STILL OF THE NIGHT 1982

Warning: Possible spoilers

All filmmakers start out as film fans, so perhaps it should come as no surprise when—and I stress “when,” not “if”—they find irresistible the urge to pay homage to the movies and directors that inspired them. I don’t mean those directors who’ve built their entire careers on appropriating the style of others (Brian De Palma, Quentin Tarantino); rather, those filmmakers brave/foolhardy enough to adopt imitation as their chosen form of flattery.

Peter Bogdanovich hit critical and boxoffice paydirt by candidly riding the cinematic coattails of John Ford and Howard Hawks, respectively, with The Last Picture Show and What’s Up, Doc?. That is, until the leaden At Long Last Love exposed the director as having no gift for the light touch required of aping the musical romantic comedies of the 1930s. Macho Martin Scorsese fared no better with his stab at the stylized realism of the studio-bound 1940s musical with his shapeless and meandering New York, New York (1977); and Interiors (1978), Woody Allen’s first dramatic film and beginning of many attempts to clone his idol Ingmar Bergman, was, to many, such a tin-eared East Coast transmutation of Bergman’s trademark Swedish existential dread, it's said that at initial screenings some viewers mistook it for a tongue-in-cheek comedy spoof. 

Fragile Victim or Femme Fatale?

When writer/director Robert Benton (Bonnie and Clyde, Kramer vs Kramer, Places in the Heart) tried his hand at updating the 1940s private eye flick, the result was the smart and quirky The Late Show (1977): a small, unpretentious little gem (which flopped tremendously) that made self-referential neo-noir look effortless.

Although I can't deny it is both well-written and watchable, Kramer vs Kramer, Benton’s wildly popular follow-up to The Late Show, still strikes me as little more than a pedigreed Lifetime movie (decades before there was even such a thing as a Lifetime movie), but it nevertheless proved to be a mainstream cash-cow/award-magnet (a whopping nine nominations) netting Benton Oscars for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Success on such a grand scale does nothing if not feed expectations, so when it was announced Benton’s next film was to be a suspense thriller in the Alfred Hitchcock vein starring such heavy-hitters as Kramer vs. Kramer Oscar-winner Meryl Streep (hot off The French Lieutenant’s Woman), two-time Oscar nominee Roy Scheider (then most recently for the critically acclaimed All That Jazz), and actual Hitchcock alumnus Jessica Tandy (The Birds); anticipation was so high it’s likely no film Robert Benton ultimately released could have lived up to the hype.

As it turns out, the public was spared from having to weigh in on the truth of such speculation when Robert Benton (collaborating with screenwriter David Newman) released Still of the Night. A film that, while unremittingly stylish, well-acted, atmospheric, and one of my I’m-pretty-much-alone-in-this personal favorites (Streep’s take on the Hitchcock blonde is my favorite of all her screen looks)—critics and audiences alike felt it to be a tepid toast to the Master of Suspense which failed to live up to the modest expectations one might harbor for even an episode of Columbo.

Meryl Streep as Brooke Reynolds

Roy Scheider as Dr. Sam Rice

Jessica Tandy as Dr. Grace Rice

Josef Sommer as George Bynum

While reeling from the dissolution of his 8-year marriage, emotionally insulated psychiatrist Sam Rice (Scheider) learns that one of his clients, an auction house antiquities curator named George Bynum (Sommer), has been brutally murdered. Bynum, a married, middle-aged narcissist with a Don Juan complex, had come to Dr. Rice seeking treatment for difficulty sleeping due to a recurring nightmare somehow related to the enigmatic, much younger woman he was seeing.

Following Bynum’s death, Sam is paid a visit by the very woman in question, one Brooke Reynolds (Streep), Bynum’s assistant; a fragile, nervousy type with darting eyes, hesitant manner, and a hairdo in constant need of fiddling with. Sam, who through his sessions with Bynum has already developed something of a dream-girl fixation on Brooke, finds meeting the icy blonde in the flesh triggering paradoxical feelings of attraction and fear within him.

Killer's Kiss?

Basically an instance of an emotionally immovable object meeting a cryptic irresistible force, the fact that Sam and Brooke’s attraction intensifies in direct proportion to both the amount of danger their association places them in and the degree to which each fears and/or mistrusts the other, becomes a (grievously underdeveloped) part of their chemistry.

The investigation into Bynum’s murder, deemed to have been committed by a woman, appears to implicate Brooke, who, at least on the surface, comes across as fragile and damaged as the antiquities she oversees. But is she the vulnerable potential target of the murderer, or in fact, a cold-blooded serial killer herself? As for Sam, the quintessential ordinary man drawn into extraordinary circumstances, his personal investigation into the crime proves a race against time as he tries to keep himself alive long enough to discover if his tapes of Bynum’s psychiatric sessions hold the key to the murderer’s identity.

Joe Grifasi and Homicide Detective Joseph Vitucci

In fashioning a Hitchcockian romantic thriller set in the cultured world of multimillion-dollar art auction houses and Park Avenue shrinks, it certainly can’t be said of Robert Benton that he faulted on the particulars. For indeed, Still of the Night is an enormously sleek and handsome film; a sophisticated murder mystery fairly drenched in atmosphere and style. Oscar-winning cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven, Sophie’s Choice) channels Fritz Lang and Hitchcock’s trademark close-ups, imbuing Still of the Night’s color-saturated interiors and shadowy nighttime exteriors with a tension and dynamism not always present in Benton’s intermittently dormant script.

But as many filmmakers before and since have learned, capturing the look and feel of a Hitchcock film is a relative cakewalk when compared to replicating Hitchcock’s gift for storytelling, his understanding of the elements of suspense, and his mastery of rhythm and pace through editing.

Sara Botsford as Gail Phillips

Still of the Night is a film I rank amongst my favorite Hitchcock homage movies, a list comprised of, but not limited to: Donen’s Charade, Chabrol’s The Butcher, De Palma’s Obsession, Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, and Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath.

But as much as I take delight in Still of the Night being a smart and worthy entry in the faux-Hitchcock romantic thriller sweepstakes; I've no problem in confessing that I find the film to be somewhat lacking as a romance, and that Benton's screenplay feels like it's a story meeting or two short when it comes to the payoff ending. Either that or perhaps the victim of last-minute tampering, as Benton had a reputation for reshoots and rewrites.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

If any of what passes for objective observations about Still of the Night ring false in my writing, blame it on the film’s title sequence. Composer John Kander (sans longtime collaborator Fred Ebb) composed music for Still of the Night described by biographer James Leve as a “nocturnal waltz theme.” When I sat in the theater on opening weekend back in 1982 and heard this beautiful melody playing beneath an elegant credits sequence that featured a full moon floating gently across a midnight sky…I knew instantly, no matter how flawed the forthcoming film might be, there was no way I was ever going to completely "dislike" Still of the Night. That opening gave me goosebumps. 

To this day I think it’s one of the loveliest, most simply poetic title sequences for a “thriller” I’ve ever seen. So much so that while working on this piece, I made a nuisance of myself by asking my partner to play it for me on the piano nearly every day.

John Kander's theme for Still of the Night is intended to
"create an uneasy balance between romance and terror" - James Levee

As for the film itself, I largely regard Still of the Night as a sensual experience. I enjoy its surface pleasures while trying not to focus too much on all the lost potential. Unlike many, I actually think Still of the Night is a very effective thriller, providing suspense, mystery, and a few surprises along the way.  It has style, tension, strong performances throughout, and a visual distinction that marks it as one of the few films from the '80s to emerge unmarred by hideous fashions and embarrassing hairdos.

But while I easily find myself stimulated by the particulars of the plot, the ritzy setting, and the overall glossy production values; Still of the Night never engages my heart, rouses my empathy, or involves me in any meaningful, emotional way with the characters. I watch the film at a pleasured remove; happy to be seeing so much talent assembled in the service of an impressive Hitchcock carbon; all the while suppressing my disappointment that the film doesn't ultimately live up to the potential suggested by the collaboration of Benton, Streep, Scheider, Tandy, and Almendros.

Still of the Night succeeds stupendously in capturing the look and feel of a Hitchcock film, but Benton's screenplay really pulls up short when it comes to characterization. These are less real people than pawns operating in service of a plot. And even there I'm afraid the ball is dropped a bit, as the complex, marvelously intricate dream sequence that holds so many keys to the central mystery ultimately feels like a letdown once its banal Freudian code is broken.

PERFORMANCES
Although easy to forget now, but one of the major selling points of Still of the Night in 1982 was that it was one of the rare thrillers made for grown-ups. In a marketplace flooded by horror sequels, teen slasher flicks, and sleazy erotic thrillers, Still of the Night's promise of a return to the classic suspense thriller shone like a beacon.
I'd been a Meryl Streep fan since The Seduction of Joe Tynan, so the idea of my favorite actress appearing in one of my favorite film genres was irresistible. In assessing her take on the Hitchcock blonde, here again, it must be said, objectivity is not likely to rear its head. I'm crazy about her in this movie. She's just so marvelous to watch. I just wish her role had been written better.

Roy Scheider, perhaps one of the last of the grown-man actors Hollywood favored before switching to its current taste for superannuated frat boys, is also very good here. But again, his character is underserved by the screenplay, resulting in his chemistry with Streep being more muted than it should be for a film dubbed a romantic thriller.
An actor whose performance has improved over time is Josef Sommer as George Bynum. I was 25 years old when I first saw Still of the Night, and I remember being somewhat grossed out at the time by this "old fart" who fancied himself a lady's man. Well, remarkably, Sommers was only 47 when he made this film (15 years older than Streep), a good 12 years younger than I am now. Suddenly he doesn't seem so old, although his character has remained every bit as odious. Sommer may not be playing a very likable individual, but his George Bynum is terrifically realized.

She's not given much to do, but it's always a pleasure seeing the great Jessica Tandy onscreen

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Perhaps in an effort to stay one step ahead of Hitchcock-savvy audiences apt to figure out whodunnit by the 30-minute mark, Still of the Night clocks in at a brisk 93 minutes. And while there’s nothing wrong with a thriller being fast-paced (a wise choice in this instance, given the relative simplicity of the plot), haste of the sort that forces events to proceed so swiftly—leaving characters and relationships undeveloped—results in a story that feels rushed.

Brooke gives Sam a Greek Tanagra figurine to replace the desk statue she accidentally breaks when she briefly panics during an earlier visit

   

Still of the Night handles its suspense duties nicely, taking the time necessary to set up pertinent plot points and having them pay off later, also, allowing for the gradual disclosure of past events (via Bynum’s taped therapy sessions) to inform and alter our perception of things in the present. Similarly, the film handles the central murder mystery extremely well, cleverly revealing details in dual “Cherchez la femme” narratives: one told in flashback by the victim himself (Bynum) as he tries to unravel the mystery of the woman with whom he’s carrying on an adulterous affair; the other relayed in the present by Sam, who alternately fears and fears for the woman he barely knows, yet has fallen in love with. It is on this last point—the romantic relationship between Brooke and Sam—where Still of the Night could have most benefited from a few more minutes running time.

Innocent Seduction

Still of the Night takes two classic Hitchcock archetypes: the icy blonde-with-a-past (Kim Novak in Vertigo, Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, Tippi Hedren in Marnie) and the physician-heal-thyself emotionally fucked-up hero (James Stewart in Vertigo, Sean Connery in Marnie), and plops them in the middle of a genuinely intriguing murder mystery. Genre conventions demand they fall in love, but Benton’s screenplay devotes so little time to helping us understand these characters beyond the plot devices they signify, their union lacks the emotional intensity the film needs. 

Two beautiful enigmas kissing does not a romance make

Brooke’s allure and mystique is wrapped up in our inability to quite figure her out, thus her abrupt interest in Sam fuel’s the film’s suspense. We’re never sure if her attraction to him is authentic or masking a sinister, ulterior agenda. 

But Roy Scheider’s Sam is the character from whose perspective the film is told, so our being given so little information about him severely undercuts our engagement in the story. As written, Sam left me with more questions than Brooke: Is Sam’s remoteness a result of his marriage, or the reason the marriage dissolved? Why does a successful psychiatrist live a life of beige austerity? Beyond her beauty, why exactly is he drawn to Brooke? They never really even have a normal conversation.

Sam and his psychiatrist mother share a moment of "shop talk" in his
sparsely furnished I'm-not-ready-to-be-a-bachelor-again pad

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Filmmakers who venture into the land of Hitchcock homage do so at their peril, for nothing wrests a viewer out of a narrative faster, nor tugs at the willing suspension of disbelief more aggressively, than being invited by the director to engage in a game of “Spot the Hitchcock reference.”

North by Northwest
Still of the Night features an auction sequence similar to the one in Hitchcock's film,
but where Cary Grant sought the attention of the police, Scheider attempts to divert it

Unlike those De Palma films where entire sequences are lifted from Hitchcock movies, Still of the Night wisely adheres to “in the style of” homage when it comes to its storytelling. Hitchcock references abound (North by Northwest blonde, Marnie red, Notorious Daddy-issues) but they're subtle and unobtrusive enough for the film to be enjoyed by those not possessing a vast familiarity with the works of the Master of Suspense. Of course, for those who do, Still of the Night offers a wealth of Hitchcock-related dividends, but none so overt as to prove a narrative distraction.

Saboteur/North by Northwest
The one arm, hanging-by-a-thread rescue attempt

Rear Window
Bynum watches Brooke's apartment and spies her undressing for a stranger  

Vertigo
A bell tower is the site of a death suspected of being murder

Spellbound
Brooke and Sam analyze the details of a dream to solve a murder and unlock a dark secret

The Birds
An attacking bird features in the film's biggest "jump" moment

Psycho
The working title for Still of the Night was Stab, so...there you have it

BONUS MATERIAL

Although they share no scenes together in Still of the Night, Meryl Streep and actor Joe Grifasi are longtime friends, their association going back to their days at the Yale School of Drama in the '70s. Grifasi has appeared with Streep onscreen in The Deer Hunter and Ironweed. Click HERE to see them performing the musical intro to an all-star 2014 charity event.

On a 2012 episode of Andy Cohen's Watch What Happens: Live, Meryl Streep offered up Still of the Night when asked to: Name one bad film that you have made."  

I remember back when Still of the Night was still known as Stab, Meryl Streep and Roy Scheider were presenters on some award show. Their pairing in the soon-to-be-released Stab was announced as they approached the podium. At some point in their stage banter, Streep joked, "Oh, I kill him in that!"   As unlikely as it is that Streep would divulge the actual ending of the film, I've always remembered her saying this, and thus, I've always wondered if there was ever an alternate ending for Still of the Night. 

Scene from "Still of the Night" - 1982

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 207

PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD 1970

I've a feeling an individual can easily gauge what his or her overall response to this film is likely to be simply based upon how one reacts to its title. If Puzzle of a Downfall Child strikes you as a potentially profound, enigmatically poetic title conjuring up images of Paradise Lost and existential disillusion, you’re likely to fall in love with this long-considered-lost exemplar of European-influenced, '70s “personal statement” cinema. On the other hand, if the title reeks of self-serious pretentiousness and needlessly arty ambiguity…well, little about the film itself is likely to alter that perception.

Me, I fall a little into both camps. For one, I've always been crazy about the title. Perhaps that's because I was 13 years old when the movie came out and the title sounded just gloomily cryptic enough to appeal to my adolescent taste for high-flown self-dramatization. (In an interview, director Jerry Schatzberg has stated that the title alludes to a plot element involving an abortion that was deleted in an early draft of the screenplay.) I adore Puzzle of a Downfall Child for its introspective examination of the elusiveness of happiness and the human desire to connect in the face of reality-distorting conceptions of image, sexuality, self-worth, and success. In the telling, few of the film’s insights are very acute, but there’s a psychological authenticity to the screenplay and performances which significantly mitigate the sometimes arthouse excesses of the film’s visual style.

Which leads to camp #2. As much as I love Puzzle of a Downfall Child and believe it to be both a beautiful and moving film, I’m the first to admit that at times it can feel like a parody of a '70s art film. The debut effort of photographer turned-director Jerry Schatzberg, Puzzle of a Downfall Child falls prey to the minor sin of over-determined significance. There’s a kind of naïve foolhardiness to be found in acts of absolute sincerity, and if Puzzle of a Downfall Child suffers from anything, it’s from a heartfelt conviction it is saying something “important” about the human condition. To some, such ponderousness can come off as pretentious, humorless, or just plain exasperating. But me, I’ll take a self-serious film that tries to be about something over today’s cynical, eye-on-the-boxoffice, market-research product any day.

Faye Dunaway as Lou Andreas Sand

Barry Primus as Aaron Reinhardt

Viveca Lindfors as Pauline Galba

Roy Scheider as Mark 

Faye Dunaway plays Lou Andreas Sand (nee Emily Mercine), an emotionally fragile former high-fashion model who has retreated to a solitary beach house on Fire Island following a crippling nervous breakdown. Visited by long-time photographer friend and former lover Aaron Reinhardt (Barry Primus), Lou recounts her troubled life in a taped conversation Reinhardt hopes to fashion into a film. With her life revealed in flashbacks that come at us in stylized and realistic non-linear stretches devoid of obvious hints as to their veracity as memory, fantasy or both; Lou reveals herself to be the most unreliable of narrators. Yet the tone of these mental images, playing out like scrapbook pages torn from an album and reassembled, expose the truth of the woman, if not always the truth of the events themselves. It's a fascinating narrative path made all the more so due to Puzzle of a Downfall Child being a film constructed in much the same manner. That the movie creates for us a sense that we are watching just the sort of film Primus' character is likely to assemble from his talks with Lou is just one more piece of Puzzle of a Downfall Child 's continually self-referential puzzle. 

Two magazine covers photographed by Jerry Schatzberg
Left: Anne St.Marie -1956 / Right: Faye Dunaway - 1968

Director Jerry Schatzberg, who had worked for more than 20 years as a photographer for magazines like Vogue, Esquire, and McCall's, based Puzzle of a Downfall Child on taped interviews he conducted with one of his favorite subjects, 1950s supermodel Anne St. Marie. St.Marie, like her film counterpart, retired from modeling after suffering a nervous breakdown. To further the whole wormhole effect of this enterprise, Schatzberg, who was rumored to have had an affair with St. Marie (as does his screen doppelganger, photographer Aaron Reinhardt with Dunaway's Lou Andreas Sand) in real life photographed Dunaway for many fashion magazines, and for a time the two were engaged to be married. Their relationship had already dissolved before Puzzle of a Downfall Child went before the cameras.

"If one can't keep some friends somewhere, then something is really wrong."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I think perhaps my favorite thing about Puzzle of a Downfall Child is that it combines two of my favorite film genres: the '70s trying-to-find-oneself character drama and the '40s suffering-in-mink women’s weepie. How perfect is that? When I first saw this film, Faye Dunaway’s too-sensitive-for-this-world fashion model was an oasis of estrogen ennui in the testosterone-leaden desert of male-centric '70s films romanticizing male identity crises and masculine existential moments of reckoning. To my taste, there was a decided oversupply of movies featuring the likes of Jack Nicholson, George Segal, Richard Benjamin, or Elliot Gould grappling with the meaning of life, while an uncomprehending female (usually a sweet-natured dumbbell, and almost always played by Karen Black) stood around on the sidelines. Aside from the vastly inferior (by comparison) Jacqueline Bisset drama, The Grasshopper (1969), Puzzle of a Downfall Child was one of the few films from this era to grant a female character an equivalent navel-gazing opportunity.

To update Easy Rider's famous tagline, Puzzle of a Downfall Child could have been subtitled: "A woman went looking for America and couldn't find it anywhere."

To its credit, Puzzle of a Downfall Child tries to find the common thread of humanity in the privileged-class despair of Lou Andreas Sand. And as embodied by Dunaway and captured by Schatzberg’s loving camera lens (actually cinematographer Alex Holender of Midnight Cowboy), Lou may never look less than exquisite (even when in the throes of a foaming-at-the-mouth nervous breakdown), but her pain is recognizable and real.

Have you ever seen an old detective movie or TV show and marveled at the perversity of (male) cops and reporters at a murder scene going on and on about how beautiful or desirable a female corpse was? I can't count the number of films I've seen where men stand over a dead woman's body lamenting the "waste" of a beautiful woman and how particularly tragic it is that said woman, so pretty or sexy in life, is now dead. It’s like there’s this overriding mentality that a woman’s looks and physical appeal matter even in death. Or worse, that one can be too beautiful to die...as if the loss of life is sad, but the tragedy is compounded if the corpse is a looker. 

Beauty: Fetishism and Objectification

Puzzle of a Downfall Child sensitively addresses the high value we, as a culture, place on beauty, and the price exacted on those who fall prey to it. In placing this character drama in the appearance-fixated world of fashion photography, Schatzberg and screenwriter Carole Eastman take an insightful look at a woman whose entire existence and sense of self-worth is tethered to her beauty. Whose need to please and always be seen as desirable under the male gaze is both a desperate, deep-seated search for approval and a profound denial of self. The film's definitive narrative thread calls attention to the pervasiveness of male exploitation and the vulnerability/susceptibility of the female form.

Distorted Image
Troubled Catholic Schoolgirl Emily Mercine attempts to lose herself by adopting a pretentious name (perhaps borrowed from Nietzschean psychoanalyst Lou Andreas Salome) and engaging in casual sex with father-figure strangers. Like a character out of Damon Runyon, Lou Andreas Sand speaks in a mannered style totally devoid of contractions, and compulsively re-imagines events of the past in order to protect her fragile image of herself.

PERFORMANCES

Faye Dunaway’s participation was instrumental in getting Puzzle of a Downfall Child to the screen, and her passion for the project is evident in every frame. And it’s a good thing too, because to the best of my recollection there isn't a single scene in which she does not appear. Mind you, I'm not complaining, for in much the manner that Liza Minnelli is so good in Cabaret that she makes you forget “Liza Minnelli: The Home Shopping Network Years”; Faye Dunaway so thoroughly blows me away in Puzzle of a Downfall Child that I'm reminded of everything her career promised before the whole Mommie Dearest / voicemail meltdown thing. One of my favorite but most problematic actresses (you have to have a taste for her mannerisms), Dunaway has every reason to be very proud of her work in this. After Bonnie & Clyde, Puzzle of a Downfall Child ranks as my all-time favorite Dunaway film. She is phenomenal in it.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I tell everyone, even if you don't have the patience for the entire film, just watch the first 15 minutes. The sequence chronicling Dunaway as a fledgling model navigating the battlefield of her first fashion shoot is cinema gold. Shot with an eye for detail only possible from knowing this world very well, Schatzberg peels back the illusions we hold in our America's Next Top Model preoccupation with the fashion industry and reveals the dehumanizing reality. Sure it's satirical, sure it's depicted from the overwrought perspective of the heroine; but from the performances, the dialogue (tellingly, Lou's voiceover describes the men on the set all looking at her as if they were sex maniacs. The visuals reveal her to have been largely ignored), and the stylish cinematography, this sequence is a great example of MY kind of moviemaking.

Dunaway reacts (I'll say) to being required to share her close-up with a live falcon. This terrifying sequence recall actress Tippi Hedren's accounts of working with Hitchcock on The Birds.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

One of the good things about viewing an old film (and at 43 years-old Puzzle of a Downfall Child definitely qualifies) is that one gets to watch it in an environment entirely different from that in which it was created. Puzzle of a Downfall Child bombed in part because it came at a time when audiences were wearying of the glut of European-influenced, tarnished American Dream films that filled theaters after the breakthrough years of 1967. When viewed from the comic book / 3-D / blockbuster perspective of today, the film looks nothing short of miraculous.

Throughout her modeling career, Lou Andrea Sand compiles a list of photographers she refuses to ever work with again due to their abusive behavior. Boldly written in red on this list is the name of the film's director, Jerry Schatzberg. In her memoir, Looking for Gatsby, Faye Dunaway explains that this was an improvisational impulse on her part born of a particularly difficult time the director gave her after actor Marcello Mastroianni (the man she left fiance Schatzberg for) visited her on the set. Schatzberg liked the touch and kept it in the film.

As a culture, we’re guilty of attributing great profundity to the existential midlife traumas of male characters in films, while women undergoing the same are dismissed as merely neurotic. (I don’t know where I read it, but someone once observed that The Graduate missed the boat in focusing on the petulant Benjamin Braddock when the film's most compelling story and most interesting character was Mrs. Robinson and her midlife dissatisfaction.) It’s difficult not to think this subtle double standard played into the critical response to Puzzle of a Downfall Child, but as good as the film is (and I think it’s a really excellent film) there’s no ignoring that it falls into the usual traps that beset movies that ask us to feel sorry for the beautiful people.

Film is a storytelling medium and all manner of human experience should be explored. But films like Puzzle of a Downfall Child seem to forget why movies exist and who attends them. No matter how masterful the film, it’s difficult to ask an audience to listen to a woman as breathtakingly beautiful as Faye Dunaway complaining about how unhappy she is in her (perceived glamorous) job as a fashion model, and how empty she finds her life (after amassing enough wealth to live in financially independent solitude in a spacious beach house). 

We all know that the rich and beautiful can suffer as much as the rest of us, but any film that attempts to dramatize a shared humanity with people whose lives offer far more options than those of the average person has to walk a precarious tightrope. If the world is too glossy, the people too lacquered, it can actually end up glamorizing that which it's trying to vilify. Ultimately sending a message similar to the one expressed by those cops in the old movies bemoaning the fact that certain people are  just “Too beautiful to suffer, too lovely to die.”

As of this writing, The DVD of Puzzle of a Downfall Child is currently only available in France (released Feb. 2012), but every year more and more obscure films are getting "made to order" releases, hopefully this will be one of them.

So, whether you take the film to your heart (as I did), or wish to wallow in its camptastic splendor  (Puzzle of a Downfall Child is an exquisite, sumptuous-looking film that has a scene involving a toilet that is sure to send Mommie Dearest fans into wild ecstatics), this artifact from the days when movies sought to do more than make Variety's Top Ten weekend boxoffice list, has a little of something for everybody.

No matter how you prefer your Dunaway, overdone and theatrical or touching and deeply affecting, Puzzle of a Downfall Child is a lost miracle of a film that is worth taking the time to discover (or rediscover).

"One only breaks oneself apart in order to put oneself back together again...better."

To view some of Jerry Schatzberg's magnificent photographs, visit his website HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

ALL THAT JAZZ 1979

All That Jazz is the movie I wish had inspired me to become a dancer. Bob Fosse's artily stylized, semi-autobiographical, cinematic dissertation on the artist as self-destructive skirt-chaser, is just the kind of self-mythologizing fable that appeals to the romantic notion of the fragility of the creative process.

As stated in an earlier post, the movie that actually inspired me to abandon my film studies and embark on a 25-year career as a dancer, is the legendarily reviled roller-skatin' muse project, Xanadu (1980). Don't get me wrong... Xanadu, in all its flawed glory, is, and always will be for me, an infinitely more joyous, emotionally persuasive experience than All That Jazz ever was (those soaring notes reached by ELO and ONJ on Xanadu’s title track could inspire poetry). It's just that when one is recounting that seminal, life-altering moment wherein one’s artistic destiny is met square-on, face-to-face, it would have been to be nice to be able to point to a serious, substantive work like All That Jazz, instead of a film dubbed by Variety as being about, "A roller-skating lightbulb."

Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon (a.k.a. Bob Fosse)

Jessica Lange as Angelique (a.k.a. The Angel of Death)

Leland Palmer as Audrey Paris (a.k.a. Gwen Verdon)

Ann Reinking as Kate Jagger (a.k.a. Ann Reinking)

Ben Vereen as O'Connor Flood  (a.k.a. Sammy Davis, Jr.)

 All that Jazz is the story of Broadway choreographer Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider); a pill-popping, chain-smoking, serial-womanizing choreographer/director who struggles to prevent the demons that fuel his creativity from consuming his life. Simultaneously mounting a Broadway show and editing a motion picture, Gideon's intensifying abuse of his health (both physical and mental) manifests, surrealistically, as a literal love affair/dialog with death (a teasing Jessica Lange). Fosse makes no effort to mask the fact that Joe Gideon is Bob Fosse and All That Jazz is Fosse's 8½; but, as gifted as he is, Bob Fosse is no Frederico Fellini. His essential shallowness of character (something he takes great pains to dramatize in the film) makes for the baring of guardedly superficial insights, leaving the larger philosophical questions of "what price art?" unaddressed.

Director/choreographer Joe Gideon engaging in his other talent: disappointing loved ones.
In this case, his daughter, Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi) a.k.a. Nicole Fosse.

All That Jazz asks us to accept that Joe Gideon is selfish, an adulterer, a neglectful father, a philanderer, a manipulator, and a liar; but gosh darn it, at least he knows it! Nobody’s perfect, the film seems to be saying, but isn't a little of that imperfection mitigated by their ability to bring art into the world? What Gideon offers as a means of earthly penance for the pain he causes others, is his genius. And it's a point well-taken, for (at least to me) Fosse's choreography in All That Jazz is so brilliant as to justify almost anything. Almost.

And thus we land at what ultimately dissatisfies about All That Jazz for me. It purports to be introspective, but at its heart, it’s apologist. Fosse isn’t invested in getting to the root of what makes Gideon/Fosse tick, so much as pleading a case for the redemptive power of artistic genius.

"It's showtime, folks!"

I buy happily into the enduring romantic myth of the tortured, suffering artist. The tortured, suffering artist as asshole? Not so much. It seems to me a curiously male perspective that allows for the emotional collateral damage of a life of self-indulgence to be tolerated, and ultimately absolved, through one’s art. (The female equivalent: the fragile, too-sensitive-for-this-world type, more apt to do harm to herself than others.)

Although we're given scene after scene of Joe Gideon indulging in the self-serving candor of the cheater (“Yes, I’m a dog, but I’m upfront about it!”), these confessions never once feel emotionally revelatory. Rather, they recall this exchange from 1968's Cactus Flower-

(Walter Matthau's aging lothario prostrating himself before girlfriend Goldie Hawn)

Matthau:  I'm a bastard. I'm the biggest bastard in the whole world!

Hawn:  Julian, please...you're beginning to make it sound like bragging.

Personally, I'm waiting for the day when someone will make a film that sheds some light on what kind of women attach themselves to artistic, self-centered men - never resenting having to play second, third, or sixth fiddle - as they float, like interchangeable satellites, in the orbit of genius.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Gaydar Setting? Off the Chart
Dime-store psychologists seeking the origins of Bob Fosse's serial-womanizing need look no further than these two dishy publicity stills from early in Fosse's dance career. This guy must have felt he had something to prove. It couldn't have been easy being a heterosexual (possibly bisexual) dancer in an era when most male dancers were presumed to be gay, and the pervasive concepts of masculinity (none of which applied to the slight-framed, thin-voiced Fosse) were inflexible. The phenomenon is dramatized in the 1977 ballet film, The Turning Point when a straight male dancer admits to marrying and having a child at a young age in an effort to prove to himself he wasn't gay.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

If you haven't yet gleaned it, I'm not overly fond of the autobiographical structure of All That Jazz's plot. But much like the women who put up with Joe Gideon because he's a genius of dance, I confess that I endure the clichéd narrative just so that I can enjoy the stupendous dance sequences. Bob Fosse is my favorite choreographer of all time, and his work here is beyond splendid. It's absolutely amazing, and among the best of his career.

A legend on Broadway, director/choreographer/sometime-actor Bob Fosse directed but three movie musicals (Sweet Charity, Cabaret, and All That Jazz), yet their influence on dance, the musical genre, and choreography for film has been far-reaching and incalculable. Raked over the coals by critics for the stylistic excesses of 1969s Sweet Charity (Pauline Kael went so far as to call the film "A disaster"); by the time these talents were honed and polished to a fine gloss in Cabaret (1972), Fosse's fluidly kinetic camerawork and slice and dice style of editing eventually became the definitive visual style for contemporary movie musicals.

What has always struck me about Fosse's dance style was how it was so perfect for the female form. If the lines of classic ballet celebrated the idealized feminine form— ethereal and untouchable—Fosse's sensuous style took women off the pedestal and celebrated her sensuality and reveled in her carnal vulgarity. Drawing from his days in burlesque, Fosse's style somehow sidesteps the passive, camp allure of the showgirl and captures an exhibitionistic hyper-femininity that carries with it a touch of danger. To watch the way Gwen Verdon moves as Lola in Damn Yankees is to see the pin-up ideal come to life. I've always thought that if a Vargas Girl portrait could move, she'd move like a Bob Fosse dancer.

PERFORMANCES

Fosse elicits many fine performances from his cast. Roy Scheider, a non-dancer, is surprisingly good, displaying an easy charm behind a keyed-up physicality that makes him believable as a dancer and object of masochistic female affection (my heart blanches at the thought of originally-cast Richard Dreyfuss in the role). Leland Palmer is perhaps my favorite; a fabulous dancer and one of those actresses whose edgy quality makes you keep your eye on her even when she's not pivotal to the scene.
No surprise that Ann Reinking is a phenomenally talented dancer and truly a marvel to watch, but it's nice that she also displays an easy, husky-voiced naturalness in her non-dancing scenes. Jessica Lange has had such an impressive career that it's easy to forget her debut in King Kong (1976) almost turned her into the Elizabeth Berkley of the '70s. Wisely turning her back on Hollywood's blonde-of-the-month publicity machine, Lange took three years off and reemerged in the small but pivotal role in All That Jazz which successfully showcased her ability to do more than look pretty sitting in an ape's paw.

Flirting with Death

The brilliance that is All That Jazz pretty much extends to everything but the central conceit of the plot (which somehow worked for Fellini and no one else. Rob Marshall's Nine was pretty dismal). Fosse gets Fellini's cinematographer, Giuseppe Rottuno (Fellini Satyricon), to give the film a smoky sheen, the music is sparkling, and the dreamy stylization employed throughout is sometimes breathtakingly inventive. One just wishes they weren't in the service of such meager emotional epiphanies.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

In the book, On the Line: The Creation of A Chorus Line, the collective of authors (several members of the original Broadway cast) recall how, after several years of film treatments, director/choreographer Michael Bennett was unable to land on a satisfactory method to translate his show to the screen. All involved in A Chorus Line thought that Fosse had, for all intents and purposes, beat them to the punch and delivered (in a virtuoso eight-minute opening sequence), everything that a screen adaptation of A Chorus Line should have been. And indeed, the opening of All That Jazz is a matchless example of film as storyteller. It's so perfect, it's like a documentary short.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I'm crazy about all of the dancing in All That Jazz. Understandably, most people recall the remarkable "Take Off With Us/ Air-otica" number, but I have a particular fondness for "Bye Bye Love/Life" number that ends the film. A fantasy fever dream/nightmare taking place in the mind of Joe Gideon as he slips away on a hospital bed, this number is outrageous in concept and phenomenal in execution. We're in Ken Russell territory when you have a dying man dressed in sequins (complete with silver open-heart surgery scar) singing his own eulogy to an audience of everyone he's ever encountered in his life, while flanked by gyrating dancers dressed as diagrams of the human circulatory system.  

WOW!

I never tire of watching this number, as it appeals to both the dancer and film enthusiast in me. Fosse, whose signature style consisted of small moves, isolations, and minimal gestures, always seemed better suited to the movies than the stage. He ushered in the use of the camera and editor as collaborative choreographers, punctuating the rhythms and drawing the eye to the details.

Bob Fosse died in 1987, mere months after the death of his closest professional peer/rival, Michael Bennett. Broadway and dance suffered a loss that year that I don't think it has ever recovered from. Bennett didn't live long enough to leave his stamp on cinema, but lucky for us, Fosse left a recorded legacy that represents the best of cinema dance as art. "Thank you" doesn't begin to cover the debt of gratitude.

Bye-Bye, Love

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011