Faites Sauter La Banque!, Rrrrrrr!
Two French comedies with exclamation points in their titles.
Faites Sauter La Banque!, or Let’s Break the Bank!, is a Louis de Funes vehicle from 1963. I had been promised (warned?) that de Funes was “The French Jerry Lewis” (whatever THAT means), so I was expecting something quite broad, if not unwatchably garish and shrill.
Luckily, de Funes is nothing like that. Born in 1914, he made over 100 movies in France. In Banque! he comes off not so much like Jerry Lewis but Jackie Gleason. He doesn’t have Gleason’s weight or immense presence (he is, in fact, rather slight and unassuming in appearance, more Joe Pesci than Jackie Gleason), but he plays a similar character: the long suffering, easily frustrated, put-upon paterfamilias, who’s just trying to keep his head above water and will resort to crazy schemes to do so.
American audiences will recognize this character not just from Gleason but Fred Flintstone (I know, I know), Fred’s futuristic cousin George Jetson, Fred MacMurray from My Three Sons, and Dagwood Bumstead (all of which more or less overlap in time; what was going on in world culture that these put-upon dads all showed up at the same time?)
The crazy scheme this time around is: de Funes has been defrauded of his life savings by the unscrupulous banker whose bank is across the street from de Funes’s sporting-goods shop. de Funes hatches a harebrained scheme to tunnel under his store and into the bank vault, and enlists the aid of his foggy, scatterbrained family to complete the task.
Complications ensue, as they inevitably must.
It’s fleet, it’s funny, it’s only a little dated, it has no ending, and it zips by in an hour and twenty-three minutes.
de Funes’s comedy is only a wee bit broad, based in stage performance but not distractingly so, very quick and very detailed.
Woody Allen fans will note that Allen lifted the basic concept and an entire scene from Faites Sauter La Banque! for use in Small Time Crooks, where the bank robbers hit a water main, then rush upstairs to the store to get repairing supplies and find the last person who they want to know about the tunnel. Even a couple of lines of dialogue made it into Allen’s film.
Rrrrrrr! is a much later comedy (2004) written and directed by Alain Chabat, who has made a name for himself in France as a creator of solidly, unapologetically commercial comedies.
Rrrrrrr! is what I would call a “prehistoric procedural,” the story of the world’s first homicide investigation, in fact the story of the world’s first homicide. There is serial killer loose in caveman days, and a pair of slackers are assigned the task of finding the culprit.
The movie is very funny, succeeding most when it sends up conventions of policiers (“don’t worry, they can’t see you through this two-way rock” says one of the detectives to a wary witness). The humor is rather Pythonesque, and Americans can be assured that this is a genuine cultural artifact by the presence of Gerard Depardieu and Jean Rochefort in supporting roles.
Sight gags and linguistic jokes abound. Everyone in the tribe is named Pierre (or “Stan” in the English translation), due apparently to a lack of imagination on the part of the tribal chieftain. All animals in the movie have mammoth-like tusks, including ducks, chickens and frogs. A babysitter is paid “half a boarmoth” for watching the kids.
The murderer is revealed early on. The characters, and indeed the movie, are in no hurry. There is no mystery to speak of, and the stakes remain low throughout the movie, the better for the gags to flow.
I have no idea if either of these movies are available in any form in the US.
The Gambler
James Caan is a self-destructive degenerate gambler in Karel Reisz’s film of James Toback’s script.
This would make a good double feature with California Split, if only to demonstrate what Approach does to a piece of subject matter. As California Split is observational and behavioral, allowing us to watch the characters and draw our own conclusions, The Gambler boldly states its themes (Caan plays a college professor and the story periodically slams to a halt so that he can lecture his students on the film’s themes of Will and Risk and Fear and so forth).
As California Split seems very “slice of life,” with characters caught in everyday, perfectly ordinary scenes, The Gambler self-conciously packs in references to Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Mahler, Beckett (Caan, who is “in a hole” as a gambler, has a first edition of Beckett’s Happy Days on his desk, a play where the protagonist sinks into a literal hole)
A number of the cast members later showed up in Goodfellas, including Paul Sorvino, Frank Vincent and Frank Sivero. Now they play old gangsters, but once upon a time they played young gangsters. 70s Usual Suspects Burt Young, Vic Tayback and M. Emmett Walsh show up, as does a skinny young actor named James Woods, playing, what else, a yuppie bank clerk.
California Split
SPOILER ALERT
American cinema doesn’t get any more behavioral than Robert Altman. This is storytelling of a very high order. Even though the film is tightly plotted, it feels like it has no plot at all. There are very few scenes that even feel like they’re scripted; it feels more improvised. Not only is the dialogue loose, a good deal of it is completely meaningless. Especially Elliott Gould’s character, who, like Shakespeare’s Gratiano, talks and talks all the time and never says anything.
The story, briefly: George Segal is a gambler on a losing streak, and he meets up with Elliott Gould, who doesn’t seem to attach much importance to winning or losing. He doesn’t see an “end game” to gambling, he just likes to gamble. But George, the second act announces, is in debt to a guy named Sparky, and has to come up with some money. George is out of money, but Elliott always seems to have enough to get by, and the two of them go to Reno and, against all odds, win over eighty thousand dollars.
Gambling, it seems to me, is a form of prayer. You put your money down, and you hope that God favors you. If you win, then your faith is rewarded. If you lose, then God is angry with you for some reason.
When you study the statistics, when you study the Racing Form, when you “bet with your head,” you’re saying that you’re not going to place your faith in anything unless you’re sure it’s a sure thing, which is another way of saying that you have no faith at all.
I think maybe that’s why cheating is so reviled, because the cheater has no faith. The cheater believes that one can be redeemed without faith.
So there’s George, and he’s on his cold streak, and he’s down on his luck, and we sympathise. Why? He’s a degenerate and a loser, why do we like him? Because we feel like we’re losers too, we feel like we’ve been shut out of some better life.
And George sells his car and his typewriter and his radio and tape recorder and takes all his money and all of Elliott’s money (which he’s gotten by hustling basketball and mugging a guy in a bathroom) and they head to Reno. And once the stakes are raised, Elliott sees everything as an omen. The snow is an omen, the carpeting is an omen, the decor is an omen. This is faith of a paranoid kind, if the carpeting is a sign that you’re blessed.
And we want George to win, because we want to win too. We place our faith in George, he’s going to win for us. He’s going to be saved, and we’re going to be saved along with him.
Think of this: all through the movie, we watch George and Elliott bet on all manner of things: cards, horses, boxers, roulette, dice. You bet on a horse, the horse doesn’t even know what money is. Cards don’t care what’s printed on them, dice don’t care how they fall. But in the audience, we’re betting on George, for the exact same irrational reason that Elliott bets on anything; he has a feeling. And if George wins, then our faith is rewarded. If he loses, then there is no God. We become complicit in the theme and message of the movie.
And guess what happens: George wins, BUT.
But after he wins, there’s a scene at a bar, just George and Elliott. And George is miserable, and Elliott is very very happy, and they have this exchange:
Elliott: You always take a win this hard?
George: There was no special feeling. I only said there was.
Elliott: I know. It doesn’t matter. We made a lot of money.
So George placed his faith, and his faith was rewarded, but in his moment of vindication, he’s realized that the dice are not God, they’re only objects, their numbers have no meaning. It took this incredible winning streak for him to finally realize that there is no vindication in winning a gamble.
Not to drag Mamet into this, but there’s a scene in his TV movie Lansky where Meyer Lansky (played by Richard Dreyfuss) goes to his gangster friends to get some money to build a hotel in Las Vegas. Gambling has been going on in Vegas for some time, but only marginally, in gas stations and bus stations and such. And Lansky holds up a sign he took off the wall of a gas station, one that was hanging over a one-armed bandit: “Higher pay means longer play.” “Gentlemen,” he says (I’m paraphrasing) “This sign is telling you that we will take all your money. What it promises is that it will take us longer to do it than others.” Mamet’s point is that there is something pleasurable and exciting about gambling itself, even in the act of losing, that people can’t get enough of, that the point of gambling isn’t winning or losing, but rather the thrill of betting itself.
After the bit about the “special feeling,” Elliott says that they have enough money to visit every track in the world, he says they have enough money to live at the track for fifty years. Because for him, there is no end to the game. Life is the game. You don’t quit the game; what else is there?
So George looks like he doesn’t like the sound of that idea, and there’s the following:
Elliott: So what do you want to do now?
George: (pause) I’m going to go home.
Elliott: Oh yeah? Where do you live?
And what he’s saying is, this is where you live, in the casino, at the dice table, at the card table, at the track. And we’re worried that he might be right.
Mr. Urbaniak will note that California Split features a three-second appearance by his Fay Grim co-star Jeff Goldblum.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
A good overview of the Enron story, its main players and their basic dramas.
Only in passing does it place the Enron phenomenon in its historical context, but there’s only so much time. For an overview of why Enron happened in the first place, I recommend The Corporation.
The key to a thing like Enron is the Milgrim experiment, which the film discusses at length. For those unfamiliar, Milgrim had one guy pose as a scientist and another guy pose as a test subject, and then asked normal people to come in and participate in some “scientific research.” He said that he wanted to learn if electrical shocks would help improve memory.
This was all a Mametesque put-on. There was no experiment, at least not involving electrical shocks.
The “scientist” was in the room with the normal person, and the “test subject” was in another room, unseen. The “scientist” would tell the normal person to increase the power of the electric shocks, the normal person would push a button and the “test subject” would scream in agony as the “shocks” got progressively worse and worse. The “experiment” would continue until the “test subject” was either dead or the normal person said that he wouldn’t push the button any more.
What Milgrim found was that over half of the normal people would gladly, even enthusiastically, kill the “test subject” just as long as the order to do so came from a legitimate enough authority figure.
A simple form of this can be found in, say, a restaurant, where you get bad service from a surly waiter. Why is the waiter angry? Probably because he’s treated badly by the manager, who is being squeezed by the owner to cut corners and maximize profits.
So the Enron story is about a handful of deeply unethical, conscience-free, amoral monsters who set the agenda for one of the largest corporations in history. They told their employees, by example and by direct order, that anything they did to make money for the corporation was not only good, but would be rewarded. And so the employees, and everyone working with the corporation, including banks and contractors and lawyers and accountants, enthusiastically participated.
Eventually, “anything” came to include a rainbow of fraud, theft, destruction and death.
Nazi Germany, same thing.
And the current administration.
And Hollywood.
Maverick
You know, I wonder why David Mamet hasn’t written a movie about poker yet, it being so popular with the young’uns these days.
Maverick starts at the protagonist’s Second-Act Low Point. He has a noose around his neck with the rope around a tree branch, atop his horse, with a burlap sack full of snakes at his feet.
The bad guys could have just shot him, but that’s the way it goes. They could have just taken out one of their guns and shot him and left him in the desert and stolen his horse. Hell, they could have just stolen his horse, that would have been enough. But no, they tie him to a tree branch, with his horse, and throw a bag of snakes at his feet. That means that the bag of snakes was part of their plan to begin with. Yes, they left town and rode out into the desert with a bag of snakes in order to put Maverick in this life-threatening position, and then they rode away.
BAD GUY 1: Okay guys, we got to stop Maverick from getting to the big card game. There’s a half a million dollars at stake, and that’s a lot of money, so it is absolutely essential that he not get to the big card game. Understand me? Okay. Here’s the plan: we capture him, hit him on the head, put a noose around his neck, put him back on his horse, find a tree in the middle of nowhere, wake him up, throw the bag of snakes on the ground, and ride away. It’s foolproof.
BAD GUY 2: Why don’t we just shoot him?
BAD GUY 1: Who asked you?
BAD GUY 3: Where do we get a bag of snakes?
BAD GUY 1: Snakes R Us, they’re having a three-for-the-price-of-two sale.
Anyway, Mel Gibson, as Maverick, is there tied to a tree, inches away from certain death. He looks up at heaven and prays to God, saying that if God will get him out of this situation, he will do anything — anything — to make it up to him.
SPOILER ALERT: Maverick makes it out of the dire situation and goes on to the big card game.
I can’t watch this scene without thinking that what is going through Mel Gibson’s head is: “Dear God, if you get me out of this grinning, happy-go-lucky movie star life of mine, I will never forget it and I will do anything — anything — to make it up to you.”
Religion, and its cousin Belief, weaves through Maverick. There are a handful of direct references to Jesus and God; Mel rides into town on an ass, and mid-way through the movie, there’s a fifteen-minute set piece where he goes out of his way to recover the money stolen from a group of women trying to set up a mission, even though they reveal themselves to be chisling, dishonest and hypocritical.
But is Maverick really about a man’s relationship to God? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, God comes through for Maverick when he needs him (and vice versa, I suppose), but on the other hand, one of the last lines of the movie is something like “There is no more deeply moving religious experience than cheating a cheater,” which, the last time I checked, does not come from the New Testament.
That line is followed by a conversation about a trick that Maverick pulls off at the climax of the movie. In this scene, Mel has 4/5 of a royal flush and is lacking only the Ace. He places his belief in the card, and lo, it is so; the Ace of spades turns up and the day, and Mel, is saved.
So, right after the joshing “religious experience” line, James Garner says to Mel something like “Hey, how did you pull off that Ace of Spades trick?” and Mel says, hardly believing it himself, “Magic.” Magic, of course, being the secular word for God.
There is a phrase that courses through Maverick (screeplay by the great William Goldman): “Just Teasing.” And in a way, the whole movie is Just Teasing. When Mel gets beaten up, it’s Just Teasing, and when he beats someone up, well, that’s Just Teasing too. When Mel acts the fool, that’s Just Teasing and when he steps up and defends someone’s life, that’s Just Teasing too. When someone says they’ll give you the money they owe you, they’re Just Teasing, and when they finally give it to you, that’s Just Teasing too. When a woman kisses you, she’s Just Teasing, and when you kiss her back, that’s Just Teasing too. Even an Indian attack is Just Teasing. Everything in the movie, it seems, is Just Teasing, except that magic Ace of Spades. That, the movie insists, is real.
If the magic Ace of Spades is the pole star for Maverick, money is the only thing that anyone cares about or respects in the young nation that Maverick journeys through. It solves problems, binds wounds, brings lovers together, builds missions, and turns the conquest of Indian lands into a farcical charade.
And I suppose that’s true of America, that all anyone cares about is money, and I suppose that money has turned the Indian’s suffering into a farcical charade.
Now, Maverick is a comedy, so let’s cut it some slack. For the Indian, the one with lines anyway, they got Graham Greene, a real live Indian, to lampoon the part he played in Dances With Wolves, and his performance is so fluid and reflexive that it reminded me of the Indians on F-Troop. So if the movie’s view of the Old West is okay with Graham Greene, I guess it’s okay with me too.
(How reflexive is Maverick? He actually refers to The Old West as “The Old West” as in: “News travels fast in The Old West,” as if people in The Old West actually referred to it as The Old West. So yes, the movie’s opinion of American History is Just Teasing.)
And while we’re at it, how about that Jodie Foster. She should do more comedy. She’s very funny in this, and she’s very funny in Inside Man too. She keeps pace great with Mel. In fact Mel, I would say, as far as big deal movie stars go, is quite generous and game to share the screen with his co-stars. And he’s hired a cast designed to remind astute audience members of great films from times gone by, and I give him (or whoever is responsible) credit for that.
But we were talking about that magic Ace of Spades. Maverick (the movie) kids about everything, everything but that. That Really Happened.
So, Maverick Believes in the Magic Ace of Spades, and even though he seems to be Just Teasing about God throughout the movie, there is, nonetheless, that miracle that allows him to win the day.
Now then, “winning the day” in Hollywood terms means that you walk off with a great deal of money. So now where are we?
I never saw The Passion of the Christ, but it seems to me that Mel pulled off his own version of Maverick here. He made a movie about Jesus, according to his lights, in Aramaic, which no one asked him to do, and he financed it with his own money. That is what folks in Hollywood would call a “fool’s gamble.” You only spend your own money on something if you’re an idiot. Right?
At the beginning of Maverick, Mel walks into a saloon and sits down at a poker table and proceeds to lose for an hour, before pulling out the stops and cleaning everyone’s clocks (whew! mixed metaphor!). I think he did something similar with Passion. He said that he would make it himself, spend his own money, and not care whether he made it back, that to make this movie was an exercise in devotion to his God. And everybody laughed and said “That Mel, he’s crazy,” forgetting that, in every movie Mel Gibson has ever made, THAT’S WHAT HE DOES. He does something ABSOLUTELY CRAZY and thus WINS.
When you think about it, it’s an incredible triumph. And, like Maverick, his act of devotion did what? Allowed him to ride off into the sunset with untold wealth.
Is this a great country or what?