Fast and Bulbous

It's the blimp, Frank!

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rocketeam:

From my list of most memorable movie scenes: Sara Diaz does a tiny dance to “I can’t give you anything but love” by Rose Murphy to try and cheer “Depresso” (as played by renowned Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo) up in the film The Goodtimes Kid

My first-ever reblog! Love this scene, though.

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Enjoying Fuller: The Irresistibility of Sensation in Underworld U.S.A.

By Christo​fer Pierson on February 23, 2010 back to Underworld U.S.A

To tell you the truth, though I loved Samuel Fuller’s 1953 classic Pickup on South Street, perhaps because the last Fuller I saw was the wildly uneven White Dog (1982), I wasn’t expecting much from Underworld U.S.A. (1961).

I was in the mood to watch something really enjoyable—whatever “enjoyable” means. I recently saw Powell and Pressberger’s ballet classic The Red Shoes (1947) over a Friday and Saturday (such has my movie watching habit become these days with Netflix online), and that was enjoyable, i.e., beautifully photographed, very well scripted, sensual, romantic, moving and engrossing. The next night I watched Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1964); though very well acted, stunningly photographed, constantly surprising and very funny, that was not quite so enjoyable.

The thing about that movie, and about Godard in general, is that he’s difficult. He doesn’t want you to enjoy yourself. He wants you to be kept off-balance and wondering what the frack is going to happen next and why you’re even watching this movie. I’m glad I saw it and I did enjoy certain aspects of it, especially all the aforementioned, but I didn’t relax while I was watching it. So last night I wanted a break. I didn’t want to have a movie fight me and force me to play a role in the watching of it. I wanted something quite the opposite, a movie that took me by force, if necessary, along with it.

Fuller is a character in Pierrot le fou—that is, he plays himself—which is probably what inspired me to pick this film last night. His most famous line from that movie: “Film is like a battleground. There’s love, hate, action, violence, death… in one word: emotion.” That, in one word, is Underworld U.S.A. Cliff Robertson stars as safecracker Tolly Devlin, out to avenge his father’s murder, which he witnessed as a young delinquent, by four hoods who rise to positions of power in an unnamed city’s underworld. As in Pickup, this outsider plays the authorities (like a violin) against the bad guys to get what he wants. Delores Dorn co-stars as a hooker-turned-informant with the adorably weird name Cuddles, whom Tolly rescues from the gang and with whom he soon falls in love. (See? Emotion!)

I was hooked (mostly) from the classically noir opening that alternated shots between drunken New Year’s revelry and a close up of a young delinquent’s eyes. Perhaps still under the influence of Godard, however, I was conscious of the artifice—the this-is-a-movie-ness—of what I was watching, the almost hand-made quality of the early scenes.

The kid who plays young Tolly at 14 (David Kent) does the best he can—but what do you want? He’s a kid in a Sam Fuller movie! You notice his awkwardness in an exposition scene with old pro Beatrice Kay. She has to do a little heavy lifting to carry the scene as the nurturing mother-figure Sandy, a gin-joint proprietress, as she tends to a wound over the kid’s eye and they talk about the past. The scene is interrupted by the spectacular shadow play of the murder that sets the story in motion, but the kid has to react to his father’s murder, so the illusion that the movie is about to rock and roll is popped. You hold your breath and root for a halfway decent cry of shock to emerge from Kent’s inexperienced throat (and you kind of get what you want).

There’s a roughness to this introductory portion of the film that is charming but, well, noticeable. I like roughness and rawness in a movie, especially from that era when Hollywood tried to stamp out idiosyncrasy and condition the public to expect a uniform seamlessness from its product. The French New Wave laughed at and rebelled against this conditioning (which it had little choice but to do, anyway, considering the budgets les auteurs were forced to work with). But as I say, I was not in the mood to be deconditioned last night.

I don’t think Fuller was a director who necessarily wanted to decondition audiences from expecting entertainment in addition to all the incidental significance that naturally poured into his heart-felt films. Famous among his friends for loving a good “yarn,” the tabloid journalist in him, no doubt, understood the irresistibility of sensation that draws a viewer helplessly into a movie.

When Robertson comes into the picture as Tolly grown up and doing time, the obviousness of the artifice dissolves (mostly) and the lurid story’s momentum assuredly breaks down the viewer’s resistance. Robertson exudes a wicked self-confidence and dark humor in his single-minded pursuit of his “job,” as he calls it—offing the four guys who killed his pop. He’s especially good playing against the women in the film. Kay, whose polish as an actress overpowered Kent’s awkwardness in the early scenes, meets her match and then some in Robertson. Sandy is the tether straining to ground the ex-con in social responsibility. Dorn’s Cuddles is less interested in responsibility than pure sex (she likes the way Tolly kisses, she repeats breathlessly), but Tolly views her desires as a distraction from master plan. The viewer, too, is much more interested in finding out how Tolly realizes his plan than in his settling down.

The rest of the film’s performances range from top-notch—particularly Richard Rust as Gus, a suave, occasionally likable but fundamentally cold-blooded (and versatile) hitman—to serviceable. I was a little disappointed, frankly, by veteran character actor Richard Eberhardt as the Big Boss Earl Connors; he didn’t quite reach the pinnacle of menace that I like in my villains. But you don’t watch a B movie for brilliant acting anyway, and when you get brilliant acting from them, as you do in this film, it’s all the more pleasurable.

Key to Fuller’s assault on the viewer’s distance from the movie, the dialogue packs a punch, hard-boiled with no effort. Some film noir scripts can sound like they were written by a Harvard with a slang dictionary. Fuller’s come honestly, stinking of cigar smoke and bourbon, direct from the street.

There’s a lot more one can say about this film, especially about the moral complexities and ambiguous stance toward society that it shares with Pickup. But my purpose was simply to consider its pleasures, and that is best done through viewing it. Underworld USA is available to be viewed for free here.

Filed under film criticism sam fuller

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Blast From My Past: Ron Rosenbaum’s Red Herring (October 2002)

Ron Rosenbaum’s Red Herring

by Burt Worm

Ron Rosenbaum, who writes a column for the New York Observer called “The Edgy Enthusiast,” composed one of the most on-target analyses of the post-modernist de(con)struction of truth perpetrated by James Baker and staff in Florida, a politico-philosophic trope, Rosenbaum suggested, that enabled them to befog the media into accepting the suppression of the vote count during Election Theft 2000 as readily as sleep-deprived college students in the 1990s accepted the cultural equivalence of Startrek and Shakespeare.

“On the surface,” Rosenbaum wrote in “Derrida, Dame Edna, and George W., Postmodernist,” “it might seem that [Bush, Baker, et al.] have been arguing against examining the ballots—the crucial facts in the case—and going so far as to tell the American people (as Justice Scalia did) that we are better off not seeing them ever, in effect saying to us: ‘You can’t handle the truth.’ But in fact, it’s much deeper than that: The Bush team’s argument isn’t ‘You can’t handle the truth’; it really is ‘There’s no such thing as truth.’”

Of course Rosenbaum was being satirical, but his point about the effect of the Bush team’s strategy post-election was dead-on, and those of us who had watched in horror and disbelief as the media passively absorbed and impassively spat back this assault on American democracy in Election 2000 took some comfort in Rosenbaum’s scathing review of the Republicans’ shameless performance, glad to have our disgust over their devaluation of truth and evidence validated by at least one pundit.

To provide aid and comfort to the enemies of Bush was evidently not Rosenbaum’s intention with this piece. I think it must be a badge of honor for him to deny people comfort, which is a perfectly legitimate goal for a satirist to have, as long as provoking discomfort, at the expense of saying something intelligible, doesn’t become an end in itself. His latest column in the October 14 edition of the Observer, a review of the Not in Our Name anti-war demonstration in Central Park’s North Meadow (not Sheep Meadow, as Rosenbaum consistently has it) on October 6, walks that fine line.

It’s not that Rosenbaum has nothing to say in his piece. On the contrary, as with all of Rosenbaum’s columns, words abound. The subject leaps from that October Sunday in the park to Robert Graves to Martin Heidegger to a review of The Road to Perdition in a London newspaper—and various other points besides. And it’s not as though Rosenbaum is completely off base in what he says. He’s on target when he criticizes some of the excesses on display on various demonstrators’ pickets; he singles out for particular ridicule one sign calling Bush the devil. He’s on target when he criticizes the failure of Marxists and fellow travelers to acknowledge the assorted crimes against humanity perpetrated by Marxist regimes. He’s on target when he weighs U.S. “atrocities” against the grossest totalitarian abuses of the 20th Century and finds the scale tips far more heavily to the latter.

            But Rosenbaum is too busy ranting against the redness and complicit guilt of what he calls “the Left” to see that he’s railing against a straw man—“A movement of Marxist fringe groups and people who are unable to make moral distinctions,” he wrote, assessing the scene— that has no relevance to most of what was going on at the demonstration.

What I saw and heard there were people who don’t want the United States to be forced into a war blindly and on its own, assembled to count their numbers, hear underheard voices, and luxuriate in a little hope for a change instead of being cowed by their political leaders into quiescence. People, in other words, who don’t approve of the Bushist way this debate about Iraq is being framed. The New New Lefties who put the demo together were the conduit for this convergence, not because everyone in attendance agreed with everything that everyone on stage said, but because they agreed with the organizers’ theme of the day: that Bush’s unilateral rush to foist an ill-conceived regime change on Iraq will not be carried out in our name. 

            Rosenbaum stages his critique as a Gravesean good-bye to all that hypothetical, hysterical leftism, which he also claims virtually hounded a truth-telling critic like Chris the Snitch Hitchens from the Nation. (I thought Snitch split of his own accord, right after typing his resignation letter in the form of one last column.) “Mr. Hitchens’ loss is a loss not just for the magazine,” writes Rosenbaum, “but for the entire Left; it’s important that America have an intelligent opposition, with a critique not dependent on knee-jerk, neo-Marxist idiocy. And it’s important that potential constituents of that opposition, like Nation readers, be exposed to a brilliant dissenter like Christopher Hitchens.”

            Set aside the implicit notion behind this infuriating paragraph that “the Left” ought to consider itself permanently in opposition and out of power: Okay, Ron, so it’s important for America to have an opposition to the empowered viewpoint, and for the opposition to be exposed to dissent of its own. But how can a viewpoint roughly identical to the empowered viewpoint—which in Hitchens’ case, it more or less is, especially on the issue of war with Iraq—be considered dissent?  Why do we need to be exposed to Hitchens when we could just as easily be exposed to Horowitz or Safire—or Donald Rumsfeld, for that matter?  They’re all just as difficult to swallow. And why should the empowered viewpoint be entitled to a place in an opposition magazine anyway?

            Most troublesome of Rosenbaum’s aims with the essay is his desire to trash the whole anti-war movement because, in his view, it lacks the sense of proportion to see that al Qaeda and other “Islamo-fascists” really are evil and must be stopped, and that whatever the Bushists’ faults, they haven’t the audacity to commandeer hijacked airliners into buildings where thousands of innocent civilians are working. Rosenbaum has somehow come to see that “the Left” doesn’t feel enough moral revulsion over the crime of 9-11, and he cites sympathetically Hitchens’ parting shot to the Nation, that it had become “an echo chamber of those who believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.”

            What Rosenbaum and Hitchens seem too overwhelmed by proportion to understand, however, is that Ashcroft and bin Laden are both menaces, though of admittedly different degrees. Just because Ashcroft is less of a menace than Osama doesn’t mean that Ashcroft’s menace—his incompetent, backwater DA’s style of management at the Department of Justice and the anti-libertarian aims he has for it—should be tolerated and left unresisted. Lord knows Hitchens didn’t think Janet Reno should have been tolerated!

            The movement that began to take shape in Central Park and in several other cities across the nation on October 6 is defined by its justified resistance to Ashcroft and militant Bushism in general, to its unabashed desire to use the tools of state, which are not legitimately theirs to use, to advance a backwards, anti-democratic, pro-corporate agenda. Yes, there were Marxists in attendance at the demonstration. There were occasional calls for revolution from the guest speakers on stage. One group in the mass of attendees affiliated with the Communist Revolutionary Youth Brigade was decked out in camouflage fatigues and T-shirts incongruously emblazoned with silhouetted guerillas holding aloft rifles. And of course there were obvious Old Lefties, New Lefties, Greens, Anarchists, hippies, Ruckus Society types and pagans scattered in groups on the rocks and under the beech trees. But there were also plenty of people like me in the crowd, people who wore no politically identifying marks—no dreadlocks, no studs, no buttons of any kind.

I’m a Democrat. And I’m a democrat. I have no sympathy for Stalinists, no hope or desire for communist revolution worldwide. I believe in democratic means to democratic ends. From this simple, basic ideology comes all my rage over what occurred in Florida in November and December 2000. From this rage comes my outrage over the Bushist regime’s push for war and war powers that it does not have the legitimacy to deserve. I am outraged by Saddam. I am outraged by fundamentalist theocrats and their insane contempt for human life. I have no doubt that Saddam Hussein is an anti-democratic tyrant who has a long overdue date with justice. But not now. Not this way. Not by the will of an illegitimate, possibly theocratic regime of our own. Not in my name.

It’s a profound mistake to think, as Ron Rosenbaum evidently does, that this anti-war movement is more of the same, more of the lame. This is not the weak-willed, wishy-washy “Left” that pulled out of the Big Game at the height of the Vietnam War not wanting to be corrupted by the swamp of politics and letting the Nixonites and then the Reaganites have the ball. Those elements are still present, but they’re being joined by a force of democrats, enraged by the sick and sicker spectacle of American politics in the last 30 years. Our anger is our energy and our focal lens. And we want the ball back.