Archive for December 2011
My ten great movies #5: The Shining
For most of the past decade, the Kubrick film on this list would have been Eyes Wide Shut, and while my love for that movie remains undiminished—I think it’s Kubrick’s most humane and emotionally complex work, and endlessly inventive in ways that most viewers tend to underestimate—it’s clear now that The Shining is more central to my experience of the movies. I realized this only recently, after seeing it at midnight earlier this year at the Music Box in Chicago, but this is still a film that has been growing in my estimation for a long time. The crucial factor, perhaps unsurprisingly, was my decision to become a writer. Because while there have been a lot of movies about novelists, The Shining is by far our greatest storehouse of images about the inside of a writer’s head. “You’ve always been the caretaker,” Grady’s ghost says to blocked writer Jack Torrance, and his personality suffuses every frame of the movie whose uneasy center he occupies.
The visual, aural, and visceral experience of The Shining is so overwhelming that there’s no need to describe it here. Instead, I’d like to talk about the performances, which are the richest that Kubrick—often underrated in his handling of actors—ever managed to elicit. At one point, I thought that the film’s only major flaw is that it was impossible to imagine Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall as a married couple, but I’m no longer sure about this: there are marriages this strange and mismatched, and the glimpses of their relationship early in the movie are depressingly plausible. As David Thomson was among the first to point out, Nicholson is great when he plays crazy, but he’s also strangely tender in his few quiet scenes with his son. And Duvall gives what is simply one of the major female performances in the history of movies, even if we suspect, after hearing of the hundreds of takes she was forced to endure, that something more than mere acting was involved.
Tomorrow: The triumph of the studio system.
“You can do anything you want to do…”
You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. When you, body and soul, wish to make a certain expression and cannot be distracted from this one desire, then you will be able to make a great use of whatever technical knowledge you have. You will have clairvoyance, you will see the uses of the technique you already have, and you will invent more.
Malcom Muggeridge on success in second-rate pursuits
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits—like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits—involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding—inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable.
My ten great movies #6: The Third Man
Even for passionate movie lovers, two things tend to date the classic films of the thirties and forties: their sets, with the inescapable smell of the studio, and their orchestral scores, which to modern ears tend to sound depressingly alike. It’s quite possible, then, that we have both the city of Vienna and Anton Karas to thank for the fact that The Third Man still seems so fresh. The zither score, combined with the extraordinary locations, result in a film that seems both utterly of its time and completely modern—it requires less of a mental adjustment to enjoy than any other movie of its era I know. Combine this with Graham Greene’s great script, with its uncredited contributions from Orson Welles and others, and we have what is both the breeziest and darkest of noirs, a film I love so much that I steal from it directly both in my novelette “Kawataro” and the conclusion of my novel City of Exiles.
Everyone knows how completely Welles dominates the movie with only a reel or so of screen time—which, while delicious, seems much more of its period than the rest of the film—to the point where our memory of Harry Lime tends to overshadow the rest of the cast: Joseph Cotten, the very moving Alida Valli, and especially Trevor Howard as Major Calloway, who contributes perhaps the film’s most stylish performance. The big moments—Harry’s entrance, the ferris wheel scene, the great closing shot—are deservedly famous, but I also like the small touches: the wizened little boy with the ball; the moment when Sgt. Paine (the wonderful Bernard Lee) loads the picture of a rhinoceros into the slide projector by mistake; or the glimpses we get into the work of hack writer Holly Martens though the eyes of his admiring readers: “I never knew there were snake charmers in Texas.” But as Carol Reed’s great film reminds us, there are certainly snakes in Vienna—and very charming ones at that.
On Monday: Kubrick, of course, but not the one you were expecting.
My ten great movies #7: L.A. Confidential
It’s a measure of how much Curtis Hanson’s movie has grown in my imagination that when it first came out, while writing for my high school newspaper, I ranked it fifth among the best films of 1997. (The movies that beat it out, if you’re curious, were Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Lost Highway, Kundun, and Boogie Nights). Ever since, however, I’ve rewatched this film on at least an annual basis, to the point where it stands as a personal touchstone for me, both as a movie lover and as a writer. Looking back, I suspect that I underrated it at the time because it makes its own accomplishments—the juggling of three important narrative threads, the stylish but unobtrusive use of period detail, the narrative density, the amount of information conveyed with such style—seem so easy. But with the passage of time, and my own realization of how rare and difficult this sort of thing really is, L.A. Confidential starts to look like the best of all recent Hollywood movies.
Roger Ebert has called Bonnie and Clyde a “total movie,” a film capable of being appreciated by critics and audiences on every possible level, and L.A. Confidential is the closest thing to a total film released in my lifetime. On a surface level, of course, it’s hugely entertaining—I can’t think of another movie with so many classic sequences—and it’s a master class on adaptation and the filmmaker’s craft. The cast is as rich as that of The Godfather, but the character who lingers most in my memory is James Cromwell’s Dudley Smith, lanky, warm to his men, but with an underlying coldness to his eyes. His last, unforgettable exchange with Kevin Spacey is one of those moments, like the turning point ninety minutes into Vertigo, that I seem fated to revisit and rethink forever in my own work, but no other version of this scene can ever equal the power that it has here, which ends, perfectly, with the smile on a man’s face.
Tomorrow: The freshest, most timeless masterpiece of the forties.
Alec Nevala-Lee 