September 25, 1975 [Dog Day Afternoon]

Al Pacino and John Cazale again--and Cazale is once more the weaker one--but not quite: Pacino’s Sonny can’t keep his shirttail tucked in or his eyes from bulging. Cazale’s Sal may be a bit slow, but he keeps his gun pointed, and is ready to do all the things that Sonny only thinks about.

But what were they thinking? How could they keep their lives private in New York City, where every bad move becomes a headline, every limping story instantly a celebration of trapped celebrity--but Sonny and Sal get to strut and shout from their tight spot, and the comedy of it grows like the crowd they attract. When we go outside to see what it looks like from there, we’re joined by Charles Durning’s cop, his own shirttail not cooperating, his happy-clown frame skittering around in the hot street, talking fast to keep the other clowns from quitting the circus.

Sidney Lumet manages to direct heat, believe it or not, the closing in of an urban summer, pressing people to do the worst things--as in Ray Bradbury’s “Touched with Fire”--the sky white and watching, checking it out but making no promises that don’t include a bullet.

June 20, 1975 [Jaws]

The first day of summer already--and already I’m uneasy about going down to Miami in August. Jaws has seen to that. My eldest girl took her little cousin to see it--and they’re both happy and freaked out. Jean and I followed them--they stayed for another show--and the movie works like a surefire fun-park mechanism, shocks and tension, lingering evolutionary fears brought up to the surface, broad as the shark’s flanks and giddy in the panicked fun of it--after all our years together, I still grin when Jean’s surprised: She lets out an actual “Eeeek!” like a lady in a cartoon cornered by a mouse.

But then everything calms down for a little bit--the three men in the little boat, reminding me of Ibsen’s dour Enemy of the People: the scientist who tells everyone the water’s no good--Richard Dreyfuss as the punk kid who flips the bird at the Chamber of Commerce of pleasant Amity--willing to redden the beaches a little; and the city cop, Roy Scheider, along for the ride, his stringy frame gripping the rail; and most of all Robert Shaw’s Quint, smiling like the damned, his face raised up to see the past: the Indianapolis sunk, the sharks and their “doll’s eyes rolling over white” and his friend bitten in half, “bobbin’ like a kind of top.”

It is a monologue that asks the swooping camera to stand still, and the big soundtrack to pare it down to a couple of expectant, mournful violins--so that the shark out there can get scarier than ever--and so that we can know what Quint knows: that after we've had our fun the shark will fill his mouth with blood as it pushes him down its throat.

December 20, 1974 [The Godfather, Parts I and II]

Francis Ford Coppola says the Godfather movies are more about a family than about the Mafia--so what happens to the Mafia? Does it become a metaphor? For what? The world the family has to live in? The politics that surrounds them? The America they have inherited--or made? All right, I'll play along; I can dig social/political theory, even at the movies.

But how can I ignore Fredo, hunched in the background, flinching under his father’s love, his brothers’ passions--hot and cold--and him stepping sideways just once, like a small crab, and crunched underfoot for it? Yes, it’s a family’s story--but it seems reverse-Biblical, the jealous brother not the murderer this time but the victim, the father’s love tarnished with pride--all the other sins following, shoring up the hull, building the haunted ship.

Haunted is right: The movies start dark, and Part II gets darker, the black sea-monster humps of post-war automobiles giving way to the false sunlight of Tahoe and Havana--but always, as in The Great Gatsby, they sit in “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The second part of the movie does grow golden at times, looking at the Don as a child--then dustier as a man (Robert De Niro fooling all of us--wasn’t he a simple-minded, terminally ill baseball player just last year?)--until Michael kneels before his mother, the two of them in the dark, looking back--the images juxtaposed, christening and hits, the wedding-dance trailing out longer and thinner until it becomes a funeral procession.

--And moping along in the rear, not even the corpse up front, is Fredo--ah, the genius of casting John Cazale, the perfect little mook next to all those groomed Corleones. No wonder he liked Vegas and Cuba so much: The lights were turned up all the way, driving the shadows back for a little while--where Michael waited, wiping his mouth with a clean handkerchief, bowed down too late in remorse.

December 17, 1974 [Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein]

Mel Brooks, once more unembarrassed by riches, in one year gives us Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Madeleine Kahn, Cleavon Little--and, as though they could not carry the pictures (Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein), he throws in Marty Feldman, Slim Pickens, Teri Garr, even ex-Detroit Lion Alex Karras--and Kenneth Mars, fergodssake, and Cloris Leachman--not to mention himself as the Gov, crosseyed and addled, burying his face in mammarial splendor. It’s as though Brooks had decided as a matter of law that vaudeville isn’t dead--let alone Your Show of Shows--then proved it--with pictures that are more than parodies, but movies about movies--Westerns and Universal Studios Gothic, to be specific--and also about the movies themselves, the greedy urge to spill into the audience and be as real as our desire to be in the movies.

Is this too much? Am I spinning out once more? I can’t help it: Brooks figured out that the “R” rating in a movie can mean more than blood and breasts--that the nightclub’s late show goes blue, and in the hands of a master works like pitch-perfect flatulent song, giving the posterior razzberry to everything both racy and racist. As Lili Von Shtupp informs us, “It’s t-woo, it’s t-woo.”

But most of all the metaphysics of moviegoing, the head-bending anachronisms--Wilder’s retired gunfighter musing, “I must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille,” or using some of Colin Clive’s lines from the original Frankenstein--let alone the sets themselves, straight from the Universal warehouse, still ready to spin and spark, while Marty Feldman plays Groucho to Wilder’s Harpo--and Peter Boyle wails his way through Cole Porter. And the final breakout: the finale of Blazing Saddles, the Western characters leaving their soundstage, wandering into a musical--and greedy Brooks, one more treat, Dom DeLuise in jodhpurs and a beret, screaming into a megaphone--and then into the theater itself to see how their own movie turns out--Hedley Lamarr (ahem) dying in front of Grauman’s Chinese, wondering how Douglas Fairbanks could do all those stunts with such tiny feet.

I was trying to think of the last time I laughed so hard at a movie--and it was The Producers a few years back. Mongo know now what funny.

November 4, 1974 [Ali: Fear Eats the Soul/Angst essen Seele auf]

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul took me by surprise: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was extravagant--almost decorative in its excesses--not a lot of fun, but fascinating, like a sculpture made from sharp objects still moving. But here he remakes All That Heaven Allows--and as fraught with peril as Douglas Sirk’s movie is, it still had Technicolor and Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman to soften the blows.

Fassbinder replaces Rock's silky, manly gardener with a stolidly anxious Moroccan, pot-bellied and unblinking--but also sort of a catch, muscled and affectionate. And Jane Wyman's eager-for-love, well-to-do suburbanite becomes a puffy cleaning woman, Emmi, yes as sweet and lost as Wyman, but also blotchy and stiff. And what happens when I accept their love as much as I accept their blocky, assertive normality? The movie invites me to see them more clearly, and the fear that runs beneath.

More re-imaginings follow: Wyman's upper-crust coterie becomes Emmi's fellow charwomen--but still they keep their noses upturned and move from Emmi as swiftly and surely as Jane Wyman's cocktail set. And then there’s the almost-comic rejection of the marriage by Emmi's children. In the Sirk movie, they stiffen and sniff, petulant and final. Emmi's children, though, gape at Ali as though he had two heads--or horns?--and then, remarkably re-inventing All that Heaven Allows's Merry-Christmas scene, the TV replacing Rock (Wyman’s stricken face reflected in its blank gaze, like the wife in The Fly confronting her new husband), the son deliberately kicks in Emmi's TV set--only to later bring her a new one, as part of a sequence that goes beyond Sirk into a more sober view of the weight of conformity and the mercenary heart of prejudice.

Just as things between Emmi and everyone else--including Ali himself--are at their worst, her enemies realize they need her--as a customer, as a workplace support, as a babysitter; and, in the case of Ali, as an all-purpose strongman, cleaning out storage areas and so on; and the couple falls into favor with the world--just as they feel a rift between each other, widened by race. Everyone around Ali either disregards or even openly insults his humanity. He is driven to plodding adultery--abetted in part by Emmi herself, who also begins to allow the world's prejudices to seep in. She makes minor but telling comments about his "foreignness," and, in a quietly painful scene, even invites her friends to feel his muscles, as though he were a particularly appealing pack animal.

Ali collapses--like Rock Hudson's sudden tumble down the mountain--from stress: ulcers as the pain of racism simultaneously made physical and internalized, literally eating at him. The film ends like Sirk's, with Emmi standing over her man, determined to help him--but fearful the pain will not go away. And the movie respectfully steps aside so that we can taste the fear that draws them apart, the pain bright and sharp, the room quiet.

October 3, 1974 [The Texas Chain Saw Massacre/The Exorcist]

I want to look away--but I give in, and The Exorcist earlier this year and now The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are not content to scold me for watching; no, I must be punished. There were moments during The Exorcist when I looked down at the lower right-hand corner of the screen, unable to escape the soundtrack but having had enough of the sight of the thing. So I’m a candyass--but during the picture there was a near-fist fight in the audience, and three people stumbled up the aisle, and when the movie wasn’t whining and growling I could hear low sickened murmurs and little sharp anxious snorts. This was not the zero-budget, grainy-print crowd: They had come to the mall for a Hollywood picture, but Hollywood had other ideas.

The Exorcist is a nightmare--oh, the cliché of that; but it’s true: The room with the closed door, the certain knowledge you shouldn’t go in, the compulsion that drives you anyway, the awful hybrids that lurk within. Over and over, in the dark, with all hope folded up tight, like a suicide note still clutched in your hand.

But there’s Lee J. Cobb, kindly and sonorous, and Max von Sydow, tall and holy, so it should be OK--but I’m too nervous from all those expelled fluids and devilish recriminations, and Cobb doesn’t know what’s going on, and von Sydow seems so frail. Could it be that I’m not in Hollywood any more?

Well, compared to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, all that was Disneyland. I’d heard this little creep of a movie was without remorse--but that’s like saying Nixon is no longer President. Both are done to a crisp, lopped off at the shoulders without hesitation. The plot does not matter; it is the world we are forced to live in--not The Exorcist’s nightmare, but a sunlit afternoon--Texas summer hot, with dead scrub along the roadside and the asphalt getting spongy--but the evening brings no respite, because that’s when the door suddenly opens, and the Monster conks you over the head--it’s why you’re there, you understand, and what It does--and happily cuts you up. This is a movie without a conscience; its last twenty minutes is nothing but uninterrupted screaming, and if you pay attention you pay dearly.

Things are getting bad out there; I’m not sure if we’re even allowed movies any more, just bad dreams and the nausea of fulfilled urges.

June 23, 1974 [Papillon]

Papillon is on a second run, and my cousin and I saw it at the dollar show in the mini-mall, the print a little scratched and the projection jumpy--but two and a half hours later we looked at each other and knew what we both wanted: to stay in our seats and watch it again.

It was a maybe-true-life adventure, one helluva yarn, like Lawrence of Arabia--but without the jaundiced eye--not with Steve McQueen starring, an actor so straightforward I wonder if, by comparison, I've ever really told the truth myself. McQueen may not reveal too much, but he's honest about it; I wouldn't fault him if he simply looked into the camera to deliver his lines, his eyes--even though ravaged by solitary confinement, the salt wind of Devil's Island, his own mad determination--never letting him down as he tries to tell us that Papillon is an instinct--the urge to survive--and he'll put up with anything--even Dustin Hoffman's fussy little forger, peering like Mole in The Wind in the Willows at the wide world set against them, a friend to the end.

When Papillon emerges from his years in solitary, his frail insistence that he remain alive reminded me of my father, blind and wheelchair-bound, hunched over and lighting up a Kool, doggedly making it through one more day. He broke my heart, and McQueen does, too, even as he tosses the raft over the cliff and improbably bobs to the surface, tiny and free.

December 20, 1973 [Sleeper]

About eight years ago I saw Woody Allen's nightclub act--the bit that stays with me is his account of group therapy baseball teams, in which a kid on the Neurotics steals second, then feels guilty and goes back to first.

That kid grows up and is frozen solid in Sleeper, and wakes up in a gag-man's dream: a future of endless over-sized props, from bananas to noses to chickens--but he's still neurotic, and a narcissist, and a cynic, and most of all the exasperated pragmatist--with an eye on the Orbs that life has to offer, the Pleasure Principle finally at his fingertips. Whether as fugitive or robot, revolutionary or the only cellist in a marching band, Allen remains the nebbish, the kvetcher, the kibbitzer, the Wandering Jewish schlemiel-schlimazel, one losing his ice cream from the cone--to land on the other's shoe. After an Allen performance I feel a Yiddishness seeping in--no, tugging at the sleeve, and I look down where the little guy winks, mincing around and a real pain--but charming somehow, eager for both of us to always have our way, despite the glasses and Larry Fine haircut.

October 14, 1973 [The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant]

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is filled with doppelgangers-in-reverse: at the periphery mannequins stand and recline, disrobe and embrace, are attended to with practiced hands--but they do not mimic the humans in the room; no, Petra and Marlene, her silent servant (as unnerving as Harry Langdon in a de Sade dungeon), and Karin, the dream-lover/model--they seem to be the dolls, smooth like plastic--even the birthday present is a doll, lying there in the room draped in Renaissance manhood, Roman muscles almost flabby as they hang over the women's heads, all of them calling it love. It's lush and desolate, Petra's bedroom-as-anteroom, waiting for someone to begin living. Maybe the mannequins--but who are they?

And so, is it too easy to see Petra's name as a sneering pun? After all, Marlene is there only as a Kewpie-doll fetish, something to be flogged, and Karin stays just long enough to x-ray Petra for us, the hollow bones pale. But Petra weeps for love, and how can we hate that? Oh, the movie makes it easy--too much so, maybe, banging on the hollow gong so bitterly that Petra's exhausted decency barely sounds, a kind of thud at the end, the conventional blunt object.

I saw the movie yesterday, and last night dreamed I was in a room talking to a woman I knew many years ago, someone I thought I was in love with--but I was lonely, and that makes one inventive, so that even today I can dream about her and imagine that she knew I wanted to love her, and that she could still sit in a room with me without reproach. But in the dream the light kept fading--and I kept looking at her because the light was behind her, the darkness at my back, and I knew if I turned around to face it, everything would end. So I can't hate Petra, even though she begs me to.