One-Eyed Jacks (d. Marlon Brando) - I'm not entirely sure when I first saw One-Eyed Jacks, Marlon Brando's singular Western, his one and only film as a director, but I was probably just old enough to appreciate it. The problem has since become that for many, many years it's only official home video release was on VHS. Due to what I have to assume are all sorts of reasons, the rights to the film subsequently fell into the public domain, which means that very few cared about it. But the drive to save, preserve, and restore films of the classic era -- from the silents to I'd have to guess the 60s -- has ramped up in intensity over the last decade or so, and with the help of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, as is the specific case here, the people doing the actual hands-on work have been able to pull many films back from the precipice. Including, I think I hardly need say, Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, which as of yesterday is out on fucking Blu-ray, from fucking Criterion. Forgive me, but I have been waiting a long time for this.
And watching the film for the first time since the VHS era has been, let's say, rewarding, because while I used to think One-Eyed Jacks was that good, it turns out it's actually this good. In plot terms, this is a fairly basic Western revenge story (based on a novel called The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider which itself was inspired by the legend of Billy the Kid, a legend that has no actual bearing on this movie, but anyhow, please ignore me), what ends up happening in One-Eyed Jacks is Brando uses basic genre ideas to, not create, but insist on the power of formulaic myths. That's a compliment. The plot's this: Rio (Brando) and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) are bank robbers. After a job with partner Hank Worden, who lasts a few minutes, they get into a serious bind, and the plan is, Dad takes off with the money to buy some a horse to replace the one Rio lost and come back so the two old friends can flee the law together. But for a variety of reasons, Dad doesn't come back, and Rio goes to prison. Then, with new friend Modesto (Larry Duran), Rio escapes from prison, with the single goal of tracking Dad down and killing him. He finds Dad because a couple of bank-robbers led by Ben Johnson want the help of the legendary Rio, and know that he's been asking around about the target of his revenge.
And so one thing leads to another. It's not too very long into the 140-minute film that Brando and Malden meet up again as hunter and prey, and in a scene where Brando, who lies to Malden about what he's been up to for the last five years, shares a glass of tequila with the man who left him behind, but who might actually buy into Brando's "you and me are okay" spiel, it occurred to me that pure cinema is and was achieved when Marlon Brando and Karl Malden were in a scene, any scene, together. Furthermore, later, Karl Malden, during a suspenseful chunk of that One-Eyed Jacks last third, rides along a ridge above a gorgeous VistaVision crashing waves, and it's as languorously beautiful and slow a moment during a period of rather heightened suspense as I can imagine. In an extra on the Criterion disc, Scorsese says Brando waited for those waves a long time. And it works, don't it? Most importantly, though, Brando, as Rio, plays the film hero as a figure of massive physical menace. I'm not sure Brando is as in love with Rio's drive for revenge -- in the face of other things the film is offering to him, anyway -- as, well, I was, and those doubts, my doubts, set in when I saw how ruthlessly Brando was playing it. He has moments when he's past reason, is on the edge of violence. In every instance, I hated -- and I suspect you do or will, too -- the men he's about to hand back a handful of their own brains. This doesn't mean Brando's Rio isn't unnerving in his heroism. Which should not suggest to you that he's not the hero.
Café Society (d. Woody Allen) - So it's fair to say, I guess, that Woody Allen's career since, arguably Bullets Over Broadway in 1994, has been the most contentious period in his nearly fifty years as a filmmaker (it would be exactly fifty if I was counting What's Up, Tiger Lily?, a film I like but which I can't pretend is the work of a director). Since then, some films, like Sweet and Lowdown and Midnight in Paris, have been widely embraced, while others have had at least the good fortune to be divisive, like Deconstructing Harry and Melinda and Melinda, while many others -- Hollywood Ending, Anything Else, Whatever Works, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion -- are basically despised. I myself, a defender of some of the unbeloved Allen films of this period (I like Scoop and think Cassandra's Dream is pretty danged good), made it only thirty minutes into Whatever Works. But I do think, overall, his films since 1994 have been, on average, better than popular opinion would indicate (though even the positive reactions can get iffy: in my view, relatively appreciated entries like Match Point or Blue Jasmine are marginal. It's possible aesthetic opinions are very personal, who among us can say?). We may never know why this has happened.
In any case, as I've said, I think there's lots to admire in this stretch of films, and in fact last year, Allen's Irrational Man, one of his "murder" films (a clutch of movies that I find among his most intriguing) played for me as a deeply clumsy yet fascinating moral investigation. Most people hated it because, from what I could see, they badly misunderstood it. Still, though: clumsy but fascinating is one thing -- what was Allen's last great film? As it happens, I have the answer: 2016's Café Society is the best thing Allen has not only written, but directed, in I don't even know how long. A 1930s Hollywood-set love-triangle that features Jesse Eisenberg as an initially naive (but not entirely likable, as an early sketch-like scene between him and a prostitute played by Anna Camp, indicates) young man trying to find his way into the movie business through his hugely successful producer uncle (Steve Carrell), Café Society suggests, quite strongly, that Allen, who has, it must be said, long ago abandoned any claim to being well-acquainted with modern society (I do not consider this an unforgivable artistic crime) should focus now on period pieces.
It's also one of his better-plotted films in a long time, as well. The center of the love triangle is Kristen Stewart, Carrell's assistant with whom he is cheating on his wife, and with whom Eisenberg falls in love. There's also a gangster subplot involving another of Eisenberg's uncles (one of the great ancillary pleasures of Café Society is its occasional shifts back to Eisenberg's blue collar and/or gangster Jewish family in New York), which begins as a lark but transforms into something else. While remaining within the boundaries of the PG-13 rating, there are a couple moments of surprisingly blunt violence, which in turn help to turn Café Society into something resembling a mix between Crimes and Misdemeanors and Purple Rose of Cairo. On some level, that latter film is the more interesting link (if I do say so myself) to this new film as it's been a very long time since Allen has been able to connect to the kind of average human life depicted there. Cairo and Radio Days are his masterpieces in this respect, and he's not too far off it in Blue Jasmine, in all fairness. But with Café Society, which is mostly concerned with the high-life of Hollywood, manages to quietly show the tension between these different sorts of lives. Which is largely what Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days are also about, while also being utterly gripping and visually beautiful, entertaining movies. As is Café Society. When you make as many movies as Woody Allen, the argument goes, you're not going to be able to tend to each work as closely as you should. But apparently, sometimes you can manage it.
Phenomena (d. Dario Argento) - Though a long-time Argento skeptic -- I love Suspiria, was bored sideways by Opera, have perhaps not chosen entirely wisely when selecting the other half-dozen-or-so Argentos I've seen -- I nevertheless have been genuinely and sincerely excited to see this one, from 1985, for a very long time. The problem has always been that for many years its availability as a home video item has been dicey, and those VHS and DVD releases it's enjoyed have not, I'd gathered as I kept my eye on things, told the full story of Phenomena. A film whose reputation, at least among fans and critics interested in horror, is that of a film which is utterly sui generis, thoroughly insane, and the work of an individual artist who, for good and ill, is following his vision wherever it may lead him. "Off a cliff" is always in the cards.
And yet, no. Before explaining why not, I should probably say that Phenomena is a horror film about a young teenager (Jennifer Connelly, fifteen at the time, and whose admirable refusal to buckle to certain requests kept the film from being a uncomfortably prurient as you might justifiably have feared from Argento), the daughter of an Italian movie star who winds up in a girls' school in Switzerland. That's actually not the problem though. The problem is that someone is serial murdering the students at this school. Homicide detectives have indeed been summoned, including Inspector Geiger (Patrick Brachau). Geiger is hoping the expertise of local entomologist McGregor (Donald Pleasance), who is studying, via maggots, the forensic evidence made available by the previous beheading murder, will, with the help of his chimpanzee best friend....
Hm. Also, Jennifer Connelly's character (named Jennifer, let's not make anything out of that) loves and is worshiped by insects. And my concern is that certain members of its cult love it because they think it's "so bad it's good." To be sure, it is utterly ridiculous. And I absolutely laughed at things Argento may not have wanted me to laugh at. But it's well made, and in its own way Phenomena is no less a jarring look into the brain of a singular filmmaker than Eraserhead. Besides which, it's so much fun. Phenomena ends many times, but each time I realized that one climax was going to droop and then build into another, I didn't sigh impatiently. Instead I thought "Oh good!" And I was never disappointed. Plus there's a chimpanzee who thinks she's people.
All of this is perhaps slightly illustrative of the tension that has been present in Woody Allen's filmmaking career since the mid-70s, which is basically Allen's own repeatedly stated regret that his mind functions comedically first, and not just first but above all, rather than tragically. That is, creatively, so that his bone-deep gift is for the joke, and not the existential weight and philosophical profundity that he nakedly strives for and idolizes in other filmmakers. In Weide's documentary, Allen comments on the strangeness -- and you have to think he regards this as debilitating -- of his having been influenced primarily by Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, and Ingmar Bergman. I think "strange" is probably fair enough, although I'd say some version of that combination, with equivalent figures swapped out based on generational differences and what have you, is hardly unique. What's unique about Allen is his ability to make it work.
As it happens, that’s none of my business, and good thing, too, because (again, barring Love and Death) Allen is at his best when he finds some outlet for both sides of his brain. I should probably preface this statement with the confession that, phony superfan that I am, I have pretty much avoided Woody Allen’s completely serious films as if they’d been made by a filmmaker in whom I had no interest whatsoever. With the exception of Another Woman, which has thus far been enough (I am also somewhat familiar with “Interiors”, a basement-tape type song by Randy Newman, who regards the sort of infamous Woody Allen drama of the same name with some amount of sarcasm). I do not, let it be noted, count Allen’s latter-day crime films like Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream in this not-actually-a-boycott, and in fact find them, though flawed, an entirely fascinating and welcome new-ish facet of Allen’s career. The only major problem with Match Point is that it never needed to be made at all, at least judging by Allen’s stated motive, which is that Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point being a remake of half of that film, is too funny. It, of course, isn’t too funny, so the problem seems to be that it’s funny at all, all of that funniness coming from the Woody Allen section. The Martin Landau section, the one that Allen thinks is worth anything, is a chilly tale of murder and guilt and, more importantly, the overcoming of that guilt in the face of a shrugging universe. The Woody Allen section, the one that Allen came to think hobbled the film overall, is a light-hearted bit of romantic comedy that involves heartbreak – unalleviated at film’s end, by the way – a particularly grotesque form of rape, and suicide. So what I’m saying is, Woody Allen is wrong about Crimes and Misdemeanors, mathematically and demonstrably (in fairness, as seen in Weide’s film, he seems to view Crimes and Misdemeanors somewhat differently and more affectionately now than his comments at the time of Match Point’s release would indicate). The film is funny, but the humor sort of chokes a little bit. And anyway, without the flashes of humor and even warmth that film has and Match Point does not, he would not have achieved the rather astonishing tone of hopeless optimism, or optimistic hopelessness, that is the film’s final note, and is of a complexity that Match Point can’t even comprehend.
Not that I can blame Woody Allen for being wary of his own impulses. By the time he made Crimes and Misdemeanors, he’d already made Hannah and Her Sisters, after all. That’s a film that, for many years, I would have placed among my favorites, but now I have to say that when I read Allen claim, as he does in Woody Allen on Woody Allen, a book-length interview with Stig Björkman, that he had a failure of nerve on Hannah and Her Sisters, that he “copped out”…well, it’s true, he did. It’s not that the film is, in the end, happy. It’s the godddamn pregnancy. The ending of the film goes something like: I can’t ever get pregnant, oh wait yes I can, roll credits. The passage of time has revealed to me that this is objectively terrible. This is a shame, because there’s a lot that’s very nice about the film, a bit New-Yorker-up-his-own-ass, certainly, but funny, full of fine performances, and empathetic. It’s just that the harder edge Allen wishes he sometimes had would have really come in handy. When Allen derides his light and comic impulse as his greatest weakness, he’s not doing it just because he thinks comedy is a lesser form – I mean, he does, he’s said so, but he’s also been creatively harmed by it before. And Allen would never patronize to the comic abilities of Bob Hope or the Marx Brothers as he does to his own. Maybe this simply makes him a hypocrite, but see, too, Shadows and Fog, a film that I – perhaps only because of my personal tastes and interests, but still – believe could have been his masterpiece, but which manifestly isn’t. When Shadows and Fog is discussed, one thing that is never, as far as I can tell, remarked upon is the fact that it’s based on a one-act play Allen wrote called Death, which can be found in Without Feathers. This play is mostly the same as the film – both are funny, eerie tales of murder and vigilantism in some unnamed, early 20th century European town, possibly in Germany or Austria, mixed with questions of God and Godlessness, plus some other things, too. Setting aside the various digressions the film, with its longer script and running time, allows itself, Death and Shadows and Fog seem to follow the same path narratively, until you remember how Death ends, and how, in an early scene, Shadows and Fog removes any possibility that it will end the same way. Okay, but Death remains eerie right up through the ending, and Shadows and Fog…well, it loses its nerve, and it cops out. It actually becomes charming, of all things. This is not the desired outcome for a film such as this. Why would Allen purposely do himself in like that? He had an ending that he could have used and which would have been better, but he refused. For all the talk of Allen’s amazing position in the film world to do whatever he wants to do, did he or somebody else convince him that, in this case, nobody would accept his ending? Not coming from him, anyway? Whatever happened, Shadows and Fog does two things: one, it adds credence to Allen’s assessment that his natural-born wit sometimes gets in the way of his better artistic judgment; and two, it places all the blame on Allen and makes you think that maybe you’d rather he not complain about it, even in the modest, resigned way he does, if the examples offered are actually going to be acts of sabotage. It also makes me think of another short play by Allen, Death Knocks, which is not terribly closely related, but also not entirely unrelated to Death and Shadows and Fog, and I start to wish Allen could give up the struggle in favor of his particularly formidable gift. “Holy Christ, and I thought you were saving sixes.”