Schraderfest 2011: Taxi Driver at the IU Cinema

Many moons ago, when Roger Ebert's review of Taxi Driver first came to my impressionable attention (in one of his earliest anthologies, possibly the 1984 or 1985 edition), little did I imagine that one day I'd have the opportunity to speak in person with one of that movie's key creators. Two nights ago, I had the honor of leading a Question-and-Answer session with Paul Schrader following a screening of the newly restored 35th-anniversary Taxi Driver that's been making the rounds, from Berlin to New York to Bloomington, IN. I'm not employed at the IU Cinema (I work nearby), but Jon Vickers, the Cinema's intrepid director, kindly offered me the opportunity to introduce Schrader before the film and do the Q&A after. It was an exhilarating experience that's left my brain abuzz. Here, in an attempt at reflection, were some of the highlights:

1. During a reception before the introduction before the movie before the Q&A, I told Schrader that my research for possible questions to ask him led me to conclude that there probably are no questions about this movie that he's never answered. He laughed and said, "That's okay. I often make up a question in my head and answer that one instead."

2. Paul Schrader is relatively short (though not as short as Scorsese) and stocky, highly verbose and articulate. From interviews I'd seen on YouTube, I was under the impression that he was a mellow, low-key guy. That's sort of true, if one goes in preconceptions about the man who created Travis Bickle. In an academic way, though, he has major backbone, bridles at questions he doesn't like and likes to argue. I can imagine that experiences with cultural lightning-rods like Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ would tend to rid one of fear, if one had any to begin with.

3. I wrote my own introduction of Schrader, calling him "a unique and significant voice in American cinema for more than 40 years." I meant that, too. How many people have contributed important work in film criticism, screenwriting, and directing? I also gently kidded him about having to choose between becoming a Calvinist minister and becoming a film critic, with his mentor Pauline Kael steering him in the direction you can guess.

4. I was nervous about introducing him (especially when the podium, which was on wheels, suddenly lurched forward when I started talking), and deeply relieved that he seemed moved by what I said. He came up to the stage with his head bowed, shook my hand, held it for a second, then spoke for a couple of minutes about how the idea for Taxi Driver came into being. Veteran movie fans have probably heard parts of that story before: Schrader lost his wife, lost his job, checked into the hospital with a bleeding ulcer, was lonely, depressed, and squatting at his ex-girlfriend's apartment in Los Angeles when a vision of the homicidal New York cabbie first appeared to him. I suspect, though, that for much of the sell-out audience (which leaned toward a younger demographic than other movies I've attended there), they had never heard the background of the story before, and that may have helped their understanding of the movie.

5. The restoration looks great, by the way. My first encounter with Taxi Driver was on shitty VHS tape shortly after reading Ebert's review. (I was only a toddler in 1976, when it was originally released.) More recently, I saw an edited-for-TV version on AMC and a decent 25th or 30th anniversary DVD. Needless to say, none of these experiences compare to finally seeing in on the big screen. The damn thing envelopes you.

6. Paul Schrader went to dinner during the showing and came back for the Q&A. Amazingly, he hasn't viewed Taxi Driver in its entirety in 35 years; neither has Scorsese. But he knows the movie by heart and was up to speed on all the issues involved in the new restoration, though not involved in them directly.

7. Surprisingly, I didn't feel nervous at all onstage during the Q&A. The only glitch was that my microphone had been attached to the left lapel of my sport jacket while I was facing Schrader on my right. During our preliminary remarks, my voice faded in and out with every turn of my head, like Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain. Quickly I switched the mike to my right lapel; things went smoothly after that.

8. For my first question (which I had struggled with all week), I quoted Jonathan Rosenbaum's review that Taxi Driver was "the work of four auteurs: Schrader, Scorsese, De Niro, and Bernard Herrmann," and asked Paul to talk about how they each came to collaborate on the film. "I don't care much for Jonathan Rosenbaum," he growled amusingly, which got the first of many laughs from the audience. "We're off to a good start, then," I replied.

9. Schrader spent more time than I expected talking about Herrmann. Perhaps he'd talked about Scorsese and De Niro so often that he was happy to talk about something else; it's also significant that the last two movies that Herrmann scored (Taxi Driver and Brian De Palma's Obsession) were both scripted by Schrader. Later on, I mentioned that Herrmann's score was the only thing Pauline Kael didn't like about the movie. "She was wrong about that," he said.

10. When the discussion turned to De Niro, I asked Schrader if he felt that the actor's presence "subtly altered the concept of the character" from a fish-out-of-water Midwesterner shocked by what he sees to a born and bred New Yorker who's been living with "filth and scum" all his life and finally snaps. I don't recall his answer (beyond "Bob tried to do a Midwestern accent"), but it seemed like he'd never been asked before. That may have been my best question.

11. My worst question was a long-winded comparison between Taxi Driver and Nashville -- the latter of which, we immediately learned, is a film for which Schrader has nothing but contempt. "Why would somebody who hates country music want to make a movie about country music?" he asked. Actually, I wasn't implying that the films were similar in form or content; I was trying a different tack to bring in the John Hinckley, Jr./Jodie Foster/President Reagan issue that he's had to endure a million times, and that Taxi Driver -- like Nashville only three months earlier, when John Lennon was killed -- had been accused in some quarters of influencing the assassin. I could have asked the question more succinctly, though.

(11a. This is pure conjecture, but I wonder if Schrader's aborted 70s-era project on Hank Williams, Jr. - whom he has hilariously called a "Travis Bickle who can sing" -- colors his opinion of Altman and Nashville?)

12. That said, Schrader did come around to addressing the topic. He recounted the story (which he's told before) that when he heard on the radio that Reagan had been shot, his first thought was, "It was one of those Taxi Driver kids." He also admitted again that he'd initially told the FBI that he'd never heard from Hinckley, when actually he'd been bombarded with requests for Foster's contact info.

13. Questions from the audience were far-ranging and excellent. I'd held off on the race issue in the movie and was glad that a perceptive student broached the subject. For time's sake, I also hadn't asked a question I'd written about Taxi Driver's relationship to film noir, and Schrader seemed happy to answer that one from the audience too. (In sum, he believes there isn't one.) It was also an endearing moment when another student raised his hand to tell Schrader how much he liked the scene in the porno theater when Travis, spurned by the black cashier (played by De Niro's at-the-time real-life special-lady-friend Diahnne Abbott), "asks for Chuckles." I know what he means; I like the Chuckles scene too.

14. Paul Schrader is more technologically-savvy than one might expect. He's a connoisseur of social media, loves i-Phone, and eagerly downloads movies (like his own Rolling Thunder) from BitTorrent. My question about whether he'd be willing to shoot a movie on digital prompted an unqualified "Absolutely."

15. Schrader is also grim about contemporary cinema and what it bodes for the medium's future. "How many good movies came out of Hollywood this year?" he asked. (Answering his own question, he named one: The Social Network.) "There was time when a good movie came out every week." While I'm getting tired of apocalyptic pronouncements (everything is always dying, in a sense), it's hard to dispute his point. Especially when he supported it by dryly referring to a trio of projects he's currently working on not by their titles but rather "Mexican money, Indian money, and Colombian money." What Schrader meant was that Hollywood no longer finances the kind of movies he's interested in making; he (and other filmmakers) have to find other sources of revenue.

16. Funniest Q&A moment: Schrader describing Pauline Kael's reaction the first time she read his script (which we had discussed earlier at the reception). So disturbed was Kael by what she had read that she tossed the screenplay into her closet, threw clothes over it and shut the door. Runner-up funniest moment: At the end of the Q&A, a cute perky blonde girl in the back excitedly raised her hand for the final question, prompting Schrader to address her as "Reese Witherspoon!"

(16a. Actually, he called her "Renee Witherspoon." He'd knocked back a few that evening.)

17. My favorite moment may have been the revelation about how much Schrader dreaded Scorsese's casting of himself (filling in for another actor who had dropped out) as the jealous husband in that crucial scene where the seed is planted in Travis's head that he should take up a colleague's offer to buy a gun. "I know that I'd hate seeing myself act onscreen," Schrader said, adding that he told Scorsese that he would hate his own performance and would want to cut the scene. Turns out, "He loved himself!"

Thus concluded my experience with Paul Schrader. It's a thrill to be able to talk with someone whose work you have genuinely admired over the years.

The Chameleon Kid (Rango)

Why, you ask, would a self-promoted animation agnostic opt to see Rango? Needing a light-hearted and colorful palette-cleanser between Netflix viewings of Taxi Driver and The Warriors compels a man to resort to desperate measures, though in truth Gore Verbinski's foray into Pixar territory has more in common with that kind of adult fare than one might expect. An oddball Polanski-Leone mashup, Rango chronicles a journey of self-actualization for a day-dreaming lizard protagonist (voiced by Johnny Depp, but you already knew that) who becomes the sheriff of a Western town occupied by assorted creepy-crawlies in the midst of a deadly drought. It's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly meets Chinatown, with a menagerie of desert critters (possums, bats, armadillos) less engagingly repulsive than the likes of Tuco or Noah Cross, yet generally amusing enough to hold your attention.

Or, at least, the attention-span of adults. Rango is a good illustration of how disaster-proof Hollywood fare has become: the last time an alleged kiddie movie ended up being so kid-unfriendly, it went by the name of Babe: Pig in the City and was a megaton bomb. Movie marketing is too savvy to allow that sort of thing to happen anymore. Rango's been hyped as a "Johnny Depp movie" (to the point where reviewers are giving the impression that he's actually in the film), with trailers suggesting quite the bouncy entertainment. The bounce is there, all right, but it just barely propels the narrative over a surprising amount of visual grotesqueries (talking road-kill) and out-of-place scatological humor (a mammogram joke in an animated movie is, I think, a first). A disgusted mother taking her young son out of the theater afterward said, "Thank God we didn't pay full price for that!" Still, they'd been enticed enough to come.

The second-half of the movie was more involving than the first -- maybe because its free-associative spirit settles into something more substantial, or maybe because I finally moved a few rows down from the teenage couple necking in the disabled section directly behind me. (From the looks of it, they were fully mobile.) Rango doesn't have the dizzying highs of Babe: Pig in the City; Verbinski's not a crackpot visionary like George Miller. At his best, he's an able showman with a flair for viual slapstick: the action set-piece halfway into the picture echoes Apocalypse Now (with a banjo cover of Ride of the Valkyries), the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the climactic pursuit from Miller's The Road Warrior. Verbinski also brings in a dash of emotional heft when Rango encounters The Spirit of the West, a.k.a. Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name (well-voiced by Timothy Olyphant). The scene is a standard movie trope -- the hero's encounter with a sage during a point of crisis -- yet The Spirit's suggestion that we are what we do is fairly profound. So is his alluring description of heaven, which apparently has something to do with Kim Novak and Pop-Tarts.

Rango occupies a welcome middle-ground between Pixar's manic blandness and David Lynch's strenuous eccentricity. If you're going to reference pop-culture, the references in Rango are just unexpected enough to work. (The only missed opportunity was a Polanski-voiced cameo for a knife-wielding midget: "You're a nosy fella, ain't ya?" could have been easily included without breaking the mood.) All the same, I am growing weary of movies that flatter our knowledge of other movies; it's moved to the opposite extreme of American cinema from a generation ago, where film characters usually spoke about films they'd seen in vague generalities. ("I liked that character." "Well, I liked the other character"....) I'm not asking for a return to hermetically-sealed cinema. An original idea or two, though, might be a nice change of pace.

Write It Again, Sam (Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart)

A few notes on Stefan Kanfer's Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart (2011):

1. I've no reason to doubt Kanfer's assertion that Bogie's straight-shooter persona cloaked bottomless contradictions. Yet his biography made me wish -- just once, for the sake of variety -- to read about an individual whose complex facade disguises a deep, profound simplicity.

2. Kanfer is a good writer with a prose style so clean it's practically ironed. If that's not exactly compelling or sexy, it's enough of a rarity to keep you turning the page.

3. Tough Without a Gun raises an intriguing question: How has Humphrey Bogart, an actor very much of his time, managed to stay relevant for more than fifty years after his death? The book's mistake is delaying the answer until the final thirty pages, rather than giving the "Afterlife" portion of the title more weight.

4. Without that, Tough Without a Gun becomes a by-the-numbers biography, rehashing colorful anecdotes that have been written and told before. Kanfer peaks early, pointing out that contemporary actors, while "well-trained, skilled in their craft, buff, (and) manipulated by powerhouse publicists," are devoid of distinctive personalities. "Impersonators don't 'do' Tobey Maguire or Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio or Christian Bale et al. because these actors don't have imitable voices or faces," he notes, whereas 'Golden Age' actors "like Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart" were fodder for comedians and impressionists.

5. The above statement isn't entirely true. For years, director Tom DeCillo was dogged by the accusation that James LeGros's performance in DeCillo's 1995 comedy Living in Oblivion was a devastating parody of Brad Pitt (with whom the director had previously worked). (Recently, DeCillo revealed that LeGros was mimicking Patrick Swayze.) And both Bale's husky-voiced Batman and his notorious on-set tirade were prominently spoofed across the late-night airwaves. But, yes, any stand-up comic doing impressions of Leo DiCaprio or Josh Hartnett or Channing Tatum won't get very far.

6. I've always heard the comparison that Humphrey Bogart, who specialized in low-lifes, was actually an Ivy League sophisticate; whereas Cary Grant, who played blue-bloods, was the son of a coal-miner. Bogart's case, at least, is a little more complicated: His family had money, but his father (a physician and graduate of Columbia University and Yale medical school) would lose much of it over time in unsound investments. His parents' marriage was also falling apart. Unsurprisingly, Bogart was a troublemaker, involved in gangs, disinterested in school, sports and everything else other than the vaudeville stage, silent-movie houses, and playing chess. Enlisting in the Navy during World War I, while offering an opportunity to see the world, did not instill discipline: he was tossed in the brig for drunkenness and insubordination many times.

7. After the war, Bogart tried various behind-the-scenes jobs in show business before making his stage debut in the 1922 melodrama Swifty. Bogart's portrayal of a "young sprig of the aristocracy" typecast him into playing rich twits for years to come.

8. His (first) big break came in 1935, when theater director Arthur Hopkins cast him as the gangster Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood's play The Petrified Forest. The distinguished stage and screen veteran Leslie Howard had the lead role, but Bogart stole the show. His entrance drew "audible gasps (from the audience), in part because he was so dark and menacing, in part because John Dillinger...had recently escaped from jail. Thanks to Bogart's diction, gait, attitude, and prison pallor, Kanfer writes, "the real-life gangster seemed...to have materialized onstage." Both Bogie and the play won rave reviews.

9. This didn't stop Warner Brothers from casting Edward G. Robinson as Duke Mantee in the movie adaptation, along with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. Bogart, who had appeared in random screen parts before with no distinction (such as 1931's The Bad Sister, also featuring Davis), was devastated. Fortunately for him, Robinson was pressing for equal billing with Howard and Davis, and the ever-magnanimous Jack Warner, eager to put Edward G. in his place, replaced him with the less-expensive Bogie. "In the film version, Humphrey conveyed the same weary authority that had been so effective on Broadway," Kanfer states. "But the close-ups gave him something more...His unshaven face was a map of distress." Bogart was thirty-seven years old.

10. One of the book's strongest sections is a brief yet revealing description of the old studio system: "MGM specialized in elegance and high production values, as in Gone with the Wind...Paramount concentrated on sophisticated comedies, RKO on the sparkling Astaire-Rogers musicals...Columbia showcased Frank Capra's directorial touch, and Twentieth Century Fox made a mint with Shirley Temple vehicles." Warners, on the other hand, portrayed the sordid underbelly of American society: Scarface, with Paul Muni; The Public Enemy with James Cagney; and Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson among the most prominent examples. Kanfer makes a good case that the brothers' hardscrabble roots (from the Polish ghetto) had much to do with their creative output and nothing to do with how they treated their employees. "Actors chafed under restrictive, long-term contracts; writers, in Jack's view, were 'schmucks with Underwoods" (i.e., typists). This is the environment Bogart entered following the success of The Petrified Forest.

11. The weakest sections in Tough Without a Gun deal with Bogart's personal life -- his three failed marriages and, finally, his fourth, successful one with Lauren Bacall. We should count ourselves lucky that we were spared the drooling, gossipy Peter Biskind writing about the 44-year-old actor's love affair with a 19-year-old actress. Kanfer's heart isn't really in it, and that's part of the problem. All the romantic interludes throughout the book reek of creative compromise -- of editorial insistence that the author include something "for the lay-dees." Ditto the weird anecdote about Bacall's crush on Adlai Stevenson, and the vague allusion to her possible affair with Frank Sinatra either shortly before or shortly after Bogie's death...too depressing to be coy.

12. Kanfer compounds the problem, however, by confusing the role of author with enabler. He's always quick to justify his subject's less-than-glamorous behavior with wives or colleagues (the gist being, Well, you see, what Humphrey really meant to say was....) or file it under either rough childhood or macho bonhomie. (I know I'm supposed to slap my knee and giggle like Kate Hepburn whenever there's an anecdote about Bogie or John Huston or some other hunk-a-man behaving falling-down drunk and cruel to friends or colleagues, but all I envision is a bunch of towel-snapping frat-boy assholes with too much time on their hands.) I've also been reading Simon Callow's superb two-part biography on Orson Welles (part one right before the Bogie bio, part two right after), and Callow shows it's possible to convey a person's failings without denigration. (For example, how Welles's decision to handle post-production by remote-control allowed RKO's hatchet-job on The Magnificent Ambersons.)

13. Anyway, the Golden Age studio system seemed to demand that an actor marry three or four times per lifetime and make three or four movies per year. While the latter would today help get Nicolas Cage out of hock, back then it threatened to stymie Bogart's growth as an actor. It would be another five years and nearly thirty movies (many of them stock bad-guy supporting parts) before his next major step up the latter: Roy Earle in High Sierra (1941). Another gangster part, yes, but one sympathetic enough to rile the Production Code censors. Ida Lupino got top-billing, but Bogart got the accolades and attention.

14. Bogart continued to make a couple of pictures each year, with at least one of them each year a hit. Later in 1941, John Huston, who co-wrote the screenplay for Raoul Walsh's High Sierra, cast Bogie as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and we all know what happened there. Ditto 1942, when an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick's became adapted as Casablanca. Kanfer quotes the appraisal of the play by a low-level underling at Warners (named Stephen Karnot): "Excellent melodrama. Colorful, timely background., tense mood, suspense, psychological and physical conflict, tight plotting, sophisticated hokum. A box office natural, for Bogart, or Cagney, or Raft..."

15. Kanfer does some welcome appraising of his own regarding The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. He challenges Louisa Brooks' opinion that Bogart ruined Sam Spade's climactic exposition scene. "Just the opposite is true. There was no other actor in the Warners studio...who could have so effectively brought off the finale, with its crowded words and thoughts." (Additionally, Bogart thought up the final line, a spin on Shakespeare's The Tempest: We are such stuff/as dreams are made on...") He also argues that Casablanca transcends its standard plot outline through a mix of distinctive elements (compelling subplots, witty dialogue, fresh locale) and happy accidents (Joseph Breen's insistence that a key confrontation scene between Rick and Ilsa end with a dissolve, making it more sexually suggestive, not less). Auteurists may turn up their noses at Casablanca, but for me no auteur has ever made a more perfect film.

16. Through the years, Bogart alternated between forgettable films and huge hits. 1944: Passage to Marseille and To Have and Have Not. 1946: Two Guys from Milwaukee and The Big Sleep. 1948 was a high-watermark year for Bogie: a popular success (Key Largo) and a towering artistic achievement (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with, in my opinion Bogart's greatest, ballsiest performance). Still, what should be the heart of the book -- Humphrey's experience filming 1951's The African Queen, ultimately winning the Best Actor Oscar -- ends up being rather rote. (Hepburn liked manly men, Huston was obsessed with shooting an elephant, blah blah).

17. The waning years of Bogart's life and career are depicted as a sad slog, with one bizarre, lively exception: the homophobic Bogie's admiration for flamboyant screenwriter Truman Capote during the otherwise miserable shoot of 1954's Beat the Devil.

18. That same year, Bogart was miscast in Billy Wilder's Sabrina. He was also evidently ostracized: Wilder, Audrey Hepburn, and William Holden forming a nudgy inner circle. (As an aside, Bogart's fine 1950 film noir In a Lonely Place was overshadowed by Wilder's thematically similar yet far slicker Sunset Boulevard, which, of course, starred Holden). He finished his career with good roles in The Caine Mutiny (also 1954) and The Harder They Fall (his final film, 1956), but even before his health failed him, Bogart was already lamenting the dearth of good roles for an aging actor. It's difficult to imagine where he would have fit in in 60s cinema.

19. Nevertheless, his iconography has endured. It's here that Kanfer's book becomes particularly disappointing, an overlong buildup to what amounts to a laundry list: Godard includes a scene in Breathless where Jean-Paul Belmondo spies a photograph of Bogart; college students admired Bogie's no-bullshit honesty; his name became a verb for refusing to share a marijuana joint. Woody Allen conjured him as a dispenser of romantic wisdom in Play It Again, Sam; Bogart-themed film festivals, bars, and even furniture stores popped up across the country. But, wait: Umberto Eco, Kenneth Tynan, and John Berryman all made references to Bogart or Bogart's movies, so he appealed to high-culture as well!

20. Well, great. And so what? Before concluding with the kind of swoony romanticism he thinks he's taking pains to avoid (the hat in the author photo is also a mistake), Kanfer comes closest with "the larger theme of American masculinity," taking issue with the claim made by others that Bogart stands out due to the emasculation of the American male (via gay rights, women's rights, etc.) "The male ego...that has been fragile for generations," Kanfer notes, an astute observation. But his subsequent claim that Bogart actually stands out due to the infantalization of cinema seems self-contradictory: Okay, there may never be another Bogart onscreen; but that doesn't explain the innumerable attempts to emulate his style. (Asserting that "the Bogart style" may now be found offscreen "in the principled action of individuals uncomfortable with compromise and conformity" is even more overreaching.)

21. Tough Without a Gun ends by claiming "sociologists and historians" frequently cite "Humphrey's rough-hewn persona and barroom misbehavior as early signs of the disintegration to follow." (Really? Who?) Kanfer counters this by pointing out Bogart's nobler aspects: "He helped Fatty Arbuckle and Peter Lorre when they were in extreme need, defiantly hired people on the studio blacklist, aided Joan Bennett and Gene Tierney when they were in distress, and quietly donated to a long list of charities. He was courteous to women and straightforward to men, and when he made a promise he kept it." He also liked puppy dogs, apple pie, and long walks on the beach, though Kanfer doesn't mention that.

22. More persuasive, to me, is a near-throwaway passage halfway through the book, recounting that during the making of 1997's L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson screened the period-relevant In a Lonely Place for Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. "'I wanted them to see the reality of that period and to see that emotion,'" Hanson is quoted. "'When I first saw In a Lonely Place as a teenager, it frightened me and yet attracted me with an almost hypnotic power.'" However deeply Humphrey Bogart may have entered the cultural fabric, the lexicon, or the finer virtues of Man, it's the work onscreen that is the reason for why he has endured.

Unmanned (James Ellroy's The Hilliker Curse)

Leave it to James Ellroy to challenge the centuries-proven axiom that writers don't score with chicks. His new memoir, The Hilliker Curse (2010), is nutso even by the "Demon Dog"'s fairly liberal standards: subtitled My Pursuit of Women, it's Ellroy's return to his self-admitted "Dead Mother Act," and strong evidence that after more than fifty years the well has finally run dry. "The Curse," as he calls it, emanated from the time he wished his mother, Jean Hilliker, dead when he was nine years old (his parents had recently divorced), an entirely blameless act that has understandably influenced not only Ellroy's fiction but his real-life relationships with women. The Hilliker Curse makes the fatal error of assuming that the latter is as fascinating as the former.

Authenticity is always hard to tell with Ellroy, who vacillates between his private and public personas so smoothly it's possible that by now not even he knows the difference. There are times when The Hilliker Curse reads like an attempt to come clean about some less-than-wholesome thoughts and actions (e.g., his previous life as a peeping-tom, his pill-popping, his panic attacks), and other times when the author's braggadocio obnoxiously traces his pickup artistry. Much of the latter transpires at book readings, Ellroy's amusing go-to seduction method. (A typical passage: "I was boffo. I read from pitch-perfect memory and laid down even eye contact. I had a pulpit and an eons-deep Protestant bloodline. I was the predatory preacher prowling for prey. The woman was my pivot point.") The author's famous prose style works like gangbusters in his fiction; as autobiography, it's laughable.

Over a thankfully brisk 200 pages, Ellroy quickly introduces and abruptly jettisons one lover after another. The standout, Wife No. 2 Helen Knode, is a fellow crime writer who offers a perceptive take on her husband's The Cold Six Thousand: "She said it was jittery and frayed and approximated my spiritual state." For the book's sequel, she "urged me to create a less rigorous style and shape it with greater emotion." Ellroy ultimately leaves Helen but takes her advice, as we meet, in succession, the Joan and Karen who influenced identically-named characters in Blood's A Rover. Finally, we're left with Erika, a married-with-two-children woman who ends up divorcing her husband for Ellroy. "The bulk of Erika's many friends have censured her," he writes. "You left that sweet man for him?"

One can greatly admire an author's collective work, defend it as being most definitely not misogynistic (or any other charge leveled against it), and appreciate the factual catalysts for fictional characters and themes while still finding his latest foray a pointless waste of time. Similarly, one can be happy for the man while still feeling skeptical that a self-proclaimed opportunist has, at 60+ years of age, learned his lessons and won't repeat his mistakes. "For a right-wing religious nut, you've always seemed to lack faith," one of his Special Lady Friends observes. Ellroy attempts to counter this near the end of The Hilliker Curse, recounting a time when, as a young man, he was wandering aimlessly in a snowstorm, coughing up blood, only to find sanctuary in an office building with an unlocked doorknob beckoning him with an ethereal glow. "God left that door open for me," he writes. "I have no doubt about that." Perhaps. But even his most devoted readership may be left wondering why a writer as monumental as James Ellroy would want to become the next Mitch Albom.

Spurs, Freaks, and Guns: From Lit Noir to Film Noir

This essay is for the For the Love of Film (Noir) Film Preservation Blogathon, hosted by Marilyn Ferdinand and the Self-Styled Siren. The blogathon calls on donations (from readers, like you) to help preserve and restore classic films -- this year's bounty going to the Film Noir Foundation. To make a contribution, please follow the link. (Should work this time!)

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"You're not a person, you're more like a vibe." So says Amelie Heinle to Peter Fonda in The Limey, Steven Soderbergh's 1999 neo-noir, never a more dead-on description of an intangible persona. Born in 1940, Fonda went almost sixty years of his eventful life successfully eluding definition. Arriving in American cinemas only a year later, film noir as we know it has evaded capture even longer. None of the earliest noir filmmakers knew that their films would one day be identified with a major cinematic movement. Still today, more than a few movies in the canon have fallen under scrutiny, with numerous persons, factions and schisms arguing in favor of some films and vehemently against others. (Are Hitchcock's suspense thrillers noir? Anthony Mann's westerns?

On the Waterfront?

The Manchurian Candidate?) Because noir is devoid of sacred cows (or should be), it's fitting that neither it would be above reproach. This healthy, if confusing, lack of complete respect targets even some widely-hailed films from the "golden age" of noir -- never mind the neo.

By now, Paul Schrader's Notes on Film Noir (1971) is quite an old-hat, go-to resource, yet the reason for its durability and appeal is because the author arguably comes closer than anyone since the late-1940s French critics to accurately defining the topic. Yes, Schrader cites familiar tropes (antiheroes and femme fatales, sewers and shadows, crime and grime). First and foremost, though, he posits that noir is not a genre, but a style determined by mood and tone. Evolving out of "four catalytic elements" -- postwar disillusionment, postwar realism, German expressionism, and hard-boiled (pulp) fiction -- the classic noir era as Schrader defines it took root during the Second World War and flourished until the deep end of the Cold War. The years 1941-1958 -- from The Maltese Falcon to Touch of Evil -- is considered the general timeframe.

A recent stab at revisionism -- by way of literary noir -- comes from the dauntingly voluminous anthology The Best American Noir of the Century (2010). Thirty-nine stories covering 84 years (1923-2007) selected by co-editors James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, Best American Noir challenges Schrader's claim that true noir is confined to a narrow window of history. In the book's Foreword, Penzler makes some persuasive points against this. (Whereas Ellroy, in his subsequent Introduction, is as always amusingly content to float in the ether: "The short stories in this volume are a groove.") However, in my review, I took issue with Penzler's increasingly convoluted description, which shifts from declaring that noir "is virtually impossible to define, but everyone thinks they know it when they see it," to characterizing the subject in no uncertain terms (emphasis mine):

"Allowing for the differences of the two mediums, I also believe that most film and literary critics are entirely wrong about their definition of noir, a genre which famously -- but erroneously -- has its roots in the American hard-boiled private eye novel. In fact, the two subcategories of the mystery genre, private detective stories and noir fiction, are diametrically opposed, with mutually exclusive philosophical premises."

In American fiction, Penzler argues, the private dick "retains his sense of honor in the face of.... adversity and duplicity," while noir protagonists are always motivated by "greed, lust, jealousy, and alienation (leading) them into a downward spiral as their plans and schemes inevitably go awry." Expanding and pigeonholing his premise at the same time, Penzler claims that film noir confuses the genres by employing the same visual techniques for each. No matter, though: "the discerning viewer will easily recognize the opposing life-views of a moral, even heroic, often romantic detective, and the lost characters in noir who are caught in the inescapable prisons of their own destruction...." In other words: Sorry, Bogie and Mexican Charlton Heston, but since you're both so damned honorable, your movies aren't really noir.

I'm reflexively skeptical of the idea that virtue and vice are automatically confined to mutually exclusive genres (especially when a few of the anthology's own selections contradict it). On the other hand, Penzler does pry noir from the clutches of Hammett and Chandler to broader interpretations of theme, content, and period. Best American Noir not only contemporizes the subject, it chooses a handful of examples that predate Schrader's catalytic elements. Additionally, the collection features an fascinating array of authors who wrote across a wide spectrum of genres, who cross-pollenated their characters and themes from novels to screenplays and back again.

Let's test these conflicting definitions (and intriguing overlap) with a pair of examples from Penzler and Ellroy's tome: each a short story that went on to become an initially dismissed B-movie; each movie regarded now as a significant American film. In my opinion, one of these, while not quite a lit noir, is one of the finest examples of film noir; the other qualifies as a lit noir yet is anything but a film noir.

1. "One of us": How "Spurs" became Freaks.

"Spurs," a sordid 1923 tale by Tod Robbins, and the lead-off hitter in Best American Noir of the Century, focuses for fifteen pages on the ill-advised courtship between a French circus dwarf, named Jacques, and a "tall, blond woman of the amazon type," bareback rider Jeanne Marie. Right away, the author's characterization of his protagonist is vividly in line with our editor's definition of the genre:

"The dwarf had no friends among the other freaks in Copo's Circus. They considered him ill-tempered and egotistical, and he loathed them for their acceptance of things as they were. Imagination was the armor that protected him from the curious glances of a cruel, gaping world, from the stinging lash of ridicule, from the bombardments of banana skins and orange peel. Without it, he must have shriveled up and died."

Imagination, Robbins implies, is how Jacques comes to see himself as an ideal suitor for Jeanne Marie. Riding into the arena on a "gallant charger" -- his large dog, St. Eustache -- the dwarf perceives himself as "a doughty knight of old about to do battle for his lady," a delusion that amuses Jeanne Marie ("bending down, with the smile of an ogress") until she learns that he has inherited considerable wealth and a vast estate. With her riding partner and clandestine lover, "Romeo of the circus" Simon Lafleur, Jeanne Marie conspires to marry Jacques and make off with his money.

A subsequent wedding party shows a bevy of circus performers scarcely more appealing than the principals of the story:

"There can be no genial companionship among great egotists who have drunk too much. Each one of these human oddities thought that he or she was responsible for the crowds that daily gathered at Copo's Circus; so now, heated with the good Burgundy, they were not slow in asserting themselves. Their separate egos rattled angrily together, like so many pebbles in a bag. Here was gunpowder which needed only a spark."

The spark comes when an inebriated Jeanne Marie hoists an angry and humiliated Jacques on her shoulders and gleefully rides him away. Robbins then advances a year later to Jacques's estate. Simon arrives to find a shockingly cowed and terrified Jeanne Marie, his attempt to rescue her ending in impalement at the end of Jacques' sword. The story ends with the dwarf dismounting his steed (St. Eustache, the dog) and climbing atop Jeanne Marie, urging her into the village with a pair of sharp spurs.

Approximately ten years after its publication, another Tod with one "d," last name Browning, took "Spurs" to the screen. At the time, the name Tod Browning was associated with the successful 1925 silent film The Unholy Three featuring Lon Chaney and the instantly iconic 1931 Dracula starring Bela Legosi. Adapting Robbins, however, proved to be more personal than adapting Stoker: as a teenager, Browning had fallen in love with a circus dancer and run off with the troupe, eventually meeting D.W. Griffith and turning to acting and filmmaking. Robbins had written the novel that became Browning's The Unholy Three, so turning to another of his friend's tales-o'-the-sideshow was for the director a natural impulse.

Yet Freaks (as became the movie's title, beating out the too-darkly-romantic Forbidden Love and too-Darwinian Nature's Mistakes) departs radically from the original story's grim worldview. Its central thread -- the efforts of the dwarf Hans (previously Jacques) to woo trapeze-artist Cleopatra (formerly rider Jeanne Marie) -- remains essentially the same; only this time our sympathies are vested firmly with the former, still woefully misguided (and unthinkingly cold to a new character, the kind-hearted dwarf woman Frieda), yet fundamentally decent. The other performers -- Siamese twins and bearded ladies, "living torsos" and "pinheads," sword-swallowers and "bird girls" -- are also depicted with unflinching empathy, and figure much more prominently than they do in "Spurs."

The humanistic, ensemble approach to the material (clearly admired by Robert Altman, who offered an inspired shout-out via contemporary oddball Lyle Lovett in The Player) culminates in the famous wedding banquet scene. Unlike Robbins' take, Browning's version is filled to the brim with "genial companionship," as the titular performers each sip wine from a goblet finally offered to Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) while chanting in unison, "One of us, one of us...." Repulsed by their offer to join the collective, Cleopatra humiliates Hans (Harry Earles) the same way the character does in "Spurs," riding him around the table while her trapeze-partner and paramour Hercules (formerly Simon) eggs her on.

While Cleopatra's drunken demeaning of Hans tips her hand (the latter's feelings conveyed onscreen as more justified than they are on the page), her attempt to poison him serves as the impetus for the film's unforgettable climax. Disposing of the dog, the spurs, and the equal-opportunity ugliness in "Spurs," Freaks ends with a brilliantly subversive set-piece in which our loyalties are allied with the killers instead of the victims. So appalled were preview audiences about the assault of the circus folk on the trapeze artists (and about the film's unflinchingness in general) that the studio chopped the film's running time from ninety minutes to barely over an hour, and tacked on an upbeat coda in which Hans is reunited with his one true love, Frieda (played, incidentally, by Daisy Earles, real-life sister of Harry). Tod Browning's career came to an abrupt end. It's unlikely that his original ending, revealing the fate of Hercules (who can suddenly hit those high notes), would have helped matters.

Needless to say, Freaks, with its influential, groundbreaking mix of melodrama, biopic, and horror, is considered now an essential American film. Yet despite the source material and Otto Penzler's insistence, I would argue that the film is not noir. This is not because the movie was released in 1932 (Fritz Lang's proto-noir, M, came out a year earlier), but rather due to the crucial change in attitude toward the material that occurred between Tod Robbins and Tod Browning. While a few noirish elements remain in place (an attempted crime, a potential femme fatale), Browning opts to emphasize humanity over depravity, regarding the setting as more than just a skeezy sideshow. For dabblers in the demimonde, though, the circus would remain an irresistible attraction.

2. "'Dot any duns?'": Gun Crazy.

Any author with The Best Years of Our Lives and Andersonville to his credit already earns the attribute of versatility; to be also a prominent writer of crime fiction transcends the definition of "range." Before MacKinlay Kantor became linked to a 1946 Oscar-winning postwar drama (adapted from his narrative poem published the year prior, titled Glory for Me) and an epic Civil War novel that earned the 1955 Pulitzer Prize, he was indeed a purveyor (perhaps for too long to be a "dabbler") of gangster novels, police procedurals, and literary noir.

"Gun Crazy," Kantor's oft out-of-print 1940 short story which, like Robbins' "Spurs," appears in Best American Noir of the Century, is deemed by Ellroy and/or Penzler as a classic example of the last. It's a seventeen-page first-person account that begins when the narrator (whose name is Dave) encounters another little boy around the age of five (named Nelson, or Nelly), who immediately fixates on the narrator's collection of firearms. "'Dot any duns?'" Nelly asks Dave: Got any guns? Dave shows off his own favorite, a cap gun:

"Nelson Tare's eyes pushed out a little when he saw it. He made a grab, and belted it on before I had time to protest and tell him that I wanted to play with the cap gun and he could play with the glass pistol or the broken pop rifle. He went swaggering around with the gun on, and it kind of scared me the way he did it -- all of a sudden he'd snatch the revolver out of its holster and aim it at me."

Kantor leaps forward from one episode to the next: Nelly, as an adolescent, goes hunting with Dave and their buddy Clyde and can't bring himself to shoot a jackrabbit; Nelly pulls a gun on a sadistic teacher, commits a robbery, and gets sent to reform school; Nelly, now a young man, returns from military service and hooks up with a carnival sharp-shooter named Antoinette McReady; Nelly and Antoinette hit the road, rob a bank, get captured and sent to separate prisons; Nelly escapes, returns home, and is finally apprehended for good. "When he was taken back into prison, he wore an expression of tragic perplexity," narrator Dave concludes. "It must have been hideous for him to know that he, who had loved guns his whole life long, should at last be betrayed by them."

An outline makes this tale sound rather lurid, but "Gun Crazy" is really a lovely story -- too lovely, I would suggest, to be lit noir. Nearly all the aforementioned action happens off the page as events that Dave reads or hears about. Antoinette, the sharp-shooter, gets no more than a cursory mention and vanishes. Justice is meted out to those who deserve it. Nelly is a volatile, tragic figure, but he's filtered through the perspective of the passive, stable Dave recalling the faraway past. The author creates a safe distance between the reader and Nelly; we feel sympathy for the character, but at no point are we asked to identify with him.

A filmmaker following Kantor to the letter might have made a movie bathed in sad, affectionate nostalgia -- the way Stephen King's "The Body" became Rob Reiner's Stand By Me. (That's not a putdown.) As it happened, B-director Joseph H. Lewis (nicknamed "Wagon Wheel Joe" for his cheapo westerns) and blacklisted "Hollywood Ten" screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (under the alias Millard Kaufman) had other ideas. Gun Crazy, the 1950 movie, inverts Kantor's story: Bart (formerly Nelly) becomes the main character, while Dave is pushed to the sidelines. We meet both during a moralistic prologue where a judge sentences a teenage Bart to reform school after a botched attempt to steal a gun from a shop. Oddly, while the original story renders the sentencing more than justified, here it seems a tad harsh. At the court hearing, his obsession is recounted via flashbacks by family and friends: a young Bart shoots a baby chick with a BB gun and bursts into tears when it dies; instead of threatening to shoot a teacher, Bart is caught showing off the gun to his classmates. When Dave and Clyde testify, they tell (and we see) the story of the hunt, only this time it's a mountain lion instead of a rabbit that Bart is unable to kill.

While the Nelly of the story grows understandably hard-edged following reform school and military service, the Bart of the movie retains a goofy, affable charm (conveyed by the actor John Dall). Yet the most dramatic departure taken by Lewis and Trumbo is to flesh out the carnival sharp-shooter Antoinette McReady, named Annie Laurie Starr in the film (and played by Peggy Cummins). Bart and Laurie's dangerous meet-cute during a shooting contest drives the plot forward. An alternate title to Gun Crazy was Deadly is the Female, and it isn't long before Laurie goads Bart into a life of crime. "I'll try to be good," she tells him early on, but deep-down she knows she's bad. (Very, very baaaaad.) They begin with petty stick-ups, graduate to bank robbery, then pull an ambitious heist of the payroll office of an Armour meatpacking plant. With the law hot on their trail, Bart takes Annie back home, hiding out at his sister's before fleeing together into the woods. Whereas the short story concluded with Nelly's arrest, the movie climaxes with an increasingly desperate Bart and Laurie surrounded by police in a mist-filled marsh. They kiss passionately (being cornered is such a turn-on!), then Bart shoots Laurie just as she threatens to kill Dave and Clyde as they close in. After committing the only murder of his life, of the love of his life, Bart gets shot to death as well.

How did a mournful coming-of-age story transform into a kinky, violent film noir? Paul Schrader would likely emphasize the difference in the prewar and postwar national mood. Kantor's 1940 "Gun Crazy" pines for an earlier, rural America; there's genuine anxiety in the story, a fear of the outside world, which is why we stay close to the sedentary Dave and not the vagabond Nelly. In Lewis's Gun Crazy, the anxiety is brought to the foreground; there's equal parts terror and exhilaration as Bart dashes off with Laurie, and as we become their accomplices. (It's also worth noting that Nelly is a World War I veteran in the short story -- one who never sees action -- and Bart a World War II vet in the film.) By 1950, the studio sets of early noirs like The Maltese Falcon were abandoned increasingly in favor of on-location shooting, and Lewis makes the most of the great outdoors in ingeniously unfussy ways (most famously in the long unbroken shot that puts the audience in the back-seat of Bart and Laurie's getaway car). His direction lacks the expressionistic flair that Carol Reed, Orson Welles, and other directors would bring to film noir. Nevertheless, Gun Crazy remains a prime example of the genre.

Ah, but there you have it: Is noir a genre, as Otto Penzler, the Internet Movie Database, and so many others assert? For the sake of convenience I'm willing to go with it. Yet the fact that I often disagree with about half the titles on any random list -- along with the additional fact that I often can't explain why -- suggests that whatever noir is, it's not unlike that aging hippie villain from The Limey, too intangible to be contained or defined. Of course I could be wrong. But I think Schrader is right: You're not a genre, noir; you're more like a vibe.

Sometimes a Shark is Just a Shark

"For instance, patriarchal power in Jaws clearly is meaningful only inasmuch as it excludes and subordinates woman. She means something which must be external to patriarchy, if it is to mean what it pretends to mean. The idealizing patriarchal meaning deconstructs at those moments when literal material connections back to woman emerge. This is especially clear during the metaphoric quest for the shark, a quintessentially male, public adventure severed entirely from female-dominated life. Yet that quest cannot do without certain literal motifs of sexual power and potency. Brody's literal glance into his pants in search of the missing phallus establishes a metonymic connection which both enables and disables the sexual metaphor of the quest. For the quest doesn't make sense except as a confirmation of manhood, that is, as the ability to perform with women. Woman is always there, in other words, as threatening perhaps as the shark."

--from Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of

Contemporary Hollywood Film, by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner (1988)

Hoo boy. First of all, in the famous scar-sharing scene, Brody does not look into his pants, at least not in the way the authors are suggesting; he pulls up his shirt to reveal an appendectomy scar, then tucks it down because it pales compared to Quint and Hooper's wounds. It's also a bit of a stretch to claim, as Ryan and Kellner do a few pages earlier, that a boy is killed by the shark because an attempted seduction by Brody's wife "distracts him from his duties." Said seduction is nothing more than a tame back rub to assuage Brody's nerves; in any case, he's distracted not by her but by a man who appears in front of him and obstructs his field of vision.

I'll admit that my frontal lobes can get buzzed by this kind of subtextual analysis. Too much film criticism takes the filmmakers' interpretations at face value, when those are often the least reliable (and most monosyllabic) accounts. When an eggheaded approach turns me off (right around, say, page 64), I can always stop reading and return to my Netflix queue. But I'd hate to be a young film studies major forced to scarf down a semester's worth of Camera Politica, the very sort of intellectual cholesterol that killed my enjoyment of literature for years after graduation. (If Jaws is as much a glorification of male machismo as the authors contend, why is the salty war veteran Quint devoured while the pensive Brody and the bookish Hooper survive?) It's great to consider movies worthy of serious scholarship; it should happen more often. But if you're going to be scholarly you should still write clearly. And if you're not going to write clearly, at least get your facts straight.

A Few of My Favorite Things

This film....

And this one....

This one too....

Can't forget this one....

Or this one....

And many more. All of which a few of we starving cinephiles in the Midwest may now see here....

The Indiana University Cinema. Opening night: January 13, 2011.