Monday, February 20, 2017

THE LE CINEMA AWARDS or The Alternative Oscars®

Since I was a kid, The Academy Awards has been my Super Bowl. Then, with only three major televised award shows representing the arts: music (GRAMMY), theater (TONY), & film (OSCAR); the Academy Awards had the cachet of representing real, old-fashioned Hollywood glamour. Because I wasn't allowed to stay up to watch The Tonight Show, or play hooky from school and watch The Mike Douglas Show, the presence of movie stars on the small screen was still enough of a rarity to make Oscar Night an occasion of near-religious ritual for my sisters and me.

Searchlights scanned the Los Angeles/Santa Monica skies, fans screamed from bleachers, Army Archerd asked industry-centric fluff questions (still preferable to that tedious "Who are you wearing?" crap), and movie starsdefinitely "on" with their scripted casual bantergave acceptance speeches devoid of laundry-list recitations thanking publicists, agents, and hairstylists. The atmosphere of the broadcast was by turns glamorous, cheesy, self-congratulatory, fun, reverent, and phony as hell. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Even in my youth I could tell awards were handed out for artistic achievement as much as for popularity, cronyism, and moneymaking; but its inconsistencies and lapses in taste all just seemed to fit with my concept of the movies, anyhow. Part pop-culture diversion, part art form, movies and the film industry have always been a captivating contradiction. You'd have to look to politics to find a larger collection of phonies and anything-for-a-dollar sellouts; but at the same time it's an industry capable of producing some of the most moving, enduring, exhilarating, and life-altering art. Go figure.

These days I still get excited about The Oscars, but I've lost my youthful naiveté. Watching it has become a ritual of tradition more than devotion. I enjoy the pomp, the spectacle, and self-parody (there is no soul more self-serious than the movie star transmogrified into an artist), and I certainly enjoy the ever-present potential for disaster or an unexpectedly memorable moment. But my best contemporary Oscar Night experiences have been when my partner and I take advantage of the ghost town atmosphere of Los Angeles on Oscar Day and spend it out and about, DVRing the Oscar telecast for viewing later in the evening when we can fast-forward past the windy acceptance speeches or sound-alike Best Song nominees.
My earliest memory of The Oscars is 1967 when I was nine-years-old and my family and I watched the 39th Academy Awards in the living room on our ginormous black & white Console TV set. It was the year Elizabeth Taylor won for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the year I remember vividly because I had to give a Current Events report on the telecast in front of the class in school the following day. I also remember it for this Las Vegas-y rendering of the theme song from Georgy Girl by Mitzi Gaynor (this is my first time seeing it color). I've never missed an Oscar telecast since.
In honor of the 50th Anniversary of my first known exposure to the The Academy Awards, I offer my non-essential alternative: The Le Cinema Awards. An obdurately subjective prize of merit awarded exclusively to films, performances, and artistic contributions which failed to garner an Oscar nomination. And so as not to encompass the entire history of cinema from its inception, the only films eligible for consideration of a Le Cinema Award are movies from my personal DVD collection. I haven't included any comments with the films listed, as many have already been written about on this blog (highlighted) or will be in the future.
There is no individual "Best" prize awarded, each of the five films entered in each category granted WINNER status by virtue of inclusion.

AND THE AWARD GOES TO...


Best Picture
Rosemary's Baby (1968) - Roman Polanski
One of the most incisively chilling contemporary horror/suspense films ever made

Eve's Bayou (1997) - Kasi Lemmons
A sensitive, mystical coming-of-age story of extraordinary beauty
What's Up, Doc? (1972) - Peter Bogdanovich
One of funniest films of the '70s. One of the funniest films ever made
The Day of the Locust (1975) - John Schlesinger
An epic vision of a Hollywood nightmare
Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) - Vincente Minnelli
A thoroughly enchanting musical with plenty of heart and humor 

Best Actress
Mia Farrow - Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Shelley Duvall - 3 Women (1977)
Debbi Morgan - Eve's Bayou (1997)
Audrey Hepburn - Two For The Road (1967)
Deborah Kerr - The Innocents (1961)


Best Actor
Gene Wilder - Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Gene Hackman - The Conversation (1974)
Jeremy Irons - Dead Ringers (1988)
Ivan Dixon - Nothing But A Man (1964)
Dirk Bogarde - Our Mother's House (1967)

Best Supporting Actress
Madeline Kahn - What's Up, Doc? (1972) 
Tsai Chin - The Joy Luck Club (1993)
Diana Rigg - A Little Night Music (1977)
Paula Prentiss - Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972)
Katharine Bard - Inside Daisy Clover (1965)


Best Supporting Actor
Harry Belafonte - Kansas City (1996)
Brian Keith - Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
Marty Feldman - Young Frankenstein (1974)
Robert Walker - Strangers on a Train (1951)
Kenneth Mars - What's Up, Doc? (1972)
  
Best Director
Roman Polanski - Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Kasi Lemmons  - Eve's Bayou (1997)
Peter Bogdanovich - What's Up, Doc? (1972)
Martin Scorsese - Taxi Driver (1976)
Charles Laughton - The Night of the Hunter  (1955)

Best Foreign Film
Europa '51 (1952) - Roberto Rossellini 
8 Femmes (2002) - Francois Ozon
The Bride Wore Black (1968) - Francois Truffaut
Suspiria (1977) - Dario Argento
Death in Venice (1971) - Luchino Visconti 

Best Original Song
"Theme from New York, New York" - New York, New York (1977)
John Kander & Fred Ebb
"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" - Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Ralph Blane & Hugh Martin
"Love With All The Trimmings" - On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970)
Alan Jay Lerner & Barton Lane
"Theme from Valley of the Dolls" - Valley of the Dolls (1967)
Andre Previn & Dory Previn
"Xanadu" - Xanadu (1980)
Jeff Lynne
  
Best Original Score
Barbarella (1967) - Charles Fox, Bob Crewe
Beyond The Valley of the Dolls (1970) - Lynn Carey, Igor Kantor, William Loose
Casino Royale (1967) - Burt Bacharach
Sparkle (1976) - Curtis Mayfield
Two for the Road (1967) - Henry Mancini

Best Cinematography
Manhattan (1979) - Gordon Willis
Petulia (1968) - Nicolas Roeg
New York, New York (1977) - Lazlo Kovacs
Casino (1995) - Robert Richardson
Eve's Bayou (1997) - Amy Vincent

 Best Costume Design
Barbarella (1967) - Jacques Foneray, Paco Rabanne
The Boy Friend (1971) - Shirley Russell
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) - Cecil Beaton, Arnold Scaasi
New York, New York (1977) - Theadora Van Runkle
Evil Under the Sun (1982) -  Anthony Powell

Best Original Screenplay
Eve's Bayou (1997) - Kasi Lemmons

This is Spinal Tap (1984) - C. Guest, M. McKean, H. Shearer, R. Reiner
What's Up, Doc? (1972) - P. Bogdanovich, B. Henry, D. Newman, R. Benton
The Out-Of-Towners (1970) - Neil Simon
Singin' In The Rain (1952) - Betty Comden & Adolph Green
  
Best Adapted Screenplay
That Cold Day in the Park (1969) - Gillian Freeman from a novel by Richard Miles
The Hireling (1973) - Wolf Mankowitz from a novel by L. P. Hartley

Starting Over (1979) - James L. Brooks from a novel by Dan Wakefield
The Joy Luck Club (1993) - Amy Tan, Ronald Bass from a novel by Amy Tan
Last Summer (1969) - Eleanor Perry from a novel by Evan Hunter

Best Choreography
Cabaret (1972) - Bob Fosse
Hair (1979) - Twyla Tharp
It's Always Fair Weather (1955) - Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen
Can't Stop The Music (1979) - Arlene Phillips 
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) - Robert Iscove

Winner's Roster
Eve's Bayou    5
What's Up, Doc?    5
Rosemary's Baby    3
New York, New York    3
Two For The Road     2
Barbarella      2
The Joy Luck Club   2
Meet Me In St. Louis    2
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever  2


Do you have a favorite film, performance, or behind-the-scenes artistic contribution that failed to get a much-deserved Academy nod? Would love to hear about it. What's on YOUR list?

Copyright © Ken Anderson

Friday, February 10, 2017

WINDOWS 1980

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Therefore, many crucial
plot points are revealed and referenced for the purpose of analysis. 

“Dying is easy. Playing a lesbian is hard.”  
Fictional actress Debbie Gilchrist, co-star of Home for Purim in Christopher Guests’ For Your Consideration (2006)

I really love suspense thrillers, but good ones are extremely hard to come by. Far too often pretenders to the title come up short on both suspense and thrills because of predictable plotlines and a near-devout adherence to the structural conventions of the genre. A common pitfall suggesting one too many How to Write a Winning Screenplay workshops offering a downloadable “Surefire Suspense Thriller” PDF template upon enrollment.
Granted, not many directors understand storytelling, the language of cinema, or the rudiments of building suspense as keenly as Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Roman Polanski, or Claude Chabrol. But one always harbors the hope that should a filmmaker endeavor to try their hand at the genre, they do so with some understanding of the fundamentals. Without such a foundation the alternative is invariably a suspense thriller that trades mystery and plot twists for contrivance, coincidence, and implausibilities.
One movie to chart rather high on the contrivance, coincidence, and implausibility meter is the notorious 1980 psychological thriller Windows. A dark and distasteful example of the “What the hell were they thinking?” school of cinema I so associate with the ‘70s (which is actually when the film was in development).

Windows is a movie of firsts and lasts: Windows is the first and last film to be directed by famed cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather, Annie Hall); It’s the first & last screenplay to be written by one Barry Siegel (not to be confused with the Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times journalist). It's the last major motion picture to feature up-and-coming The Godfather/Rocky alumna Talia Shire in a lead role; Windows being the three-strikes-you’re-out, last-straw flop that followed on the heels of the underperforming features Old Boyfriends (1979) and Prophecy (1979). Finally, Windows has the dubious distinction of being the first film to be released in 1980 (January 18th), but, seeing as it was pulled from theaters almost immediately after the near-unanimous critical drubbing it received, it's a good guess Windows also wound up as the last entry in 1980's year-end boxoffice tallies.
Talia Shire as Emily Hollander
Elizabeth Ashley as Andrea Glassen
Joe Cortese as Detective Bob Luffrono
Shy, stammering Emily Hollander (Shire) works in some mysterious capacity at the very picturesque Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Though we never find out exactly what she does there, we do learn that her co-worker is her husband and that they are soon to be divorced. Where Emily lives is picturesque too, her apartment being in a quaint Brooklyn Heights brownstone huddled, troll-like, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. She shares this tiny apartment with a cat, a closet full of look-alike outfits, and several volumes of books devoted to the subject of stuttering. We're left to do what we will with all this visual backstory, for the film refuses to disclose anything which might provide a clue as to why she's so timorous or why her fashion sense runs to Italian Tzniut.
We know Emily regularly sees a therapist and that she struggles with a stutter.
What we never find out is why Emily, like Olive Oyl, has a closet full of the exact same outfit.

Returning home one evening after work, Emily is assaulted in her apartment by a man wielding a switchblade and a mini tape recorder. In a very difficult-to-watch scene, Emily is terrorized and sexually humiliated (not raped, as many critics thought at the time) by her assailant, her frightened pleas recorded for some kind of perv posterity. This roughly 2½ minute sequence feels like it goes on for an eternity. And as you sit there squirming in your seat, wishing maybe Rocky Balboa would show up to kick some ass, somewhere in the back of your mind you’ve arrived at a concrete certainty: you’re certain that nothing that follows in this film (that’s now only 8-minutes old) will ever—no matter how masterfully done—justify this scene.
Physically unharmed but emotionally shattered, Emily reports the assault to a sensitive Italian police detective named Bob (cow-eyed Joe Cortese), but is understandably reluctant to go into details. Enter husky-voiced, over-solicitous neighbor and friend Andrea Glassen (Elizabeth Ashley), an affluent poet whose obscenely large and equally picturesque apartment in the same building suggests Emily is perhaps renting her closet. (Truth be told, Andrea may inhabit the same apartment building or live several miles away. For all the time invested in providing painterly images of New York, Windows takes a rather relaxed attitude when it comes to establishing location and proximity.) 

While the traumatized Emily sits silently grappling with her feelings, Andrea spends her time shooting officer Bob lots of stony glances until either futility or boredom causes him to leave. In a refreshing departure from the usual suspense thriller gambit which contrives for a terrorized protagonist to remain living at the scene of the crime in order to better facilitate encore visits from the assailant, Windows has Emily hightailing out of her apartment the very next day and moving into a picturesque (what else?) Bridge Tower apartment across the river. A place with a spectacular view, ginormous picture windows, and a convenient shortage of drapes.
Now, Windows is a curiosity for any number of reasons, but the core of its strangeness lies in what transpires at this juncture. Just when it seems as though the stage has been set for the suspense part of this low-thrill thriller to kick in (vulnerable heroine, potential love-interest/hero, motiveless assailant, suspicious characters), the film just up and reveals the identity and motive of the villain. Mind you, this is 25-minutes in. Suspense obliterated, this leaves us with roughly 60-minutes of resolution. 
(You’ve been warned, spoilers to follow.)

It seems Andrea is a lesbian pathologically and psychotically in love with Emily. Andrea's romantic scheme to win her lady love is to hire a cab driver to sexually assault Emily in the hope that the trauma will: (1) turn Emily off men for good, (2) send Emily rushing into her arms for protection and comfort, sparking a love/gratitude romance (3) all of the above. (How the hell did Andrea find a sicko for such a job, by looking through the Yellow Pages?) 
*Note to straight screenwriters creating gay characters: “That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.”

Windows is the last film appearance of Oscar-nominated Funny Girl co-star Kay Medford.
She portrays kind but apprehensive neighbor Ida Marx. Ida & Emily share a similar fashion sense

Once Emily moves away and begins a hesitant and intensely dull love affair with Detective Bob, Andrea secures herself a loft directly across the river from Emily's apartment and (relying heavily on Emily never purchasing blinds) watches the object of her affections through a telescope while getting off to the tape-recorded cries and moans of Emily’s assault. Fun gal, that Andrea. 
With the “whodunit” out of the way, you'd think Windows would devote its time to exploring motive—a valid concern given that we're shown precious little about Emily to warrant interest, let alone obsession—but instead, the film opts for atmosphere over content. The characters may remain vague and ill-defined, but New York has never looked as picturesque and moody (by now you've gathered that "picturesque" is the film's defining dramatic motif).
To remind us that we're watching a thriller, Windows throws in a couple of off-screen murders and a scene of Emily discovering something unpleasant in her freezer wedged between the broccoli spears and Cool Whip. But for the most part, suspense is limited to wondering just how Nutso-Bismol Andrea is going to go before the inevitable showdown. A showdown brought about by the screenwriter having the characters do the absolute dumbest things possible at the absolute perfect time.
"Hello, Police? I just happened to catch a cab driven by the man who assaulted me...what should I do?"
"Get back in the cab and have him drive you to the police station."
"Oh, OK...will do!"
The arch dialogue may be mine, but I swear, this actually happens in the film!

Although falling woefully short of the mark by comparison, the movie Windows most obviously attempts to replicate is Alan J. Pakula’s masterpiece of paranoid urban dread Klute (1971),  a suspense thriller in which Gordon Willis’ evocative painting-with-shadows cinematography is used for more than creating pretty pictures. Like Windows, Klute’s mise en scène is New York as a claustrophobically alienating city devoid of intimacy, and at the center, there's a tentative romance between a detective and a woman terrorized by a would-be assailant equally fond of tape recorders. But that's where the similarities end. 
Klute revitalized the standard detective thriller through its subjective visual style and character-study approach to its protagonists. Windows’ screenplay feels like it’s either a few story meetings short of a completed idea or the victim of a lot of editing. Behind the tired "scheming lesbian" trope, you have a pretty harrowing crime. One committed by proxy, yet. But nothing in the way the film unfolds aligns the bizarre nature of its premise with what appears to be a desire to say something about alienation, identity, and the inarticulate human struggle to connect.
Andrea's therapist (Michael Lipton) questions her about the authenticity of her love for Emily
"Have you said how you feel?"
"I will. I...I mean, I can't yet...but I will."

With Emily, there’s her stutter, her inability to make her feelings known to her ex-husband, and the noncommunicative wariness of her new neighbors. The tape recorder used during Emily's assault reinforces this "vocal" theme, as does the assailant centering his knife threats in the region of her mouth and throat. As for Andrea, she has trouble communicating with her therapist, expresses herself emotionally only through poetry, engages in voyeurism and ecouteurism (sexual arousal by listening), and clearly has a problem landing a date. 
Add to this the echoing visual motifs of windows, glass, lenses, reflective surfaces, and the themes of watching and being watched, and you're bound to feel certain that  Windows has a distinct point to make about it all. Yet it never materializes. Windows is a classic example of all style and no content. So much obvious care and thought have been given to how the film looks and the ways windows can be literally and figuratively worked into the narrative. But it's the narrative itself that feels the flimsiest and least thought-out. By the time Windows limps to its conclusion, it actually comes as something of a surprise that all this curated weirdness has failed to add up to anything substantive.
Every move you make, every step you take, I'll be watching you
The hit song by The Police was released in 1983, but it fits Windows to a T

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
 As tends to be Hollywood's irresponsible wont, when it "discovers" gay people, it can only think to feature them in mainstream movies in the most sensational, exploitative ways possible. That's why 1980 saw the controversial release of two movies featuring violently psychopathic gay characters within one month of each other. January brought the psychotic lesbian of Windows, while William Friedkin's Cruising, slated for February release, granted us another film featuring a homicidal homosexual. Although Windows garnered its share of controversial press, advance word-of-mouth about the film was so poor that picketers didn't even bother to show up when I saw it on opening night.
I remember being less concerned about the controversy than I was overwhelmed at the prospect of what I was about to see. Anticipation was at an all-time high for I had worked myself into a frenzy thinking that Windows was going to be as scary as Klute, gritty as Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and as stylish as Eyes of Laura Mars. I had thoroughly convinced myself that this was going to be something really special. Advance word-of-mouth be damned.
Did Windows measure up to my expectations? Well, I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it. Indeed, I sat through it twice. But it wasn't because it was such a great thriller; I was riveted to my seat by the sheer weirdness of it all. It reminded me of that scene in Young Frankenstein when Igor drops the genius brain resulting in an abnormal brain ("Abby someone...Abby Normal") being inserted into the monster by mistake. Windows feels like the studio assembled an A-list cast and crew, sunk a lot of money into the budget, but at the last minute somebody slipped in a script for a low-rent, mid-'70s, grindhouse rapesploitation flick.
The one-two punch of Cruising and Windows appeared to be a harbinger of the decade to come. A time when Hollywood seemed primed to trade one dehumanizing, negative stereotype (the scary urban African-American of the Dirty Harry-'70s) for another (the homosexual as degenerate predator and killer) for the sake of a sensationalist buck. To put such offensiveness into context, it was bad enough that this unimaginative wave of cliche felt like a conservative negation of the pro-sex, gay-liberation vibe of the sexual revolution of the previous decade; but in so associating homosexuality with death, the timing couldn't have been worse, what with the specter of AIDS looming on the horizon of 1981. Inclusion certainly involves gay characters being allowed to be the heavy in movies, but the larger issue is one of proportion; with so few depictions of gay characters onscreen at all,
there is something inherently problematic with narratives that cast gays (traditionally the targets of bullying and violence at the hands of heterosexuals in real life), as agents of homicidal threat to victimized straights.
As the '70s came to a close, gay characters in films were still largely depicted in either comic or derogatory terms, so the gay community was right to protest this rare instance in which two major films with large roles for gay characters depicted both as pitiable psychopaths. Windows was so widely panned and dismissed that I honestly don't think it was still in theaters by the time Cruising opened just four weeks later on February 18th.

For me, the distancing of time has made Windows considerably less sensational, and in turn, the character of Andrea far less offensive...largely because she's so sketchily drawn she's less a human being than a plot contrivance.
The film's windows/lenses motif is carried over to Andrea's Brobdingnagian eyewear

PERFORMANCES
Years after having made the Windows, director Gordon Willis expressed regret at having made the film, calling it a mistake. One big mistake I can attest to is the decision to have Talia Shire more or less play the character of Emily as a "greatest hits" reprise of her Oscar-nominated performance in Rocky. Shire’s Emily is a veritable portfolio of self-conscious gestures, downcast eyes, halting whispers, and fleeting half-smiles tucked into a knit hat. As much as I like Talia Shire (and I like her a great deal) her Xerox performance here had me feeling, at least the first twenty minutes or so, that Windows was the darkest, most surreal Rocky sequel ever made.
I think the cautious romance between Emily and Detective Bob is supposed to be touching,
but at times they seem like they're mere moments from pledging a suicide pact 

I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Ashley, but it surprises me to think that outside of a TV movie or two, I've only seen her in this, Coma, and Ship of Fools. She has an intensity that makes her always interesting to watch, plus a kind of Susan Hayward propensity for overacting that challenges the believability of her characterizations. Playing a can't-win role, Ashley is really not that bad. Short of resorting to that "unblinking stare" thing that movie lesbians have been doing since Candice Bergen trained her gaze on Joanna Pettet in The Group, her stereotypically written role is mercifully devoid of grand "I'm a lesbian!" acting indicators. The screenplay does her no favors in the final scenes (where she's left to go right over the top without a net), but she definitely has her moments and her performance looks better to me now than it did in 1980.
"Why don't you ever smile? You almost never do."
I think Elizabeth Ashley is very good in her moments with her therapist, as well as in this scene near the end where an opportunity is missed for Emily and Andrea to interact in a manner this is not just advance/retreat. Had the screenwriter seen Andrea as a flesh and blood person instead of just a gimmicky villain, perhaps he would have found a way to make this meeting between two women- emotionally damaged in vastly different ways -represent something deeper than a genre payoff.

Although Windows has an impressive pedigree and the odd cult cachet of being a film few people have liked, heard about, or seen; it's not, for me anyway, an undiscovered classic. What it does have is the stamp of being a visually stylish '70s-into-the-'80s curio which manages to be, by turns, both engrossing and off-putting.


BONUS MATERIAL
In 2007 Talia Shire appeared in a series of commercials for GEICO.com in which she portrayed a therapist to one of those cavemen that were so popular for 15-minutes back in the dayeven getting their own ill-advised short-lived sitcom.  Shire playing the silliness absolutely straight is really rather marvelous.
Commercial #1
Commercial #2
Commercial #3

Paperback tie-in novels adapted from screenplays were once a popular part of movie marketing. The novelization of Barry Siegel's screenplay for Windows was written by H.B. Gilmour. Gilmour carved out quite a career novelizing screenplays, a few of her many other paperback adaptations being: Saturday Night Fever, All That Jazz, and Eyes of Laura Mars

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES
Gordon Willis died in 2014 at the age of 82. This autograph is from 1984 when I was a dance extra in the awful John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis aerobics movie Perfect (1985), for which Willis served as cinematographer. Some of his other more distinguished films are: Annie Hall, All the President's Men, The Parallax View, Pennies from Heaven. Considered one of the most influential cinematographers of the '70s, he was nominated only twice (Zelig, The Godfather III), and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2010.


Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2017