Salon.com > Daniel Mangin

“Burt Lancaster: An American Life” by Kate Buford

Fri, 10 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

For an actor whose screen debut, the 1946 film noir classic "The Killers," made him an instant star, Burt Lancaster's first few seconds on celluloid are remarkably subdued. He lies motionless in bed, his face in shadow. The brightest light in the shot shines on his T-shirted chest as he learns that two hit men are on their way to rub him out. He's nearly invisible as he passively accepts his fate, his face in shadow until just before he's murdered.

Four decades later, in his last feature film, 1989's "Field of Dreams," Lancaster plays an elderly doctor who has always wanted a time at bat as a professional baseball player. His final scene concludes with him disappearing into a cornfield after achieving his dream. These two evanescent moments bookend a career in which box-office hits like "From Here to Eternity" and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" made possible the artistic risks he took in foreign and independent American films such as Luchino Visconti's sumptuous epic "The Leopard" and the acerbic "Sweet Smell of Success."

“The Big Tease”

Fri, 28 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It's a Hollywood truism that if a film's pitch doesn't make sense in less than 10 seconds, the chances the picture will ever be made diminish considerably. With "'Spinal Tap' meets 'Shampoo'" and "'Rocky' in curlers" as their rallying cry, the makers of the hairdressing mockumentary "The Big Tease" had seconds to spare. So it should come as no surprise that despite a modest pedigree -- the script was co-written by and meant to star Craig Ferguson, the snarling Mr. Wick on ABC's "The Drew Carey Show" -- Warner Bros. signed a deal and rushed "The Big Tease" into production during Ferguson's hiatus from his TV series.

The plot, lighter than a swirl of John Paul Mitchell's mousse, centers on Crawford Mackenzie (Ferguson), a gay Scottish hairstylist who thinks he's been invited to an international competition in Los Angeles. The talented but naive newcomer treks across the Atlantic with a British television crew, only to discover that the form letter he received entitles him merely to be a "guest observer." Oops. After he bestows an impromptu makeover on a loopy but powerful publicist (played by Frances Fisher), she vows to help him secure the requisite HAG (Hairdressers of America Guild) card. Thwarting the duo at every turn are the contest's snooty organizer (Mary McCormack), who only traffics in superstar stylists, and the reigning champion (David Rasche), a pseudo-Nordic boor with the oafish name of Stig Ludwiggssen.

“Sugar Town”

Fri, 17 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

During Hollywood's golden age, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney played exuberant kids who fought the odds to put on a show or get into one. Sentiment being the order of their day, the duo's pluck and talent usually netted them fame and fortune. Behind the scenes they may have been popping pills, hitting the booze, wrecking happy homes and otherwise messing up, but audiences saw only the entertainment world's wholesome side.

Something of the reverse has occurred with "Sugar Town," a music-biz satire with the premise that nothing breeds desperation like a rock 'n' roll wannabe questing for stardom -- except perhaps fallen stars maneuvering to regain their luster.

This story's heartwarming side happened off-screen. Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, the co-writers and co-directors of "Sugar Town," scripted it in less than two weeks, shot it in three and set up financing with relative ease. @ la Mickey and Judy, they persuaded friends to donate their houses as sets and contribute their talents for lower-than-usual fees. The film's unvarnished look only adds to its charm.

The adventures of Sir Peter Ustinov

Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

As I sit down to chat with actor, writer and director Sir Peter Ustinov, someone whispers that he's getting peeved because every interviewer on his current publicity junket -- from Regis and Kathy Lee to the BBC -- keeps asking the same two questions: What was it was like to be knighted? What was it like working with the late Stanley Kubrick on "Spartacus"?

To get on his good side I mention upfront that neither query is on the agenda. "Thank goodness," he replies. But I press my luck when I inquire if there's anything he'd like to discuss that no one's asked him about. "Look, bub, I'm not here to do all the work," he conveys with a stern expression. Then comes a devilish smile.

"The function of silence," he intones with a chuckle, before pursing his lips, easing back in his plush chair and closing his eyes. Interview over.

Pause, two, three, four. Gotcha.

Such mischievous geniality accounts in large measure for the appeal of "On the Trail of Mark Twain with Peter Ustinov," a four-hour documentary that airs on PBS beginning this week. Twain took a round-the-world trip in the late 1890s that he documented in his book "Following the Equator." Sir Peter retraces Twain's steps a century later and compares notes.

“Head On”

Fri, 20 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

When a male director films a gritty, visceral look at life
-- a "Mean Streets," a "Reservoir Dogs" or a
"Trainspotting" -- it's usually taken at face value and
praised as "muscular" moviemaking. Let a woman try the same
thing and she's apt to find herself being chided for trying
to "out-macho" her male counterparts, as has Ana
Kokkinos, the Australian director of "Head On."
Sexism aside -- "I thought the press here had matured past that kind of thing,"
was Kokkinos' only comment about it during a conversation we had in June -- with "Head On," the insinuation seems all the
more misguided given that most of the film's action also
takes place in its source, Christos Tsiolkas' novel
"Loaded." If anything, Kokkinos was in competition with the
book, in which a rebellious, drug-devouring 19-year-old
describes his fucked-up world. She reworks what was mostly a series of monologues in "Loaded" into vivid scenes, and trumps the book by supplying the techno-infused soundtrack it implies.

“Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst”

Tue, 17 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

When a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise" blasts popular literature of the day, he cites "Fanny" Hurst among several authors "not producing among 'em one story or novel that will last 10 years." Harsh, yet not far off the mark: Fannie Hurst was one of America's highest-paid writers, but few of her tales of shopgirls, boardinghouse dwellers and immigrants are still in print. These days, when she's not being confused with entertainer Fanny Brice, she's mostly remembered for the multiple film versions of her short story "Humoresque" and of her bestselling novels "Back Street" and "Imitation of Life."

In "Fannie," the first full-fledged biography of Hurst, Brooke Kroeger concedes her subject's literary shortcomings. But she makes a convincing case that Hurst was a literary trendsetter who used her celebrity to promote an agenda that included racial equality and women's rights. An early supporter of African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston (who worked briefly as her secretary) and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's, Hurst saw beyond the jargon of the causes she championed. She encouraged men to support equal opportunity for women, for instance, but challenged her gender to live up to the bargain, mocking the "languid psychology" of women engaged in "the industry of gold digging."

“Genghis Blues”

Fri, 09 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Andy Warhol observed that film is first and foremost about
personality, which was his rationale for dispensing with editing,
special effects and even plot. "People are fantastic. You can't
take a bad picture," he said in the '60s. Although the
inelegance of much reality-based television calls Warhol's dictum
into question, the new documentary "Genghis Blues" proves
that if you put fantastic people in front of the camera, something
memorable is likely to happen.

The low-tech film, shot on video and
blown up to 35mm, follows Paul Pena, a blues musician from San
Francisco -- he's played with B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Bonnie
Raitt and others and wrote the 1970s Steve Miller song "Jet
Airliner" -- on a voyage to Central Asia, where he participates
in a contest celebrating the ancient art of throat-singing. Witnessing
that high point in Pena's otherwise difficult life -- he's blind, in
shaky health and prone to depression -- is one of the film's major
pleasures; another is encountering Pena's exuberant friend and
mentor, the master throat-singer Kongar-ol Ondar.

Cinema therapy

Thu, 27 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

During the early days of home video, psychoanalyst Foster Cline treated a woman whose wild and uncommunicative child resisted the slightest display of maternal affection. It occurred to the doctor that his patient might benefit from seeing how Anne Sullivan dealt with the similarly rebellious Helen Keller, so he asked her to pop "The Miracle Worker" into the VCR.

Arthur Penns 1962 film about Keller and her teacher didn't work a miracle but, according to Cline, "the client learned from it how to set limits with a difficult child and saw that some children need to be held whether they like it or not." He found the experiment so successful he began to assign "video homework" to patients on a regular basis. Today many other therapists and mental-health professionals do the same, and some suggest that videos can help you even if you're not in therapy.

Interpretation of scenes

Fri, 21 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Bernardo Bertolucci describes "Besieged" as a "piece of chamber music for the cinema," the Italian director's way of acknowledging a sweep less operatic than that of previous works like "The Conformist," "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Last Emperor." Old habits die hard, though. "Besieged" unfolds on the surface as a duet between two dislocated souls, but Bertolucci can't resist working many of the psychological, sociopolitical and personal themes of his larger projects into this supposedly simpler composition produced for Italian television. The strategy at once expands on the film's source, a short story by James Lasdun, and diminishes it.

At the film's outset an African woman named Shandurai, played by Thandie Newton, flees her unnamed country after its military arrests her husband. She lands in Rome, where she enrolls in medical school, supporting herself by tidying up after an eccentric English musician who becomes intensely infatuated with her. Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis), as Shandurai always calls him, can't just come out and tell her he's mad about her. Via the dumbwaiter that connects their living quarters -- a townhouse he inherited from his aunt -- he shuttles cryptic gifts: a question mark on a blank sheet of music paper, an orchid, an heirloom ring.

Boys to men

Fri, 14 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Sweet films about young gay boys are enjoying an art-house vogue these days. The flood of syrup's enough to set a jaded queen to pining for Genet and Fassbinder, but who said the fight against homo defamation was about depth or finesse? Like the rest of the moviegoing public, queer folk crave youth and romance, something indie producers in the 1990s finally got wise to: Out with the psycho killers and in with buff boys and sensitive lads.

Among the current crop of crowd-pleasers are "Get Real," about a British teen's love affair with a closeted high-school jock, and "Trick," in which a musical-writing New Yorker falls for a hunk of a go-go dancer. "Get Real," currently in release, has the better script, but "Trick," which opens in July after screening at a few gay festivals, has Tori Spelling, of "Beverly Hills 90210" (believe it or not, this is a plus). Trumping both entries is "Edge of Seventeen," written by Todd Stephens as a remembrance of things from his gay past.