All Too Fitting

Want to see perfection? It's available for twelve more days on Amazon Prime. Now streaming is 1961's The Misfits, one of the most perfect movies ever made. Marilyn Monroe stars in a movie written by her husband, the great playwright Arthur Miller. And it's kind of a movie about her as well as more generally about people adrift in a world that has no place for them.

It's funny to say that about Monroe or her character, Roslyn. If anyone has a place in this world, surely it's Marilyn Monroe whose image even to-day, even here in Japan, is instantly recognisable. But Arthur Miller and director John Huston's portrait of a woman increasingly desperate to make connexions with men even as she's surrounded by men who adore her is keen as a razor.

Somewhere between the fantasy she can't live up to and her own need for affection is a place of complete psychological isolation. One suspects Monroe knew a lot of guys like Eli Wallach's character, Guido, whose fervour is all about his needs. "Give me a reason," he says, like the Portishead lyric, and that's when she realises the former bomber could "blow up the world" and all he'd be sorry for was himself. How far would Marilyn have to get with a guy before she realised all of his demonstrations of love were entirely selfish? It would be hard enough for most people in her shoes, it was probably twenty times harder in a Hollywood filled with narcissists.

Clark Gable's character, Gay, is the best guy for her, the dream man that probably never existed. "How do you just live?" she asks him when he tells her how simple his life is as a cowboy. In the climax we find his freedom does come at a price his conscience is finally no longer willing to pay. But he'd probably always have a certain equanimity about him, a quality that allows him to tell Roslyn she's so beautiful, "It's kind of an honour," just to sit next to her. But not greedily clutch at her the way Guido does or pathetically the way Perce, Montgomery Clift's character, does.

He's another lost soul perfectly cast. But he's looking for a mother, that's clear from his introductory scene where tries to make his real mother proud of his rodeo achievement in a pathetic phone call. He's not as independent as Gay but both of them want something at that dangerous rodeo that Roslyn can't understand. She screams in despair every time Perce falls off the horse. She's always trying to patch up wounds in others that may not even exist, much to Gay's evident irritation. And finally it seems obvious that her response to her own psychological pain is to project it on others rather than try to heal it in herself. Maybe that wasn't even possible.

They keep making biopics about Marilyn Monroe but they needn't bother. Nothing's ever going to top The Misfits.

You Can't Hit Some Things

Is there any glamour to be stripped away from boxing? I don't know, but I do know 1972's Fat City is a great film. Directed by John Huston, it follows one washed up boxer, played by Stacey Keach, as he befriends an up-and-comer played by a very young Jeff Bridges. Along the way, Keach meets an alcoholic woman played by Susan Tyrrell and Bridges gets knocked out a lot. Huston vividly evokes a hot, down-and-out Stockton, California peopled by some of the most credibly dippy and fractious characters you'll ever see.

First we meet Keach's character, Billy Tully, sprawled back in bed. The camera lingers a long time and if you didn't notice his penis prominently in the middle of the frame right away, you're bound to notice it by the time the shot finally tracks to follow him across the room.

What a way to start. Does it mean anything? I guess the story is indirectly about downstairs plumbing. Boxers talk about pissing blood and then we actually see it later in the film. Tully wins one fight when he correctly deduces his opponent is hurting below the belt, despite one of his managers telling him it was too risky a gamble.

Nicholas Colasanto and Art Aragon as the two coaches are worth the price of admission alone. I could listen to them swap stories and opinions all day about the history and current state of boxing. They have the kind of credible mix of knowhow, instinct, and innocent bullshitting that you'd only get from writers who've known guys like this.

Oma Lee Greer (Tyrrell) is just as great. You can watch her gears turn at the bar as she starts out talking to Tully about her man in jail and gradually the conversation starts to work on the premise she and Tully are going to start living together. "You can count on me," is a line he starts randomly inserting into the dialogue. But her batty brain makes her easy come, easy go.

The final note of the film is about loneliness. Even Bridges' wide-eyed young man doesn't seem to expect much glory from the job. He's already worked the fields, cutting weeds, with Tully in one of the film's fascinating, slice-of-life segments on California agricultural labour in the '70s. No glory, but what about loyal friends? Tully starts to realise that might be the real con in the business.

Fat City is available on The Criterion Channel now as part of a John Huston collection this month.

Twitter Sonnet #1459

Cicada bandits scream for stolen sleep.
The hidden dream can melt like pillow mints.
With horror movies maidens ply the deep.
Beneath a burning bulb she read the hints.
Eleventh hand reports confirmed the sound.
The ghosts of cars were gathered east of roads.
A rider routed thunder down the ground.
A name escapes the throats of chorus toads.
We traded sweets beneath the office tape.
And here the paper ends with ragged edge.
A lunar shine denotes the flying cape.
The racket slapped a sphere beyond the hedge.
The party lacked a decent cup of tea.
We gathered leaves and built the woods for free.

The Orphan and the Billionaire

I find there are two ways to appreciate 1982's Annie--to repress thoughts about the events unfolding or to read much more into the events than they truly warrant. The musical can be at turns charming, annoying, and an oddly cosy dive into a very '70s vision of the 1930s.

I know, it came out in 1982, but it's based on a 1977 stage musical. There's also something very 70s about the frequent panty flashing.

Nowadays, people would call this "male gaze" and stop thinking about it. And maybe some of it is for the viewer's sexual gratification (male or female) but mostly it doesn't feel at all sexual, just like watching kids having fun with their skirts, which they do tend to do. Watching it doesn't make me think, "Dear god, the harlots," as much as it makes think, "Dear god, we've become so repressed."

This was the first and last musical directed by the great John Huston, and certainly this movie is nowhere near the greatness of his best films (The Misfits, The Asphalt Jungle, The Maltese Falcon). It's kind of unendurable until Albert Finney shows up as Daddy Warbucks.

Finney plays the character with vocal mannerisms suspiciously similar to John Huston himself. In any case, it's a magnetic and delightful performance, whether it's seeing him bark at the Bolshevik trying to assassinate him or pontificating to Annie (Aileen Quinn) on his life of struggle. It's also nice seeing him having a friendly dinner with a Democrat, FDR himself (Edward Herrmann). That's a scene that made me think, "Dear god, we've become so regressed."

Aileen Quinn is notorious for her performance. She strongly reminds me of Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace in that I sense most of her facial expressions are forced imitations of those modelled by the director. Her costumes are nice, though.

Supporting performances from Carol Burnett, Tim Curry, and Bernadette Peters as the villains are terrific. Burnett in particular succeeds so thoroughly at being thoroughly repulsive, heaping abuse on the orphans while drinking herself into a masturbatory stupor. The way she forces the children to say they love her was a brilliant choice by the writers--by turning "love" into something rote and forced, she diminishes even the possibility of real love. Come to think of it, that makes her a perfect Leftist villain for Warbucks' Republican hero--demanding love as a basic right instead of earning it.

But the movie certainly isn't biased towards one political side considering how positively it portrays FDR's New Deal. Though, again, Roosevelt's dialogue has him putting emphasis on giving people an opportunity to earn a living.

Annie is available on Netflix in Japan.

Twitter Sonnet #1451

The fourth of three retained the pilot boy.
Between the red and blue decision shook.
Maternal blue was waiting 'neath the toy.
Combustive red retains an eye to look.
A diving board supports a fleeting foot.
Discreetly lettuce swapped a leafy splash.
The knowledge ghost is haunting heavy soot.
A roller skate assists the mile dash.
The scutcheon fades across a naked arm.
A paper house regards the wasted hill.
A planet pulled the health in wooden harm.
A shaking light revealed the shaded will.
A vibrant red was wanted out of house.
The curly hair ensnared a rooster louse.

Art in the Noise

"No machine ever produced as much as it consumed," says one character in Orson Welles' 2018 film The Other Side of the Wind. Considering the decades since principal photography was completed on the film and the money expended in legal battles in the effort to get it finished and released, the quote may well apply to the film itself. But you can't really measure great art against quantitative things like time or money, to paraphrase William S. Burroughs on the subject of souls*. Certainly the soul of Orson Welles is in this film; bitter and critical about himself, filmmaking, and the culture of filmmakers and the people who surround them. It's a movie about movies about movies--better than that, it's the story about an artist lost in a world where people insist on foisting their interpretations on his art to elevate or flatter themselves.

At the centre of the film is a director, Jake Hannaford, modelled on a particular kind of 20th century macho auteur with John Huston perfectly cast in the role, gamely playing up the man's casual, easy going cruelty. Welles claimed Ernest Hemmingway primarily as the model. It's a character that resembles Welles less than most people would say, though Hannaford is a lot like Welles' character in Touch of Evil, particularly when he shares the screen with a Marlene Dietrich-ish character played by Lilli Palmer, who, like Dietrich in Touch of Evil, sadly and coolly makes pronouncements on Hannaford's self-destructiveness.

But as a character, he's better suited to making a point Welles makes with the film about the divide between the artist and the people in his or her orbit. Mostly the film follows Hannaford and a host of friends, collaborators, and journalists at the man's seventieth birthday party, a party for which he has the ulterior motive of securing funding for his film also called The Other Side of the Wind. To questions and opinions about himself and his work he's cagey, mean, funny, and charming--all ways of diverting people from their attempts of reducing him to something easy to print, some juicy interpretation that they can make hay from while conveniently obscuring his actual intent.

Susan Strasberg plays a character purportedly based on Pauline Kael but she misinterprets Hannaford's work in much the way Laura Mulvey misinterpreted Vertigo, assuming a story about a flawed man is meant to degrade women. The film within a film, which is intended as a parody of Antonioni and New Wave filmmaking in general, includes, as being a rough cut, audio of Hannaford gleefully instructing his leading actress (Oja Kodar) to enact castration fantasies.

It may have been meant as a parody of Antonioni but the film within a film is still remarkably beautiful, indeed capturing some of the kind of sharp edged, sepulchral beauty Antonioni excelled at. Much of it consisting of the naked woman wandering a desert and the dilapidated MGM backlot--where Welles and his crew apparently shot covertly without permission.

Hannaford may only be vainly attempting to stay relevant yet, even if that's true, he still creates something more beautiful and rewarding than the swarm of hangers on at the party, even if that party consumes ten times the raw material.

The Other Side of the Wind is on Netflix.

Twitter Sonnet #1172

In purchased rounds the ghosts deliver drinks.
Across the bar a heavy hand's at rest.
In saving time the hour slowly sinks.
A later start to-day is surely best.
The sky of strings combine to make an Earth.
Tomato kits illume the garden's seed.
Against legumes a bread has measured worth.
The wild flowers watched a fateful deed.
A water picture backs against the card.
The tiny trees became a closet nail.
A thousand bulbs collect a single shard.
In sordid seas the cake became a whale.
Accosted wind replays the storied hair.
A space of years confirmed the movie rare.

*There are no honourable bargains
Involving exchange
Of qualitative merchandise
Like souls
For quantitative merchandise
Like time and money.