MAHOGANY 1975

Diana Ross is one of a kind. No disrespect to the pop stars of today (well, that’s not entirely true. I have plenty of disrespect for the pop stars of today, but this isn't the forum), but take away their wigs, costumes, and multi-million dollar stage pyrotechnics, and Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, and even personal fave, Janet Jackson, all look like suitable candidates for the “&” half of any '60s girl group (à la, Martha & The Vandellas, Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans).

Diana Ross, on the other hand, is nobody’s idea of a backup ANYTHING. She couldn't blend in if she wanted to—which, to hear childhood friend and former Supreme Mary Wilson tell it, is something Diana was incapable of even as a skinny teenager in Detroit’s Brewster projects. Take away Diana Ross’ wigs, makeup, and costumes (unimaginable, I know, but try), and you've still got yourself this thoroughly unique, almost bizarre little lightning rod of a woman with a thoroughly captivating, slightly nasal, honey-coated voice; that extraordinary, CinemaScope smile; enormous, Keane-size eyes; and a body I'd always likened to a satin-draped straight-razor.

In short; an original. Someone so unlike anyone else that she easily stands head-and-shoulders above the crowd…as is…without even trying. Add to all this a genuine talent and charisma capable of holding one’s attention without the need for a phalanx of dancers and laser beams behind her, and you've got yourself Grade A star-quality of the sort conspicuously absent in today’s breed of homogeneous pop music androids culled from TV “talent” competitions and assembly-line image-stylist laboratories.

As someone who grew up with the music of The Supremes and always thought Diana Ross looked and acted like a full-fledged movie star (read: Diva) long before she actually became one; I viewed the Academy Award nomination she received for her film debut in Lady Sings the Blues (1972) as the realization of a professional inevitability and harbinger of things to come in what looked to be an equally successful career as an actress. To some, Lady Sings the Blues was just the successful film debut of another singer/actress along the order of Barbra Streisand's breakout performance in Funny Girl. But to the Black community, Diana Ross making it as a movie star was recognized for the wholly auspicious, thoroughly inspirational landmark it was.

All Bow Down to the Goddess
I love how, in this screencap, she isn't flattered, flustered, or even embarrassed by the hand-kissing. Diana just accepts it as her due. Like the Pope. 

The '70s Black film explosion was a culturally polarizing era in which the gain of increased onscreen visibility for Black women was mitigated by the fact that all too often in these films—specifically those that fit the Blaxploitation paradigm—their participation was limited to that of sassy sexpots or badass kung-fu mamas.

The mainstream success of Lady Sings the Blues signaled a growth and evolution in Black cinema, while Diana Ross' natural crossover appeal (a classy, sophisticated soul that didn't alienate Black audiences; an exotic-yet-familiar Eurocentric glamour that appealed to whites) ushered in a new age for Black actresses in film. Hollywood, after having dropped the ball with Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, and Diahann Carroll, appeared at last ready to bestow upon a Black leading lady, the status of motion picture superstar.

Throwback Stunt Queen / Diana. Doing the Most. Always.
(Someone online described her in these hilarious terms, and I've never forgotten it)

Unfortunately for all but lovers of soap opera, camp, drag queen aesthetics, bad acting, risible dialog, and above all, haute couture excess (i.e., yours truly); Diana Ross’ follow-up to her promising debut film was Mahogany: a problem-plagued production of a creaky "suffering in mink" romantic melodrama that's a virtual 1975 soul-food gumbo of every “women’s picture” cliché of the '30s, '40s, and '50s.

Diana Ross as Tracy Chambers

Anthony Perkins as Sean McAvoy

Billy Dee Williams as Brian Walker

Jean-Pierre Aumont as Christian Rosetti

Mahogany tells the story of Tracy Chambers, an aspiring fashion designer from the slums of Chicago who finds fame and fortune, but not much in the way of happiness, as Mahogany, an international supermodel. Or, as the ads proclaimed, “The woman every woman wants to be—and every man wants to have!” 

Were this a rags-to-riches tale about a male, the predominant conflicts would undoubtedly be of the professional sort…the dramatization of the obstacles impeding the hero’s achievement of his goals. As Mahogany is a film with a female protagonist, it falls into the usual trap of a great many "career woman" movies: it filters all of her professional struggles through the prism of her personal relationships with the men in her life. In Mahogany, Tracy inadequately juggles a trio of suitors, each progressively creepier than the last.

Let’s see what she has to choose from: there’s Brian, the hip Chicago politician who's an old-school chauvinist who thinks everything he is about is the shit, while everything that means anything to Tracy is ethically suspect. There’s controlling, sexually-confused photographer/Svengali, Sean, who resents any attempt by Tracy to achieve independence from him. And last, there’s 60-something Christian, a rather sweetly smarmy Italian Count who financially supports Tracy’s goals so long as she is open to a little hanky-panky payback. She can really pick 'em.

Tracy to Brian: "Something tells me there's more to you than that."
I wish the writers of Mahogany' had felt the same about their title character. In lieu of fleshing out Tracy Chambers' story (what happened to her parents?) or providing deeper insight into what makes her tick, Mahogany is all surface gloss. The film is satisfied with merely presenting Diana Ross as a glamour icon.  

On paper, the casting of Diana Ross as a top fashion model must have seemed like a cinematic slam dunk. Ross had long ago established herself as a thoroughbred clothes-horse whose beauty and flamboyant stage persona had launched a thousand drag shows (and a poorly-made doll by Ideal in 1969). And indeed, had Mahogany been designed as a Vogue photoshoot, all might have gone swimmingly, for when we're asked to gaze upon the luminous Miss Ross, all is right with the world. Lamentably, this being a motion picture and all, it's only when people start to walk and talk that things start to fall apart.

Calgon, Take Me Away
Mahogany, clearly enjoying Sean's fumbling, stranger-in-paradise, amorous attentions

For starters, the script is a disaster. The dialog is tin-eared, and it's hard to fathom the presence of so many post-Valley of the Dolls / The Best of Everything career-girl cliches stockpiled in a film not intentionally conceived as parody or satire. 

Secondly, the performances are all over the map. No two people seem to be appearing in the same film at the same time. The clashing acting styles of Ross (over-modulated), Williams (laid-back), and Perkins (twitchy), have the feel of one of those international productions where each member of the cast speaks in their native language, only to be dubbed later.
This fluctuation in tone is perhaps due to the film's original director, Tony Richardson (A Taste of Honey, Look Back in Anger), abandoning the project—fired or quit, depending on the source—and directing neophyte/veteran control freak Berry Gordy taking over the reins. Ross and Gordy, former lovers, apparently clashed frequently on the set, resulting in Ross staging a walkout of her own.

Everybody's a Critic
Mahogany, here debuting one of her "originals," gets a taste of the kind of
critical drubbing Diana Ross would later receive upon the film's release.

Most grievously, Mahogany fails to make good on any of the opportunities posed by Tracy being an African-American woman daring to dream outside of the narrow social confines of poverty, sexism, and racism with little to rely on but her determination and drive (successful Black models were still rare in 1975). While there are a couple of token scenes broaching the complex and controversial issues of racial authenticity, selling-out, and the European acceptance/eroticization of Black women, the film clearly prefers to spend its time fueling the Diana Ross success myth.
At every juncture, Mahogany invites us to subconsciously blend Tracy's life with that of Diana Ross. Sometimes intentionally: Ross studied fashion design as a teen and grew up in a poor neighborhood. Sometimes unintentionally: Tracy's relationship with the psychotically possessive and controlling Sean McAvoy hits awfully close to home with what's been written about the Ross/Gordy pairing. In its determination to give Diana Ross fans the Diana they love and want to see, Mahogany ultimately avoids being about anything in particular and winds up just being another diva vanity production on par with Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces and A Star is Born.

Get used to Diana's throat. You're gonna see a lot of it in this film.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

While Mahogany’s somewhat sour subtext will always prevent it from being one of my top favorites (handsome or not, Billy Dee Williams’ Brian is a genuine jerk. And I can’t get past the film’s “Men are allowed to be passionate about their jobs; women are only allowed to be passionate about men” ideology), I do confess to having grown extremely fond of this movie over the years. For all the wrong reasons, of course, but fond of it, nonetheless.

As movies grow increasingly dumber, blander, and more market-researched, good camp is becoming increasingly hard to find. Most bad movies today are bad because they are unimaginative and lazy. Give me an old-school trash movie that jumps the track because it’s carrying a full cargo of ego, pretension, hubris, and delusion. Mahogany has plenty of the aforementioned to spare, plus the added bonus of a lead actress who never really knows when to tone it down, and a parade of ghastly, gaudy, gorgeous fashions. 

A few of my favorite Mahogany moments-

The Kabuki Finale

Mahogany's "stressed out" face

The homoerotic gun battle

These Extras

The Nip Slip

The Interview

Sean playing "Dunk the Diva"

PERFORMANCES

What makes Mahogany so enjoyable for me is, first and foremost, Diana Ross, who I'd be happy to watch if all she was doing was a crossword puzzle. And it's a good thing I feel that way, because, for whatever reason, the sensitive, compellingly natural actress from Lady Sings the Blues (or The Wiz, for that matter) is nowhere to be seen in Mahogany. In its place are scenes of self-conscious, Great Lady suffering and moments that feel as though she's lampooning her own image by behaving like a Diana Ross impersonator. There are a few moments where Ross is actually very good (she has a good, relaxed rapport with Williams in their scenes), but for the most part, I get the impression she's creating her own performance without a lot of directorial guidance.

Always a favorite is the late-great actress and Oscar nominee (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) Beah Richards, who appears oh-so-briefly as Tracy's Aunt Florence

When it first came out, I was just disappointed in Mahogany and its waste of a one-of-a-kind natural resource like Ross. Now, given that she has made so very few films, I find myself grateful that there exists at least one film where Diana Ross gets to delve into Joan Crawford/Faye Dunaway territory and give her fans exactly the kind of excessive, camp-tastic drag show her recording artist persona has always played upon.

Miss Ross  - Killin' it.
Beyonce, JLo, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry...the whole lot. They should be thankful as hell that young Diana isn't around.  They'd all be eating her dust and chilling in her shade.

Anthony Perkins, playing to type (once again), gives the second most enjoyable performance in the film. As the psycho photographer Sean McAvoy, I think he's supposed to suggest Francesco Scavullo, but he's more Z-Man Barzell from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. His scenes are fun because they have a suitably electric, edgy, unpredictability to them. And though he sometimes comes off hammy as hell, in this corny and cheesy cinema casserole chronicle, he's just the spice this film needs. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

There are two bits of perfection in Mahogany beyond 8th Wonder of the World, Diana Ross: The Oscar-nominated theme song, "Do You Know Where You're Going To?" and the amazing, much-imitated fashion montage sequence that accompanies the instrumental rendition. The montage is credited to Jack Cole, and it's literally the most striking bit of filmmaking ingenuity in the entire movie. It could have been released as a stand-alone film or music video. It's brilliant, it's exhilarating, and I just love everything about it. (Maybe Jack Cole should have directed the whole film!)

Because the full title of the song is Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To?) I always assumed it was composed for the film. While researching this post, I found out that Thelma Houston actually recorded the song first (with slightly different lyrics) back in 1973! You can listen to it HERE. 

Diana Ross in Mahogany (top left) and Barbra Streisand in Funny Lady (bottom left) channel Modern Dance legend Martha Graham's 1930 dance piece, "Lamentation" (right).

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Representation matters. And if a film as seriously flawed and inherently silly as Mahogany matters at all (and it does), it's as an alternative vision of African-Americans onscreen. I always like thinking back on how powerful and inspiring the glamorous images in Mahogany must have appeared to young people in the '70s, young Black girls in particular, who rarely got the opportunity to see someone who looked like them onscreen revered for their beauty.  That's why I always give this movie a great deal of credit even while not considering it to be very good. 

And yet, while I greatly admire Diana Ross as a role model, Mahogany has never earned any points for the double-sided message it sends to young women. 

In the '70s, feminism in the movies liked to talk a good game, but when it came to love stories, a great many films ended with the female characters doing all the adapting, while the males pretty much retained the lives they led when we first met them. In 1974s Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Ellen Burstyn’s character makes a very good point when she declares, “It’s my life!  It’s not some man’s life that I’m here to help him out with!” Yet by fade-out, Kris Kristofferson still has his ranch and horses and no immediate plans to move to Monterey, while Alice, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily table her dream of becoming a professional singer, but not in Monterey, her goal throughout the film. The not-so-subtle implication being that her dreams of Monterey were the fantasy of a young girl; her relationship with Kristofferson is the real (grown-up) thing. 

That's comedy writer Bruce Vilanch under all that hair

In Mahogany, Tracy Chambers dreams of being a fashion designer. Although her behavior in every sequence suggests a professional ambition backed by considerable drive (she devotes every free moment to working on her designs, attends night classes, and takes her sketches to dress manufacturers), the screenplay seizes every opportunity to minimize her goals, subtly characterizing them as the superficial dreams of a socially unenlightened woman. 

Especially when compared to the lofty, “uplift the race” ambitions of smug, self-satisfied defender of the downtrodden, small-time politician Brian Walker. A man who, when not reproaching Tracy for actually having thoughts and ideas that are not specifically his own, spends his time using one arm to pat himself on the back for his altruistic impulses, the other to start brawls with political hecklers. Instead of Brian and his dismissal of her dreams representing the kind of narrow-minded people Tracy needs to get away from, Brian is presented as the savior of her literal and figurative "soul." And so, at the film's fade-out, Tracy, having left behind Rome and her successful career, is (I can only assume) to be applauded for being mature enough to choose love over a job, and for taking Brian’s Curse of the Cat People proclamation: “Success is nothing without someone you love to share it with!” to heart. 

Despite the fact that Brian has experienced, by film's end, nothing in his own career that comes close to the level of success Tracy has achieved, everything ends on a note of things being "righted" when Tracy returns to his side, vowing to " put her imagination to work” for the cause both she and her man believe in. The message is clear: Women have fantasies and dreams that are self-centered and superficial, while men have ambitions that are righteous and benevolent.

I guess, in a way, it's kind of good that Mahogany isn't a better film. Were it a movie people took seriously, they might actually have paid attention to its message. As it stands, Mahogany is much like a great many real-life fashion models: exciting, beautiful, stylish, a tad overdressed, but without too much to say that's of substance. 

BONUS MATERIAL
A fun and informative review of Mahogany can be found here at Poseidon's Underworld

Diana Ross plays a haughty, arrogant nightclub performer (surprise!) harboring a dark secret in the 1971 Danny Thomas sitcom, Make Room for Grand-Daddy. (She's very good.)

Mahogany lip reading: There are a couple of re-dubbed scenes in Mahogany that, thanks to the wonders of HD TV, one can now easily make out. In the big argument scene between Tracy and Brian (in which Brian subtly tells her that she needs to face the fact that she has no career and is unlikely ever to have one) Diana Ross's voice says, "Forget You, Brian!" while her lips reveal "Fuck you, Brian!" (My thoughts, exactly.) This allowed the film to get a PG rating instead of an R.

Similarly, in a scene set in Rome where Tracy buys Brian a snug-fitting Italian suit, Brian can be heard complaining (in long shot), "I feel like an old sissy in these clothes!" Moments later when Brian mimics Tracy's high-pitched voice, Diana Ross can be heard saying, "Now, you sound like a sissy!" but a look at her mouth reveals she is actually saying, "Now, you sound like a faggot!" Clearly repeating the word Billy Dee Williams said (and later re-dubbed) in long shot.
Shame on you, Mahogany!

Ever the professional, Diana practices her dialog from The Wiz...three years early

When Mahogany was released wide, the original poster art got a Linda Blair head-turning makeover. The aloof, "Get a load of this" Diana was now (after the reviews had come in) all smiles and even more over-emphatic with the self-aggrandizing accolades

Mahogany opened in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 22, 1975, at the Alhambra 1 Theater on Polk Street. I was in high school and worked there as an usher, so I saw this movie a lot. I was in heaven!

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2013

MACBETH 1971

“If you take material and filter it through me like a sieve, it’s gonna vaguely have my shape. I can’t hide that ‘signature’ any more than I can create it. It’s something that occurs. It’s DNA.”        
Robert Altman on the topic of directors subconsciously leaving their personal imprint on a film.

When Roman Polanski’s controversial film adaptation of Macbeth, William Shakespeare’s famously “unlucky” play (theater superstition has it that the play is cursed), flopped unceremoniously at the boxoffice, the director salved his wounded ego by complaining to any and all that the film’s poor reception was due to the public failing to believe his blood-soaked, graphically violent approach to Shakespeare's tale of a nobleman brought low by ambition and waning conscience, was in any way influenced by the Manson killings. Polanski felt his film was never given a fair chance because misguided critics and Freud-obsessed American audiences insisted on reading allusions to the brutal August, 1969 slaying of his wife (actress Sharon Tate) and unborn child into all those explicitly rendered, Shakespeare-mandated, stabbings, dismemberments, ambushes, beheadings, and infants from their mother's wombs untimely ripp'd.
Yeah...how silly of us.

"It makes 'The Wild Bunch" look like 'Brigadoon'"
Or so one critic thought upon the film's release. Most of the bloodshed that traditionally occurs offstage in Macbeth is placed front and center in Polanski's adaptation. 

Polanski was right of course. Audiences at the time most definitely reacted to Macbeth as a film made by a director exercising questionable taste in drawing upon an unspeakable personal tragedy for artistic inspiration. But how could they not? His first film in almost three years, Macbeth was Polanski's follow-up to Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and his first film since the cultural shockwave of the Tate/LaBianca Murders. I think it would be fair to say that at this point in his career, Polanski could have adapted The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore and audiences would still have scoured every frame looking for traces of what affect such a profound loss and personal trauma might have had on his work.

Roman Polanski is perhaps my favorite director of all time, but for him to have assumed it would be otherwise is not only naive, but smacks more than a little of a disingenuousness on his part. As one of the breed of filmmakers who greatly benefited from the “film director as star” cult that sprang out of the '70s "auteur movement," Polanski became the darling of both mainstream and avant-garde film by promoting his films as the creative end-result of his singular artistic vision. Whose fault is it then when audiences seek to detect traces of the director's DNA on the celluloid?

Jon Finch as Macbeth

Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth

Martin Shaw as Banquo

Terence Bayler as Macduff

John Stride as Ross

Both Polanski and co-collaborator Kenneth Tynan (the noted theater critic and literary manager of the National Theater Company) are terrifically faithful to Shakespeare's original text of The Tragedy of Macbeth, but make no mistake, this IS Polanski’s Macbeth. Good or bad, whether he likes it or not, Roman Polanski's cinematic fingerprints (not to mention copious amounts of blood) are all over this adaptation. Instead of denying it, perhaps it's time for Polanski to embrace it; for it is the infusion of one man's real-life fixations into the fictional story of another that wrests this Macbeth from its theatrical confines and brings it to vibrant, intensely compelling life. 

All the trademark Polanski templates and obsessions are in attendance: the bleak, empty vistas under ominous skies recall Cul-De-Sac; Repulsion's hallucinatory dream sequences are echoed in Macbeth's haunted nightmares; there's the coven of nude, elderly witches that hearken to Rosemary's Baby; and the coiled, masculinity-baiting tensions that exist between Lord and Lady Macbeth are not dissimilar to Knife in the Water's aggrieved married couple.

The Three Witches

Chaos, Darkness, & Conflict

So many familiar themes and motifs that later came to punctuate the entire Roman Polanski film oeuvre are present in fevered abundance—blunt, unsentimentalized violence; pessimism; a distrust of human nature; guilt; impotence in the face of destiny; black humor—one might be forgiven for forgetting that Macbeth was indeed written by William Shakespeare in the 17th Century and not Mr. Polanski in the 20th.

Nicholas Selby as King Duncan

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’m not much on Shakespeare. The language is beautiful, I’ll grant you that, but the image I have of Shakespeare on film is one of lugubrious dramas with British actors in love with the sound of their own voices staring off into the distance delivering speeches. In tights, yet.

There are exceptions of course. I'm fond of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet – (1996), Titus (Andronicus) - (1999), and this, Polanski’s Macbeth—which is my favorite screen adaptation of a Shakespeare work. Macbeth, with its exceedingly high body count and concern with such relatable, base emotions as guilt, envy, and revenge, is a particularly impressive translation to film, not only because Polanski is a perfect ideological match for a tale about the poisonous imprint of ambition (Lord Macbeth and Rosemary’s Baby’s Guy Woodhouse would have a lot to say to one another), but as one of cinema’s great visual storytellers, Polanski’s command of the language of cinema enlivens the story by creating images as poetic and dramatically evocative as the words that accompany them.

As though summoned by Macbeth's own brooding temperament, dark clouds
 gather in the skies above Inverness castle as King Duncan approaches to meet his fate

Polanski takes the naturalistic approach to Shakespeare’s play, an approach that forges a psychological intimacy to the story, making the characters life-size and rendering their faults not ones born of evil natures, but of human weaknesses. The tragedy of Macbeth is that the darkness within him is only unearthed after his fortunes have taken an upturn and his future success ordained. Lord and Lady Macbeth are only truly unhappy with their lot after it has been prophesized that it is to be improved. It’s like the “entitlement” sickness that grips Americans today. People seem to have lost the knack of being happy with what they've got because everywhere you look they're being told that they should want more, that they deserve better…and worse…as citizens in the “land of plenty”, are entitled to it. Ambition for ambition's sake is the madness that grips Macbeth.

Lord and Lady Macbeth: Thwarted by vaulting ambition

Polanski, who knows all too well the corruptive allure of ambition and its close kinship to guilt, makes Macbeth’s conflict of conscience one disturbingly personal and frighteningly real.

PERFORMANCES

In spite of Polanski's well-documented technique of micromanaging the hell out of his actors (which, given the level of performances he gets out of his actors, may well speak to the efficiency of the technique overall), naturalism dominates. His actors appear liberated and unfettered, their performances effortlessly lifting Shakespeare's characters from the printed page.
Macbeth’s boxoffice prospects were greatly diminished by the lack of star names attached to it (beyond Polanski’s, of course), but in Jon Finch (the late actor who starred in Hitchcock’s Frenzy) Polanski has an actor capable of tapping into the man behind the monster. Finch, whose dark, anxious eyes reveal more about the demons plaguing his character’s mind than any monologue can adequately capture, makes for a persuasively vulnerable, down-to-earth Macbeth. A performance refreshingly devoid of theatrical posturing and the arch striking of surface attitudes, Finch’s Macbeth is a man driven to malicious madness by weaknesses within him that he allows himself to be convinced are strengths.

Jon Finch's Macbeth is no speechifying protagonist. He's a man suffering
the disintegration of his soul in pursuit of ambition he scarcely knew he harbored.

Gender, sexual politics, and women as possessors of the only true power, have been recurring themes in a great many of Polanski's films (Cul-De-Sac, The Ghost Writer, Bitter Moon, Knife in the Water, Carnage, and his forthcoming Venus in Fur). Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth is tailor-made for Polanski's usual upending of gender roles in the service of dramatizing the subtle gynophobia that lies behind the uneasy alliance known as sexual relations in his films. 

In Francesca Annis, Polanski happily departs from the usual depiction of Lady Macbeth as natural femininity perverted by the "masculine" pursuit of power, and presents her as something of an intellectual barbarian equal to the physical barbarism displayed by the men. She is no better nor worse than those around her who plot and scheme, but hampered by the medieval limitations placed upon her gender, she operates within the only sphere allowed her: covert puppetmaster to her husband's implicit will.
Few critics in 1971 were able to get past her nude-sleepwalking scene, but Francesca Annis gives a very fine, understated performance as Lady Macbeth, both her fevered desire for the crown and eventual decline into madness are quite affecting.

"What, will these hands ne'er be clean?"

From his childhood eluding the Nazis in his native Poland, to the loss of his family to the Manson madness, one attribute of Polanski's real-life acquaintance with the naked face of horror has been his inability to see the need to paint evil as anything more than human, and anything less than something that resides within each of us.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Perhaps because I've never been partial to medieval costume dramas full of derring-do, pageantry, and heroic swordplay; I’m crazy about the squalid, gloomy look of Macbeth. Polanski gives us one of Shakespeare’s most unrelentingly bleak and depressing plays and serves it up with extra dollops of rain, murk, and medieval filth. There’s nothing romantic or even remotely cheery about it, and the effect is to ground Shakespeare’s larger-than-life themes of wrongs corrected and order restored into a cynically circular tale where suffering is as ceaseless and bleak as the horizon.

The graceful, romanticized fencing duels of the typical Shakespearean film are replaced by clumsily brutal bouts that highlight the awkwardness of the armor and the sense that what we are witnessing are not heroic battles, but lowly brawls and acts of aggression.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Although I dearly wanted to, I wasn't allowed to see Macbeth when it was opened. Not because my parents thought it was too violent for my tender age (I was 14), but because of all the pre-release publicity surrounding Lady Macbeth’s nude sleepwalking scene (so tame by today’s standards, the film could be shown in high school English classes) and the guilt-by-association tarnish of Macbeth being the premiere entry from Playboy’s newly-formed film division. (It’s reported that Polanski’s somber film got off to a bad start at press screenings when the title card, “A Playboy Production” was greeted with snorts of derisive laughter.)

The Macbeths find their nights plagued by sleeplessness

In any event, I’m grateful for having been spared seeing this film at a time when the horrors of the Manson case would have still been too fresh in my mind. As Manson's trial had only ended that same year, seeing the film just would have been too painful and depressing an experience. Now, with neither its nudity nor violence the incendiary focus they once were, it's possible to see Macbeth as one of the screen's more successful Shakespeare adaptations. A fact that remains even though time has yet to fully eradicate the cloud of sadness hovering over the violent events it recalls.
Polanski's Macbeth was released the same year as Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell's The Devils. As you can imagine, the entertainment world was up in arms over what it perceived at the time to be the "new permissiveness" in films gone completely out of control. 

Both in interviews and in his memoirs, Polanski has spoken of how happy he was during the making of Rosemary's Baby; a fact easily attested to by Polanski delivering an ingeniously dark thriller that is nonetheless buoyed by a delicate black humor and obvious love of moviemaking. By comparison, Macbeth, as riveting a dramatization as it is, has an unshakable air of sadness about it (the real reason I think the film fared to score well with audiences), and feels at times like an act of hostility directed towards the audience. It's as if—in choosing to make the violence so graphic, gruesome, and in-your-face—Polanski is enacting revenge on those who blamed him and his films for attracting the violence of the Manson crimes.

Critics like Roger Ebert took issue with Macbeth's wanton barbarism and the unfortunate resemblance of many of the knights to Charles Manson and his minions

Armed with the rejoinder that all of the violence depicted in Macbeth is Shakespeare’s, not his own, Polanski, subconsciously or not, decides to rub our faces in it. Outdoing any film he’s done before or since in terms of the depiction of savagery (even going so far as to provide a startling view of jeering crowds from the point of view of the already beheaded Macbeth), Polanski, perhaps feeling he would be damned by the public no matter what he did, opts for showing us a vision of a world the press had claimed he'd inhabited all along. A world of unremitting bleakness and hopelessness.

"When you tell a story of a guy who’s beheaded, you have to show how they cut off the head. If you don’t, it’s like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line."

                                                                                                 Roman Polanski 

The suggestion that artists cannot help but leave behind a patina of some aspect of themselves on their work is a concept to which I strongly adhere. And in the case of an artist as gifted as Roman Polanski, such a belief only stands to further enrich the viewing experience. For me, his Macbeth, a film of haunting images both beautiful and horrific, stands as a towering achievement in terms of one artist adapting the work of another (in this instance, a story ofttimes told) and fashioning it into something uniquely, exclusively...and to Polanski's regret...revealingly, his own.

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2013

GOSFORD PARK 2001

Adapting Robert Altman’s trademark, multi-character, freeform narrative style to the formalized structure of a classic Agatha Christie murder mystery is such an inspired concept, I’m rather surprised it took until nearly the end of Altman’s 50-plus years in film for someone to think of it. But after tackling musicals (Popeye), westerns (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), farce (Beyond Therapy), romantic comedy (A Perfect Couple), film noir (The Long Goodbye), the psychological thriller (Images), and satire (The Player); a good, old-fashioned whodunit was just about the only genre left for one of the more resilient and versatile filmmakers to come out of the New Hollywood.

Robert Altman has been one of my favorite directors since first discovering him in the early 1970s. But following the rather (for me) dismal back-to-back entries of Cookie’s Fortune (1999) and Dr. T and the Women (2000), I really thought Altman had gone the way of that other '70s favorite, Peter Bogdanovich; i.e., dried-up creatively, his best work behind him. I was wrong. Like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman proved himself to be one of those directors capable of delivering surprisingly fresh and innovative work well into their seventies. Indeed, at the ripe old age of 75, Altman’s Gosford Park revealed the director in his finest form since 3 Women (1977), delivering not only one of his most solid and fully realized films, but his biggest boxoffice hit since M.A.S.H. (1970).

Maggie Smith as Lady Constance Trentham

Clive Owen as Robert Parks

Kristen Scott Thomas as Lady Sylvia McCordle

Jeremy Northam as Ivor Novello

With Gosford Park, the collaborative efforts of Robert Altman, producer Bob Balaban, and screenwriter Julian Fellowes combined to create a marvelously layered re-creation of a traditional English-style crime mystery with a decidedly Altman-esque twist. The twist being that the mystery—a murder taking place during a weekend shooting party at an English country estate in 1932— is not seen from the point of view of the aristocratic set of relatives and guests, but rather, from the perspective of the servant class, below stairs. It’s a simple yet ingenious device allowing for the filmmakers to cleverly intermingle the crosscutting stories of some 35 characters while making shrewd observations on everything from the class system, changing times, sexual mores, social conventions, personal relationships, and cultural differences.

Helen Mirren as Mrs. Wilson

Alan Bates as Jennings

Emily Watson as Elsie

Kelly Macdonald as Mary Maceachran

In detailing a strained weekend in the country in which virtually all in attendance have something to hide or something they’re after, Altman’s legendary virtuosity behind the camera serves the misleadingly conventional setup exceptionally well. In fact, not since Nashville has Altman’s celebrated “bag of tricks” (overlapping dialogue, peripheral activity, cross-cutting storylines, ensemble cast of characters harboring secrets) seemed so organic to the material. Ostensibly hemmed in by the rigid constraints of the religiously adhered-to rules of the British social class structure, Altman actually comes off as more liberated than ever. There’s something in Julian Fellowes’ (Downton Abbey) surprisingly witty, culturally-perceptive script that presses most of Robert Altman’s best qualities to the forefront (I can’t think of a single director capable of getting us to keep track of, let alone care about, so many characters), while suppressing a great many of his weaknesses (the English locale spares us Altman’s fondness for the easy laugh of hayseed southern accents).

Michael Gambon as William McCordle

Eileen Atkins as Mrs. Croft

Bob Balaban as Morris Weissman

I saw Gosford Park when it opened in 2001, and, clocking in at a little over two hours, it's a film I was nevertheless sorry to see come to an end (a problem happily remedied by the DVD which contains loads of deleted scenes!). In a world where I find myself feeling grateful if the film I'm watching at least chooses to rely on smart clichés instead of stupid ones; Gosford Park is an endangered species: a film that feels like it's shedding the rote and predictable with the introduction of each new character. Somehow, while still adhering to the genre conventions of an Agatha Christie crime drama (or, as is referenced in the film itself, a Charlie Chan thriller) Gosford Park manages to confound expectations. The comedy is sharp, the drama is well-played and frequently moving, the characters are dimensional, the mystery element engrossing, and its subthemes on class distinctions are poignant and eye-opening.
Of course, the biggest surprise of all is that after all these years, Altman is in the best form of his career.

A particular favorite of mine is Camilla Rutherford as Isabel McCordle.  She and Mabel Nesbitt are characters with story arcs I'd describe as classically Altman-esque.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Perhaps the right word here is “grateful.” What I’m grateful for about Gosford Park is the depth of its intricacy. It's an entertaining film that breezes along, providing both character-based humor and genuinely affecting dramatic moments, yet Gosford Park has a great deal more on its mind than just providing a solid mystery and a houseful of suspects. It's a very smart, observant look at the kinds of surface behaviors and rituals that people engage in order to mask who and what they really are. And all this is layered atop a social satire and comedy of manners contrasting self-imposed hierarchies of status against those that are socially imposed. It's a film just brilliant in its complexity, chiefly because all of these layers play out subtly beneath an outrageously entertaining mystery that is fun to watch in and of itself.
From every conceivable angle, Gosford Park is a marvel of logistics. So many stories to tell, so many characters, so much information to impart...and yet, the film feels light and effortless. That Altman is able to deliver to us so many interesting characters in so brief a time is a skill he has demonstrated several times before; his being able to do so while simultaneously enlightening us as to the myriad duties and rituals that go into the running of an English manor house is something else again.

Gosford Park is a great film for repeat viewings. It's staggering the amount of subtle details one misses when first just trying to figure out "whodunit." The interwoven lives of all the characters become much clearer.

For me, it's such a delight to see a film that asks something of you. That requires your attention, mental involvement, and active participation in following along and picking up on all the pieces provided. It’s great not to have everything spelled out for you, or to have a camera continually directing your gaze towards where you should be looking and why. Gosford Park assumes an alertness from its audience and rewards you with a story that pays off as terribly sharp mystery, crisp comedy, taut character drama, and biting social commentary.

Stephen Fry as Inspector Thompson

PERFORMANCES
The nearly all-British cast assembled for Gosford Park is an eye-popper (Knights! Dames! The inexplicable presence of Ryan Phillippe!), a fact made all the more impressive by having some of the most distinguished actors democratically blended and divided between the upstairs and downstairs characters. Dame Maggie Smith steals scenes and looks quite at home as the snobbish dowager Countess (a role that is essentially a dry-run for the one she would assume 9 years later in Downton Abbey); but it's great fun seeing Sir Alan Bates as the butler of the household, silently occupying scenes like an overqualified extra; or Dame Helen Mirren, makeup-less and relegated to below stairs quarters. And as Gosford Park is a murder mystery, such egalitarian casting works much to the film's benefit, as it is impossible to play the "billing" game here - attempting to guess the victims and guilty parties based on star rank.

Geraldine Sommerville as Louisa Stockbridge (younger sister of Lady Sylvia)
Altman films have a reputation for being well-cast, and Gosford Park is no exception. As was the case with A Wedding, Altman makes it easier for us to tell who's-who by casting actors who look as if they could plausibly be related

The performances in Gosford Park are so uniformly excellent that it's both pointless and futile to try to single out a particular actor. I confess to finding Ryan Phillippe to be the weakest link, although even in this instance his blank screen persona works well within the film's context. Nor am I too fond of Stephen Fry's Inspector Thom...(above stairs, no one lets him complete his introduction), which feels like another of Altman's risky forays into needlessly broad farce (think Opal in Nashville). Certainly, individual characters and their storylines stand out more than others, but if you're like me, you'll wind up having a different "favorite" each time you view the film.

Claudie Blakley as Mabel Nesbitt, serenaded by Ivor Novello

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

There's no escaping the feeling when watching Gosford Park, that one is watching the most elegant, life-sized game of CLUE ever! The insular, bygone world depicted is meticulously recreated in the seamless blending of locations and sets, outrageously gorgeous clothing, and an attention to period detail in makeup and hairstyles that fittingly recall the very sort of films from Britain's past that Gosford Park pays homage to.

Derk Jacobi as Probert, Sir William's valet

All this lavish period-detail fetishism would be off-putting were it not used in service of dramatizing the huge difference in the lives of the "haves" and "have-nots" of Gosford Park. And this is precisely why Robert Altman has always remained one of my all-time favorites; for while the average director would be content to have us ooh and ahh over the jewels, gowns, and luxury of the life depicted, Altman matches every loving close-up and perfectly framed shot of upstairs opulence with a similar shot in the tight and privacy-free servant's quarters. He never preaches or tells us what we should feel about it all, but unlike, say, the inappropriately worshipful depiction of wealth in 1974s The Great Gatsby, Gosford Park captures it all, but with a conscience.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Gosford Park ranks among my top five favorite Robert Altman films. I’m also an avid Downton Abbey fan...a fact that really intrigues me. Not only about myself but about America. American audiences aren’t known for taking British culture to its bosom, but Julian Fellowes’ tales of servants and the social classes seem to have struck a chord with us.

Speaking for myself, I suspect there is something about the distancing effect and “otherness” of British society class struggles that allows me to be entertained by them in ways unthinkable were these tales told about contemporary wealthy American households with maids, nannies and the like. Here in the U.S. we still have yet to come to terms with our own race-based class systems.
Our films and audiences have no trouble humanizing the downtrodden and their plight if they are white; but so much guilt is attached to our ugly slavery/Jim Crow history that Hollywood tends to mostly greenlight movies in which black characters in servitude exist to reassure white audiences or provide them with white "hero" characters who rescue the oppressed from the very racist social structures they created.
No, as far as America is concerned it can take a Downton Abbey to its bosom because it is infinitely easier for this country to culturally process stories that feature white characters both above and below stairs. A lot of uncomfortable subtext is avoided. In my own experience, I can attest to there definitely being a distancing issue here that makes Downton and Gosford suitably escapist.

Gosford Park boasts a beautiful musical score
There's an absolutely charming sequence where we're shown the servants hiding in the shadows to listen to the music coming from the drawing room. Ironically, the aristocracy is bored by it, while the lower classes, prohibited from being seen listening to it, are transported by it. 

Were there to ever be a film about slavery in America (or even the recent past of the Jim Crow era or the 1960s) in which slaves or victims of systemic racism are depicted not as they usually are (as a social issue), but as fleshed-out, fully-realized characters with the same level of dimensional humanity as the servants of Gosford Park or Downton Abbey – varied, unique individuals granted their resentments and temperaments, people with their own hopes, personalities, and emotional agonies derived from their life circumstances – I'm pretty sure my heart would never stop breaking.

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2013