Pier Paolo Pasolini: 'Accattone' (1961)

Accattone (1961), Pier Paolo Pasolini's first film, is set in post-World War Two Rome among deadbeats, "scroungers" and working class denizens. Generally, able-bodied men work as little as possible, preferring to pimp out a girlfriend or commit petty thefts to get by rather than work like dogs. Many sit around at little outdoor cafe tables, clowning off with macho edginess  -- exactly as we later see New Jersey gangster crews do in The Sopranos. 

Here, Maddalena (Silvana Corsini) with Accattone (Franco Citti) in their little crib, which is a shared space.

Once Maddalena is imprisoned, Accatone scrounges up Stella (Franca Pasut) to fill in, with mixed results.

Pasolini keenly observes situations involving collisions between people and living conditions, socio-economic class structure, gender roles, and Catholicism. Shot in crisp black and white with an occasional surrealistic sequence, Accattone is a beautiful film about trapped people. The non-professional actors are superb. They've got The Look. 

Today's Rune; Fertility. 

The Week of Three Thursdays

I came across several Ford dealer booklets today, and hereby present two scanned covers from the bunch. Here: Ford Falcon '61: "The World's Most Successful New Car" (complete with racing Snoopy). Robert Strange McNamara (1916-2009), whose heavy hand would shortly be felt in Vietnam, had his fingers on the Falcon first. Some elements of the Falcon went into the Mustang, which hit the big time in 1964. 

The Falcon helped Ford recover from the disaster that was the Edsel. Here: "1960 EDSEL: new ~ nifty ~ thrifty." Fewer than 3,000 of the 1960 model were actually rolled off the assembly line.

Farewell, 2015!

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Солярис' / 'Solaris' (1972): Take I

To date, there are multiple versions of Solaris, starting with Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel and proceeding through movies, plays, radio programs, albums and operas as recently as 2012. It's a compelling story.

In this case, let's consider Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 movie version, Солярис / Solaris. This is a very cool film. The basic setup is this: a research station, mostly depopulated due to Earth-bound decision making, hovers above Solaris, a planet with super consciousness by way of Ocean. Ocean can create human beings out of cosmonauts' memories, and put them on the space station. How the different beings relate to each other is the nexus of the story. Spectacular! 

Today's Rune: The  Mystery Rune.

Margarethe von Trotta: 'Hannah Arendt' (2012)

Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt (2012) focuses on the deep 20th century thinker (pronounced more like "Errant" or "Aren't" than "Ah-Rent") around the time (early 1960s) of Adolf Eichman's trial -- and execution -- in Israel. 

With her articles on the Eichmann trial and the resulting book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Arendt's ideas at the time aroused heated controversy because of their multilayered complexity. Specifically at one point, she argues that some Jews were complicit in facilitating the evils of the Holocaust through their cooperation with Nazis. The movie covers all of this ground very well, including the hatred from others which she had to contend with.   

Many people nowadays know at least some of Hannah Arendt's ideas, with or without her name attached to them, such as "the banality of evil:" evil acts made easy by a widespread, bureaucratic, impersonal evasion of responsibility. Pass the buck. It's not my department. I didn't know. I was just following orders, rules, protocol. Sorry, I cannot recall . . .   

It took me about twenty minutes to get into sync with Hannah Arendt's pacing and field of characters; once in, I was all in. 

The meticulous 1960s details of a working intellectual and her circle of friends, assistants and critics -- plus her living and working spaces -- are all excellent, as are the actors: especially Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt and Axel Milberg as Heinrich Blücher, Hannah's anti-Stalinist communist philosopher-poet professor husband. 

Among several other important characters, keep an eye out for Martin Heidegger, the philosopher -- an early paramour and, for at least a time, Nazi sympathizer -- and American writer-friend Mary McCarthy. 

Today's Rune: Partnership.   

Freedom Riders

Stanley Nelson, Jr.'s Freedom Riders (2010) does excellent work bringing the Freedom Rides of 1961 -- and the harsh resistance to them -- into perspective and full, open view. Drawing from the work of Raymond Arsnenault and others, Freedom Riders weaves throughout the tales of several key players -- Freedom Riders, other civil rights leaders, politicians and officials with different perspectives, witnesses and Good Samaritans. Like the Freedom Rides themselves, Nelson's documentary starts out smoothly and then picks up momentum, driving right into the brutal resistance of white segregationists in Alabama and Mississippi. 

At about two hours, Freedom Riders (PBS, American Experience) takes us on a mesmerizing and sometimes horrific journey through fresh, still resonant American history.

The music is gripping, too. I was delighted to hear in the background (near the end of the film) Detroit-born Barbara Dane's version of "I'm On My Way," which is a very cool one, indeed, as are various other interpretations of this great traditional gospel song, usually referred to in full as "I'm On My Way (and I Won't Turn Back)." Check out, for instance, recorded performances by Odetta, The Carter Family,* Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone and Mavis Staples.

Full disclosure: I'll be co-discussing Freedom Riders at a local college next week. Glad I watched the film ahead of time, certainly. 

Today's Rune: Fertility.

*"I'm On My Way To Canaan's Land," by Alvin "A. P." Carter.

Sam Mendes: Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road is, off the bat, two things: a novel written by Richard Yates (1961) and a movie directed by Sam Mendes (2008). 

Mendes' film adaptation of the novel presents a bleak microcosm of isolation, alienation and peer pressure set mostly in the mid-1950s, in New York City and suburban Connecticut, five years prior to the beginning, in chronological setting, of the AMC series Mad Men. Think Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), and anticipating Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967). 

This brightly lit (almost washed out in its brightness) film is both grim and meticulously done in Sam Mendes style -- if you've seen American Beauty, Jarhead, or the latest James Bond film, they all bear his stamp. 

Here, a marriage is pressure-cooked. Kids, nice house and stability are of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. Follow your dreams or die a little inside, day after day. Think big, not small -- and God go with you. Once you've got food, shelter and clothing, you are free to choose your arc -- don't let yourself feel trapped, isolated and hopeless. Got it? In 2014, there should be more room to maneuver than there was in 1955. Do you think there is?   

Today's Rune: Harvest.  

Coen Brothers: Inside Llewyn Davis

Seeing Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), it's 1961, okay? All across the USA . . . It's set mostly in NYC, Chicago and along the road in between. 

I really like this film, and it'll take a while to absorb. Kind of trippy, kind of existential, kind of like a mythical tale, with realism, magical. On the road between the cities in snow and at night -- these scenes were mesmerizing. And along came Dylan. Can you dig?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 
   

The Innocents

I hadn't seen The Innocents (1961) in quite a little while, but it stuck with me over many years. 

After another look just now, The Innocents turns out to be just as excellent as I remembered. 

Based on The Turn of the Screw, the 1898 book by Henry James and a later play version, the screenplay for this movie variation -- directed by Jack Clayton and starring Deborah Kerr -- was largely written by none other than Truman Capote. 

What I particularly love about this horror story is its creepy ambiguity. 

Is Miss Giddens (the governess, played by Kerr) possessed of a wild imagination, or are the sibling children Flora and Miles (Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens) partially or wholly possessed by demonic spirits?

What's going on here? Is everybody crazy? Or are they being haunted by different aspects of their own infiltrated souls? 

The Innocents: black & white and seen all over. Well worth checking out this Hallowe'en season.  

 Today's Rune: Gateway.

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild (1990). Retro (1960-1961). Atmosphere. People. Lonely. Lost. Pining. Wet Streets.

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild. Interior Spaces. Smoking. She wants this, he wants that. Telephones and clocks. 

Wong Kar-Wei: Days of Being Wild. Image. Music. Groovy style. I dig. Can you?

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Jean-Pierre Melville: Léon Morin, prêtre / Léon Morin, Priest

With Léon Morin, prêtre / Léon Morin, Priest (1961), Jean-Pierre Melville delivers a strong adaptation of Béatrix Beck's 1952 novel, Léon Morin, prêtre (English edition, The Passionate Heart). It's so good, so interesting. 

Moving at a novel's pace, Melville showcases more dialogue than is typical of his other films, and to good effect. With a tense backdrop (a town in occupied France during the Second World War), the main characters build an intense personal relationship in which they discuss spiritual matters, including aspects of Catholicism, Judaism and "heresy." And, how best can people live during wartime and at all times? To hook contemporary audiences these days, the main character (a widow with a daughter named France) has a crush on another woman and also on a certain priest. How will this play out?

Jean-Paul Belmondo (À bout de souffle / Breathless) as Léon Morin and Emmanuele Riva (Hiroshima mon amour) as Barny are both in top form. What a delight. If a grade had to be assigned, A+ all the way. The clear black and white Criterion Collection DVD includes deleted scenes, allowing one to glimpse ways Jean-Pierre Melville chose not to go with the completed film.

Finally, it appears that most or all of Béatrix Beck's novels are out of print, and most have not been translated into English at all. Seems like an ideal project to bring them back to life in the 21st century. 

Today's Rune: Partnership.    

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

José Quintero's The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, a 1961 movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams' 1951 novella, stars Vivien Leigh a half dozen years before her death, Warren Beatty on the upswing, Jill St. John, Coral Browne and Lotte Lenya, among others. This provides a field day for fans of Tennessee Williams, the ambience of Rome or any of the actors.   

Vivien Leigh's Karen Stone stands in for herself and also for Tennessee Williams. Not only is she (and they) trying to overcome loneliness and a sense of  mortality through "a geographic;" so, too, there's an eerie, haunted-looking stalker always just out of reach, a specter, a momento mori or reminder of limited years in which to live.  Many reading this will have at least some inkling of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).    

Other actors featured in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone have greater contexts, as well. Two of them feature prominently in James Bond films, one apiece -- think From Russia, With Love (1963) and Diamonds Are Forever (1971) to dig the connections.

This was José Quintero's only outing as a movie director -- he normally stuck with stage productions. 

Finally, there was a remake in 2003, but that's for another time and another place. 

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Tar Heel Nation 3: Maceo Parker

"Pass the Peas!" Maceo Parker (b. February 14, 1943, in Kinston, North Carolina), sax player and all-around cool musician, comes from a family of musicians -- including older brother Kellis Parker (trombone) and younger brother Melvin (drums). All three played in Kinston (Blue Notes, Junior Blue Notes, Mighty Blue Notes) and all three went on to college, the two younger brothers to North Carolina A & T (Agricultural and Technical) in Greensboro in 1961 and 1962 respectively and Kellis via the very first small wave of students to desegregate and begin integrating the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1960. (In case you were wondering, it took nearby Duke University until 1963 to desegregate -- so we're just fifty years on as of this posting).

The younger Parker brothers were hired by James Brown -- a whole story in its own right. 

I came to know about Maceo Parker through listening to James Brown & co. recordings -- records, cassette tapes, eventually CDs, whatever was at hand at the time, beginning in my later teens. Try like I did a long version of "Cold Sweat" (1967) and hear JB rapping in 1960s' style: "Put 'em where it's at now. . . Let 'em have it!  Blow your horn! Blow your horn, Maceo! . . . Get it!" The name Maceo stood out (Spanish-traced name for "gift of God") -- making me want to know more.   

This fall, Maceo Parker will be touring in countries like Argentina and the Czech Republic, but he can also be experienced live in Tar Heel Land. Where and when? Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where I saw my first formal jazz performance as a teen) on Friday, September 27, 2013, with George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic. Here's a link formore details. From the promotional:

'It’s hard to tell which came first, Maceo Parker or the funk. Maceo got his start with James Brown, and for over 20 years he has been building a new funk empire, fresh and stylistically diverse. In his blistering solo career, he navigates deftly between Brown’s 1960s soul and George Clinton’s 1970s freaky funk, while also exploring mellow jazz and hip-hop.' 

Can you dig? If all else fails, you can get yourself a brand new bag.

Sources include:

Markus Gruber documentary, My First Name is Maceo (2003, 2004 DVD).

Maceo Parker, 98% Funky Stuff: My Life in Music (Chicago Review Press, 2013), especially pages 41-53. 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

The Moviegoer

Last time I read -- and then wrote about -- Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (1961) was about two years ago. Before that, I hadn't read it since high school. In between the first two reads, Katrina struck. What I see now is  how much I've taken to heart Percy's existentialist idea of "the search." The search is about funding the now with meaning -- "significant moments," as San Antonio Bill would say, "energy exchanges." Social media conveys these sporadically, theatrically maybe. Theatre of the Absurd much of the time.

I should point out that I'm a Catholic convert, and very much dig Pope Francis for telling it like it is. Percy was a Catholic convert, too. You don't have to be Catholic to be an existentialist, though; you don't have to be religious at all. It's more like karma -- it's there and it works. The search. Not "finding oneself," more an active, open-ended, open-minded seeking, and finding of significant moments, exchanging "real" energy, not flagging half-ass energy. This can be done in solace, alone, or with another person or with other people -- strangers, friends, frenemies, guests, enemies, acquaintances, immediate family, extended family -- the quantity and specifics are less important than the momentous quality.

Percy: "The search is what anyone would undertake if . . . not sunk in the everydayness of [one's] own life . . . To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair" (page 13). 

One must be watchful of complacency and laziness, of losing one's sense of curiosity and wonder, of sinking or slumping into what Percy calls "everydayness" (a sort of "vegetable torpor," as Woody Allen once put it).

And so Binx Bolling notes later in Percy's novel:

"But, good as it gets, my old place is used up . . . and when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness. Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it -- but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch" (page 145).

The key is to keep searching, not for "the one key" but for (adopting a Stevie Wonder idea) "songs in the key of life." 

Today's Rune: Wholeness.  

Stanley Kramer: Judgment at Nuremberg (Take II)

Stanley Kramer's film version of Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is based on the teleplay by Abby Mann, which is why it's so dialogue-driven. Three central characters hold the intense drama together: the main presiding judge (Spencer Tracy), the main prosecutor (Richard Widmark) and the main defending attorney (Maximilian Schell).

They are supported by various others, such as a military liaison (William Shatner, who brings some levity to interpersonal scenes), the aristocratic widow (Marlene Dietrich) of an executed German general, the friend (Judy Garland) of an older Jewish man who was framed and executed by the Nazis before the Holocaust was well underway, an austere German judge who went with the Nazi flow (Burt Lancaster, over the top), a zealous and unrepentent anti-communist former Nazi judge (Werner Klemperer -- Colonel Klink of Hogan's Heroes), a simple-minded working man who was sterilized by court order before the war because his father was a communist (memorably done by Montgomery Clift), and a slew of minor characters.

Hitler's only been dead for a couple of years and already 1) many people are tired of the proceedings in Germany, even in "Allied" countries; 2) the dynamics of the Cold War have already replaced the Second World War in the minds of many policymakers on all sides; 3) the "West" intends to use the part of Germany under its aegis as a bulwark against Joseph Stalin's energies. That is, "Justice" is tinged and directed by political pressures, but not for everyone involved.

Today's Rune: Warrior.   
 

Stanley Kramer: Judgment at Nuremberg (Take I)

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is so sharp and engaging I was astonished on first run-through. This film explores still completely pertinent questions about freedom and responsibility (individual and collective), loyalty and dissidence, laws and justice. The cast is stellar, including: Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell (who won an Oscar for his performance), William Shatner, Marlene Dietrich, Richard Widmark, Montogmery Clift, Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland. Stanley Kramer (On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, Ship of Fools, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) focuses on intense dialogue, but his use of backdrops, settings and historical context is also effective. Very impressive work and not in the least a drag, as some might suspect.  

Today's Rune: Signals.   

Michelangelo Antonioni: La Notte / Night (Part II)

A little more on Michelangelo Antonioni's masterful film, La Notte / The Night (1961). Besides the sheer delight of Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti in fraught existential meditation, look for the shapes and signs of civilization, part changing and part grounded in ancient culture.

Do we still startle at the sudden dropping into view or earshot of helicopters, jet fighters, flailing construction equipment?  Does a sudden cloudburst send you scurrying? 

Besides shapes, patterns, and careful observation, there's a relaxed jazz backbeat and another one of those strange Antonioni scenes involving constructions of race. In La Notte, two "black" performers do jazz-backed circus tricks while the married couple (Mastroianni and Moreau) look on dazedly, restrained by their own "white" limitations. If this doesn't make many people feel a little uncomfortable in 2013, probably nothing will.  

Pictured above: Giovanni (Mastroianni) looks on in horror as his possibly soon-to-be-ex-wife Lidia (Moreau) exchanges interesting thoughts with his possibly soon-to-be-new-paramour (Vitti), while simultaneously considering a job offer by the latter's ultra-wealthy father. All in a day's work for the writer. Imagine think bubbles floating above their heads. Earlier, when visiting Lidia's ex-paramour Tommaso as he lay dying in a hospital, Giovanni asks the poor man (a fellow writer, pumped full of morphine) if he really likes his new book? Then they drink champagne with his mother. Que Sera, Sera.

Today's Rune: Fertility.        

Michelangelo Antonioni: La Notte / Night (Part I)

Really digging Michelangelo Antonioni's films. Latest round (out of sequence): La Notte / The Night (1961).

Three reasons to see La Notte: Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti.

More reasons: architecture, design, symbols and signs, documentation of time and place (Italy, 50+ years before 2013). 

Extras: jokes at the expense of writers. Not really jokes, but knowing details.

Three questions to consider. What makes happiness?  What keeps happiness? Is freedom more important than stability? 

Three more questions. How does an awareness of mortality play into your plans? Do you settle? Will you change anything in your life barring unforeseen circumstances, or is this it?

Today's Rune: Protection. 

Ingmar Bergman: Through a Glass Darkly

Ingmar Bergman's Såsom i en spegel / Through a Glass Darkly (1961) revolves around a mere four characters in a short timespan (twnety-four hours or so). It's not exactly a Thanksgiving gathering, but all of these chracters are family. There's David, the emotionally paralysed father, a writer who has spent most of his time avoiding the rest of them. There are his two children, teenager Minus (Lars Passgård), a student and aspiring playwright, and Karin (Harriet Andersson), an adult recently released from a mental institution where she's been treated for schizophrenia and subjected to electro-shock therapy. Finally, there's Karin's husband, Martin, apparently a professor, or perhaps a doctor who also teaches (it was unclear to me from the sparse dialogue, but he carries a medical kit and mentions dealing with his students). Martin is played by Max von Sydow and David by Gunnar Björnstrand. Not incidentally, in Bergman's Det sjunde inseglet / The Seventh Seal (1957), the former portrays a crusader knight and the latter, his squire.

Cool movie, beautifully shot in black and white on Fårö, an elemental Baltic Sea island.

Karin slips in and out of "two worlds" -- the mundane (pragmatic) and mystical-disordered (schizophrenic).  The way everyone relates to each other seems very true, and Harriet Andersson is superb in flipping the switch on Karin's state of mind, so to speak. 

I've known two schizophrenics, both very smart people. One, in North Carolina for a while, was a physicist and the other, in London, a landscape architect. Both of them would go off into mystical musings while seeming to retain an awareness that they were, or sounded, quite strange compared to those around them. I still remember some of the eerie things they would say. Tasked with conveying messages to both (years apart) and seeing to it that neither did self-harm or lurched into trouble, I also experienced other wild fluctuations in their behavior firsthand. As far as electroshock, it elicits memory loss to varying degrees, from what I've seen.

Bergman's influence extends to the Rolling Stones

Today's Rune: Gateway.          

Marlon Brando: One-Eyed Jacks

At one point in László Benedek's The Wild One (1953), when Brando as biker character Johnny is asked what he's rebelling against he famously replies, "Whatdaya got?" In One-Eyed Jacks (1961) -- which Brando directed and stars in -- his horseback-riding character Rio is more interested in settling a five-year-old score with his former partner-in-crime Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) than in general rebellion, though here, too, he is rebellious, and here, too, cherchez la femme: Sheriff Bleeker's daughter Kathy in The Wild One, played by Mary Murphy, is almost exactly paralleled by Sheriff Longworth's stepdaughter Luisa in One-Eyed Jacks, played by Pina Pellicer, a haunting actress who committed suicide in 1964.

 

One-Eyed Jacks is more or less a B-grade film, but it's plenty interesting and could use a good physical restoration (the colors look garish and smudgy, for one thing).  In addition to Brando, Malden and Pellicer, there are some enjoyable character actors involved, including Mexican greats Katy Jurado and Rodolfo Acosta, Puerto Rican great Miriam Colón, the always reliable Ben Johnson and Slim Pickens and, lesser known but also good, Larry Duran and Joan Petrone.

Other notable things about One-Eyed Jacks include its
settings -- Sonora, Mexico and Monterey, California, in the
1880s -- and its sympatico depiction of Mexican characters. Both pretty unusual in U.S. films at the time. It's also worth mentioning that at one time or another, Rod Serling, Sam Peckinpah and Stanley Kubrick were all involved in the project.  

Today's Rune: Signals.     

Catch-22 at Fifty

"The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live." -- Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (Simon & Schuster, 1961). A few more snippets follow . . .
 

"What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for."

"Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action."

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses . . .

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. -- Major General Smedley Butler, US Marine Corps, 1935.

Today's Rune: Harvest.