Certain Hollywood comedies from the 60s seem to have been designed to work as sedatives.  Nothing much happens in them, the plot complications are so trivial that one never really worries about their resolution, and everyone involved in the production seems to be half-awake.

There’s something pleasant about the phenomenon, in a mindless sort of way — like watching golf on television while under the influence of a mild pain-killer.

The Glass Bottom Boat is such a film.  Doris Day and Rod Taylor have some minor misunderstandings on the road to romance.  A crowd of fine character actors involve themselves in the proceedings to one degree or another, with nothing much to do except display their amusing personae in the absence of any scripted wit.

The film was directed by Frank Tashlin, who had one of the wackiest imaginations in Hollywood at the time — but he confines his energy to a few tepid bits of slapstick.  Dom DeLuise puts his foot in a pie, then gets it stuck in a trashcan — then Doris gets her foot stuck in it, too, trying to help him out of the jam.  When they both jerk free, Dom falls into a fish pond.

Everyone seems to be going through the motions, waiting for lunch, or recovering from it.  Yet the tone of distance is so consistent, so assured, that you have to think it was deliberate — offering an anesthetic for anxiety duly indicated and professionally administered.  Arthur Godfey, the personification of the entertainer as somnambulist, makes his film debut here — his practiced nullity anchors the film in its odd nether world, its sleepiness.

I don’t know why it’s all so delightful, so soothing — but I don’t really know how codeine works, either.

Perhaps these films did for audiences of the 60s what Jared Hess’s films do for us today — tell us not to worry so much, tell us that everything, as improbable as it might sound, is going to be o. k.

Vote for Pedro.

There’s something exhilarating about Mel Gibson’s total repudiation of
the conventional wisdom of Hollywood these days — which is to say, the
conventional wisdom of large corporations slowly and inexorably losing
touch with their audiences.

To make a 40-50 million-dollar film with your own money, in the Mayan language, with an
all-unknown and mostly inexperienced cast, is downright heroic — and someday Gibson is going to be numbered among the rebels and mavericks who finally brought the tottering empire of Hollywood to its knees.

Apocalypto isn’t going to be a mega-hit, the way The Passion Of the Christ
was.  Though it opened well, its word-of-mouth was terrible and it
will be lucky to earn back its cost, but it’s a fine film — not just
admirable from a conceptual point of view, but very well made, moving
and entertaining.

Gibson gets remarkable performances from his neophyte cast who, like
silent film actors, need to communicate with us primarily with their
bodies, faces and eyes.  Gibson has cast extraordinarily striking,
charismatic people in the main roles, but he’s also given them the
creative space and the confidence to wholly inhabit their characters,
to convey their essence to us.

I really don’t see how anyone could call the film racist, though some have — Gibson is an
easy mark for that kind of criticism these days.  But to set a whole movie inside a lost and alien culture demonstrates a kind of respect Hollywood, for all its political correctness, would never have the guts to back up with cold hard cash.  Gibson’s film is violent, and the tale he chooses to tell might be fairly accused of over-emphasizing the violence of a very violent society — but at the same time we’re not asked to condemn it in a patronizing sort of way, and we’re encouraged to sympathize deeply with many of its characters, without moral qualifications.

There are many bold and powerful images in the film, but there’s also a lot of quick
cutting of blurred shots that create a kind of synthetic excitement, quickening the pulse but taking us out of the environment of the story and into an editing room.

Still, it seems churlish to complain that the film isn’t a masterpiece, since it re-animates and throws us into the middle of a world we could never imagine as clearly through any other medium.  What we should complain about is that movies don’t do this sort of thing more often —
that it takes an eccentric filmmaker, working outside of all conventions, to make a film as ambitious as Apocalypto.

“Some women possess an artificial nobility which is associated with a movement of the eye, a tilt of the head, a manner of deportment, and which goes no further.”

— La Bruyère

This surely is the nobility of Elsa Lanchester’s “bride” of
Frankenstein — a cinematic vision which lasts just a few minutes on
screen but instantly becomes iconic, unforgettable.  But is her
nobility truly artificial?  Is she truly artificial?  Pieced
together out of corpses she may be, but how can we be sure she doesn’t
have a new and authentic identity of her own?  How much further
might her nobility go — or have gone if Frankensten’s monster hadn’t
destroyed her moments after she was born?

There is a world of mystery hidden in these questions.

Vile, perverse, depraved, this film is nevertheless a 70s noir masterpiece.  In it, Sam Peckinpah indulges his nihilism and misogyny freely — and isn’t misogyny the ultimate form of nihilism? — and through the medium of his protagonist, brilliantly played by Warren Oates, feels sorry for himself in the bargain.  It’s like the later works of Hemingway — a study of alcoholic despair seen from the inside through the eyes of genius. It’s unsettling, fascinating, moving and infuriating all at the same time. The film is also partly a love song to the real Mexico, as it is in between the tourist destinations, and a riff on the romantic theme of Mexico as locus of the dark side of the American unconscious — a theme also found in the works of B. Traven and Malcom Lowry and Tennessee Williams, all of whom are referenced here.  It’s Peckinpah’s most personal film and maybe his best, too — a sick work of art but a work of art all the same, with an absolutely stunning performance by Isela Vega as the earthy whore-madonna and voice of reason the Oates character will not heed . . . until it’s too late to matter.

Back in the Sixties, during his most radical phase, Jean-Luc Godard said
that Jerry Lewis was the only director making progressive movies in
America. Lewis’s work was so strange and subversive that even now it’s
hard to assess it — though one can trace its influence clearly in the
work of Godard, Coppola, Scorsese, Wes Anderson and (perhaps
indirectly) Charlie Kauffman. The Ladies Man, the second film he
directed, from 1961, is vintage Lewis — a discombobulating blend of
brilliant sight gags, hilarious vaudeville routines, dumb mugging,
cartoonish action and deeply surreal deconstructions of the Hollywood
studio style. Lewis doesn’t make me laugh very often, but when he does,
I laugh really hard. What’s important about his work, though, is its
radical assault on cinematic convention — which still seems brazen
and/or lunatic, depending on your point of view. You might not like his
work — you might even hate it — but if you love movies you need to
come to grips with it.

From Masculin Feminin, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1966:



“It wasn't the film we dreamed; the film we carried in our hearts; the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted
to live.”