by the time it was over. Everyone involved in it worked their tails off, perhaps because the material dwells so much on how hard it is to be recognized for our gifts—this thing makes it look easier to become a Mafia don than a working actor—that it touched something in them. I don’t know. I do know that last night I also watched All in a Night’s Work, a movie that the same director, Joseph Anthony, made a mere two years later, also with Martin and MacLaine, and it was ground chuck—so impersonal and antiseptic that not even the sight of Shirley MacLaine spilling out of a bath towel got a rise out of me.
Posted by Tom Block as Uncategorized at 9:24 PM PDT
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Like its younger cousin The Shining, Bigger Than Life is often touted as a Trojan horse assault on the nuclear family, but this may be giving Nick Ray’s immaculately directed picture an advantage it doesn’t really deserve. (It’s certainly one it doesn’t need.) Before James Mason develops his taste for cortisone his family is tainted by only one visible sign of repression, and that’s a minor one: schoolteacher Mason hides his part-time job as a cab dispatcher because his wife won’t think it worthy of him. There’s two things wrong with his theory, however: 1) his second job is a spectacularly crappy one, and 2) Mason’s wife (Barbara Rush)—a woman who proves herself by turns to be loving, perceptive, humorous, and brave—is a nearly ideal spouse. (In fact, we never see her sporting any chip on her shoulder about her family’s class or status, and when she does find out that Mason is moonlighting, she’s merely relieved that his strange absences can be explained by something other than an affair.) Before things go south Mason also enjoys open, even lenient, relationships with his son, students, and colleagues, so that when he does go off the rails thanks to the drug he’s simply too aberrant to epitomize sweater-wearing automatons like Ozzie Nelson—that is, unless you find the notion of middle-class family men troubling in itself. Even at picture’s end the Eisenhowerian take on what’s “normal” remains the optimal state of being: Mason’s restoration of his senses, and his family, is shown as an unqualified Good Thing, even if he isn’t going to sue the pants off the distant, morally dicey doctors who nearly destroyed his life. When all’s said and done, the picture finds that practically anything—even getting clocked by Walter Matthau—is preferable to gutting your kids with a pair of scissors, and this is as it should be.
What’s more interesting to me about these Hollywood ’50s flicks is how even the best and most intelligent ones so often talked down to their audiences, as if they were rather dim children requiring almost constant clarification and instruction, with every truth delivered in kid gloves. (Hadn’t this generation just fought the bloodiest war in history?) After the doctor says that Mason might be “psychotic” when he comes out of his sedative, the camera cuts to a tight close-up of Rush, who gasps, “You mean…out of his mind?” (Whoa, Professor! You’re making our heads spin!) This tendency was something more than the dumbing down that’s always been a part of American movies. It’s part and parcel of the wall-to-wall, utterly humorless narration in The Killing, the smiley-face epilogue the studio nailed onto the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the tone-deaf comedy relief shoehorned into The Searchers—all movies which, along with Bigger Than Life, happened to open in 1956. It started with the crude calls to patriotism in the wartime movies of the ’40s, and reached its apotheosis in the psychiatrist’s lethally tedious monologue that explained—and then re-explained, and then re-re-explained—what the hell was up with Norman Bates. For 20 some-odd years a director could concoct the most sophisticated film imaginable, yet still be obligated to put at its core touches that treated his viewers like a herd of village idiots.
Posted by Tom Block as Uncategorized at 10:17 PM PDT
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I’ve put off watching Renoir’s Les Bas-fonds for years because I’m not big on theatrical adaptations for the screen and I can only take so much literary caterwauling about the lower classes, and welding the two together has never been a party for anybody. And to tell the truth I did get more than one flashback to John Frankenheimer’s version of The Iceman Cometh tonight, especially when the action would grind to a halt so the idiot savant accordion player could dance around like a monkey or the idiot savant actor could deliver another monologue about the germs infesting his body, but the movie winds up transcending, by a wide margin, all the deadeningly meaningful crap that Gorky stuck into his play. Renoir made it in ‘36, hot on the heels of The Crime of Monsieur Lange and A Day in the Country, and he co-wrote it with Charles Spaak, who he’d collaborate with again on his next film, Grand Illusion, so we’re actually in pretty good hands here. For another thing it stars Jean Gabin as, not even a two-bit, but a one-bit house burglar, who unexpectedly starts accruing some lucky breaks, and Louis Jouvet, as a worldly baron whose life is headed in the opposite direction thanks to a nasty gambling habit. (The close-up in which we realize that he’s lost everything at the banco table–his hand can’t light the cigarette that would’ve been a victory signal had he won–is one of the famous shots of the ’30s.) Neither man is much impressed by the turns their respective lives have taken, and Jouvet even seems to embrace life only after he’s landed in Gabin’s flophouse–his walk takes on such a laid-back style that his legs arrive at his destination a moment before the rest of him does. Gabin and Jouvet have half a dozen richly comedic scenes together–in one of them they lie in the grass and have a boisterous conversation while Jouvet plays with a snail as it crawls across his wrist–and it’s like seeing the great scenes between Brando and De Niro that The Score promised but refused to give us. But there’s one shot where the movie suddenly becomes a true Renoir picture: a fade-in, on the piping of a musician’s band uniform, slides backwards like a car pulling out of a garage into a tracking shot that keeps reframing the action and evolving until it blossoms into a leisurely stroll through a crowded beer garden almost two minutes long. Intrusive tones and echoes from other movies, some of them not even made at the time, had me thinking the film was about to take a tragic turn at three or four different points, but it never does, not for long anyway–instead things end with a giddily happy image of the hobo life that looks backwards to À nous la liberté and ahead to Sullivan’s Travels. Somehow I’d forgotten one of the basic facts of life: Jean Renoir would never sing a dirge for the poor.
Posted by Tom Block as Uncategorized at 12:06 AM PDT
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Judging by the two films of his I’ve seen, I’d have to guess that Peter Watkins would be a dead duck in a formal debate, for his natural tendency seems to be carrying ideas not just to, but far, far beyond, their logical conclusion. Watkins’ 1971 political Disneyland ride, Punishment Park, hammers out the fatalism and paranoia of Easy Rider’s final scene until it’s flat enough and wide enough that he can pin it on the American body politic like the tail on a jackass. An elegy for dissent and an indictment of those who’d stifle it in the name of national (read: “personal”) security, his film is most effective as a very exacting snapshot of what two politically charged forces looked like and sounded like when they got in each other’s faces 40 years ago—that is, less as a cautionary fable than as a time-capsule.
Those two foes—Nixon’s Silent Majority and the protesters against the Vietnam War—were in their absolute inability to understand each other the Custer and Crazy Horse of their day. In Watkins’ doomsday scenario the U.S. government is busy rounding up all of America’s supposed Benedict Arnolds, even the ones whose only crime is being too directionless to join the Army, and subjecting them to down-and-dirty trials by civilian tribunals ending, inevitably, in long prison terms. But when the prisons grow overloaded and the system breaks down, the dissidents are offered a choice: they can do their time or else they can partake in a forced endurance contest, crossing 50 miles of California desert to where an American flag (seen only in long shot to reinforce the remoteness of its ideals) is waiting for them. If they do that, then they can walk, but doing that means that for three scorching, waterless days they must evade the cops and National Guardsmen swarming the desert floor, and who approach the “training exercise” as something approaching a blood sport. This doesn’t make a lick of sense, of course: the number of prisoners thinned out by the process wouldn’t even dent the prison population. More importantly, it’s crucial to the credibility of Watkins’ fantasy that his dissidents include no clergy, no celebrities, and not even a single representative of the myriad middle-aged or senior moderates and liberals who also opposed the war—that is, no one that anyone in power might be moved to speak up for.
While half of the movie trails a squadron of dissidents picking their futile way across “Bear Mountain National Punishment Park” the other half documents one of the civilian tribunals, a hermetically-sealed affair so rigged it makes the panel of wart-nosed priests in The Passion of Joan of Arc look like the Warren Court. The nine or ten drugstore Torquemadas who make up the court are so gaudy in their ordinariness they wouldn’t look out of place at a PTA cake-swap, and in fact very closely resemble my mental picture of the MPAA ratings board. To convince the accused, but mainly themselves, of their own impartiality, they make a big show of asking the defendants—who, having been kidnapped, now sit stripped of their rights, shackled to a chair, and intimidated by a constantly hovering cadre of guards—to “explain” themselves, but these invitations are delivered in patronizing, often threatening tones that mentally kneecap the accused before they can even open their mouths. One judge, a brilliantly conceived creation—identified in subtitle as a “union steward,” he looks like a Chicano who’s struggled up the first three or four rungs of the economic ladder and is hell-bent on making sure he doesn’t slide back down again—bemoans the fact that the defendants “just don’t seem to appreciate” this wonderful chance to present their side of the story. The charade is only a step removed from the vice-principal in Frederick Wiseman’s High School who calmly weathers the protests of a troublesome teen before coming out with what he was going to say all along, that the lad must go back and grovel before the teacher who’s plainly responsible for the mess. (Whereas the actors playing the defendants offer what are more or less their own opinions in the tribunal scenes, only some of the authority figures were played by real-world right-wingers.)
The confrontations in Punishment Park make it clear, as if an ounce more clarity were needed on the subject, what a colossal blight “Vietnam” was on the American landscape: beyond the mortal polarities represented by the Mailers and Buckleys of the era, we’ve since seen a host of post-Boomers who, hacked off at being hemmed in by another generation’s political baggage for so long, roundly conclude that the period’s revolutionaries were either world-class knuckleheads or deputies from the Devil. A couple of friends who are a little less rickety than I am, and who in most contexts root eagerly for the rebel and underdog, came away from Punishment Park primarily put off by the defendants because the stridency of their last-gasp outbursts seemed somehow more obnoxious than the gym coaches and hausfraus playing infantile mind-games and doling out dime sentences like cotton-candy. I suspect my friends were mainly vexed by the pair of women who spackle some Marxist-tinted cant into the movie’s running time, and who, truth to tell, are pretty grating (though I feel compelled to point out that one of them is so cute Cheney himself might give her a pass). In actuality, though, Watkins’ actors—some five or six of them in all—invest the defendants with a fairly wide range of motives, militancy and levels of eloquence. The leftist writer who conjures up H. Rap Brown faces his accusers with a molten blend of despair and contemptuous sarcasm; in any other setting a couple of his comebacks would serve as big laugh-lines, but you just can’t laugh at them here. Elsewhere there’s the lumpy, shut-down twenty-something who doesn’t care a whit about politics per se; busted for skipping his induction, he’s less like Che Guevara than Ferdinand the Bull—he just wants the world to leave him alone. If people 40 years after the fact still take away such variant readings from the period, Watkins comes close to showing the genesis of the ingrained failing to comprehend alternate viewpoints that the war engendered.
This isn’t to say that Peter Watkins is a political genius—boy, is he not that—but in places he makes up as a filmmaker for what he lacks as a thinker. The horror of his basic conceit is at its purest not in any of the trial scenes but in an extreme telephoto lens shot of a police car descending like a cruise-missile upon a band of hapless, panicking longhairs. The highest compliment I can pay Punishment Park is that the authenticity of its detail made me occasionally forget when it was made, something close to an Olympian achievement for such an intensely topical work. Its raw and occasionally beautiful naturalism places it closer to the handheld, DV spirit of The Blair Witch Project or United 93 than to Patton or Hearts and Minds, and in places—as when a paunchy grand inquisitor stands up to yawn and stretch a little in between two of his wearying “cases”—it rivals Pontecorvo’s talent for convincing us that we’re witnessing a very nasty reality.
Posted by Tom Block as Movies, Politics at 7:00 PM PST
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There’s a (justly) famous sequence in Boudu Saved from Drowning where Renoir took his camera out onto the street and shot part of his movie in the middle of an uncontrolled Parisian crowd. The people who gathered were fascinated by the film crew, and Renoir didn’t even try to direct them: in the shots surrounding Michel Simon being pulled out of the Seine perhaps of a third of the onlookers are staring directly at the camera. The idea of blending a movie into what’s actually happening on the street has always fascinated me, and the French have always been the least afraid of it: Renoir would do it again in The Crime of Monsieur Lange, and it pops up over and over in the New Wave’s movies. (American cinema has at least one sterling example, in the running block-long argument between Rupert Pupkin and Masha in The King of Comedy.) Whenever I see one of these scenes I’m always hit by the question, “What would happen if the filmmaker turned away from his actors and simply asked someone in the crowd what they were up to that day?”
Louis Malle’s Place de la République answers my question, right down to its “What would the dog do if it caught the car?” overtones. In 1974 Malle set up shop near a narrow rectangle of greenery in a working class section of Paris and just started talking to people, with no attempt to hide his cameras or mics. He picked a rapid, flowing stretch of sidewalk, with shoppers, vendors, street workers, and a surprising number of directionless souls constantly bumping elbows with each other; at times there’s scarcely room for him to stand still as the throngs mill around him. Some of the interviews are very brief–one good-looking woman won’t believe the crew isn’t just trying to hit on her, for instance–but the idle, the attention-starved, the retired, and the crazy, all these have plenty of time to talk. A roundfaced grandmother who begins singing what were probably popular songs in the pre-war cafes, a graying, mild-mannered Jewish man who somehow made it through the Occupation without being deported but who today seems defeated by heart problems, a vapid cute blonde with huge freckles who’s just had her purse stolen, a handsome but feckless black man who turns out to be a chronic psychiatric patient, a young housewife who insists she isn’t racist (”I could even marry a Spaniard”) but who’s almost visibly nauseated when Malle asks, “What about an Algerian?”–these are typical examples. Perhaps halfway through there’s a cock-up out by the curb: a businessman who feels “his” space has been stolen by a delivery truck is outraged when a gendarme points out that city parking spaces aren’t reserved. “You mean it’s whoever gets here first?” he asks, sounding like Manuel trying to make out one of Basil Fawlty’s instructions.
The film gets even better when Malle returns for a second, and especially a third, day. By now people like the middle-aged woman who sells lottery tickets, and who insisted during the first day’s shooting that she didn’t want to be filmed, couldn’t be happier to open up for the cameras. The blonde with the big freckles also returns, but when Malle gives her a camera and turns her loose, she can only think to ask people how their sex lives are. Finally a cockeyed woman who barely registered on the first day reappears–this time she launches into a long, extravagantly detailed story dating back to her work for a German company during the war, her recent detention at the Swiss-German border, and who knows what else. The blonde, camera in hand, pretends to listen but is plainly aching for everyone to turn their attention back to her, where it belongs. The sight of a blonde carrying a camera causes first a young man, then an older man, to pause, swelling the circle; this small knot of people causes others to stop, each looking from one to the other of them as the cockeyed woman continues her rant. Finally they grow listless, and begin to drift away, sliding just past Malle’s camera, and one by one melting away into the twilight.
Posted by Tom Block as Uncategorized at 12:01 AM PST
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It’s a slow-ass day today, so much so that I was a little irked when the mail trolley didn’t bring me that copy of The Crime of Monsieur Lange I’ve been pining for, and instead dropped off the latest issue of one of my company’s in-house magazines. I was flipping through the various urban renewal stories inside it when the words “Opa-Locka, Florida” caught my eye—I hadn’t known before today that we’ve been working on some revitalization projects there. Opa-Locka is, of course, the hell on Earth into which the bible drummer Paul Brennan falls during the Maysles Brothers’ and Charlotte Zwerin’s great film Salesman. It’s one of those nutty little communities that adopted a “theme” when it sprang up during the land boom that Groucho took an axe to in Cocoanuts, and its choice of motifs—the Arabian Nights—seems stranger still now that we’ve entered the 21st Century. In one of Salesman’s most memorable passages an exasperated Brennan tries to make sense of the city’s whimsically named and plotted streets, including Sinbad Avenue, Sharazad Boulevard and, yes, Virginia, Sesame Street. The town’s founders, not content with laying out their city as a pack of five-year olds might, went on to line its avenues with buildings done up in a faux Moorish style, with a City Hall festooned in golden domes and pointed arches and minarets so laughably fakey that Walt Disney’s version of Mad Ludwig’s Castle looks authentically medieval by comparison. And if you thought the name “Opa-Locka” was coined by some tin-eared booster, you wouldn’t be wrong: it’s a land developer’s abbreviation for the region’s unwieldy Indian name. A true linguistic curiosity, it’s a word that physically pains the eye that takes it in.
What civic nuttiness couldn’t take care of, geopolitics would do its best to finish off. When I was a kid my family drove down Route 66 to my grandparents’ place in the Ozarks every summer, a trip that took us through the tiny burg of Cuba, Missouri, whose denizens, perhaps too aware of how much that name stood out in the early 1960s, mounted a billboard at the city limits that read WE MAY BE NAMED CUBA BUT WE DON’T LIKE CASTRO. I can’t help but think that in late 2001 Opa-Locka’s civic leaders felt even more pricklish and on the defensive, especially when it came to light that the some of the 9/11 hijackers, perhaps at home amongst the papier-mâché towers and play-tot street names, had taken their flying lessons there.
Now, you’d think that its links to Salesman—one of the most ferocious assaults on American capitalism ever put to celluloid—and the WTC attacks would create enough bad vibes for any city in the world, but Opa-Locka had yet to win the saddest prize of all. In 2003 and 2004 it led all of America’s cities in violent crime—and not by a little, but by a lot. In 2005 its murder rate dropped to second, after East St. Louis, but it was still something to behold: where the killing fields of Oakland reported 23.2 murders for every 100,000 citizens, Opa-Locka—with a population slightly south of 16,000—racked up 51, while the number of its assaults and robberies dwarfed the national averages. Most of the violence could be traced to “the Triangle,” a tiny warren of streets just a short hop up Ali Baba Avenue from where Paul Brennan got lost in 1968, and home to some truly vicious drug wars.
In Salesman’s closing shot a sere and withered Paul Brennan gazes out of his motel room, and his thousand-yard stare looks like it’s taking in the abyss rather than some choice Floridian real estate—the poor old guy was seeing his hopes and dreams evaporate before his eyes. It was the end of a long process but one that starts easily enough. This morning the mailroom guy plopped a magazine down on my desk and I happened to glance at its thirteenth page, and in less than an hour I was up to my eyes in Opa-Locka.
Posted by Tom Block as Uncategorized at 10:33 AM PDT
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…the last of Robert Altman’s four greatest films have made it to DVD. When they came out it was inconceivable the day would come that you wouldn’t have to wait on the vagaries of rep house schedules or some film professor’s whims aligning with your own before you could see them. Now they’re there for all to see, at any time of day or night: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, and California Split. And the world’s a better place for it.
Posted by Tom Block as Uncategorized at 4:36 AM PDT
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I spent this afternoon watching the last half of something I forgot I even had, the 250-minute documentary about Nixon’s second term simply called Watergate that BBC and The Discovery Channel put together about 15 years ago. I have about five documentaries and specials about the mess but this one is the mother of them all. That’s partly because it isn’t fixated on The Washington Post’s role the way the others are—Woodward and Bernstein make an appearance alright, but they’re onscreen just a tad longer than Tony Ulasewicz, and they get a helluva lot less face-time than Dean or McCord or that bow-tied dandy known as Archibald Cox. Another thing that makes it great is that the filmmakers somehow put all the subjects at their ease, with Haldeman and Ehrlichman in particular showing hitherto hidden human faces. Nixon himself is present only in the form of generous excerpts from the David Frost interview in ‘77, and when describing the meeting in which he fired Haldeman, Nixon describes his old chief of staff, spitting the words out as they come to him, “not as some Germanic…Nazi…stormtrooper,” which does pretty much nail the public’s perception of the guy, but as a “decent public servant.” That last phrase might be stretching a point but Haldeman comes off well. With his hair grown out a tad and wearing a plaid shirt, khaki pants, and a pair of half-glasses, he comes across like an uncle at his favorite fishing lodge. And he’s not alone. Ehrlichman, Liddy, Dean, Magruder, Colson, Mardian, Porter—damn near all of them—speak out with a surprising openness and lack of rancor, and the way their interviews are woven together makes us feel for once that everyone’s telling the truth.
There are exceptions. John Mitchell, who died years ago, isn’t on-hand, of course, but you get the feeling that even if he was he wouldn’t have been interested in opening up to a film-crew for a documentary narrated by Dan Schorr. He’s the one who bluntly told the Ervin Committee that he considered Nixon’s re-election so important because of “what the other side was putting up” that he would’ve done anything to accomplish it, and he’s also the only one who failed to see the humor in his exchange with Sam Dash. When Dash asked Mitchell why he hadn’t thrown Liddy out of his office while Liddy was describing one of his hare-brained (and highly illegal) schemes, Mitchell, pipe in hand, evenly replied, “In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t just thrown him out of my office, but that I’d thrown him out of the window.” With a professional’s timing Dash let the answer hang in the air before prefacing his next question with, “Seeing as how you did neither…” As the caucus room rang out with spontaneous guffaws, the camera zoomed in on Mitchell who, judging by his expression, looked as if he were trying to decide whether it would be more fun to kill Dash by roasting him on a spit or throttling him with his bare hands.
Still, the man who comes off the ugliest isn’t named Mitchell or Haig or even Richard Milhouse Nixon. It’s E. Howard Hunt, the reputed “spymaster” who did us all a favor by dying and going to Hell just a few short weeks ago. Hunt, it will be recalled, led the planning for the break-in along with his co-mastermind Gordon Liddy, and it was he who began squeezing his former bosses for hush money after his arrest. Hunt, too, appears in contemporary interviews, but where even the likes of Colson, Magruder, and Ehrlichman mellowed with age, and managed to recognize the tawdriness in their own souls somewhere along the way, Hunt gazes into the camera as one might regard a bottle of cyanide as he talks about the “considerations” he felt were due him. It’s a disgusting, even disquieting, performance.
Posted by Tom Block as Uncategorized at 12:18 PM PDT
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One of the more knowing—and ticklish—appreciations I’ve seen in a while: Dylan Hears a Who. “Miss Gertrude McFuzz” especially recommended.
Posted by Tom Block as Uncategorized at 4:33 PM PST
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