Some years back, director Francis Ford Coppola released The Godfather Trilogy1901-1980: a chronologically reassembled
edit of all three of his Godfather
films. As appealing as it was (in a passive, brain-dead, sort of way) to have
the sprawling Corleone saga laid out in a fashion so as to make it impossible for even the
most distracted viewer to lose the narrative thread, the sad result was that in
the attainment of unequivocal comprehension, all poetry was lost. Robbed of the
sometimes poignant juxtapositioning of past and present events, The Godfather became just another
gangster film.
The artful manipulation of time in The Godfather films—the past coexisting with the present—is more than just a stylistic conceit; it's an essential representation of the films' narrative themes of destiny and predetermination. In Petulia, the conveyance of time as a nonlinear phenomenon reflective of the characters' fractured lives (a point of annoyance for several critics back in 1968), is no less fundamental to the telling of this distinctly Sixties, yet timeless, story.
Down on Me Well-heeled attendees of a charity fundraising dance "Shake for Highway Safety" react to the rock group Big Brother & the Holding Company (Janis Joplin)
Richard Lester’s Petulia
is the story of a small group of very pretty people whose perfect-looking lives are nevertheless bloody battlefields strewn with the carnage of emotional (sometimes physical) violence every bit as senseless and arbitrary as the glaring images of the Vietnam War that flicker from the largely ignored TV sets running nonstop in every room. Depicted in an
artfully disjointed style which intercuts flash-forwards and flashbacks with scenes occurring in the here
and now, Petulia examines the
tentative love affair between impulsive, unhappily married newlywed Petulia (Christie) and the generationally displaced surgeon Archie (Scott). Archie is an old-fashionedly decent man facing a kind of existential mid-life crisis in the midst of "The Pepsi Generation," and he doesn't know quite what to make of it all.
Just as Coppola's use of flashbacks in The Godfather created a sense of history encroaching upon the present, Petulia is an almost-love-story
told in a time-tripping, hopscotch fashion so organic to the era (the swinging Sixties); the place (Summer of Love San Francisco); and characters (the beautiful
people), that it’s impossible to imagine the film realized in any other way.
Julie Christie as Petulia Danner
George C. Scott as Archie Bollen
Richard Chamberlain as David Danner
Shirley Knight as Polo (Prudence) Bollen
Joseph Cotten as Mr. Danner
I saw Petulia for
the first time just two months ago, and given my predilection for all things Julie
Christie, it struck me as more than a little puzzling how this near-perfect little gem had managed to elude me all
these years. I suspected I would like it, but I didn't really expect to love it as much as I did. Funny, touching, and full of startling performances...it's so perfectly attuned to my tastes and interests it practically has my name on it. Advertised
at the time of its release as “The uncommon movie,” Petulia might well have added "unexpected” to the mix, for I've really never seen anything quite like it. Not only does it have Julie Christie at her most jaw-droppingly
gorgeous (EVER…and that’s saying something), but she, George C. Scott, and Richard Chamberlain bring an empathetic intensity to characters one might best describe as guardedly dispassionate.
Although they share no scenes together, Petulia reunites Kathleen Widdoes (pictured) with her The Group co-star, Shirley Knight
Petulia is Richard Lester's savage
picture postcard satire of American life in the late Sixties. A time when
sentimentality was considered square, relationships tangential, and the
polished-metal, automated world of “now” was moving and changing so fast it stood in constant danger of leaving itself behind. As a dissection of an emerging cultural scene and its people, Petulia is a surprisingly focused social skewering considering its relative lack of distance (it's one of the few mainstream films commenting on the decade to actually have been filmed where and when what we commonly associate with '60s culture originated). Richard Lester (A
Hard Day’s Night, The Ritz) takes
a fragmented, psychedelic view of the gleaming-surfaced existence of jaded, wealthy
hippies and disillusioned, drop-out professionals. A world where the disenfranchised poor and people of color are
always glimpsed (just barely) on the periphery, and the hippies are just as phony and callous as the straights. The darkly
comic, fumbling interplay of these lost-and-found souls striving—often in shell-shocked
bemusement—to reach out to one another in a disposable, mechanized, instant
gratification society is rendered in strobe-light glimpses boldly captured by Nicolas Roeg’s (The Man Who Fell To Earth, Don’t Look Now) kaleidoscopic camera lens.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT
THIS FILM
Petulia (based on
the John Haase novel, Me and the Arch
Kook Petulia) is very effective, not to mention outrageously stylish, in the ways it depicts
the messy complexity of relationships. Contrary to what songs, romance novels,
and fairy tales would have us believe, really connecting with another human
being is a frustratingly difficult business. It's imperfect, inconsistent, and
comprised of a million little disappointments and uncertainties, all tethered
to an overpowering but seldom acknowledged need for human contact.
The straightforward Archie can’t make head-nor-tails of the
captivating but confounding Petulia, who is herself of two minds about her
beautiful but abusive husband, David. Polo, Archie’s ex-wife, is not quite over
him, yet seems to have leapt into a compromise relationship. Meanwhile, their friends Barney and Wilma (?!) -Arthur Hill and Kathleen Widdoes - whose own marriage is
falling apart, scheme to have them reconcile. These emotionally inarticulate couplings
form a roundelay of missed chances and miscommunications endlessly reenacted by
the uniformly dissatisfied protagonists. Individuals whose words and actions seem
to be forever at cross purposes with their desires.
As Petulia is as
much a social satire as a poignantly bleak meditation on emotional authenticity
(“Real, honest-to-God tears, Petulia?”),
the picture of America that Lester paints is one of alienating mechanization and deceptive appearances. Richard Lester’s San Francisco is one of automatized
motels; switch-on fireplaces; indoor flowers that die when exposed to real
sunlight; decoy hospital room TV sets; sullen flower children; nuns driving Porches; topless restaurants;
gloomy all-night supermarkets; and kiddie excursions to Alcatraz Prison (which
is a reality now, but was not, if I remember correctly, the case back in 1967).
Among the row houses of Daly City, Archie seeks the assistance of two two non-cooperative hippies (that's WKRP's Howard Hessman in the pink shirt)
PERFORMANCES
No one does sham superficiality better than Julie Christie. From Darling's narcissistic Diana Scott, Far From the Madding Crowd's perniciously thoughtless Bathsheba, to the emotionally vacant Linda Montag of Fahrenheit 451, Christie has made a career of adding depth and dimension to otherwise unsympathetically shallow characters.
The walking contradiction that is Petulia Danner: arch posturing one moment, self-recriminating anguish the next, is one of Julie Christie's strongest most persuasive performances.
I can't say I've ever cared much for George C. Scott (who somehow grows increasingly more handsome as the film progresses) but I think he is rather spectacular here. He avoids the usual self-pity that comes with these kinds of roles and makes Archie into a strong, very likable character you come to care a great deal about. It's a most effective dramatic device when a staunchly unexcitable character in a movie breaks into a smile, and when this happens in Petulia, it just about breaks my heart.
Special mention must also be made of Richard Chamberlain (then known exclusively for TV's Dr. Kildare and as a heartthrob romantic lead) daringly cast against type and delivering an overwhelmingly chilling portrayal of a man who is a physically perfect, psychologically damaged, Ken doll. THE STUFF OF FANTASY
A film set in '60s San Francisco is bound to be visually vivid, and Petulia is a marvelous-looking movie whose color photography is as expressive as it is overwhelming. There are psychedelic light shows accompanying musical appearances by The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, striking vistas of Bay Area locations, and the candy-colored mod fashions of the day take on a fairly 3D effect.
My partner was the first to take note of the beige/brown cheerlessness of Archie's bachelor apartment (top) contrasting so expressively with Petulia's fraudulently festive pink and yellow boudoir (below).
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
It's always struck me as a curious phenomenon how so many films from the '80s and '90s can appear so dated to me, yet most of my favorite films from the late -'60s and '70s seem to have a timelessness about them. I don't pretend to know the reason, but I suspect it's because so many '60s and '70s films are about people and relationships, while '80s and '90s films are chiefly the result of pitches, formulas, and focus groups. Ignore the swinging '60s window dressing (but who would want to?) and Petulia is as topically relevant today as it was in 1968. Perhaps more so
Estrangement. The natural consequence of erecting barriers in the avoidance of pain
On the strength of one month's ownership of the DVD and three viewings, Petulia has become my absolute favorite Richard Lester film. The first American feature from a director known for his bold comedic style, Petulia is not as great a thematic departure as it at first appears. There are plentiful examples of Lester's penchant for absurdist humor, caustic irony, and the sad/funny details of human interaction. But what distinguishes Petulia for me is the humanity at the core of this little microscopic vision of the world. That and the sophisticated style of its execution. In that, Petulia is indeed an uncommon movie.
Petulia is, at its heart, an adult twist on the classic fairy tale. Petulia is the damsel in distress who, perhaps tragically, can't or doesn't want to be saved. David, the Prince Charming whose beauty conceals a beast. Archie, the frog prince who lives happily ever after.
A conversation between Motown head honcho Berry Gordy and Universal
Studios regarding the already eight-months-into-preproduction film
adaptation of The Wiz:
Gordy -“I just got awakened by a call from Diana (Ross) who wants
to play Dorothy in 'The Wiz'! She had a
dream that she played the part and the film was one of the biggest smash hits
of all time!” "The Wiz Scrapbook" by Richard J. Anobile
And thus began one of the most divisively controversial casting
decisions since Jack Warner threw Julie Andrews over for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.
Diana Ross has the answer to the question: "Whose turn is it to be the big screen's next Dorothy Gale?"
The Wiz is based on the 1975 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical that is itself a very '70s, funkified, all-Black reimagining of Frank L. Baum's 1900 children's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The story of the little Kansas farmgirl who gets whisked away by a tornado and learns the value of home and family through the help of characters she meets in the mythical land of Oz is a tale as well-known and beloved as Alice in Wonderland. The Wiz, which hews closely to Baum's book (silver slippers, not ruby), was created at the height ofthe '70s Black Pride revolution in fashion, music, film, and art.
The Broadway production (then billed as The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz") was an attempt on the part of Charlie Smalls (music) and William F. Brown (book) to create a modern children's fantasy familiar enough to encourage crossover appeal, yet reflective of contemporary Black culture. The score is full of songs influenced by funk, soul, and gospel, and the book is peppered with comic dialog derived from '70s slang idioms. Thanks to the creative contributions of director/costume designer Geoffrey Holder and the powerhouse vocals of 17-year-old Stephanie Mills as Dorothy, The Wiz proved a great success and went on to win seven Tony Awards that year, including Best Musical.
Diana Ross as Dorothy
Michael Jackson as The Scarecrow
Lena Horne as Glinda
Richard Pryor as The Wiz
Nipsey Russell as The Tin Man
Ted Ross as The Cowardly Lion
Mabel King as Evillene
Theresa Merritt as Aunt Em
When it was learned that Motown and Universal Studios were to collaborate on a film version of The Wiz, speculative casting buzz centered around Stephanie Mills reprising her Broadway role and Motown Golden Girl Diana Ross being cast as the glamorous Glinda the Good. Of course, all that changed with Diana's fateful dream and the subsequent early-morning call to Berry Gordy.
Disregarding the very real possibility that Miss Ross’ dream could just as well have been a nightmare, the powers that be behind The Wiz—a film that stood the chance of being one of the most expensive musicals ever made—abandoned plans to conduct a nationwide talent hunt for a talented, age-appropriate unknown yo play Dorothy and instead went with what then must have seemed a smart business move: casting an internationally famous, Oscar-nominated singer/actress with both marquee value and mainstream appeal. Thus, swayed by variables ranging from the capricious (Diana wanted it, dammit!) to the practical (Ross' participation most assuredly contributed to the acquisition of other notables, like pal Michael Jackson and Lady Sings The Blues co-star Richard Pryor), The Wiz was launched with considerable fanfare and star-power, but also amid a flurry of boxoffice-crippling negative publicity.
While I really liked the look of Diana Ross in The Wiz, a vocal majority let it be known they preferred their Ross glamorized and Mahogany chic.
The mounting of a large-scale film adaptation of The Wiz was already a sizable professional gamble (not only was the public touchy about anyone challenging the memory of a film as beloved as The Wizard of Oz but there had not yet been any kind of boxoffice precedent for such a big-budget film with an entirely Black cast). A gamble not entirely helped by the almost unanimously unpopular announcement that the, shall we say, “mature” Diana Ross would be playing Dorothy, a character whose age is unspecified in Baum’s books (a fact Ross was quick to point out at every opportunity), but whom even the most imaginative of readers were unlikely to have envisioned as a fully-grown woman.
One wonders how things might have turned out for The Wiz and, indeed, Diana Ross' feature film career (it came to an abrupt halt with The Wiz) had Ross campaigned for the role of Glinda. As it now stood, the head-scratching incongruity of her casting and all the changes it precipitated (Dorothy was now a 24-year-old Harlem school teacher with a doozy of a social anxiety disorder, living in a brownstone with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry) fueled the public's already strong perception of Ross as an ego-driven diva. The mainstream press tends to already look upon the ambitious artistic endeavors of Black artists with a hyper-scrutiny not applied to the work of white artists, and so in the film's initial stages of production, the negative advance buzz threatened to overshadow everything else.
The news of Ross' casting set off a veritable tornado of outraged cries of ruinous miscasting the likes of which we wouldn't hear again until 1990 when perennial daddy’s darling Sofia Coppola plodded through the waters of casting nepotism and single-handedly sunk The Godfather Part III. In hindsight, it's obvious that the preoccupation with Ross's casting also served as a convenient grievance smokescreen for those taking racist umbrage over Black artists "daring" to tackle a beloved all-white cinema classic.
The casting of 33-year-old Diana Ross proved an insurmountable hurdle for many viewers, blinding them to The Wiz's many delightfully witty design concepts. Here, Dorthy and pals dance atop charmingly bulbous Oz Taxicabs in front of a surreal rendering of the Cowardly Lion's home, The New York Public Library. The cabs, in satiric commentary on an all-too-familiar urban reality, are always off-duty when the black characters try to hail them. The Yellow Brick Road traffic signals flash "Ease" or "Don't Ease" for pedestrians.
When Diana Ross was brought into The Wiz, the film's original director, John Badham(Saturday Night Fever), took a powder. Scrambling for a replacement, the studio settled on Sidney Lumet (known in the industry as Mr. finish-it-on-time-and-under-budget) in spite of his inexperience with the musical genre. It's a perverse Hollywood tradition that an industry famously averse to risk-taking ONLY seems to take chances when it comes to placing directors unfamiliar with a genre at the helm of multi-million-dollar productions (cue: John Huston and 1982s Annie)
Then-screenwriter Joel Schumacher (Sparkle, Car Wash), later hack-director (Batman and Robin), jettisoned the entire Kansas-to-Oz elements of the play and, at Lumet's suggestion, fashioned the film into an urban fantasy with an Oz resembling a surreal, fever-dream vision of New York. Schumacher, who, like Diana Ross, was a proponent of EST (Erhard Standard Training - the self-help teachings of Werner Erhard which were popular at the time), also inserted tons of Me-Generation proselytizing into the script and supplanted The Wiz's simple themes of "There's no place like home" with a great deal of the "You'll find it within yourself" navel-gazing of the '70s Human Potential Movement.
The Yellow Brick Road leading to The Emerald City Tony Walton's Oscar-nominated production designs for The Wiz convey a charming storybook wit
The relative haste with which The Wiz was fashioned perhaps explains why a film of this magnitude contains so many errors in editing, dubbing, and "We don't have time for a retake!" awkwardness. As with many films, it was given a release date before even a foot of film was shot. Slated as a summer 1978 release, the date was later moved to the fall due to weather issues, union strikes, and Ross burning her retinas staring into the white beams of The Wiz's eyes. Critics were quick to call attention to shots of a buckled yellow brick road, sweat stains under Miss Ross' almost perpetually upraised arms, poor lip-syncing by the Cowardly Lion, and surprisingly cheesy-looking special effects for a film that cost a whopping $24 million (Dorothy's mannequin-stiff entrance into Munchkin land and Glinda the Good's graceless"floating" were popular targets). However, almost unanimous praise was afforded Quincy Jones' work on the musical score, and the brilliant production design and costumes by Tony Walton (Mary Poppins, The Boy Friend).
Dorothy Learns the Value of Friendship In another of the film's witty, New York design concepts, the Yellow Brick Road leads to a subway entrance where a sign directs pedestrians to "Get Down"
I first saw the theatrical production of The Wiz in October of 1976 when the touring company of the Broadway show played in San Francisco. Ren Woods (Xanadu) was taking over for Stephanie Mills, and I remember it being a spectacular production. My single strongest memory of the show is the fabulous staging of the tornado whisking Dorothy and her farmhouse away to Oz: The tornado itself was embodied by a beautiful, leggy dancer sporting a scarf headdress that billowed behind her, far beyond the stage's wings. She danced seductively around the farmhouse, ultimately (and provocatively) straddling its roof. As the house began to rotate on a turntable, the ever-elongating scarf wound itself around and around the entire structure until it completely enfolded the house in the fabric. It was mind-blowing!
In the movie version of The Wiz, Glinda the Good is something of a supernatural life coach. Here, she creates the tornado that will blow the house-bound Dorothy out of Harlem into a vision of New York unlike anything I'd ever seen.
By the time the film version was released in October of 1978, I was living in Los Angeles, and any initial trepidation I may have had about Diana Ross' casting had long been absorbed by all the exciting hype surrounding the film. Michael Jackson's film debut! Quincy Jones arranging the music! Lena Horne returning to the screen for the first time in almost ten years! From Richard Pryor landing the role of The Wiz, to the behind-the-scenes talents of Tony Walton and Albert Whitlock (the latter, visual effects artist for The Birds, Earthquake, Day of the Locust); it seemed as though all the top talents in Hollywood were working on this musical. Once the colorful billboards and posters began appearing around town (tagline: The Wiz! the Stars! The Music! Wow!) and the Ross/Jackson duet single of "Ease on Down The Road" was in heavy rotation on the radio...well, I was gone. Everything surrounding the promotion of the film looked so fantastic that I convinced myself the final film was going to be something so stupendous, it would make us all eat our words at ever doubting the wisdom of casting superstar Diana Ross.
If it can be said that any single image sold me the film version of The Wiz, it has to be this vision of Oz rendered as a surreal landscape where the Coney Island Cyclone roller coaster meets five Chrysler buildings. It's exactly like something a kid would conceive of as a fantasy image of New York.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As I mentioned in a previous post, the one way to get both the best experience of a movie yet at the same time the least reliable impression of how that film will perform at the boxoffice, is to see it on opening night. The Wiz opened at the famed Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood. The Dome itself was bathed in yellow light, as were the decorative fountains out front. The only thing missing was a literal Yellow Brick Road. Lines stretched around the parking lot, and the sold-out opening night audience was primed for an "experience." And that's what they got. The crowd ate the film up. Laughter drowned out dialog, special effects and sets drew gasps of approval, and the conclusion of every number was met with rounds of applause.
The audience was especially responsive to Diana Ross' vocal performance (which, no matter what one thinks of her acting, is pretty phenomenal here). Seriously, Ross was never known as a belter or even considered particularly soulful...not in the Aretha Franklin vein, anyway...yet in The Wiz she displayed a versatility and range that had audience members literally screaming! By the time her soul-searing rendition of "Home" ended, some audience members were acting as though they were at a live concert. It was all very heady and a major goosebump experience for me, especially the dancing. Ah! Such dancing! Were The Wiz edited down exclusively to its dance sequences, that alone would be enough for me. Needless to say, I was absolutely thrilled by The Wiz and was positive that the film was going to be a big, big hit. Of course I was dead wrong.
The cast of The Wiz reacts to early reviews
The newspaper critics savaged virtually everything about The Wiz, all uniting in agreement over Diana Ross' adult Dorothy being a severe liability no amount of movie magic could surmount. The public even chimed in, complaining of the film being too dark (if cinematographer Gordon Willis ever shot a musical, it would look like The Wiz), too scary, too preachy, or just too somber in tone. Grease (a film I absolutely abhorred, by the way) emerged the big musical blockbuster of 1978, and The Wiz, much like the misguided reworking of the film's title character, pretty much slumped away in ignominious defeat.
PERFORMANCES
I like Diana Ross a great deal. Indeed, I get teased a lot by my partner due to my baseless belief that she can't be as bad as her diva reputation attests, because she has such kind-looking eyes (I also think Faye Dunaway has kind eyes...so maybe my partner has a point). I find Diana Ross very likable in The Wiz but I'm the first to say that she really needed to turn it down a notch. Her idea of conveying Dorothy's shyness is to approach the role as though she were portraying Laura in The Glass Menagerie...with all of the attendant ponderousness.She's far too high-strung and neurotic from the start. By the time she reaches Oz you almost expect her head to fly off, she's so unwound.
No one can say Diana Ross didn't throw herself into the role The rousing production number Brand New Day is one of my favorites...for any number of reasons.
That being said, I think Ross is rather appealingly game throughout the film, throwing herself into the strenuous dancing and singing in a way I can't help but admire. She's in the finest voice she's ever been, and while I get a little worn down by her personality towards the end (she's a tad harsh on Richard Pryor), I have to say her grown-up Dorothy has never bothered me as much as it has others. A friend of mine once made the astute observation that when The Wiz came out, the concept of a grown-up unable to leave home was such an anomaly, with audiences balking at what they considered to be the obvious contrivance of her character. Today, with what we know about social anxiety and the phenomenon of "Boomerang Kids" who stay under their parents' roof well into adulthood; The Wiz seems almost ahead of its time.
The Great and Powerful Oz
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
If my blog has any objective at all (which it doesn't, but I'm trying to make a point), it's to promote my firm contention that "good" movies are not always the ones we most enjoy and that a film's boxoffice success or failure has absolutely no bearing on its actual quality or value as entertainment. For example, Variety's list of the 100 highest-grossing films of all time reads very much like an "avoid at all cost" inventory of my least favorite movies. Whereas the films that bottom out in the "flop" category (Day of the Locust, 3 Women, Two for the Road) are among those that have meant the most to me.
The great Quincy Jones makes a cameo as one of the fashion-conscious citizens of The Emerald City
The Wiz is, in many ways, a mess. There is little time devoted to character; it seems over-infatuated with scale over emotion; some script choices are seriously ill-advised (by this point, the cinematic de-fanging of irreverent comic Richard Pryor had come to border on the tragic); it doesn't seem quite fair to the legendary Lena Horne to give Diana Ross have first crack at Horne's only song just minutes before she's about to sing it. Lastly, it's much too long.
But I swear, there is something about The Wiz that has the power to lighten my heart every time I watch it. It's certainly full of spectacle and eye-popping visuals; it has moments when it's lighthearted and fun, and there is no lack of energy and style in the thrilling musical numbers. Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, and Ted Ross provide a refreshing contrast to Diana Ross' twitchy over-emoting (which reminds me of Joan Crawford's exhaustive earnestness), but even that is mitigated by her peerless singing, which is the finest part of her performance. Her rendition of "Home" forgives all transgressions.
The Emerald City sequence, filmed in the Plaza of the World Trade Center Towers
I've always loved the show's score, and Quincy Jones' arrangements are very good. But in the end, I always come back to Tony Walton's designs for the look of The Wiz as being one of the most enduring pleasures of the film for me. I keep noticing new details in the costuming and sets each time I revisit it. The Wiz's whimsical take on a grungy New York City may not be to everyone's liking, but it is the single most cohesive thematic thread in a film that, at times, feels as though it were created by a hydra. Envisioning and constructing a complete fantasy world on film can't be easy, but Walton's contributions meet and even exceed the potential The Wiz had for being one of the great musicals of the 70s.
The New York State Pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair was transformed into Graffiti City for Dorothy's arrival in Munchkin Land
The Emerald City
In a world where three Transformers films and three Twilight films rank among the highest-grossing movies of all time, you'll never convince me that audiences avoid films simply because they're "bad" or even "inept." Many factors play into why a movie flops, some of them having nothing to do with what's happening up there on the screen, others having to do with our culture. Hollywood doesn't have the most stellar record when it comes to highlighting and showcasing Black talent, and American movie audiences STILL have a long way to go toward accepting films with African Americans in principal roles. The Wiz isn't perfect, but there's no doubt in my mind that large segments of the populace were never going to give it a chance from the getgo, and Hollywood allowed its boxoffice performance to excuse its already rigid practice of rarely greenlighting motion pictures with Black protagonists or Afrocentric themes.
Escapism Politicized Hollywood films are predominately about the white experience. Unless politicized or shunted to the background, the depiction of black life on the big screen is still all too rare.
In a strange way, The Wiz is one of those movies I think many people wanted to like, but the film kept thwarting the viewer's goodwill. Diana Ross' Dorothy is a tough nut to crack. Ross' one-note performance never engages our hearts. Then there is the matter of her "journey" in Oz. We're given endless spectacle in lieu of character identification, and sometimes it's hard to find reasons to care about what happens to her. The script, which relies on the impressive makeup effects to provide most of the character distinctions for the Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man, doesn't always make a lot of sense...even for a fantasy. For example: I thought it a grievous mistake to have Dorothy actually "resolve" to kill Evillene as The Wiz requested. Killing the witch by mistake in an effort to acquire her broom is one thing; having her make a conscious decision (however reluctantly) to murder Evilene (even if she IS a baddie) feels somehow wrong.
Dorothy is just a little too happy for a woman who's just committed involuntary manslaughter
When I think of The Wiz and how much pleasure I derive from it despite its flaws, I think of my friend, a big fan of Grease,who will call my attention to how much he loves that film in spite of its cast of middle-aged teenagers, icky message of "conform or be unpopular," and the score's anachronistical '70s-sounding, disco-era musical arrangements.
Just like Dorothy discovers that her imperfect home is nevertheless a place that makes her happy, it's good to remember that if a movie brings you joy, it doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to have something that makes you respond to it. That's personal, that's private, and it has nothing to do with whether the movie is deemed a hit or a flop by Variety.
There's No Place Like Home
BONUS MATERIAL
Although The Wiz is only 34 years old as of this writing, Diana Ross is the only major cast member still living.
According to the book Footprints on Broadway by David W. Shaffer, dancer Gregg Burge (he played Richie in the film version of A Chorus Line, was featured on TV's The Electric Company, and co-choreographer of Michael Jackson's Bad video) appears as Michael Jackson's dance double in certain scenes in The Wiz and had to sign a release promising not to seek credit.
Diana Ross' self-produced album Diana Ross Sings Songs From The Wiz was intended for release in 1979 but shelved when the film performed so poorly. The album was finally released in 2015.
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 isBob Fosseand 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.
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 "Adisaster"); 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.
.JPG)
