Harlan Ellison's Watching (22 page)

"No, I never read it," I said.

For an instant we were playing with each other, the way two men who secretly fancy themselves intellectuals play with each other. One, two, riposte and retreat. Then I had his public face again.

Thoughts on acting: "I act the way Mies van der Rohe talked about 'less is more.' An actor has to let himself be watched. I sit here and let the walls watch me, the chair watch me, the table watch me." I stared at
him
like a bird. I have never understood what actors were talking about when they got into all that "space" and "less is more" talk. It seems to make them feel good, though. I just report it.

There wasn't much more. We parted, and he took a couple of my books with him. I hope they don't wind up with the Gideon Bible in a dresser drawer in some Midwestern city on his next PR stop for the film. I didn't get my hook or my burning insight. At one point I thought I did, but when I got back to the typewriter I couldn't make it hang together. It had something to do with public faces, with masks, and about how much tougher it must be for Boyle to project those masks. They keep casting him as loonies of one sort or another, but he's apparently a simple and direct man, a good actor, and neither a Joe nor an Eagle at heart. But then again, all I had lunch with was a polite public face, a gentle and intelligent mask, so I have no way of knowing.

And lacking that knowledge, I can form no opinions.

Perhaps that's as it should be. Perhaps Boyle is having it just the way he wants it. Lautrec once ventured, "One should never confuse the artist with the art." Perhaps Boyle understands that to remain a private person he must present the pleasant, public face and by the magician's misdirection of a talented actor force those who would go beyond the performances to the performer, to settle for the better part of Boyle: his on-screen portrayals. Perhaps interviewers ought to mind their own goddam business and leave audiences to simmer in their own morbid curiosity. Perhaps all there ever was and all there will be of Peter Boyle is what he offers us in darkened theaters.

But never again, a fake lunch under false pretenses.

The Staff
/February 16, 1973

Cinematically, the most stunning thing happening currently is the cycle of
New Hungarian Cinema
on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Circumstances conspired to prevent an earlier broadside for this exceptional series of films, thus killing your chances to see the first three programs, but tonight (Friday 23 February) and tomorrow you can catch the fourth, fifth and sixth bills; the seventh and eighth next weekend. If you never listen to me again, do yourself a favor and cancel whatever else you have going, and don't miss this rich and bewilderingly varied testament to the health and muscularity of the Hungarian film industry.

To whet your imagination let me tell you about the first two films in the cycle, one a fourteen-minute short of almost heartbreaking insight and Kafkaesque surrealism, the other a dream feature that reminds one of the first bold uses of color by Fellini and Ophuls.

Student Love
is the short film. The story is deceptively simple . . . one of those ideas that seems so obvious upon viewing, one wonders why it has never been done before: a rural movie house, the audience sparse, a film of saccharine, adolescent romance. Suddenly the film breaks. The lights go up. The audience waits patiently a few minutes, then begins clapping, jeering, demanding satisfaction. From the shadows emerge first a silent woman who stares back at them: the assistant manager. Then the manager. Nothing can be done. The film cannot be repaired. They will be given passes to come back the next night. We want our money. We will give you passes. But the film tomorrow night will be a different film . . . we want our money . . . or we want to see the end of the film!

A semi-obese woman of middle years suddenly appears and says, "I will tell you how the movie ends." The audience is intrigued. They put a chair up on the stage in front of the blind screen. And the old woman begins telling how the film ends. But it is not the idyllic love story the audience wanted. It slowly turns into a nightmare of loss and shame and degradation. The woman's face is a special wonder, gentle readers. It cannot be described here with even the remotest accuracy. Pressed to explain the face and the expressions that consume it as she tells her heartbreaking story, I would use metaphor, and make references to the patina of sorrow left in the character lines of the face of one who has lost youth, lost expectations, but not lost dreams. Could the story the woman is telling not be the unseen film but a paradigm for her
own
life? One is not told. The audience rejects the ending, tries to retell it for itself . . . the short ends enigmatically, the old woman still sitting on the stage, the audience unsettled, having undergone a disturbing experience.

And by extension
we
, the
other
audience, have undergone a
doubly
disturbing experience. In fourteen short minutes director Gyorgy Szomjas and the film's scenarist (whose name, sadly, sadly, is unknown to me) have compelled us to re-examine the act of moviegoing. We have not been permitted—as the audience in the film has not been permitted—to go merely for escapism. We have been drawn into the vortex of life and its pain, its unutterable anguish. Moviegoing is traditionally a fleeing from the real world into fantasy realms. Go to the movie and forget your cares for two hours. But not this time. In fourteen minutes the condition of sorrow and loss has been laid open and it is our own viscera we see.

If by the above you perceive that this short film made its mark on your reviewer, more than even the longer and more technically adroit feature with which it was shown . . . you perceive correctly.

I have no idea if this film will be released commercially in Los Angeles, but if it isn't, stalk it across the world. Find it. See it. You will not soon forget it.

By comparison, the full-length feature
Sinbad
that accompanied
Student Love
fares well—for it is a visual and sensual cinematic revel, a celebration of diffused colors—but only because it is such an evocative piece of film art.

A lesser effort would have been washed from the memory instantly before the potency of that little black-and-white, fourteen-minute wonder.

But
Sinbad
is a stream-of-consciousness journey through the last moments of a dying roué's memories . . . a gallery of a thousand brilliantly-pigmented paintings. The women he loved, the places he moved through, the meals he ate, the emotional crises he survived, the billions of false sentiments he used to put his victims on their backs. Each one lovingly examined with an incredible visual eye that glances quickly but misses no detail, each one turned in the imagination like a faceted jewel, seen from many angles, returned to in the mind's view again and again . . . without genuine understanding but rich in the detritus of memory. Like the marrow bone Sinbad eats in one exquisite series of scenes, the memories of this Don Juan's affairs never seem to be wholly emptied of their aftertaste. There is always a bit of succulence to be savored.

Director/writer Zoltan Husarik, forty-one years old and offering this as his first motion picture effort, reveals himself to be a man with the talent to expand the film form: his use of color is breathtaking, startling, variegated and unforgettable; his story seems jumbled, erratic, non-cohesive, but when the film ends one realizes there was coherency in totality. One leaves the theater having seen into the smoldering, remorseless core of a certain sort of human being.

And if one accepts Faulkner's statement " . . . the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat" as the truth, then the gift of Husarik is a precious and invaluable one.

Again, this reviewer has no idea whether after its museum tour this film (and the others) will be released commercially, but if the opportunity ever presents itself to see
Sinbad
, you miss it at your own risk of loss.

Michael Webb and Ronald Haver of the L.A. County Museum of Art's film program department are to be commended for their courage and foresight in bringing this outstanding cultural and entertainment cycle to our city. They've already been rewarded with three weeks of sellout audiences (making your efforts to gain admittance that much more difficult), but for the film buff seeking enrichment beyond escapism, there is no reward great enough.

Go, at once! Get tickets for the remaining programs. You will thank me for chivvying you.

Along with our sense of societal self-loathing, concomitant with our shame at racism, inhumanity, warmongering and profligacy, we the American people have recently been lusting after films about amoral anti-heroes. As if we were seeking, in visual explications of the utterly amoral and despicable, some catharsis: a release from the awfulness of our own corrupt natures by examinations of fictional counterparts incredibly more debased than ourselves through the logistics of fantasy manipulation. Some of these films have become classics:
Hud, A Clockwork Orange, Little Mother, The Godfather:
because they were made with Art and Understanding. Others, as
The Unholy Rollers, The Getaway
and
The King of Marvin Gardens
, have failed—however interestingly—because they chose to deal with the superficial, sensational aspects of that exhibited amorality.

The latest in the genre of loathsome flicks—and I don't want to overlook
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
or
Hammersmith Is Out
, which former I hated and latter I adored—is a
very
interesting nightmare from Cinerama Releasing under the title
Payday
.

Starring the too-seldom-seen Rip Torn as country & western semistar Maury Dann, the film was written by Don Carpenter, whose 1966 novel,
Hard Rain Falling
, should be familiar to you. It was directed with a firm hand by Daryl Duke and marks the producing debut of jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason. In arresting supporting roles Ahna Capri, Cliff Emmich, Jeff Morris and Frazier Moss—most of which are names you may not know but ought to remember—add tone and expertise as solid background to Torn's bravura performance.

When I call this a "loathsome" film, I want you to understand I'm not talking about the quality or entertainment levels of the production, which are high; I'm talking about the philosophy presented as the viewpoint of the central character. He is a swine. An utterly amoral, mean and despicable swine whose sycophantic fans long for nothing more than to be fucked and/or fucked-over by him. I mean, when you're watching a film about a segment of show biz, and the most likeable dude in sight is a
road manager
, for Christ's sake, you
know
you're observing a barnyard full of genuine slop-swillers!

The plot is a rambling one, moving through two days in the road tour life of Maury Dann and culminating with "payday." During those two days the filmgoer is treated to an intimate evisceration of the squamous lifestyle of a contemporary god, one of the uncrowned American nobility—the musical idol. (And having traveled with The Rolling Stones and Three Dog Night, I can assure those naïve few of you who've never been to a rock concert, that the brutal meat-into-meat couplings, the ravenous groupies, the sudden maniac-flashes of anger and violence, the constant stench of
machismo
exhibited in this nice nice script are
far
from exaggeration.) The power of utter adoration with which popular musicians are gifted by their vampiric followers forces even the most gentle and ethical into attitudes of callousness and brutality. For those who are already twisted . . . it is a blank check to demean other human beings and develop a messianic view of the entire human race.

God knows it isn't a new story; we've seen it to telling effect in
Citizen Kane, A Face in the Crowd, The Great Man
and other fables, but it is a story that needs to be told again and again, a lesson that needs to be relearned (apparently) with every change in cultural mores.

This latest incarnation is a healthy one, and Rip Torn as Maury Dann will chill you to the spine. Ahna Capri as his toothsome little trollop-of-the-moment gives the best performance of her spotty career and is only less horrifying because she has less power in Dann's ego-world. There are special scenes that leap from the screen with telling impact: a moral blackmail encounter with a rural dj, a fight scene culminating in a kind of murder, and a scene following the slaughter in which Torn purifies himself by creating a country tune so sickly-sweet it could give you diabetes.

But it is the overriding miasma of loathsomeness that makes
Payday
a memorable film. It is a despicable film, in the most positive senses of the word. Positive, in that it holds up the mirror of life and wrenches us around by the hair, and demands, "
Look
at yourself!"

It is a vision only the most honest will admit has veracity. For the others . . . merely purgative.

Bud Yorkin has produced and directed a swell film going under the title
The Thief Who Came to Dinner
. It is swell. It is dandy. It will make you smile. It will produce wonders before your very eyes such as Ryan O'Neal actually acting, Jacqueline Bisset actually becoming invisible, Warren Oates actually getting a chance to show his stuff and—oh oh what an
and
—the remarkable, sensational, bewildering, blindingly talented Austin Pendleton stealing an entire motion picture away from the heavymoney stars.