Screwballs and Mobsters
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We’ve reached that time of year when movie lovers and industry insiders begin to speculate about the Cannes lineup. The first round of predictions comes from Variety’s Elsa Keslassy, Ioncinema’s Eric Lavallée, and the Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Ritman. The festival, in the meantime, has issued a statement “on the situation in Ukraine,” and for Daria Badior, a cofounder of the Ukrainian Film Critics’ Union and a curator for Kyiv Critics’ Week, it misses the mark. Fairly or not, Badior argues at Hyperallergic that Cannes comes down harder on women who refuse to wear heels on the red carpet than on “the country that kills innocent people.”
Turning to this week’s highlights, we begin by looking back to 1972. Two of that year’s top critical and box office hits, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc?, were released fifty years ago this month. What’s Up, Doc?, an exuberant salute to the screwball comedies of the 1930s—and in particular, to Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938)—screens tonight at the UW Cinematheque in Madison and tomorrow and Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Hollywood Reporter’s Ryan Gajewski talks with the movie’s stars, Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, and hears that everyone involved seemed to have had a blast making it.
MoMA’s current retrospective, Peter Bogdanovich: American Filmmaker, is on through March 23, and from March 28 through April 5, the Museum will present the world premiere of Squirrels to the Nuts, the original cut of the comedy that studio suits chopped up, mangled, and released in 2014 as She’s Funny That Way. In 2020, James Kenney, a CUNY English instructor, discovered a high-definition video master of “the Lubitsch cut” on eBay, and you really do want to read his telling of the story. It’s a pure shot of unabashed fandom at its most joyous. “You saved one of my best pictures,” the late Bogdanovich told him.
- For MoMA’s Magazine, Peter Tonguette (Picturing Peter Bogdanovich: My Conversations with the New Hollywood Director) writes that “Bogdanovich’s ability to respect the voices of the directors who preceded him while also developing his own voice is key to understanding the way his career eventually unfolded: he sought to preserve all that was good in American film while also adding to the story. The Last Picture Show is shot, staged, and edited by someone who had absorbed the fundamentals of film grammar, but its content was harsher, bleaker, and more candid than anything ever imagined by, say, Hawks or John Ford.”
- Two years ago, Jonathan Freedland noted in the Guardian that The Godfather had become a political handbook. “Many is the fast-talking aide—whether in Westminster or Washington—who will identify a weak link in the campaign team or around the cabinet table as Fredo, the middle Corleone son, or an emerging threat who must be dealt with as Moe Greene,” he wrote. For Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, The Godfather is “a movie about fathers and sons.” In the New York Times, Michael Wilson reports on how “generations of mobsters” have looked to the Corleone family as role models. The NYT’s Dave Itzkoff interviews Al Pacino, and seven writers riff on their favorite quotes. “The Godfather is perfect from first frame to last,” writes Manohla Dargis, “but its greatness also feels of a different order: It speaks to a truth about the American character that we all can recognize.”
- The Andy Warhol Diaries, directed by Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times), is a six-episode documentary series based on entries the artist dictated to Pat Hackett that were then collected and published in 1989. Interviewees include former Interview editor Bob Colacello, the late Greg Tate, John Waters, Debbie Harry, and Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Time’s Judy Berman finds that “Rossi understands something that eludes so many biographers: that conflicting insights can be more revealing than consensus.” Bob Erwin reads the entries, and his voice is run through an algorithm to create a simulation of Warhol’s voice. “It would seem to be a terrible idea,” writes Andy Battaglia for ARTnews, but “it turns out, against all odds, that the novelty of it not only works but, in fact, becomes surprisingly moving as the series progresses.” Warhol “proves to be a special case, especially as much of the subject matter of the Diaries is highly emotional in ways that the artist himself never was in a clearly articulated way.”
- In the new Texte zur Kunst, Alice Blackhurst writes about Chantal Akerman: From the Other Side, a recent exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery Paris that presented Akerman’s Je tu il elle (1974) and her 2002 documentary De l’autre côté as multichannel video-art installations. For Blackhurst, “encountering Je tu il elle as an installation recalls the story’s embryonic sense of psychic splitting and divided subjectivity. Its zigzagging temporality highlights Je tu il elle’s nomadism, its streaking between spaces and objects of desire, rather than the original’s sense of deep immersion, its lush ambiance of refuge and retreat.”
- Pre-Code Paramount, the Criterion Channel program of twenty features from the late 1920s and early ’30s, “represents a Whitman’s sampler of delectable displays of lust, drunkenness, wanton criminality, marital infidelity, bed-hopping, and more,” writes Jaime N. Christley, introducing a selection of contributors’ favorites at Slant. “It was a time when even a bad Vitaphone movie has razzmatazz.” In Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930), Marlene Dietrich is “frightening to watch because she seems capable of anything,” finds Dan Callahan, and for Eric Henderson, Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go to Hell (1931) is “a surprisingly lithe drama.” As for Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), Matthew Connolly writes that “it’s the moments of wistfulness—the acknowledgment that the world is flawed and messy, and all the more wonderful for it—that make this gem sparkle all the more.”
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