We were desperate

The Decline of Western Civilization

(1981)

This documentary about the early LA punk scene has been a White Whale for me, a Holy Grail--I've been wanting to see the film since a friend who wasn't isolated, as I was, in West Virginia saw it and sent me a cassette dub of the soundtrack. It had a VHS life, I guess, but I never came across it in that format, and its DVD existence has been sketchy at best. Thus, uncharacteristically, I'm linking the title not to the Rotten Tomatoes page (which inexplicably dates the film 1988) but to the Amazon streaming video link (seems not to be available in any format from Netflix, but you can now [finally] buy it on DVD or BluRay, though only packaged with its two sequels). I finally got hold of it when TCM showed it in the middle of the night, and I noticed in time to DVR it.

Long, birthday-related story why I came to be watching it with my friend Laura B, but I was fairly certain that she wouldn't have seen it and absolutely certain that she'd want to. I was correct only in the second assumption, as she had a much more immediate relationship with the music than I and also wasn't isolated in West Virginia. So let's do another of those email dialogue posts:

LB--I was worried that after so much time this documentary wouldn't stand up. I think I find it MORE compelling now. In addition I wanted to know what happened to the people (other than the ones we know have died. Darby [Crash, enthusiastically self-destructive frontman of Germs],  didn't live much past postproduction). What happened to the movement?  Are they all capitalists now?

CB--The where (and who)-are-they-now? question is irresistible, of course, but for present purposes I'm more interested in the personal grip punk and this film (for you as a film, for me as a cassette dub of the soundtrack) had on us in 1981. I was an age-inappropriate 27 when I put away the Manilow and Newton-John of my married life and embraced Jonathan Richman and X and Ian Dury, but you were of the punk age cohort--but living in what I've always imagined was a fairly quiet, fairly protected community. Correct my misconceptions, and tell me why you listened to punk and got all those tattoos and piercings as a kid.

LB--Yes, yes, it was a difficult time for sure. I was really angry. Angry at my broken family (divorces, drugs, domestic violence, neglect, emotional abuse). Angry about living in a trailer in a biker neighborhood on the outskirts of Phoenix. Angry knowing that my generation was the first generation that wouldn't do as well as our parents'. Angry at race inequality, gender inequality, class inequality. Angry at the horrible education I got. (I remember the first time someone told me their parents took them around to shop for colleges. The idea was completely foreign to me and the very working-class background I was accustomed to.) Punk came along and ignited the fuse. Suddenly there were 100X more like me, disillusioned and exploding with energy. Watching the film now I understand that it wasn't a very healthy thing to respond to anger with more anger. We gave our anger carte-blanche, when really there were probably other things I could have been doing to create a better future for myself and the world around me. Everything that I experienced as a teen is nothing new. There are kids experiencing the same things now. I feel guilty for not behaving better, for not being a better person and looking for a more positive outlet. But hey, I was 14, 15, 16 . . .  And it was seriously fun to slam. 

CB--Are there photos? Were there tattoos and piercings? Apart from the chronological difference—when I was discovering punk, it had zero practical application to my lower-middle-class-but-upwardly-mobile life; it was just exciting new rock & roll, in stark contrast to the mind-deadening sentimental dreck that had dominated the predivorce playlist—it’s hard to establish, if I had been the right age but living the life I lived at that age, how punk would have worked for me. Sad to say, I suspect I never would have noticed it, because I was the antithesis of the rebel when I was in high school. “Rebellious” music for me then was the Doors, Cream, Led Zeppelin, but I mostly listened through headphones, to avoid rocking (!) the house/boat. If anything, I’m afraid I’d have been like the skin-deep suburban pseudopunks (though I was way too far from any “urb” to have been remotely suburban). In my real life, punk, like so much else, was essentially an academic construct.

LB--For some reason, in Dec. 2013, my high school friend Tracy posted the attached picture to my FB page. I was 19 when the photo was taken in 1985. It's a pretty tame photo given the topic, but you can see I wasn't your average Deb. That's Danny Elfman's guitar pick on my left ear, captured the year before at a show in Phoenix. Lou Reed is over my left shoulder. We silkscreened the B&W prints in our graphic arts class in high school. The high school I attended was heavily focused on graphic arts, we learned printing and photography among other skills. There was no such thing as college prep; I was told not to bother to apply to college by my counselor. Of the people who did not leave Phoenix, many of my peers wound up either in jail or working at the jail. A cohort just posted her prison release papers on FB. Very few of my peers got a college education, and those that did got out. I've been mighty uncomfortable with the middle-class most of my life. It is a conflict, I desperately want to be accepted by the middle-class while at the same time eschew it for all its comforts and societal ease. I have seen classism, sexism, and racism perpetuated by many "good" people who call themselves middle class. But I have also seen incredible generosity, humanity, and empathy. Today the middle-class is declining and I have some sympathy. Maybe the demise of the classes will bring us closer together as a country. The 99%.

CB--You’re pointing at Bowie’s dick! You little hussy!

LB--Not possible, Bowie is an androgynous being.

CB--In that case you're pointing at both of his genitalia.

Sandy

Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot's holiday)

(1953)

Sorry, but I'm clearly too unsophisticated and too American to appreciate this.

Oom-pah-pah

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

(1936)

A valley between the titanic It Happened One Night and that other Mr. Somebody-goes-somewhere flick, this is a pleasant enough film, but it shows what people who hate Capra are talking about: short on subtlety, long on social sanctimony--er, conscience. Still, I'll watch Jean Arthur in anything.

Little red non-Corvette

Butterfield 8

(1960)

I confess that I didn't watch this straight through, 'cause Matt Harvey was pitching for the Mets, but near as I can tell, Gloria (Elizabeth Taylor) is a magical mix of sexuality and toxicity, and Liggett (Laurence Harvey, no relation to Matt) is as bad an actor as the actor who plays him. And there are other characters in the cast, but they don't mean anything--oh, except for the little red Sunbeam Alpine convertible Gloria drives. I think the main thing we need to know about this film is what Robert Osborne told us at the start: that Taylor, though she won an Oscar for her performance, hated the film, in fact turned it down at first, until she realized that it would let her complete her MGM contract so she could take the $1 million gig from Fox to play some Egyptian tart.

The roar of the greasepaint

Twentieth Century

(1934)

I'll stipulate that John Barrymore and Carole Lombard are great actors, and it's fun to watch them chew the scenery. For a while. Not necessarily for two hours. This is one of those films that I don't get why people find it great.

Murdered by irony

The Hospital

(1971)

I was thinking I saw this when it was new, but '71 doesn't seem right; maybe I saw it second-run at the drive-in in Macomb, Illinois, where my girlfriend (now first ex-wife) was going to school.

A strange, overloaded satire, with one of the most implausible love stories since the '30s musicals.

Love and war

The Informer

(1935)

Dublin, 1922, and Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen)--strong as an ox and half as smart--sells out his best buddy to the occupying Brits for the £20 that will get his girl Katie off the streets and onto a boat with him to America. Except that within a few hours he has spent a big chunk on booze and a bigger chunk on generosity, while his onetime IRA mates watch, and count.

I wanted to like this more than I did--I expected to like it more than I did--but the heavy-handed comic elements don't work as counterpoint to the tragic Judas story, they just sort of muddle the tone. It was one of John Ford's favorites, though, dear to the proud Irish American's heart.

Springtime

Cabaret

(1972)

Well, this was a no-brainer as soon as I saw that it had just cleared the 2-year threshold for DVR deaccessioning: an infinitely better representative of the personal-lives-playing-off-of-sociopolitical-watersheds musical genre than the one I saw last week, and a show whose latest Broadway incarnation featured the guy who carried today's earlier film.

I remember the first time I saw this, in a classic old movie palace in New Orleans, with my then-girlfriend (later first wife) Sue and an old friend of the family Katie (two ladies!). I also remember that the last time I saw it, which must have been close to a decade ago, if not more, I decided that it had run its course. The time off has revived it somewhat, but I still find it a collection of grade A songs wrapped in a C+ story. But oh, those songs!

Not made of stone

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

(1939)

Yes, everyone knows how poignant and stunning Charles Laughton's performance is in a role that Lon Chaney made his own in the silent version 16 years earlier, but what I want to talk about is: has any supporting actor ever had a better year than Thomas Mitchell had in 1939? Not only did he win the Oscar® in that category, but this was no better than his 4th-best role, maybe 5th-best, pending my taking another look at Only Angels Have Wings.

Buy some illusions

A Foreign Affair

(1948)

Directed by Billy Wilder from a script he wrote with Charles Brackett, this tries desperately hard to be so much: propaganda for the effort to rebuild postwar Germany at the same time that we're taking pride in having bombed the bejesus out of Berlin; a charming romantic comedy despite the drawbacks of a nothing leading man (John Lund) and a grotesquely miscast Jean Arthur (who could ever believe her as a prig?); and an updated version of Dietrich's shady-but-plucky saloon singer from Destry Rides Again. And Dietrich--as in Destry (and for that matter, in Der Blaue Engel before both crossed the Atlantic), singing great songs by Friedrich Holländer (as Frederick Hollander)--comes close to providing a saving grace.

As if you'd seen a ghost

My Favorite Wife

(1940)

You know, if Gail Patrick's third wheel were as sympathetic as Randolph Scott's fourth, this would be a practically perfect comedy. But poor Patrick, whom I just saw in My Man Godfrey: did she ever get to play anything but a spoiled rich bitch?

Cary Grant's 45-degree-angle take when his Nick first spies his ostensibly late wife (Irene Dunne, never lovelier) may be his best single comic moment ever, which is tall cotton.

Did you ever have a sister?

The Birth of a Nation

(1915)

Some 20 years ago Ms. Tonic and I watched a rental VHS of this that, as I recall, clocked in at less than half the 185 minutes I watched tonight. Perhaps one of us wondered aloud whether we had been slipped a Reader's [Viewer's?] Digest condensation of the film, but all I remember is being surprised and not a little relieved that this epic film was so short.

So yes, to answer your first question, this is the first time I've ever seen the film in its entirety. And yes, to answer your second, it is everything it has been made out to be: mind-bogglingly racist and revisionist, and at the same time a textbook example of effective filmmaking at its finest, with a narrative momentum that made it hard to find a place to stop for a pee.

Fortunately, about halfway through, the tragically-misguided-on-the-issue-of-states'-rights-but-essentially-humane-and-well-intentioned president gets shot, and that turns out to be the perfect intermission moment for more than one reason. 'Cause until then, the politics is only pro-Confederacy; it's not until the second half that it becomes pro-Nazi.

Here's the thing, you see: the southern reaction to Reconstruction--including the genesis of the Klan--was all about, not to put too fine a point on it, pussy. Specifically, Caucasian, southern pussy. Even more specifically, the hunger of negroes [sic], including mulattoes [sic] for same, and their proclivity to rape if not accorded same consensually, which, of course, they would never be, because, as we see, any unmarried, virginal (please excuse the redundancy) southern woman would rather throw herself fatally onto rocks than to surrender that which her countrymen (including, critically, her brothers) had fought valiantly but futilely to defend.

This, of course, is the same battle Quentin Compson (the first one; the male one; the one with a sister) was fighting 45 years after the war and George Wallace was still fighting a century postbellum. So why should we be surprised that the Kentucky-born Mr. Griffith was fighting it a half-century after Appomattox and almost a century ago (my god, really? the Civil War is almost 150 years in the past? but I remember so clearly when it was just a century past! I was so young and full of promise then!), and my god, he fought it as well as anyone on the wrong side possibly could. Even the score--what I listened to was a modern score, but based on the original--made me want to root for the guys in the bedsheets. Hey, Coppola showed us that we don't necessarily have to believe in what's going on to get behind action scored to the Walkürenritt.

Anyway, if you've always thought, "I suppose I should see it, but I'm sure I'll hate it and afraid I won't," you're right on all counts, and mainly the "should see it" count.

Slick hick clicks, takes licks

A Face in the Crowd

(1957)

Pre-Mayberry Andy Griffith is brilliant as a boozing, womanizing hayseed who is plucked from obscurity and makes the most of the opportunity, turning the toddling technology of television into a forum for politically conservative populism. Stunningly prescient story by Budd Schulberg includes such elements as canned laughter, the political-advertising-entertainment nexus, and, in all but the words, the sound bite as ascendant over discussion of policy. Falls down near the end with some gratuitous explanation of what we've just seen, but never for a moment seems dated.

Liquor is quicker

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock

(1947)

Remember back in October, when I watched my first Harold Lloyd film? Well, here's my second, which includes part of a third, 1923's The Freshman, which in turn provides a key kickoff, if you will, to this story--which, did I mention, is pretty damned terrific.

His youthful football heroics having landed him a job as a bookkeeper, Harold is still at the same desk after a brilliant visual montage reveals the passage of 22 years. Even more brilliant is the all-but-monologue in which he relates his serial love for seven sisters, each more beautiful than the last. But the capstone of brilliance is not the bizarre plot twist that leaves Diddlebock seeking a buyer for the circus he has obtained, but rather what is the closest thing to a moral of the story: if you've lived to age 44 without ever sampling strong drink, it's time to change your ways.

A trip to the dentist

The Paleface

(1948)

Maybe I was subjected to too much Bob Hope in my youth ever to consider him anything but the un-hippest, most reactionary comedian of my father's generation. Many people apparently consider this funny. I half-smiled once, I believe; I certainly never laughed. And casting Jane Russell as Calamity Jane is a blasphemous violation of Robin Weigert.

White lies

(The earrings of) Madame de . . .

(1953)

Delicious web of ironies in a continental context of flirtation to and perhaps beyond the brink of betrayal. It's all fun and games until someone loses . . .

We come in peace, and to jam

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

(1977)

OK, that is, I believe, three chances I've given this film over the years to enchant me, to enthrall me, to delight me. More than any of those, it bores me. Well, occasionally Richard Dreyfuss amused me, and it was fun to see Bob Balaban with hair, and Melinda Dillon distracted me with those "I know her--what is her name" self-queries, until it turned out at the end that her name was completely unfamiliar (though IMBd has just reminded me why she looks so familiar: she has a small but important role in Magnolia). Anyway, I don't think it's ever happening for me with this one; I give up.

It happened una notte

Roman Holiday

(1953)

Reporter shields runaway heiress to protect his story, only to fall in love--yes, derivative and formulaic, but with Audrey Hepburn at her freshest (24 years old, in her first starring role), Gregory Peck doing his best to channel Gable, and Rome a natural as itself, you have to be pretty cranky to resist. Released in the year of my birth.

These precious days

Radio Days

(1987)

A really odd film, pointedly limited in its appeal but dedicated to the titular era, and blessedly so. It's never going to be anyone's favorite Woody Allen film, but the participation of some of his repertory company in minor roles--a small part for Mia Farrow, tiny ones for Jeff Daniels, Tony Roberts, and (vocalist for one Cole Porter song) Diane Keaton--suggests how much more heart mattered than head.

And (and  tall cotton, this): maybe the best soundtrack of any Allen film.

Occupate Via Appia

Spartacus

(1960)

Let's play What Does This Film Have in Common with the Last Film I Watched? Hell, I don't know--something about keeping a private world intact while the public world is going to hell? For me, this is about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo finally getting a screen credit and depicting men not naming names--or, rather, claiming rather than naming names. The scene that everyone remembers is less than a minute long, but if it doesn't move you, you're immovable.