Will Sloan's Wonder Emporium

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man (1961)

For his third and most formally ambitious directorial effort, Jerry Lewis set the action in one of the largest sets ever constructed for a film: a giant, dollhouse-like residence for girls. This is Lewis’ set…

Now here are two sets it influenced: Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien (1972)…

…and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic (2004)…

At their best, Lewis’ self-directed films (particularly the early ones) are riotously colorful, like live-action cartoons. As a filmmaker, Lewis was at his best when he had the full resources of a studio at his disposal to create elaborate, immersive comic worlds, the better to suit his own frantic, outsized performances. (By contrast, it’s morbidly amusing to watch a late-period independent effort like Hardly Working, where everyone is flailing around but the sets are pure low-budget minimalism. It’s like cognitive dissonance). From an interview in Contemporary Film Directors: Jerry Lewis (2009)…

Chris Fujiwara: I want to talk to you about the “movie” look of your films. That seems to have been very conscious with you from the beginning. Even The Bellboy, which is not a studio film, has…

Jerry Lewis: A lot of that. Almost taking people past the fourth wall. I love knocking down the fourth wall, all the time.

CJ: Which you do to great effect in The Ladies Man, when you pull the camera back so we see the doll’s house and the empty space in front of it, and you do that in the [George] Raft scene too, with the spotlight and the empty space.

JL: I sit on the camera, and I block the shot. I have to see what I want to see in the end result. In structuring a scene, I always kept foreground very important. Every aspect of the frame was important to me: I filled it, and marked it, and watched it, whereas a lot of directors will look at the focal point, the artist, the actor, the actress, the prop, dead center of the frame. If it’s a joke, it better be there. If it’s exposition, if you’re building, if you’re moving into a situation that you want clear to the audience, you gotta do it all, you just have to do it all. I didn’t learn that from anyone; it was instinctive with me right from the beginning. If you’re going to point the camera, point it at what you want the people to see. Don’t hide anything unless it shouldn’t be seen.

CF: What was important to you about this “movie” look? Why is that such a big element of your films?

JL: Because as I child, I was enthralled with thinking about who was watching. Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous. Remember that film? Who was over here? Who was their fourth wall? The sea, the ship, Tracy in the water dying. It’s not real. He is not dying, he’s not going to die. So there’s people here watching this. God, would I love to be there with them. To watch it. I would have wanted to see it as I saw it first, and then, could I see it the other way? It was always my desire to peek behind the scenes. I was always behind-the-scenes-conscious and knew that moments of behind-the-scenes for an audience just uplifted them. Whether they thought about it or not, if you show it to them, they’re going to see it. They’re either going to like it or not understand it. Most people love it. Or maybe in the back of my mind I always felt it would be good to never take them so deeply that they forget it’s a movie. I think David Lean needed to do that, so that you’d forget it was a movie. [Fred] Zinnemann would do that. Great directors I think did it most of the time. They’re careful not to make the audience conscious that it’s a movie. Frank Tashlin had a fetish about green. Shrubbery placed in the scene by a shrubbery man. He hated it, he never could get the pure color of a grass lawn or bushes. So I said, “Frank, take it out of the studio, get what you want.” We would do that sometime, just because he needed to see that. He was obsessed with the ugly color of studio-prop green.

CF: Why did you want to remind the audience that it’s a movie?

JL: Well, I don’t know that I wanted to shake them up, “Hey, this is a movie!” But I was hoping there were kids out there that would feel about it as I did. That’s all that was. I never wanted it to be so far and away from reality that your audience would look at it as a distant faction.

The Ladies Man was also the film for which Lewis famously invented video-assist technology, mounting an early video camera on the side of a 35mm camera so that he could watch and evaluate his performance quickly without having to wait for the rushes. Video-assist soon became standard on all Hollywood sets.

Aside from the technical innovations, The Ladies Man is a typically ramshackle and episodic Lewis comedy, concerning the misadventures of Herbert M. Heebert (Lewis), a heartbroken woman-hater who suddenly finds himself surrounded by ladies. While hit-and-miss, it’s one of Lewis’ best vehicles, notable for possibly Lewis’ best sustained gag: the hat sequence. Here’s an excerpt from the interview book This is Orson Welles…

Peter Bogdanovich: What do you think of Jerry Lewis?

Orson Welles: When he goes too far, he’s heaven; it’s just when he doesn’t go too far that he’s unendurable. [Laughs] Now he wants to be a respected member of the community, and it shows in every move of his body. But, God, he can be funny! He did a scene in a movie I saw in Paris about eight years ago where he keeps trying to fix the hat on a gangster’s head -

PB: The Ladies Man

OW: And I got sick laughing, it was like in my childhood with [W.C.] Fields - I really had a kind of heart attack from laughing. It was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen in my life.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Jerry Lewis in The Jazz Singer (1959)

This made-for-TV production, a remake of the legendary Al Jolson vehicle, was Jerry Lewis’ first attempt at an out-and-out dramatic performance. Jerry gives a capable performance as Joey Rabinowitz, a successful nightclub comic who nevertheless fails to win the approval of his orthodox Cantor father, who rails against the younger Rabinowitz’s show business career. In the unforgettable climax, Joey ditches his big TV appearance to fill in for his ailing father and sing Kol Nidre for Atonement Day - and delivers the song in full clownface (a sideways nod to Al Jolson’s blackface). I daresay that this fairly bathetic “tears of a clown” conclusion may well be the defining moment of Jerry’s career.

Critics were generally dismissive of the hour-long broadcast, treating it as a vanity project for a star who had always fancied himself something of an heir to Al Jolson. Embarrassed (“I was too young to play the role. A leading character who looks less than 30 years old wrestling with deep problems of life comes off looking silly,” said Lewis in 1995), Lewis kept the film out of circulation until earlier this year, when it received a long-belated home video debut (so who knows - maybe there’s hope for The Day the Clown Cried yet). Though not a major work, The Jazz Singer is essential viewing for Jerryologists for its autobiographical undertones. As Shawn Levy explained in his excellent biography King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis (1996), the film echoes Jerry’s uneasy relationship with his unabashedly Jolson-esque vaudevillian father.

The Jazz Singer was one of Jerry’s most personal and heartfelt undertakings. He changed the name of the protagonist from Jack to Joey [Lewis’ birth name was Joseph Levitch] and further christened Joey’s sympathetic mother Sarah, after his beloved maternal grandmother. And while he atavistically retained the title of the project even though there was no jazz singing in it, he could have written from personal experience the story of the son eclipsing the father and then sentimentally capitulating to him.

Jerry admitted as much to Hal Humphrey of The Los Angeles Mirror News, harkening back to one of his deepest pains to explain the genesis of the project: “When I was thirteen, my parents couldn’t afford my bar mitzvah. Dad was on the road making twenty dollars a week in burlesque and I was living with my grandmother. I had to accept a charity bar mitzvah from the synagogue. You can’t imagine how badly my family felt about this. So The Jazz Singer, with its relationship between a Jewish father and his son, is kind of close to me.

Nevertheless, it was ironic material to work with. Danny [Lewis, Jerry’s father] had virtually retired, after all, and had long resigned himself to Jerry’s career choices. He lived primarily off his son’s largesse, though he still reserved himself the right to criticize Jerry’s material and colleagues. His bitter grumblings about his failed career, however, were hardly analogous to Cantor Rabinowitz’s pious grief over his son’s departure from religious traditions. For Jerry’s part, while he felt a filial bond with his father and sentimentally bragged about Danny’s show biz prowess, his hero worship for Danny had died, and he found himself increasingly uncomfortably in his presence.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Oscar Micheaux’s Swing! (1938)

Oscar Micheaux was the most prolific black filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century, writing and directing 40 films (about 15 of which survive in their entirety today) on practically nonexistent budgets, touring them around the country himself. From early silent near-masterpieces like Within Our Gates and Body and Soul, to fascinatingly terrible talkies like God’s Step-Children, Micheaux remains one of the most intriguing, frustrating, and incendiary filmmakers to deal with race.

Richard Corliss wrote perceptively for Time Magazine:

Oscar Micheaux was the D.W. Griffith of race cinema. And also its Edward D. Wood, Jr. An unquestioned pioneer who wrote, produced, directed, financed and distributed his own films, Micheaux made movies for 30 years, yet remained ignorant of the basic craft and the visual grammar of the medium; by any normal standard, his no-budget, no-retake films are defiantly, fascinatingly bad. His declared mission was to “uplift the race,” but did it by showing light-skinned blacks (usually women) as ethically superior to those of a darker shade (usually men, who are derided as slaves to crap games and numbers rackets).

Swing! is fairly innocuous by Micheaux standards: a melodrama about a housewife (Cora Green) who leaves her no-good cheating husband to move to New York. In Harlem, she finds herself the star of the very first all-black Broadway show when the diva-ish leading lady breaks her leg. “Of all the Colored shows that have gone by the boards,” says the director, “no Negro has ever produced one. From Williams and Walker to The Green Pastures, they’ve all been sponsored by white men. No Negro has ever been in on the money, or the profits.”

There are some unintended chuckles to be had, as when a white investor promises to put the show on Broadway in just three days “without even an out-of-town tryout” because Green is such an extraordinary talent (the “Broadway show,” when we see it, looks like a banquet at a Legion Hall). Still, as with any Micheaux work, it has a certain amount of charm and passion. To the Cleveland Plain Dealer, leading man Carman Newsome (“The Dark Gable”) said, “We don’t have the money to spend on big sets and many retakes. We mostly shoot with one take, but if it isn’t good or isn’t what our director wants we have gone as high as seven takes for one scene. We try to make the very best picture we can.” In his definitive biography Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only, Patrick Milligan calls the film “a diverting piffle,” and adds, “Swing! was sprinkled with Micheaux’s social criticism, especially in the form of disapproving portraits of shiftless men, two-timers, gamblers, and welfare bums.”

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-1998)

News that Jean-Luc Godard will shoot his next film, Goodbye to Language, in 3D is cause for celebration. With the arguable exception of Stan Brakhage, Godard is the filmmaker most in love with the tangible act of filmmaking - or image-making, to be more precise, since his work in the last three decades has embraced video and digital technology as enthusiastically as 35 and 16mm film. One of the delights of all his work is the way he plays with the physical properties of the medium. His recent Film Socialisme (2010), for example, may have been a grumpy lament for the decline of western civilization, but it gained a certain optimistic edge from Godard’s thrilling use of digital video technology - from gorgeously sharp, high-contrast images, to wildly colorful low-end cellphone recording.

This is why I’m always surprised when I hear film lovers say that they hate Jean-Luc Godard. “Hate” is one of many boxes - “genius,” “fraud,” “poet,” “intellectual,” “pretentious,” “bigoted,” the list goes on - that Godard doesn’t quite comfortably fit in. Godard may be an asshole - especially whenever he’s talking about Israel, women, or America - but his assholeishness is so closely intertwined with the things that make him valuable (his probing intellectual curiosity, his formal inventiveness, his relentless contrarianism) that I’d rank him with a small group of auteurs (Jerry Lewis, John Waters, Kenneth Anger, Terry Gilliam, Federico Fellini, maybe even Steven Spielberg) whose negative qualities are as crucial to their value as their positives. In a typically hyperbolic statement, Godard once said that “the cinema is Nicholas Ray.” Like him or loathe him, for better or worse, I believe the cinema truly is Jean-Luc Godard.

The eight-part, 266-minute Histoire(s) du Cinema (rough translation: The (Hi)Story of Cinema), is Godard’s most ambitious, challenging, and frustrating work, and possibly also his greatest (but again, “greatest” and “worst” are labels that Godard and his films tend to defy). Whatever it is, it’s certainly the work of a master of the form - the nearest cinematic equivalent to Finnegans Wake (and yes, I know I said the same thing last week about Turkish Star Wars, but really, no foolin’ this time).

Histoire(s) du Cinema is Godard’s attempt to affirm the cinema as the dominant art form of the 20th century - and, in so doing, hold it partially accountable for the 20th century’s atrocities. To Godard, the central moral dilemma in 20th century cinema and history is the Second World War. The cinema, like humanity at large, failed to prevent the Holocaust (talking about George Stevens’ work using early color photography to document the Nazi war camps, Godard states provocatively, “Elizabeth Taylor could not have found her Place in the Sun without Auschwitz”). In the cinema, as in the world, America came to be a dominant, almost oppressive cultural force. And cinema, being one art form among many in a vast history of human creative expression, is the product of a dense stew of centuries of music, theater, poetry, and visual art, all of which rub shoulders with clips of Italian neorealism, concentration camp newsreels, Italian neorealism, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and hard-core pornography.

On At the Movies, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky made this beautiful observation:

Out of all the many ideas in Godard’s film, the one that I am drawn to the most is that there is a single story of cinema made up of all the images and all the sounds and ideas and feelings of all movies, and it reminds me of a saying beloved by Godard’s fellow New Wave pioneer, Claude Chabrol, that there are no waves, there is only the ocean.  

Here’s what Dave Kehr had to say in the New York Times:

Because of its long gestation, Histoire(s) has already produced a considerable library of academic exegesis, and it is bound to produce even more. Composed of unidentified film clips, snatches of dialogue, glimpses of painting, passages of classical music, quotations of works of literature and art criticism, all orchestrated into thematic clusters and provocative contradictions, Histoire(s) is by nature an open-ended, unstable work that even its author would be unable (and certainly unwilling) to explain.

There are those who will always find Godard frustrating — or flatly denounce him as a fraud — because his work resists strict and systematic analysis. But as he has grown older, he has claimed the privilege, as David Byrne put it in a memorable lyric, to “stop making sense.” What he has made instead is a sort of associational machine, as dense and obscure as any of the Symbolist poetry that also serves as one of Mr. Godard’s reference points, but one that also solicits the viewer’s participation in connecting the dots and filling in the blanks. […]

In its overall structure, Histoire(s) takes on the form of a very personal dark night of the soul. In the early episodes, Mr. Godard appears in his darkened study, hammering away at an electric typewriter, apparently in the throes of creation; later episodes find him endlessly and uselessly running film back and forth through an editing machine; toward the end of the series, he has retreated to his bookshelves, flipping through texts in search of inspiration or insight. The darkness deepens and nightmares come, with images from Goya, Tod Browning’s Freaks and the Nazi death camps.

The final installment, “Les Signes Parmi Nous,” depicts a return to the light (it is dedicated “pour Anne-Marie Miéville,” Mr. Godard’s longtime companion, and “pour moi-même”). As dawn breaks, the film evokes its spirit guides — philosopher-historians like Sartre, Braudel and Péguy; writers like Bataille, Rimbaud and Faulkner; filmmakers like Hitchcock, Guitry and Eisenstein. The film ends with Mr. Godard reciting a passage from Borges, over a photograph of himself as a young man: “If a man passes through paradise in a dream, if he is given a flower as proof of that passage and then wakes up to find that flower in his hands, what is there to say? I was that man.”

There are many digressions and asides over the course of Histoire(s) du Cinema — here, a contemplation of Hitchcock and the power of the artist; there, an analysis of the New Wave and its historical position. Yet this sprawling work is also a concentrated, focused one, circling back to the same stock of images and ideas, drawing them into new combinations and new paradoxes, producing — if not crisp, clear, sloganized ideas — at least a misty, fecund atmosphere of creation from which fresh ideas can emerge. Perhaps, like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, this is not a work to be read but a work to be read in: to be picked up and put down, sampled and considered, over a period of time. Jean-Luc Godard took 30 years to compose his Histoire(s). It might take just as long to absorb it.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (aka The Man Who Saved the World) (aka Turkish Star Wars) (1982)

In honor of “May the Fourth be With You” day, revisit this low-budget Turkish pastiche/rip-off of the Star Wars films. Earlier today, I published an article articulating its myriad pleasures, but one thing I didn’t include was this monologue in which some sort of Wise Elder explains to our hero his mission:

“Son, here is the tomb of Hz. Haci Bektasi Veli. A shrine which break off the world a 1000 space years ago. Being the biggest tribe and the most rooted society, Islam, your religion, is the sign of the civilization. Islam has begun with the last prophet Hz. Muhammed and has been the guide of righteousness and humanity for centuries. Each Muslim is the messenger of Islam and defender of the religion. As the villains got away from their god and religions, the wars have begun and the world has been the target of all evil in space. Your holy book Koran, which has been embraced by the Muslims and read for centuries, is a book that told one by one about the world, the space, and the phases which will be faced by the human civilization and all living, non-living creatures ever existed since the creation of the world and will exist till doomsday. That book tells that human should believe to his death as he believes his birth. Death and immortality. The world was destroyed. Then around a mountain made of bronze came the 13^th tribe. Those high bronze mountains protected from radiation. They melted the mountain. They made a sword and accumulated the mountain’s power in it, and they got out of the plains. Wise men gathered, and they unified the brain power of the humans who were extinct for thousands of years, together with goodness and wisdom inside one brain. The sword and brain stayed on this planet which is a part of the world. And who remained from the 13^th tribe were us, the Wizard and the immortals. My daughter is unable to speak since the day I hid the sword and the brain. She will take you to the sword, son. You must pass all obstacles and reach to the sword and the brain.

“When the blasphemers started to mass kill the humans believing in god, the ones with religion and belief did flee away. They built cities seven layers beneath the ground and fought with blasphemers. Jesus Christ was leading them. The cities they built thousands of meters below the ground were the achievement of the most modern technology. They lived and reproduced… Hundreds of immigrants arrived and passed through their country. They met them and then they understood that there is one god.

You can see the whole goddamn movie here, with wacky subtitles.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966)

I’ve seen Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. Once last December, on a bootleg DVD I found, and once last night, at the Anthology Film Archives, as part of a project I’m doing on the Chelsea Hotel. For those keeping score, that’s twice in the last six months. Next, I plan to climb Mount Everest.

Originally projected onto one screen by two projectors simultaneously, with one of the images muted (like two side-by-side windows in the Chelsea Hotel, I reckon), Chelsea Girls documents a number of Warhol’s 1966-era posse as they sit and converse aimlessly. We see Ondine ask Ingrid Superstar questions about her sexual history; Brigid Berlin shooting up; Mary Woronov dominating Marie Menken; Eric Emerson telling his life story while stripping naked; etcetera etcetera.

Like all of Warhol’s films, Chelsea Girls makes amateurishness part of its mission statement. There’s a moment in the Mary Woronov segment when the camera focuses and unfocuses on Woronov’s face about four or five times, and we realize this is because Warhol became briefly fascinated by the focus feature on his camera. The sound is often muffled and inaudible. Only some of it was shot at the Chelsea Hotel.

If you stare at it long enough, parts of Chelsea Girls become kinda hypnotic. But to be honest, it’s a fairly unwatchable movie, interesting more as an idea or cultural curio than a standalone art work. Most of the segments and people are pretty mind-numbing, and, to top it off, impossible to hear. The best segment, by default, is Mary Woronov’s, which also happens to be the most completely scripted. She wrote in her autobiography, “I was the only one who memorized my lines, and no one even noticed.”

Having said that, Rex Reed called the film “a three and a half hour cesspool of vulgarity and talentless confusion which is about as interesting as the inside of a toilet bowl,” so if it makes Rex Reed angry, it must be doing something right.

You can watch the whole goddamn thing in this YouTube window. I dare you. I fucking double-dare you.

Here’s an interview with Warhol from the book Andy Warhol’s Index (Book), with Gerard Malanga (1967):

Q: Why do you let the camera run for the time it runs?

A: Well, this way I can catch people being themselves instead of setting up a scene and shooting it and letting people act out parts that were written because it’s better to act naturally than act like someone else because you really get a better picture of people being themselves instead of trying to act like they’re themselves.

Q: Are all the people degenerates in the movie?

A: Not all the people - just 99/9% of them. Who did I like best in the movie? I liked Pope Ondine best. Ingrid in the movie I think is very funny

Q: What was the greatest influence on your work?

A: People themselves and their ideas. Actually, there are no other films similar except Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tom Jones. If I were going to make Chelsea Girls in the South, first of all, I think I’d call it Southern Belles. And as pope Ondine I’d probably use Gugliana Magaduna, and as Ingrid, Babette La Rod. As the fat pill pusher and dope addict I would probably use my father. I would probably use the hud of Dothan Motor Inn in Dothan, Alabama. It’s the swingingest hotel in the South. Not necessarily a lot of degenerates - a lot of bands stay there, a lot of whores, wrestlers, and a lot of people like that. You might say it’s all the degenerates, yes. Uhhh. I think drugs wouldn’t be such a good subject to use in South Alabama, really. Liquor, since South Alabama’s completely dry. Yes, I do come from the South. These other Yankees don’t know that I’m from the South, so they don’t bother me, but the South has a feeling toward the human person that the North doesn’t have and its many more of a humane person living in the North.

Q: Do you advocate everybody using drugs?

A: Certainly I would advocate everybody using drugs, but only the drugs that are given by prescription.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

John Waters’ Desperate Living (1977)

Female Trouble and Polyester have sharper satire, and Hairspray is surprisingly sweet, but if I’m being completely honest, I think Desperate Living is my favorite of John Waters’ checkered cinematic canon - although words like “best,” “worst,” and “favorite” are meaningless applied to Waters’ films, which usually feel like extensions of the same long, rambling, fitfully amusing, often inept film. The last of Waters’ underground provocations before he became semi-legit with Polyester, Desperate Living is the ridiculous, almost stream-of-consciousness of a wealthy invalid (Mink Stole, playing it to the balcony) and her 400-pound maid (Jean Hill) who flee to the vaguely Oz-like kingdom of Mortville. There, they live under the rule of the tyrannical Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey, in her finest role - “The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life!”), and meet the ludicrously butch Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe) and her lover Muffy St. Jacques (Vegas showgirl Liz Renay, who was once Mickey Cohen’s moll).

Divine is absent this time around, but otherwise, Desperate Living has one of Waters’ best (and loudest) casts, with a particularly hilarious performance by Susane Lowe. It’s a fine synthesis of Waters’ influences (namely Russ Meyer, Herschel Gordon Lewis, Walt Disney, and The Wizard of Oz), and unlike Mondo Trasho, Multiple Maniacs, and even the sainted Pink Flamingos (which drags a lo-o-ot), Desperate Living has a real lunatic momentum. Like all Waters films, the humor is hit-and-miss, but the film just keeps piling on greater and greater obscenities with a certain zeal (up to and including cinema’s most memorable sex-change operation). It would be completely irredeemable if it weren’t so oddly joyous.

An excerpt from an interview with Waters by the A.V. Club in 2000:

O: What was your relationship to the underground during that period?

JW: I had no relationship, I just made the movies. In those days, early films like Mondo Trasho were never shown in New York, and that’s really the only place underground films were at the time. It was totally a New York chauvinist thing. They didn’t even look at my movies, because I was from Baltimore. Outside of Baltimore, the films played in San Francisco and Los Angeles way before New York. Nothing played there until Pink Flamingos became a hit. Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs had toured all over the United States before that. They didn’t play widely, but there was a midnight underground circuit then. In those days, I didn’t know any directors. And no one said my films were any good, either, except the hippie audience that were really punks and didn’t know it yet. My audience was about a third gay, a third angry hippies, and a third bikers. Bikers loved my movies. They used to come to my sets and try to eat shit—after Pink Flamingos was made. We didn’t even want them there! So it was an angry audience that hated peace and love and were sick of it. That was my core audience in the beginning, but no one said [my films] were good except for Fran Lebowitz in an interview, and she was a cab driver. The only other good review we got was from New York magazine, which called Pink Flamingos “beyond pornography.” [Laughs.] So nobody was saying they were good, and they never played in real movie theaters, but the audience was rabid. Every person was on drugs in the audience, every person was on drugs in the movies themselves, and I was on drugs when I thought them up. And [the exhibitors] would put down sawdust on the floor because of all the puking.

O: I remember you saying that if a person throws up at one of your movies, it’s akin to a standing ovation.

JW: Oh, sure, I would take credit for it. But they weren’t puking because of the movie; they were puking because they were drunk.

O: Your films received a mixed reception in prison, didn’t they?

JW: Yeah. Later, when I showed them in a class I taught at prison during the ’80s, the reaction was racially divided. Oddly enough, when I showed Pink Flamingos to my class—and I had a good class, because the warden gave me the smartest and the worst, the smartest people who had done the worst crimes—and every black person left when Divine ate dog shit. They never came back, dropped the course. And every white person stayed. It was so weird.

O: Do you have any theories about that?

JW: I don’t know to this day. “Fuckin’ white people are crazy,” that’s all I can think of. [Laughs.] That’s what they must have said. Later, when I taught in prison another time, I walked in and my class was all black Muslim, with the hat and everything. I didn’t show Pink Flamingos, but we got along anyway. At first, it was tense, but then I made them do improv and pretend like they were on a plane that was crashing. After that, we got along all right.

O: How do you feel about your sort of low-brow humor crossing over into the mainstream?

JW: I don’t feel any connection to it. I’m not against it—I like those movies—but I don’t feel like I’m part of it. I get asked that question all the time, and I get why people ask it, but it’s only made it easier to get my films made. It hasn’t hurt me in any way. But I did those films so long ago, and I don’t really do them anymore. I mean, I might include [low-brow humor], but that’s not the reason I make the movies. I’m not in this contest, this Battle Of Filth. I won! [Laughs.] Now, they’re all in the Battle Of Filth and they’re duking it out. I’ve retired. I’m a filth elder. I’m the Henry Cabot Lodge of filth. I’ve long since retired, and had I tried to top myself, I would not be working and I wouldn’t have for a long time. I don’t think that many directors who started out making weird films in the ’60s are still working, because you have to change. There are still kids who see my movies for the first time who want me to make Pink Flamingos over and over, but if I did, it wouldn’t work. It would be too calculated. Pink Flamingos was made as a crime, almost. Nobody sent me head shots to make that movie. The guy with the singing asshole just came over and showed me. Incidentally, he went to the re-release 25 years later—he’s like 50 years old—and he sat in the theater. When his scene came on, he would look over at the person next to him and whisper, “That’s me.” And people were shocked. It was like Candid Camera: It was terrorism all over again. People would be really uptight, because what could you say when you’re sitting there in the theater and the guy with the sphincter is right next to you? Movie manners. [Laughs.] And he just did it on his own, which I thought was really a good star appearance.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975)

The best of the “early, funny” Woody Allen movies, and the last example of a time when Allen would film in a place that wasn’t a big city. This spoof of Russian literature was Allen’s last flat-out comedy before Annie Hall, and while it’s very funny in the same Marx Brothers Hope way as Bananas and Take the Money and Run, it also feels like a step forward, offering the first full articulation of the “whatever works” philosophy that would remain at the forefront of practically every Allen film to come. Actually, the title Love and Death would work as a perfect summary of Allen’s entire canon.

I also think that Allen’s final monologue is one of the key passages in his work:

The question is: have I learned anything about life? Only that… only that human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun. The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there IS a God, I don’t think that He’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that, basically, He’s an underachiever. After all, you know, there are worse things in life than death. I mean, if you’ve ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, you know exactly what I mean. The key here, I think, is to… to not think of death as an end, but think of it more as a very effective way of cutting down on your expenses. Regarding love, heh, you know, what can you say? It’s not the quantity of your sexual relations that count. It’s the quality. On the other hand, if the quantity drops below once every eight months, I would definitely look into it. Well, that’s about it for me folks. Goodbye.

Here is what Allen had to say to Stig Bjorkman in the book Woody Allen on Woody Allen (1994):

Stig Bjorkman: Somewhere at the beginning o the film, Sonya (Diane Keaton) asks Boris (played by you): ‘Isn’t nature incredible?’ And you answer: ‘To me nature is, I don’t know, spiders eating bugs and big fishes eating little fishes and plants eating plants. It’s like an enormous restaurant. That’s how I see it.’ What is your attitude towards nature as opposed to urban life? I guess maybe your attitude is not of a Rousseau-like kind?

Woody Allen: It’s deeper than that, because certainly in terms of the contrast between urban life and rural life I fall into the urban life personality. This kind of dichotomy in artists has existed for many years. I mean, Dostoyevsky was clearly an urban person where Tolstoy was quite rural. Turgenev was particularly rural. But it has no relationship to the quality of the work or the depth of the work. I prefer the city to the country. I don’t mind driving in the country or being in the country for one day now and then. But, in this context, I meant ‘nature’ overall, city and country. I mean, when you look at natural beauty you look at a beautiful pastoral scene. If you look closely, what you will see is pretty horrible. If you really could look closely, you would see violence and chaos and murder and cannibalism. But when you look at the broad picture, a Constable painting, it looks quite beautiful.

SB: Yes, and that goes for the urban landscape as well.

WA: Yes, if you look at the city, you can see a picture of urban beauty. But when you come in close, you can see the bacteria and what happens between man and his fellow man. It’s a pretty miserable, ugly, horrifying thing.

SB:Love and Death, compared to you later films, is still a more loosely told story. And sometimes, like in your earlier films, the dialogue is mere wisecracking. A typical example of this is in the scene between Boris and Sonya in the attic.

WA: Sure, I used to always want my character to speak in jokes, like Groucho Marx or Bob Hope. So there is always a witticism rather than behavioural dialogue.

SB: What inspired you to write this film?

WA: It’s an interesting little story, maybe. I had just done Sleeper, which I had shot in Colorado and California. And I wanted to make a picture in New York ity. I wrote a murder mystery. But when I’d finished it, I didn’t want to do a murder mystery. I didn’t think it strong enough for me, so I put it aside. Then I got a sudden wish to do a Russian thing, with a lightly philosophical theme, so I wrote Love and Death. And I did it. After that I came back to the murder mystery, and i took some of that plot, some of the characters in it, and I made it into Annie Hall. The characters were Annie and Alvy and the murder mystery, and there were many things that were exactly the same. But I dropped the murder part. But for Manhattan Murder Mystery, I came back to the murder mystery.

SB: That same story?

WA: Pretty much - I adapted it a little bit - but pretty much. So with Love and Death I surprised everybody, because they all expected a film in New York, a contemporary New York film. But that was some of the most fun I had, making that film. I like that area. It was fun working in Paris. I liked the French people and I loved being in France. Budapest was a little rough at that time for me, because it was cold.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Charlie Chaplin’s How to Make Movies (1918)

Charlie Chaplin’s 1918 contract with First National gave him unprecedented creative freedom, an unheard-of million-dollar salary, and even his own studio. As if to show off his newfound freedom, Chaplin produced this vaguely self-aggrandizing behind-the-scenes pseudo-documentary about the Chaplin Studios in 1918, purporting to show a typical day at work. Intended to be the first film in Chaplin’s contract, First National never actually released the film (they paid for real Chaplin work), and How to Make Movies sat uncompleted in the Chaplin vaults for decades. It was only seen in snippets until the historian/archivist Kevin Brownlow completed it in the 1980s. As a sort-of time capsule of Chaplin at the height of his popularity, it is invaluable.

For part two, go here.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

The Three Stooges in A Plumbing We Will Go (1940)

In light of the release of The Three Stooges, a bizarre conceptual art project by the Farrelly Brothers currently being marketed as a comedy, why not revisit one of the finest short films by the original Stooges? In A Plumbing We Will Go, Moe, Larry, and Curly find themselves masquerading as plumbers at (where else?) a swanky mansion, and get into assorted havoc involving pipes, sledgehammers, and hammers.

This was a short story I wrote for my high school newspaper in 2007, vaguely inspired by A Plumbing We Will Go. I still think it’s pretty good.

The Plumbers

By Will Sloan

Mrs. Richmond was not happy.  It was seven thirty, just half an hour before her big dinner party, and the plumbers had not yet arrived.  She paced around the living room of her spacious mansion, pausing briefly to adjust her earrings or re-touch the makeup she vainly used to cover up her middle-aged wrinkles.

She threw her arms in the air. “OH, where are those THREE PLUMBERS I hired?!”

The butler entered, trembling at the knees. “M-M-Mrs. Richmond,” he stammered, “the… the plumbers have arrived.”

“Thank goodness! Show them in!”

The butler did not need to. The three men pushed him aside, drawn to Mrs. Richmond’s open bar. They were a motley crew of blue-collars, and the sight of them fumbling over the seltzer bottles alarmed the wealthy socialite. She hesitated for a moment, but decided to break the ice.

She tapped the bald one on the shoulder. “Ah, hello… you must be the plumbers.”

The bald one turned, but the pipe he had been holding over his shoulders hit the other men’s heads. As they rose from the floor, trading blame and insults, Mrs. Richmond looked them over. What a bunch of ruffians, she thought – short, clumsy, homely. Hopefully she could shoo them out before her guests arrived.

One of them stepped forward – the leader, Mrs. Richmond assumed. He had a sagging face, with heavy bags under his eyes and a mouth in a near-permanent sneer. His hair was a hideous, inky black – dyed, no doubt – and combed in a bowl over his forehead. “Oh, say, you must be the dame whose pipe’s we’re fixin’,” he growled. “Well, you ain’t got nothin’ ta worry about. We’re three of the finest plumbers who ever plumed a plumb.”

He pointed a thumb at his chest. “I’m Moe.” He pointed to a sour-faced man with a bulbous nose and a hair formation – frizzy around the sides, bald on top – even more improbable than his own. “That’s Larry.” Finally, he pointed to a chubby, jittery man, with a shaved head that Mrs. Richmond thought resembled a dirty tennis ball. “And this porcupine over here is Curly.”

Curly puffed out his chest and let out an incomprehensible moan. “I ain’t no porcupine!” he stated firmly.

“Quiet, you!” Moe banged a fist into his stomach. “This here’s a classy broad. You lookin’ to cost us a job?”

Curly searched for words, but could only squeal, “Mwwwwrrraaaaaaahhhh….” Finally, he stepped closer to Moe, and barked in his face. “rrraAAAFFF! rrrraaaAAAAAAFFF!”

Moe would not have this backtalk. His tired eyes took on an angry new spark, and his sneer shifted to a scowl. “Why I oughta…”  Suddenly, Moe raised a hand and swung his arm through the air until it landed with a smack on Curly’s face. Mrs. Dumont was sickened by the cold, clammy sound his hand made with the raw meat of the cheek, and Curly desperately rubbed his hand over his face. “OOOhh! OOOhh!”

Larry looked down. His bushy eyebrows arched sorrowfully, and his weary face lost what little spirit it had. He sighed. “Aw, whad’ja do that fer?”

Moe’s rage intensified. Without warning, he extended his index and middle fingers, lifted his arm in the air, and jabbed the fingers into Larry’s eye sockets. The unbelievable pain overwhelmed Larry’s senses. He felt a lust for revenge.

Larry thrust out a fist and pointed at it. “D’ya see that?” said Larry, in a condescending tone.

Moe scoffed.  He pounded his own fist on top of Larry’s, but the force of Moe’s punch twirled Larry’s arm, fist landing squarely on head.

Mrs. Richmond was terrified. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please control yourselves!” But it was too late. Moe grabbed the monkey wrench from his toolbox and slammed it into Curly’s head. To Mrs. Richmond’s astonishment, Curly’s head caused the wrench to bend. Curly pointed at the wrench, chuckling “N’yuck n’yuck n’yuck,” until Moe jabbed his fingers into Curly’s eye sockets.

Mrs. Richmond once again attempted to restore order. “Gentlemen, gentlemen control yourselves!” But her cries of protest made the plumbers realized that she was the common enemy. Out of the corner of his eye, Curly spotted a cream pie cooling on the windowsill, which he hurled with great speed at Mrs. Dumont’s face. When it landed, she was inundated by the power of the pie’s scalding heat. She shrieked, but not before Larry drenched her with a seltzer bottle and Moe whacked her with a sledgehammer.

Lord Richmond entered. “What is all of this commotion, I say - -” A cream pie landed on his face. He gasped as the icing dripped onto his suit. “Wha… wha… I…” Lord Richmond grabbed a pie of his own, but his throw narrowly eluded Moe – landing square on the face of the poor Butler.

The familiar sound of sirens wailed in the distance. Moe grabbed Curly and Larry by their collars. “Alright, boys, we gotta scram.”

“Whaddabout the job?”

“You numbskull – d’ya wanna wind up back in the pen?”

And so the three plumbers ran, stopping only briefly to grab some of the liquor, the sound of “WOOOOOOB WOOOOooob Wooob wooob…” growing ever more distant. As Mrs. Richmond rose to her feet, rubbing the inexplicably large bump on her forehead, Officer Healy was scribbling a police report.

“Who were those guys, anyway?” asked Officer Healy.

“A pack of knuckleheads,” she said quietly. “A pack of knuckleheads.”

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Kim Tai-chung and Bruce Lee (sorta kinda) in Tower of Death (aka Game of Death) (1981)

Three years after the success of the posthumous Bruce Lee film Game of Death (1978), came this sequel, also from Golden Harvest, also starring Bruce Lee. As Lee had by now been dead for eight years, and practically any remaining footage of him had already been used and abused, Tower of Death gets the dregs. The plot: Billy Lo (“Bruce Lee,” often seen from behind, and mostly played by Kim Tai-chung) is back, but this time he’s a monk instead of a famous movie star (?). A disciplined master of the martial arts, Billy is dismayed to find that his brother Bobby Lo (Kim Tai-chung) is a womanizing hooligan. However, after about 25 minutes, Billy is killed by a mysterious villain. We then see footage from Bruce Lee’s actual funeral, including shots of his corpse.

Most of the Bruce Lee footage comes from outtakes from Enter the Dragon, and most of them you can see in their entirety in this trailer. Note how the Shaolin monk he talks to wears a robe that magically changes from yellow to orange.

With his brother dead, Bobby Lo steps up to the plate, and launches an investigation to find the criminals responsible. Eventually (big ellipses here, I know) he finds himself in what I assume is the titular tower of death. Except it’s an underground tower, and everything is orange and retro-futuristic.

This movie is stupid. Transcendentally so. It raises stupidity to the level of poetry. Like, there’s a scene where Bobby fights a big, stuffed tiger. Overall, Tower of Death is one of the greatest movies ever made.

Director Ng See-yuen also directed the classic Bruceploitation biography Bruce Lee: The Man, the Myth (and he’s the executive producer on the next Wong Kar-wai movie. Huh.). Star Kim Tai-chung went on to peddle his Bruce Lee lookalike schtick in the immortal Jackie and Bruce to the Rescue and the early Jean Claude Vane Damme saga No Retreat, No Surrender (in which he played - you guessed it - Bruce Lee’s ghost).

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Pier Paolo Pasonlini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

I am hardly the first person to point out the irony that the finest, most reverent film ever made about Jesus Christ was directed by an Atheist. Arriving at a time when the “Biblical Epic” was one of the dominant “blockbuster” modes, Pasonlini’s stripped-down, black and white, documentary-like depiction of the life of Christ (complete with pimply nonprofessional actors and dirty-looking scenery) was a real breath of fresh air. With all of its dialogue coming directly from Matthew’s Gospel, Pasolini’s film is certainly one of the most faithful Biblical films, with the added subversive edge that the outspokenly Communist filmmaker made Jesus look an awful lot like a Marxist revolutionary.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)

What better way to celebrate Easter than by revisiting one of the finest films ever made about Christianity? Born in the manger down the street from Jesus, Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman), the thoroughly unremarkable illegitimate son of the decidedly-not-virginal Mandy (Terry Jones) becomes mistaken for the Messiah in Jerusalem, 33 A.D.

Though Life of Brian was widely protested by Christians in the United States and Europe (it was banned in Ireland and Norway, as well as several regions of the United Kingdom), the Jesus-centric comedy actually occupies less screen time than you might remember; actually, the film is more of a broad-ranging satire about the corrupting power of organized bureaucracy, whether it be religious or political (consider a plot strand involving the incompetent People’s Front of Judea’s pseudo-revolutionary attempt to overthrow Pontius Pilate). Anyway, it was the last Python film I saw, at age 13. My parents wouldn’t let me see it until after my Catholic confirmation.

Life of Brian is the only Python film to have a really coherent narrative, and it has a strong central pillar in Graham Chapman’s straight-faced performance, but as usual, it’s mostly remembered for individual scenes: “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” “What have the Romans ever done for us?”, the Latin lesson, the Sermon on the Mount (“What did he say? Blessed are the cheesemakers?”), Brian’s abduction by aliens… really, every single scene is a small masterpiece.

Like the dirty, muddy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian gains credibility from its atmospheric, persuasive depiction of the time and place. Inspired as much by Pasolini’s earthy The Gospel According to St. Matthew as the Cecil B. DeMille epics, (and “designed” by Terry Gilliam, according to the credits), many scenes were shot on leftover sets from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth. One unlikely fan of Life of Brian: Paul Verhoeven, the director of RoboCop, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers, and also one of the world’s foremost authorities on the historical Jesus (!). In his book Jesus of Nazareth, he wrote:

Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a good example of how history can be put to use in a script. Although a comedy, the movie draws on the information in the books of Flavius Josephus, touching on the political problems in Jerusalem, in which Pontius Pilate is constantly at odds with Jewish interest groups. As we know from Josephus’ writings, Pilate took money from the Temple to finance the building of an aqueduct that would provide Jerusalem with a decent water supply. Life of Brian is an accurate portrayal of the popular resistance to this project.

Interesting fact: when the Monty Python group were unable to secure financing, George Harrison personally paid for half the budget, and set up Handmade Films, solely to finance Life of Brian. “He mortgaged his house to put up the money for this movie,” said Eric Idle, “because he wanted to see [it]. Which is still the most anybody’s paid for a cinema ticket.” Handmade Films would become an important British production company throughout the ’80s, producing such films as Time Bandits, Mona Lisa, The Missionary, and Withnail and I.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Joe Don Baker in Walking Tall (1973)

The narrative of early 1970s American cinema is so often canonized in terms of the artistic, auteurist explosion of “the New Hollywood” (The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, Mean Streets) or taboo-breaking work made possible by the fall of the production code (Sweet Sweetback, Deep Throat, A Clockwork Orange) that it’s easy to forget that people who didn’t ascribe to any of that newfangled hippy-dippy stuff periodically went to the movies too. Appearing on the list of the top-grossing films of 1973 alongside Last Tango in Paris, The Devil in Miss Jones, and The Exorcist was Walking Tall, one of the biggest surprise successes of the era - a reactionary law-and-order fantasy that was a huge hit in southern drive-ins.

Joe Don Baker plays Buford T. Pusser, a real southern sheriff, but the Pusser of this film bears only the slightest resemblance to the real thing. In this film, Pusser is a former wrestler who moves back to his small Tennessee hometown with his wife and kids, but is shocked to find that a gambling den/house of general ill-repute has emerged, full of ladies of the night and alcohol. When Pusser finds that the craps table is rigged, the mob goons beat him up, knife him, and leave him in a ditch for dead. But Pusser recovers, and does the only thing anybody would do: he shows up after hours and smashes the place with a big wooden stick.

So that lands him in court, but acting as his own attorney, Pusser takes off his shirt in front of the jury and makes a case that vice has fallen on their town, and it’s time for them to take action. In a grievous miscarriage of justice, Pusser is found not guilty.

So, this dangerous vigilante (in my opinion) decides to run for sheriff on a law-and-order platform, and wins. He enlists the film’s resident Black Best Friend (a wholly fictional character, mind you) as his deputy, and wages war against the casino. The mob does all kinds of awful things, like killing his dog and eventually killing his wife, and in the final scene, Pusser drives his truck into the casino. Everyone seems pretty cool about it.

Directed crudely by Phil Karlson - a veteran journeyman from poverty-row Hollywood whose credits include everything from The Phenix City Story to Swing Parade of 1946 with the Three Stooges - Walking Tall does have a certain blunt power in spite of itself. For Joe Don Baker (who had shown up in small roles in Cool Hand Luke and Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner), Walking Tall should have been a starmaking vehicle. He’s physically imposing and he yells a lot, but he also has a certain sweetness, like an enormous, friendly dog. Alas, Baker followed up Walking Tall by coasting awkwardly as a poor man’s Clint Eastwood and/or Burt Reynolds in a string of action potboilers (like the immortal Mitchell). He wouldn’t be this good again until the ’90s, when he saw a resurgence as a portly, affable character actor in movies like Cape Fear.

But after Walking Tall was released, Baker was hot enough to turn down the lead in the sequels. Originally tapped to replace him: the real Buford Pusser, who was to play himself. Unfortunately, Pusser died of a fatal car crash the same day he signed the contract. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that Pusser’s criminal enemies may have run him off the road, but let’s get real: he probably just had a few too many celebratory drinks.

A fun fact from IMDB:

Many residents of McNairy County were upset and turned their back on Sheriff Buford Pusser when the movie was shot in neighboring Chester County, shutting them out of the money being spent by the production. Pusser subsequently lost re-election for Sheriff.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Bruce Li in Bruce Lee: The Man, the Myth (aka Bruce Lee: True Story) (1976)

Of the many pseudo-biographies of Bruce Lee starring lookalikes and imitators (Young Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee’s Deadly Kung Fu, Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story, etcetera etcetera), this one was probably the best. For a really cheap movie, it had a high-ish budget, shooting scenes in Los Angeles, Rome, and Seattle. I mean, the scenes set in these locations are pretty tacky - at one point, streetcar full of Americans waves at the camera, while we only ever see out heroes loiteringjust outside the 20th Century Fox studios. But sometimes you take what you can get.

Bruce Li (Ho Chung-tao) stars as Bruce Lee. We follow his rise to fame, his battles with racial prejudice, his blah blah and his blah blah. Mostly, we see him fight people. In Seattle, he fights some dudes who trash-talk him at a gas station. In San Francisco, he fights Japanese dudes who think karate is better than kung fu, and Chinese dudes who think he shouldn’t be teaching kung fu to white people. In an airport, he fights a squadron of dudes sent by… I dunno, a mobster? On the set of The Big Boss, he fights a challenger, and on the set of Enter the Dragon, he fights another challenger (played by Yuen Biao). On the set of Way of the Dragon in Rome, he fights another mafia goon. He fights…

In the final scene, Bruce Lee dies. But then the narrator says that many people believe his death was a cover-up, and they show us a couple of other possible scenarios, like Lee being killed by a bunch of gangsters, and Lee going into monk-like seclusion until the year 1983. I think it’s fair to say that at least one of these scenarios can now be ruled out.

This is a pretty stupid movie, where characters like Bruce Lee’s wife are addressed briefly in awkward scenes while everybody challenged Bruce Lee to fights like he’s in a Bruce Lee movie. So, all in all, worth seeing.

Fun fact: director Ng See-yuen is also the executive producer on the much-anticipated Wong Kar-wai martial arts film The Grandmasters! He also produced No Retreat, No Surrender, Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master, and directed Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. So there are some trivia questions answered for you right there.