The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
A better film than The Secret of My Success.
For a drama as behavioral and character-based as this, there is an impressive number of process shots. Bogart and friend sit on a bench in a town square and chat, but the bench is on a soundstage and the town square is in a city a thousand miles away. Then, seconds later, Bogart and friend walk down the street in that same town, and there we are on a meticulously detailed set designed to emulate the town square we saw in the background in the previous shot. It’s all seamlessly done and seems impressively complicated.
My guess is that Bogart (or Huston, or both), for whatever reasons, didn’t want to travel to Mexico to shoot anything, so a crew was dispatched to shoot the background plates in the Mexican town square. Meanwhile, a section of the town square was built on a soundstage where the light and the action could be more closely controlled (and probably still be cheaper than a location shoot). But that means that the entire sequence would have to be storyboarded in advance, so that the second unit could get exactly the shots they needed for the background plates, all so that Huston could shoot Bogart and friend chatting casually and not have the audience think for a moment that they weren’t in a town square in Mexico.
But it’s not just the town square. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre takes place almost entirely outdoors, and yet the demands of light, actors’ schedules and control of elements demands that the bulk of the outdoor locations be built on indoor soundstages in Hollywood. So campgrounds and hiking trails are built in convincing detail and their scenes are cut seamlessly into outdoor scenes shot probably in the suburbs of LA. So the entire movie is this complex interweaving of studio scenes, outdoor scenes and location shots, all of which had to be planned in absurd detail beforehand to make sure it would all match and cut together. Which it does.
So you’ll have, say, Bogart and company hiking on a real trail on a real hillside somewhere, then you’ll cut to the reverse angle and they’ll be on that same trail, but now it’s on a soundstage and there’s a background plate of a mountain in Mexico in the background, then they’ll come around a corner and there they are on a campground set complete with hills and trees and rocks and dust and grit and shifting patterns of light, all in the same conversation, and it all matches and cuts together and you’re paying attention to their casual, low-key conversation instead of thinking “why does this campground look like a set?”
My two favorite moments in this exemplary American drama:
1. Walter Huston, as the old man, at one point is mistaken fora god by the natives. As is the custom. We find him lying in a hammock, kicking back and accepting gifts from the Indians. They give him a slice of melon, a piglet, a drink of tequila complete with salt-lick and squeeze of lime. A gorgeous senorita bends down to wipe his chin and lingers on his eyes. Huston then, inexplicably and completely out of character, does a take to camera, his face saying “Not bad, huh? My son directed this. Knows how to treat his old man.”
2. The Mexican bandit played by Alfonzo Bedoya (“we don’t need no stinking badges” is his classic misquoted line) casually, cheerfully, asks a firing squad if he can put on his sombrero before they shoot him to death, suddenly elevating one of the most despicable characters in the history of film into a charming rogue who’s philosophy suddenly seems to be “eh, you win some, you lose some.”
Interestingly, Bedoya’s film just previous to Treasure is an adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Pearl, a story which raises almost the exact same questions regarding the value, danger and purpose of material goods.
A note on Walter Huston: he’s very good here and deserved his Oscar, but for my money the Walter Huston performance to see is his Abraham Lincoln in DW Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln. The movie has no plot, being a pageant-like selections of “famous scenes from the life of our greatest president,” but Walter Huston is the only actor to have ever played the part and made his a living, breathing, actual person instead of a plaster saint, a cigar-store Indian or a Guy Wearing A Lincoln Beard. When I watch John Ford’s Young Mister Lincoln, I spend the whole movie saying “Why is Henry Fonda’s voice coming out of the mouth of that wax dummy of Lincoln?” Watching Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln I feel like I’m actually watching the great man himself on film.
The Secret of My Success
As in Working Girl, the secret of his success is that he gives himself an unofficial promotion. And hilarity ensues.
(One day, I promise, I will write a comedy called Hilarity Ensues.) (And also one called Suitcase Full of Money.)
Herbert Ross directed many fine character-based comedies. And also this.
The 80s, it seems, were not good for him. His direction here is arch, self-conscious and brittle.
Don’t get me started on the music. Clangorous, deafening 80s arena rock by bands with names like Night Ranger and Restless Heart. Not what you want for an office comedy, romantic comedy or farce, all of which Secret of My Success tries to take on at different points.
Michael J. Fox, bless his heart, looks all of 17, Helen Slater looks like Princess Di (in linebacker’s shoulder pads) and Richard Jordan does an uncanny (if inexplicable) impression of Willem Dafoe.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright and national treasure Christopher Durang logs many days as an executive with a lot of screen time but few lines. He and David Mamet and Wallace Shawn and Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter should all do a movie together. Actually, I guess I mean the exact opposite of that.
Mark Margolis, who made such an impression in Scarface as the Peruvian assassin with blood of icewater, here is reduced to muttering and looking hapless as an elevator maitenance man. I guess after Al Pacino splatters your brains all over the side window of a station wagon, you take what you can get.
A young Mercedes Ruehl plays a dotty waitress.
The zany comedy drags. Faces are pulled, doors slam, clothes come off, elevators are stopped (much to the consternation of the ex-Peruvian assassin with blood of icewater).
Usually in movies like this they put off-brand art on the walls because the originals would cost to much to procure and insure for the shoot. I give this movie credit for having its walls festooned with genuine 80s art instead of just knockoffs, mostly bold geometric assertions by the likes of Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt. However, I take away points for having a Josef Albers hanging sideways through the whole movie. Sideways! Albers must have been lying sideways in his grave. People, people, you turn “Homage to the Square” sideways and it makes no sense at all!
Working Girl, even with its big fake Warhol, crushes this like a grape.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
This is the best written, best acted, best executed American situation comedy since All in the Family.
Oh, I know, there was another well-written, well-acted, well-executed show somewhere in there, a little bauble called Seinfeld, but I honestly see Curb Your Enthusiasm as the more refined, better-formed show.
Legend has it that The Dick Van Dyke Show originally starred Carl Reiner, and that a pilot with him as the star exists somewhere. I think if that show had gone forward as planned, it might have turned out something like Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The show has its drawbacks. For instance, if I want sex from my wife, we cannot watch Curb Your Enthusiasm before bedtime.
Three different times, American television has tried to re-make Fawlty Towers, once with Harvey Korman, once with Bea Arthur, and most recently with John Larroquette. I don’t advise against a fourth attempt, but if they should want to try it again, Larry David could be their man. He doesn’t have anything like Cleese’s towering presence or exquisite physicality, but no one else currently in American TV can be as unapologetically unpleasant as he is and still have the audience on his side.
Some thoughts on supervillains
Let’s say Blofeld, specifically the Blofeld from You Only Live Twice.
Blofeld needs money. He’s going to build a rocket with a warhead on it and hold the world hostage.
That’s his plan.
How do you carry out this plan? Well a warhead is an expensive item. Even if you steal one it’s going to run you a pretty penny.
Then there’s the rocket. Even if you’re a genius and you know how to build a rocket yourself there’s still the staff you’ll need for labor. Rockets can’t just be slapped together, they have to work. Rockets are expensive now, they were even more expensive back then. And the labor has to be skilled labor. The parts all have to be made to precise specifications. It’s complicated. And all these people, your rocket designers and technicians and so forth all have to be paid. Why do they have to be paid? Because they’re not idiots or drug addicts, they’re skilled professionals who would otherwise be in demand elsewhere in the world. You have to pay them what they’re worth. They won’t build a rocket for you at gunpoint.
Once you’ve got your rocket, where do you launch it? It has to be a secret location. It has to be a secret location because what you’re doing is highly illegal. Where can you hide it? Blofeld came to the decision: A Dormant Volcano. He hollowed out a volcano (I’d like to have seen the bill for that engineering project) and installed his Rocket Launching stuff inside, then built a fake roof on top of his Rocket Launch Pad, making it look like the Dormant Volcano has a lake in the middle of it.
Okay. So. He has the expense of the designing and building the Rocket, designing and building the Warhead (or stealing it), hollowing out the Dormant Volcano, and designing and building the Launchpad inside the Dormant Volcano (which is, of course, in an extremely remote location, so you also have the expense of shuttling workers back and forth from the Dormant Volcano construction site and their homes in the towns surrounding the jungle).
Now then. How do you keep your Secret Launchpad safe while you plan a good date to hold the world hostage? Well, you hire a Private Army, that’s what you do. Mercenaries, I’m guessing.
Where will they all be housed? Now you have to build dormatories inside your Dormant Volcano. What will they eat? Where willthey sleep? Where will they go to the bathroom? What will they wear? Who will design and create their uniforms? Is there a cafeteria? Is there a Blofeld Company Store? (I know, there was a Simpsons episode that asked a lot of these same questions.) How do you keep your workers and mercenaries entertained during the long months of construction and preparation? Do you hire local talent for entertainment? Rent movies? Now you have to build an auditorium to entertain them in.
That all sounds like a lot, but Blofeld isn’t actually done yet. No, his Dormant Volcano is so large, he has to build a MONORAIL inside it. Because God Forbid he would have to step out of his office and make the trek from there to the launchpad on foot. No, he needs a Monorail. Could have just as easily laid some blacktop and bought an electric golf cart, but no, he needs a Monorail. Okay, so now you’ve got to design and build a Monorail inside your Dormant Volcano with the fake lake roof and the Launch Pad inside with the Rocket and the Warhead inside, and a Private Army to watch it all so that some English guy in a tuxedo doesn’t show up and ruin everything.
My question is: wouldn’t Blofeld have been better off if he had just hung onto his money and invested it wisely? It seems to me that once you make a decision to hire a Private Army, you end up having to take the world hostage not from a power-mad vision, but from necessity. Because a Private Army is too fucking expensive. All the expenses add up, and before you know it, you have to take the world hostage, just to meet your payroll.
I think if Blofeld were half as brilliant as his publicity claims, he would never had hired a Private Army to begin with and thus would never have to be in the position of needing to hold the world hostage.
This is one of the things I like about The Monarch and the other villains of The Venture Bros. They have no particular interest in World Conquest, they just want to harass scientists. I love the way they discuss it as a love affair or even a job, “Yeah, I’m arching Dr. Venture these days, but I’m looking for something else.” This is the world they live in, they don’t have the vision (or fiscal irresponsibility) to want to take over the world.
The Edge
SPOILER ALERT.
Anthony Hopkins is scary good in this movie. He’s always very good, but for some reason he’s scary good in this.
One of the important things he does is make Mamet’s trademark rhythms feel utterly natural and in character.
Alec Baldwin, already with a little Mamet under his belt at this point, is also good, but takes a little while to come into focus for some reason, for me anyway. Maybe because he has to make the transition from Take Charge Fashion Photographer to Scared Airplane Crash Survivor to Flailing Helpless Guy to Cold-Blooded Killer All Along to Sobbing Helpless Guy to Dying Guy, and needs to find a common thread through all that.
This is one of my favorite Mamet scripts, even though it’s a movie about a couple of guys and a bear.
Lee Tamahori’s direction is elegant and unfussy. The dramatic scenes are understated and natural, the action scenes are nerve-wracking and upsetting.
The bear performs admirably and the stunt work is terrific. Either that or those are real movie stars fighting with a bear and falling down mountains and treading carefully across a log over a high waterfall.
Harold Perrineau holds up well under the burden of playing the role of “non-star who gets eaten by a bear.”
The roles in general are written with great humanity and nuance.
I dig nuance. Movies are full of cliches, this one included, they are in fact smoothly efficient vehicles for cliches, and in fact they thrive on cliche and depend for their survival on cliche. So nuance and detail become important in selling these stories.
An unusual 4-act structure for a 2-hour film. Act 1 is, “Let’s have an adventure, even though there are definite tensions between the principles.” Act 2 is “Well, maybe having an adventure wasn’t such a good idea.” Act 3 is “Oh holy fucking shit, there’s fucking BEAR WHO WANTS TO EAT US.” Act 4 is “How about that, we killed the bear. Oh shit, these tensions between us just got worse.” And you could even split Act 4 into two distinct sections, each about 15 pages long, one being “Aha! Forgot all about this, did you?” and “Well, that was a bad idea too. Shall we go home now?”
And then, 97 minutes into the movie, comes the Wind.
Back in 1996 or so, there was a Star Wars video game called Dark Forces. There was a level to the game that took place on the ice planet of Hoth. Hoth was cold and windy, as ice planets tend to be, and there was a recording of Wind that played, over and over, throughout the entire level. Since I’m a really crappy player, I spent many, many days trying to get the fuck off of the ice planet of Hoth, and got to know that Wind very, very well.
Now I can barely watch a movie with an outdoor scene, because they keep using that same Wind. Most recently it was featured in the opening minutes of Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter to emphasize the desolate quality of a hot, dusty African road. Of course, for me it will always evoke the freezing cold and sheer ice cliffs of Hoth, so that scene just didn’t work for me. In The Edge, at least, it’s set among the majestic peaks of what I’m guessing is the Canadian Rockies, so at least the “cold” part of it works. But as soon as the Wind came on, I started looking for stormtroopers and Imperial droids.
There is a very funny account of the filming of The Edge in producer Art Linson’s book What Just Happened?
Venture Bros. miscellaneous
In the pilot, I love how The Monarch has, in addition to his antennae-like eyebrows, another pair of pretend antennae on his crown. As though to say, “Look how evil I am! TWO PAIRS OF ANTENNAE!”
In the Christmas episode, it’s a true pleasure to hear James Urbaniak recite the most faithful, and yet most demented, version I’ve ever encountered of the climactic scene from A Christmas Carol. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that one of the key pleasures of this show is how it is incredibly faithful, even fannish, about its source material, while simultaneously gutting it in the most disrespectful ways.
The pilot is interesting mostly to see how the characters aren’t quite there yet, how the timing and feel of the show, its balance of elements, developed and matured over time. Given the rapid rise in quality from the pilot to the first episode, I can’t wait to see what happens in Season 2.
The Christmas episode is so packed with incident and ideas, presented at such a breathless pace, it almost makes me wish more shows were done in 11-minute segments, like Spongebob is. Maybe there could be more 11-minute Venture Bros. pieces, ideas that are funny but won’t sustain a 23-minute narrative.
Worth it for the “Tiny Joseph” character, and the moment when Hank says “Uh-oh, baby Jesus is out of the manger!” and Brock habitually checks his fly.
I was sad to see Baron Unterbheit kill off his henchmen with the Tiger Bombs. I really wanted to see the further adventures of Cat Cyclops, Girl Hitler and Manic 8-Ball.
Gimme Shelter
An extraordinary document, even 36 years later.
Hard to believe that the Rolling Stones, or the generation they represent, were ever this young.
They look like gods, of course, as they must, since about a third of the movie is about them sitting in recording studios looking glum, bored and strung out as they listen to playback mixes and watch editing run-throughs.
The songs, of course, speak for themselves. There isn’t one in here that hasn’t met the test of time.
Is it just me, am I getting old, or do today’s acts just not come up to this standard of excellence? It’s hard for me to imagine that, 36 years hence, middle-aged men will plop themselves down to watch old footage of Coldplay or Tool or Korn. Even within the context of the movie, Jefferson Airplane and whoever the other act is seem like pale, confused kids to the Stones. Except for Tina Turner, who easily holds the screen, electrifying in her ecstatic sexuality.
Will future generations watch Rattle and Hum or Meeting People is Easy or The White Stripes Live in Blackpool to find out what our times were like?
The Criterion transfer is one of the most astonishing I’ve ever seen, the sound as well as the picture. The songs are rendered palpable in their immediacy and urgency.
Part of the miracle of this movie is that it wasn’t intended to be the document of a tragedy. It was intended to document a rock tour. No one was expecting the tragedy, and it happened on the last day of the tour. So the Maysles had a startling opportunity and a difficult challenge. How do you tell the story of the Stones’ 1969 tour, which everyone knows ended in tragedy, and have it be anything but a standard concert film with a real bummer of an ending?
Their solution, which seems simple but must have had them tearing their hair out until they hit on it, was to make the disaster at Altamont the subject of the movie. They announce, right up front, that something terrible happened at Altamont. They do this by having a tape of a radio show playing in the editing studio, long after the show, and filming the Stones as they listen to the tape. So the movie is already about looking back. And everything else is a flashback. It’s like the good parts of the tour are an extended dream sequence that we cut back to, instead of concert sequences that the editor has to gussy up somehow.
The decision to make the end of the tour the subject of the movie throws everything into sharp relief. It creates an almost unbearable tension. We know something bad is going to happen, but we don’t know where or when. We start to pick up details as the film goes on. The editing, which is simple in execution but complex in concept, cuts back and forth from concert footage to the Stones listening to playback of the concert recordings to footage of them traveling from place to place to more concert footage to the Stones watching various film elements in the editing room. The movie juggles all these time elements effortlessly, never becomes confusing or disorienting.
There’s a weird telescoping effect from this. There’s the “event,” the concert, then there’s the music from the event, which is the playback scenes, then there is the film of the event, which is viewed at a fair remove. It sets up a weird echo effect as we watch the event unfold and look back on it at the same time. It makes us feel as helpless as the Stones do, watching footage of themselves and unable to change the events depicted.
The vibe starts to get worse in the middle third of the movie, when (guess what) the lawyers enter the picture. Now, it becomes about logistics and legalities, the actual physical effort to get this free concert at the racetrack set up. Who is liable, where will people park, where will they void their bladders, etc. The hippie dream smashes up against the hard facts of business, dealt with by impatient middle-aged men in wide lapels, sideburns and bright ties.
As the movie approaches zero hour, the flashbacks and flash-forwards become less and less frequent and as the hour mark passes, the Stones take the stage in Altamont and the time shifts disappear altogether.
The vibe at the speedway is deeply uncomfortable, even 36 years later, inducing a sense of dread, ugliness and unease. The hippies go from making out and waving flowers to slamming into strangers and grabbing their faces in horror. The crowd starts to look like escapees from an asylum, beating their heads against speakers, eyes rolled back in their heads.
By the time the Stones hit the stage, the crowd is so unruly that the cameras can only be behind the band. Mick Jagger, the prince of arrogance and cocksure rooster, is put into the uncomfortable position of being the chastising aunt and flower-child peacemaker. And he is visibly uncomfortable doing so. In the other concert footage, as I say, he’s a god, as confident, bold, masculine and charismatic as any performer who ever graced the stage. Next to a team of Hell’s Angels and 100,000 bad-tripping hippies, he looks frail, timid, frightened, overwhelmed and ridiculous in his garish, absurd costume. There’s an extraordinary moment in one song where he simply stops moving, stock still, slackjawed at something happening off stage right. We never see what it was, and soon he starts quivering and dancing again, but the fun has clearly long gone out of this event. The people are pressed up so hard against the stage, and there are so many people on the stage, that it barely seems like there is a stage any more. The Stones, trying to play their instruments, can’t see the crowd and keep bumping into concert promoters, techies and Hell’s Angels. It looks like they’re playing in the middle of a crowded bar. Not even on the stage of a crowded bar, in the middle.
And then, of course, hell breaks loose and the concert and the movie ends. We cut back one last time to the editing room, where Mick watches the footage of a man stabbed to death 20 feet or so away from him and we see the whole sixties dream fade from his features. He stands up, puts on his coat and announces that he’s leaving. Well, at least he showed up in the first place.
A young man named George Lucas is credited as one of the camera operators.
Venture Bros: Ghosts of the Sargasso
Hands down, my favorite episode.
Why? Starting with the head-spinning Bowie intro (what is it with these guys and Bowie? Except that Bowie always had the air of a Bondian super-villain about him) (seriously, why hasn’t Bowie been made a Bond villain yet? Chris Walken has, Jonathan Pryce has, why not Bowie?), then moving from 1969’s “Space Oddity” across the pond to 1969’s “Scooby Doo” and the ghost pirates. Having young children, I’ve seen the ghost pirate episode of “Scooby Doo” several times now, so this parody has especially sharp teeth for me.
Then there’s things like the treatment of the colors in the “1969” footage, and the quite-subtle dirt and scratches on the film, not over-played, not drawing attention to itself, beautifully done.
But mostly, it’s the script, or rather, the plotting. I think this is the most tightly-plotted of all the episodes. All of the episodes use the collision of “exciting adventure” and “prosaic real-life” to produce laughs, but usually they do it in terms of “adventure that doesn’t happen.” The assassination attempt fails, so the henchmen have to wait around in the yard. The torture victim has a medical condition, so the torture has to be put on hold. It’s about dashing expectations.
But here, there’s an actual adventure. Rusty is actually going to try to do something (retrieve his father’s spaceship), and his actions have consequences (unleashing the ghost of Major Tom). Meanwhile up above, the ship is taken over by “ghost pirates,” who turn out to be real pirates.
Now there’s a twist! Ghost pirates that turn out to be not part of a real-estate scam, but REAL PIRATES! Even if they’re lame pirates, they are actually still real pirates, and they even manage to get the better of Brock.
And then there’s Brock. Brock, who specializes in getting out of impossible situations, gets out of a doozy here. I’d like to think that the actual fight with him and the pirate henchmen, where he clubs one to death with the body of the other, while the other’s arm is still up his ass, was filmed but cut, and exists somewhere in a vault. But that’s probably only a dream.
Two actual exciting events going on, Rusty stuck at the bottom of the sea, slowly dying, and Brock turning the tables on the pirates above, PLUS Hank actually turning into a capable action hero (with coaching, of course), all played out in an exciting, albeit highly comic cutting style.
Then the REAL GHOST shows up, and by this time we’re so off-balance, we’re ready for anything. So when it turns out that the ghost isn’t interested in killing anyone, hurting anyone, or really doing anything but re-living its dying scream over and over again, PLUS there’s the great bring-back of “The Action Man” from the pre-credit sequence, it’s just too laugh-out-loud, alone-in-your-living-room funny.
The ending, where Brock simply tears the ghost limb from limb and tosses it overboard, reminds me of the old Jack Handey “Deep Thought:”
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
This is, of course, the casual cruelty that I’ve mentioned before that gives the show its misanthropic bent. We start the show with a real (if comic) tragedy, we produce the screaming ghost of that tragic figure, and there’s that moment of actual pain and anxiety where we feel that ghost’s pain. The tragedy of the past is literally brought to the surface and shoved in our faces. And how shall we deal with it? Dr. Orpheus’s plan doesn’t work. And the ghost doesn’t want to hurt anyone. But it won’t stop SCREAMING. So let’s let Brock tear its head off and throw it overboard. Good riddance.
Pirate Captain: “Well, we could have done that.”
Question: They call Dr. Orpheus for help, but then in the episode where they first meet Dr. Orpheus, Hank (or Dean, I can’t remembe their names) says to Punkin that they’ve recently battled ghost pirates. Did they battle ghost pirates twice, and why were we denied that episode?
Query
Who is the Edmund Gwenn of today?
What I need is a good actor famous for being kindly, benevolent and fatherly, who’d give anything to be able to shed that image. Steve Martin has mentioned, but for me he was a genius before he was fatherly. Kind of like Rusty Venture that way; becoming a father killed his creativity.
OR, let’s make this easier. Who is the Frank Morgan of today?
Venture Bros: Tag Sale — You’re It!
Why is Dr. Girlfriend with The Monarch? She’s smart and attractive, snappy dresser. Why does she hang out with (and fornicate) with that whining, petulant, impotent fraud?
Some of my favorite Brock moments are when he just doesn’t want to deal with the drama of a situation. When the secret service head asks him if he wants to see the chatting Misters in pretty pink dresses, he stares straight ahead and, voice thick with disinterest, says “No, I don’t want to see ’em in dresses.” The difference between Brock and a lot of other characters Patrick Warburton plays is that Brock seems to always have too much on his mind; his halting speech isn’t dim-wittedness but a reluctance to waste his breath on the unimportant, which is a great concept for an animated character.