Washed Away

The first time I ever heard of Satyajit Ray was in 1992, when he was given the Lifetime Achievement Oscar (shortly before his death, as it turned out). All I remember from that part of the Oscars is the clip reel of Ray's films, and that they all looked so very strange to me. The name stuck in my head, anyway, firmly enough that when I purchased Salman Rushdie's essay collection Imaginary Homelands some time later, I skipped down the contents page to read his piece on Satyajit Ray. The Rushdie piece is really a review of Andrew Robinson's book Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, but like many a book critic before him, Rushdie uses the book in question as an excuse to talk about that book's subject (I remember a review of a biography of Ogden Nash that included one sentence about the book under review, and everything else was about how much the reviewer knew about Ogden Nash). And in fairness, Rushdie is very interesting on the topic, or was to a total Ray novice such as myself. In the essay, Rushdie makes a big deal about Ray's fantasy films, such as The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, and the relative dismissal, on a global-cinema scale, of those films as compared to the naturalistic work, like Pather Panchali, that made Ray famous in international film circles.

All of this I found very interesting, and Rushdie's praise of the fantasy films that have been forgotten about outside of Ray's homeland really strengthened my desire to check out these movies. But of course part of the whole deal about Satyajit Ray is that his films are strangely unavailable, at least on video, in the US. What releases there have been have been sporadic and inconsistent, so it's long been believed that It Was About Damn Time somebody got on the ball here. And so they have, at least tentatively, with the Criterion release of Ray's The Music Room from 1958.

The Music Room takes as its theme a very popular one among serious artists, both foreign and domestic, and that is the passing of one type of society into another, modern world, about which the artist is thoroughly ambivalent (in America, we might have something about "Why aren't there any cowboys anymore?"). However, it is simply the way of the world that some societies will seem more exotic to Western eyes than others, and India is quite exotic for most of us. As Claude Sautet points out in one of the extras on the Criterion disc, one of Ray's great accomplishments in The Music Room is the way he first exposes the viewer to, and then eases them into, this exotic world. The India of The Music Room looks like a blasted land, with dry earth stretching out around the palatial home of our protagonist Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas) -- this is a surreal image, reminiscent of something from J. G. Ballard, but before Ballard got there himself.

In fact, The Music Room repeatedly, but subtly, tips off Ray's interest in the fantastic. The story is basic, as most stories of this kind are -- a man once rich and powerful, when the world ran in a certain way, now finds those riches and that power draining away as the world begins to run in a different way. But Ray brings shadows and eerily dimming lights, spiders crawling on paintings or drowning in alcohol, in other words strange, near-fantastic imagery, into his depiction of this dissolution. Meanwhile, much is made in the film of the land Roy used to have and what has happened to it. We're told it has been destroyed by the rising waters, but where is the water? Even a wrecked boat, which figures into the film in numerous ways but is only seen once, is, when it finally appears, stuck on dry land. Forget modernity -- water has destroyed Roy's life, and then it disappeared. What little water we see appears calm, harmless, remote.

But that's not all, of course. In The Music Room, Ray manages to do a lot of things while keeping the film surprisingly lean, and among the things he does is showcase Indian music, as Roy's greatest indulgence is holding parties in the titular room, where his rich friends get drunk and musicians and dancers perform. In an interview included on the DVD, Ray says that part of the inspiration for the film was to see if music and dancing could have a place in Indian cinema, which leads me to believe I know even less about Indian cinema than I thought. In any case, The Music Room strikes me, in its focus on realism through the occasional prism of very low-key fantasy imagery, and in the depths of my ignorance, as a perfect starting point for those new to Ray, and a perfect title to begin the flood of Ray films released to video. Which is just my way of saying "More, please."

Writers as Actors

Actors, it would seem, very often want to be doing something else with their lives. The old joke is "What I really want to do is direct", but often what they want to also do is write, and they don't necessarily want to write screenplays. The actor-as-writer is not really a recent phenomenon -- Shakespeare was an actor, after all -- and even the idea of a movie star writing novels stretches back several decades. Robert Shaw was a respected novelist and playwright, as was Peter Ustinov. Both were prolific enough as writers, in fact, that they could reasonably be said to be both things equally.
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But being both things at once -- the modern version of being a true Renaissance Man -- is kind of a dying art (Stephen Fry, with, I think, five ten books under his belt, is the only guy I can think of who can be said to fit in the Ustinov and Shaw mold) and nowadays we have a lot of actors who dabble in writing. The most prominent of these would probably have to be Ethan Hawke, who has written two novels that apparently nobody likes (I haven't read either, and never will). Other than that, you have Hugh Laurie, whose one novel, The Gun Seller, I have read (and it was darn good, too, until the American Military showed up to play the role of "cartoonishly evil bad guys"), or Michael Palin (one novel also, called Hemingway's Chair, which I plan on reading soon), or fellow Python Eric Idle (two novels, actually, one hard-to-find novel from the 70s called Hello, Sailor, and another, Douglas Adams-esque, except supposedly far less good, SF comedy called The Road to Mars), or David Thewlis (one novel, called The Late Hector Kipling). One day, I'd like to gather up a bunch of these novels, the ones I haven't read (well, except for Hawke's), and plunge in. Maybe write them up as a kind of series. That might be interesting.

But anyway, what about the reverse? What about when writers choose to be actors? It doesn't happen often, because writers tend to be content, if that's really the word I want, with being writers. Still, it does happen, and the results are often surprising, or interesting, or maybe bad and weird. It depends.

First off, I'm going to cheat, because look below:

That still is from Alexander Mackendrick's A High Wind in Jamaica, and the blonde-headed lad is Martin Amis, world-famous and highly-respected as the author of Time's Arrow, Money, London Fields and many others. Obviously, when Amis did this film, he wasn't in the position of moving from the role of novelist to actor, but I've been a fan of Amis for quite a long time, and when I first heard that, as a boy, Amis appeared as an actor in this film, I became extremely interested. I didn't see the film until a year or so ago, after I'd read the source novel by Richard Hughes. The novel is a chilling masterpiece, and the film is, well, not. And Amis, as I remember, has almost nothing to say in the film, even though in the novel his character was pretty chatty. The film is a wash, really, and even if you're a fan of Amis, the novelty of the idea of seeing him in a film isn't actually heightened by actually seeing the film.

Above we have an image from Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. To the right of Klaus Kinski is Roland Topor as Renfield. Topor isn't exactly a household name, but he was, among other things, a Kafka-esque, surrealist writer whose most famous novel, The Tenant, was adapted by Roman Polanski as The Roman Polanski Story (better known as The Tenant). Herzog says he cast Topor because of his laugh, but unfortunately all of Topor's dialogue had to be re-dubbed by another actor (the reasons for this escape me) so you don't even get to hear it. And as much as I love Herzog's film, Topor has always seemed like the weak link to me (well, Topor and whoever dubbed his voice), because he plays Renfield as a scampering cartoon loony, with none of the insectile creepiness that Kinski brings to his role. It always felt like a bad match, to me.

The way I remember hearing it, John Boorman agreed to cast James Dickey in the role of Sheriff Bullard in the film version of Dickey's Deliverance pretty much just to get Dickey off his back. Dickey was notoriously difficult to work with, or drink with, or sit in the same room with, or be a family member of, and it was no less difficult for the cast and crew to have him wandering around, insulting people, lying to them, and then slapping them on the back later as though they were old pals. But Boorman -- and anyone who cares to can correct me if I'm wrong in the comments -- achieved some sort of peace by casting Dickey as the sheriff who, in the last section of the film, suspects that our heroes are hiding something from him. And as it happens, Dickey is terrific in the role, the one roaring success of this kind of writer-to-actor leap I can think of. He brings a great authenticity and sharpness to a small role, and his performance is one of the most memorable in the whole film.

And then Salman Rushdie played himself in Bridget Jones' Diary. I don't remember anything about the film, or even what Rushdie did or said in his small amount of screen time, but I do remember thinking, "Well. That's kind of odd, isn't it?"

So who am I forgetting? Any other writers who made a brief foray into film acting that deserve a mention here? Let me know.

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Update:

Where do I begin? In the comments section, many, many, many other examples of writers-as-actors have been pointed out to me, many I simply didn't think of, others I had no idea about. And now I feel mighty embarrassed, but oh well. I asked, didn't I? So, from the likes of Marilyn (who's probably mad at me), Mariana, Greg F., Pat, ND, here's some more...

Sam Shepard in a whole shitload of movies, most notably The Right Stuff and Days of Heaven

Norman Mailer in Ragtime, as well as some of his own films

Marshal McLuhan in Annie Hall

Robert Benchley in a whole lot of stuff

While I'm at it, Peter Benchley in Jaws

Paul Auster in The Music of Chance (that one was mine!!)

Stephen King in Creepshow, Sleepwalkers, Knightriders, Creepshow 2, and etc.

Truman Capote in Murder by Death

William S. Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy

Colin McCabe in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

Jerzy Kosinsky in Reds

George Plimpton in Reds, Good Will Hunting, and etc.

Antonin Artaud in The Passion of Joan of Arc

And, it just occurred to me, Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag are both in Zelig.