Portentous, monumental, endless are all descriptions that came to mind after seeing Apocalypse Now (1979; dir. Francis Ford Coppola). The Paris Theater’s "Big and Loud" series presented the restoration of the original roadshow version, which runs just shy of three hours. When the film ended, without credits, it felt like I’d been hit repeatedly about the head and shoulders with a heavy, blunt instrument, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. There’s a lot to take in, and it takes time and reflection to make sense of the movie.

After seeing Megadoc, Mike Figgis’ documentary charting the making of Coppola’s most recent feature, Megalopolis, just the other day, I can see parallels between the two movies, despite their being made more than 40 years apart. From the evidence of the two movies, I’d say that Coppola is more interested in big themes than simple stories; in an epic scope rather than human scale; and in spotlighting operatic violence, even buckets of blood, whenever possible. He strives to reach 11 on a scale of 10, and succeeds more often than not, leaving the audience gasping in his wake. I believe the Sicilian word is stonnat' or stunned.

To recap the plot, Apocalypse Now takes place during the Vietnam War and is about Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who is sent up the Nung River to find Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade Green Beret who’s conducting a private war from a base in Cambodia. Along the way, Willard witnesses and participates in a string of horrific war crimes that do nothing to advance the plot, but pretty effectively traumatize the audience much as the war traumatized the soldiers who fought in it. Finally, he finds Kurtz’s base and at that point the movie turns into a dramatization of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which was set in the Belgian Congo at the time of King Leopold’s worst atrocities. Not only is Kurtz certifiably insane, but a photographer (Dennis Hopper) is loose on the property and he’s floridly psychotic as only Hopper can be. Kurtz takes Willard prisoner, tortures him, then frees him, and (no spoilers) Willard has to decide if he’s going to carry out his mission. In the meantime, an ox is ritually slaughtered, serving as an on-the-nose metaphor and yet another spectacular set piece.

Coppola made Apocalypse Now, at considerable personal cost, to put the war on the screen. It was his answer to the question posed Norman Mailer’s book, Why Are We in Vietnam?, and unlike Mailer, who found his answer in a sublimated homosexual dominance, Coppola showed what the war looked like and how it destroyed the people who were sent to fight it. Tens of thousands were killed, the rest were traumatized.

The problem for me after my first viewing was that beyond showing how Captain Willard, who starts out pretty unhinged (he bloodies his fist by punching a mirror in a drunken stupor in the movie's first 10 minutes), ends up nearly catatonic after he leaves Kurtz’s compound, it seemed like there wasn’t anything else to take away about the characters. With some reflection, I changed my mind.

Willard starts out damaged and ends up wrecked by what he’s been through and what he’s had to do. The surfer, Lance (Sam Bottoms, Timothy Bottoms’ brother), is similarly wrecked, though his LSD trips shield him from the worst of the carnage he’s witnessed and participated in. And the audience should be touched in a similar way, though some people may remember the visuals more clearly than the message. This isn’t surprising, since Coppola’s message is widely understood today, more than when the film was released.

For many viewers, the spectacle is enough—the helicopter ballet to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries gave me goosebumps, the explosions were lovely, and Kurtz’s compound in a Cambodian ruin was beautiful. That Apocalypse Now is more than this, that Captain Willard becomes an empty shell to cope with his experience inside the heart of darkness, is a testament to John Milius’ script and Coppola’s vision as a director.

The Wrong Box (1966, directed by Michael Hodges; script by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, inspired by a story by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Despite its misfires, it has some marvelous performances.

Today's movie in the Museum of Modern Art's Michael Caine retrospective was The Wrong Box. It isn't bad—at best it's a shaky ⭐️⭐️⭐️ movie—but given the creative team it should have been better.

While The Wrong Box isn't quite as funny a farce as it thinks it is, there are some truly comic scenes that stand out from the stodgy bits: Ralph Richardson (Joseph Finsbury) dodging the missiles hurled by John Mills (his brother, Masterman Finsbury) as he tries to mortally wound him, thereby collecting the money in the tontine that was set up when they were boys; Peter Sellers as Dr. Pratt, surrounded by kittens and cats in his dire flat, with so many good lines that you'll have to take notes to remember them all; and the last scene when everybody's chasing everybody, the coffin ends up in the wrong carriage, and clergyman Norman Bird, who's trying desperately to conduct a funeral, is so flustered that he starts to read the marriage service. There's also a dead body that has to be dealt with, the oldest butler in London (Peacock, played by Wilfrid Lawson) who always seems on the verge of expiring, and a Salvation Army delegation that rescued Masterman after he was dumped in the Thames and brought him home when everyone thought him dead. Overall, though, it doesn't entirely rise to the level of a classic farce. It’s more of a British fruit tart than the dessert soufflé it should be.

As for the other stars, Michael Caine plays Masterman's son, Michael, as a dim bulb, which is tiresome; Peter Cook (Morris Finsbury) and Dudley Moore (John Finsbury) are his conniving cousins, doing a double act in which Cook is the smarter one and Moore is always being distracted by whichever lady is in the vicinity; and Nanette Newman (Julia Finsbury) is a beautiful but not very bright ingenue who screams at the least provocation.

If the writer of the Museum of Modern Art’s note saw the movie they wouldn’t have described Michael Caine’s role as “brief but memorable.” He has as much screen time as any of the other stars.

The Wrong Box will be screened at the Museum on Sunday, August 31 at 2 p.m. It was available from Sony in the U.S. and Indicator in the U.K., and though it seems to be out of print, it can be found on eBay. There are no streaming options.

Deal With It

I'm not napping, jerk.

The Gulf of Mexico

From J.F. Letenneur: "Exceptional onboard document of this rare and fabulous maritime atlas, a masterpiece by the greatest French hydrographer of the 18th century, with maps of all the coastlines known at the time."

Source: The David Rumsey Map Collection
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~284155~90056663:Carte-Reduite-du-Golphe-du-Mexique-?sort=pub_list_no_initialsort%2Cpub_date%2Cpub_list_no%2Cseries_no&qvq=q:Golphe%20du%20Mexique;sort:pub_list_no_initialsort%2Cpub_date%2Cpub_list_no%2Cseries_no;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=0&trs=20 

 It’s Love I’m After (1937)

It’s Love I’m After sounds like it would be more interesting than it turns out to be. There's nothing wrong with the leads or the supporting actors—Eric Blore is almost the fourth lead—but it never achieves takeoff velocity. Whether because of the studio—Warner Bros. instead of Paramount, the director—Archie Mayo instead of Ernest Lubitsch, the year it was made—1937 instead of 1933, or the high society setting, it is a curiosity and not a classic.

     Basil Underwood (Leslie Howard) and Janet Arden (Bette Davis) are two stars of the The-a-tuh who are (we’re told) madly in love but can’t stand each other for longer than it takes to play a scene before the claws come out and they fight like two cats in a sack. Marcia West (Olivia de Havilland) is a besotted fan of Underwood, engaged to Henry Grant Jr. (Patric Knowles), and Digges, no first name (Eric Blore), is Underwood’s dresser and Man Friday. To show Marcia that Underwood is unworthy of her infatuation, Grant inveigles him to turn up at the West family estate and play the cad. He agrees, despite having promised Arden that they will be married that very night. Naturally, nothing goes according to plan. 

     At the West estate, keyholes are peeped through, doors are slammed, signals get crossed, and people turn up when they are least expected by the characters if not the audience. It’s funny enough but it isn’t My Man Godfrey. Still, with Howard, Davis, Blore, and the impossibly young Olivia de Havilland doing their best, 90 minutes pass pleasantly enough. Also in the cast are Spring Byington as de Havilland’s aunt, George Barbier as her father, and Bonita Granville as an annoying girl who might be believable as a nine-year-old but looks like the 14-year old she was.

     You can watch It’s Love I’m After on a Warner Archive Collection DVD. TCM screens it from time to time and there are less legitimate sources for those who care to look for them.

As I was saying...

As Facebook becomes less inviting and Meta more obsequious, it's a good time to start posting again.

To begin, here's a short piece on The Brutalist. 

Wednesday’s movie at the Regal UA Kaufman 14-Plex was The Brutalist (2024, dir. Brady Corbet) starring Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Hungarian architect who has reached the United States after World War II. He left his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) behind, thinking they had died at the hands of the Nazis.

Interlocutor: And how did you find The Brutalist, Mr. Jerry?

Jerry: It was brutal, and yes, I'll be here all week.

I stuck with the movie past the halfway mark/intermission, right up to the scene where it jumped the shark. No spoilers, but the action was so implausible and out of character that I walked out. After a few minutes and a chance to reconsider I went back, only to find that there was a new implausible scene, with Tóth berating Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé), his oldest friend in America, someone who’d stuck with him through good times and bad, for no good reason. There was about 15 minutes left, but I’d had enough. You can let me know what I missed in the comments.

There some good things in "The Brutalist," though I can’t remember what they were, but they were outweighed by the problems: slow, almost languorous, pace; multiple implausibilities and plot holes; headache-inducing editing, and peculiar music choices. One that bothered me was a scene in a Black club where the musicians are playing something like free jazz, which as far as I know wasn’t widely heard until the late 1950s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_jazz).

If I had to offer an opinion on why Adrien Brody received a Golden Globe and is nominated for an Oscar, I’d guess it’s because he maintains a Hungarian accent for more than three hours, he has a scene where he loses his temper and throws things, because Tóth has a heroin habit, and it’s a Serious Movie about a creative person who's misunderstood. The heroin is particularly confusing because it doesn’t affect his work or his appearance, it shows up and then disappears, and he keeps it a secret from everyone except Gordon for decades.

As always, your experience will vary and I’ll be interested to hear what you thought.

 reactions:

“It's important to have a look.” I

Her nametag is hard to read: Poodle.

It’s important to have a look. A signature. Be someone. So people will remember you. You all think you're so special. You’re a dime a dozen. There are hundreds, no, thousands of you out there, studying, auditioning, going here, there, hither and yon. You expect people to remember you if you don’t have a look?

From Master Class by Terence McNally

All Lit Up

Morning view, #7 line

This could turn into a blog of pictures of people sleeping on the subway. What I liked about this was contrast between how the tablet lit up the guy’s face while the people on either side were sleeping. The way his hair stands straight up is a bonus. I’m not sure if the “Discovering Columbus” poster is a distraction or a comment.