Forty years on, what The Front (1976) tells us...

Responses to The Front (1976) [Woody Allen fronts for black-listed writers]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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New Year's Eve

Some immediate responses to The Front (1976), in which Woody Allen plays Howard Prince, who fronts for writers who have been black-listed under ‘McCarthyism’

With the opening archival montage, and as we hear Sinatra (with ‘Young at Heart’ [Carolyn Leigh / Johnny Richards]), the tone of irony and of dramatic irony¹ is set : deliberately (but only if we stop to ask ourselves what the images that we are seeing depict), a contrast of ostentation, as set against disadvantage…


Almost at the centre of the film (which goes on to shed insights into the origins of the part of Danny Rose in Broadway Danny Rose (1984)), there is a scene between ‘Hecky’ Brown² (Zero Mostel) and Hennessey (Remak Ramsay), the post of the latter of whom² (whatever is his exact office, which seems to answer callers as 'Freedom Information Service' [suitably Orwellian ?]) effectively influences studios in whom they should consider ‘Unamerican’, and why… :


Brown : You want me to spy on Howard Prince ?

Hennessey : We are in a war, Mr Brown, against a ruthless and tricky enemy, who will stop at nothing to destroy our way of life. To be a spy, on the side of freedom, is an honour !

Brown : And, if I spy on Howard Prince, I can work ?

Hennessey : I don’t do the hiring, Mr Brown – I only advise about Americanism. But, in my opinion, and as the sign of a true patriot, it would certainly help…

Brown : (Smiles, and laughs.)

In The Front (1976), a scene's reminiscent of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976), as Prince (Allen) incites resisting the committee

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 1, 2017

Likewise, Reggie Perrin (Leonard Rossiter) tells CJ (John Barron) when it suits him to see CJ : he perversely gets some other appointment... https://t.co/uCBiUtf8JD

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 1, 2017

Cinema both shows us dogmas that come to power, and that they can cease to rule - this film takes us to the wire :https://t.co/m5A07lELgL https://t.co/haf0GOQ34a

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 1, 2017

End-notes :

¹ Sometimes, we are allowed to congratulate ourselves for seeing in advance what is coming, which helpfully hinders our confidence in our judgement at other times, when we are not granted that privilege. (Irrespective of how meritorious the subject and message of - not unrelatedly - Snowden (2016) may be, the fact that it is lacking in irony, or in putting what we know to good effect with dramatic irony, is a large part of what is so dismally disappointing about the film.)

² IMDb (@IMDb) is, as usual, fairly hopeless on character-names : in the dialogue, we hear Brown’s real name (Herschel Brownstien³, not just this nick-name), and Hennessey has his full name on his desk (Francis Hennessey, with a middle initial of X.⁴), but the web-page for the film, however its information may be gathered (here, just from the closing credits ?), is ignorant of this knowledge, and not to be relied on for it.

³ Except that American pronunciation is notorious for pronouncing a Germanic 'stein' as 'steen'...

⁴ Thereby invoking an Irish-American background and, via the name Francis Xavier (a co-founder of the Society of Jesus), The Spanish Inquisition.


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Seen at – or adjacent to – Cambridge Film Festival (its earlier, one-screen venue of The Arts Cinema)

Seen at (or because of) Cambridge Film Festival in the mid-1980s

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9 August

Seen at (or because of) Cambridge Film Festival in the mid-1980s

It was necessary to borrow Hugh Taylor’s copies of Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) programme-booklets from the early to middle 1980s (two of which, within Apsley Towers (@THEAGENTAPSLEY), are conveniently to hand), so one, almost necessarily, has not located ticket-stubs that could clinch whether one did watch any film, listed below as seen at around that time, at the Festival itself : hence ‘at – or adjacent to – Cambridge Film Festival’ in the title of this posting…

That said, one just knows as fact that one chose to see Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) in what, then, would have still been called a Festival gala performance (not ‘a screening’) : the Festival atmosphere – even then with enviably comfortable seats in the snug premises in Market Passage* – was so good, and one wanted to be part of it, rather than waiting for the film to come on release.

And, before anyone talked about ‘ear-worms’, that is what the catchy, jazzy principal theme of Hannah already was, on leaving the cinema after the credits, to both one’s fellow viewer (@AJRigbyTweet) and one's self (and for a number of days or weeks), courtesy of Dick Hyman’s arrangements, band, and leadership / playing**. The same had been true of the score of Broadway Danny Rose (1984), for which IMDb® (@IMDb) does give Hyman credit as the ‘music supervisor’ : the themes from both films have such a hook to them that one easily recalls them now. (However, at the time that when the Festival booklet had been printed, that film was said to be ‘unconfirmed’ (as may be legible, in the image below, in the column next to that for El Norte), so it did not have a date / time slot in the programme of events at the back, but was later confirmed and came on sale.)


All that being said, and for the two years in question (being those of the 8th and 10th Festivals, respectively), here was what was seen, if not at the Festival in 1984 and 1986, then as a result of it – in each case, the date and time are given simply of the first performance listed in the programme (except for Danny Rose, where one is having to guess when it would have ended by being shown) :

8th Cambridge Film Festival (15–29 July 1984)

Sunday 15 July

* 3.00 The Dresser (1983)

* 6.00 Swann in Love (1984)

* 8.30 El Norte (1983)

Thursday 19 July

* 6.30 The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) (1975)


Saturday 21 July

* 2.00 Cal (1984)


?? Friday 27 July ??

* ?? Broadway Danny Rose (1984) ??


Saturday 28 July

* 1.30 Paris, Texas (1984) [referenced in The Night Elvis Died (La Nit Que Va Morir L’Elvis) (2010), and referred to in What is Catalan cinema ?]

* * * * *

10th Cambridge Film Festival (10–27 July 1986)

Thursday 10 July : Opening night

* 8.00 Mona Lisa (1986)

Sunday 13 July

* 6.30 Plenty (1985)


Friday 18 July

* 11.00 After Hours (1985) [How Time views After Hours (1985)]

Saturday 19 July

* 11.00 Sid and Nancy (1986)

Sunday 20 July

* 8.45 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

* * * * *

Twenty-five Festivals later (this will be the 35th), Director of #CamFF
Tony Jones is still in charge

End-notes

* Which runs between Market Street and Sidney Street, when that separated Joshua Taylor from Eden Lilley (one fantasized that they were lovers, cruelly separated by Victorian parents. [Or later ? One thinks of the lyrics of ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’ – whose meaning Tommy Smith queried at The Stables lately…]).

Well, anyway, before that became bar / club land, and when, upstairs, had been Angeline’s, a lovely restaurant in which to be made very welcome, and luxuriate in continental cuisine.

Who - of a certain age - remembers this about Cambridge... ? [From the programme-booklet of the 10th @camfilmfest] pic.twitter.com/Z37HEJXmDS

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 12, 2015

** Although not credited by IMDb®, proving unreliable again (and making one doubt oneself and one’s memory, despite owning the soundtrack (on LP)).

*** Probably less famous than Hannah, although with Allen magic of its own, Broadway Danny Rose is a super film in monochrome : with Allen as Danny (an indulgent theatrical agent), his star turn Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte), Mia F. as Lou’s unsympathetic secret lover (whose life-or-death attitude Danny finds immediately and alarmingly frank), and gangsters, in the funniest shoot-out in a hangar that you will ever see !


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Mr Allen's not for fading...

This is a review of Fading Gigolo (2013)

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27 May

This is a review of Fading Gigolo (2013)

Fading Gigolo (2013) is a fun but hardly flawless film, with the hues of autumn and melancholy, and nice performances by Allen and Torturro.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 27, 2014

Or even – O Brother, Where Art Thou ? ! – Turturro !

Fading Gigolo (201?) is a romp from John Turturro, doing a Woody Allen of writing, directing and acting – not as well crafted as Allen’s own triumphs such as Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and not quite mastering, say, the light and shade of that film*, but suffused with charm, wit, elegance, and seductiveness :

In fact, on that latter point, we feel as if we might be straying into the territory of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), with a strand of the plot whose rationale (albeit necessary) seems not wholly obvious. At other times, until they conveniently dissipate, it feels as if the Kafka-infused spirit of Scorsese in After Hours (1985) is upon us, mixed in with a bit of sectarianism from Witness (1985) for good measure.

Moving on, as these moments of menace – not least with a comic turn from Bob Balaban as Sol, trying a line of legal argument that does not appeal to his client – are momentary, there is much to like more in the way that the film has been put together : one can see Murray (Woody Allen), if one likes, as Cupid, as well as Bongo the pimp, to benefit Fioravante (John Torturro), but what matters is the immediacy of the cinematography, with features made of windows and the light coming through them, of objects and people seen through each other, or one foregrounding the other, or dwelling unashamedly on Sharon Stone’s or Allen’s face.

Likewise, two scenes with dancing are delightfully choreographed, with the characters and the moving camera, causing the background to shift behind, first, Torturro and Stone (as Dr Parker), and then Sofía Vergara (Selima) with him), and – in evocation of many a film, yet feeling fresh – against, through and into a carousel. Yet Torturro’s greatest resource is almost certainly Allen’s timing and acting – where maybe he has been more exacting with the 78-year-old, and required more takes, than Allen did of himself in, say, To Rome with Love (2012) (as Allen is notorious for calling it a day not to miss sport such as The World Series).

One says ‘almost certainly’, because Torturro’s own nuanced role as the less-shallow, slightly melancholoy one of the pair, is rather fine, and it has been written in such a way that the scenes with Allen and him largely fit them well. Vanessa Paradis, as Avigal, has an element of ‘the mysterious woman’ about her, which is refreshingly different from using Stone to remind us, in the guise of a dermatologist, of famous attire / poses from the likes of Basic Instinct (1992) : it is clear enough why Fioravante can perform for one, but fall for the other.


Ending on a light moment of flirtation, complete with a colourful orchid and a beverage being made that seems irrelevant, the film cements the central pairing in our mind, under their fictitious names, and gently points the lesson of friends looking out for each other. We have long forgotten the bookshop that had to close, but Murray, in keeping it going so long (even if it did give Fioravante some work), was clearly missing his métier all this time, with his skills of networking, smooth-talking and making deals – which, with Danny Rose, is where we came in…



End-notes

* Not that we equate The Mob with Brooklyn’s community of Hassidic Jews, who convene a religious court at the instigation of Dovi (Liev Schreiber – Ted Winter from Salt (2010))…


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I'm a self-destructive fool (Thanks, Kate and Anna !)

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1 October

* Contains spoilers *

During late-night Festival drinks, @tobytram was heard to say (words to the effect of) :

He has the self-delusion that [...]


According to said Tram, it was 'semantics' when @TheAgentApsley pounced, querying what delusion there is other than oneself being deluded, because, as with a headache, no one else can experience it as one's proxy - also, which was perfect true, that The Agent's point was not germane to whatever point he had been making*.

OK. Can X give Y a delusion ? In the world of films, it is often a device, but is it an illusion or a delusion, if someone pretends to be Mr Ripley, Martin Guerre, The Tichborne Claimant, or even Danny Rose as the beard ?

As would meet with Mr Allen's approval to mention, what magicians do is called an illusion - that card that someone scribbled on appears to have been found inside a perfectly ordinary orange, but maybe we do not know how it was done. Are we deluded ? Would we only be deluded, as I was as a 3-year-old, when I believed that the father of my next-door playmate could really cause coins to appear about her person ?

In common parlance, maybe we do not make much distinction between the world - he has set himself an illusory goal as against he is deluded about his likely success. Where, I would suggest, we should be thinking is where the belief is immutably fixed and not susceptible to reason, which could, say, be the paranoid belief that one's neighbours have trained birds to defecate when the washing is on the line (as I was once told) :

If the person will not just accept that shit happens and maybe she is just unlucky, we would probably describe that as delusional thinking. If, on the other hand, it is merely an explanation that comes out of some conflict, with a rational status, with the neighbours and which might cause a person out of sorts to wonder, then I am imagining that being amenable to reasoned argument would make calling it a delusion less certain, not least since the thoughts have passed with reassurance that it is coincidence. Some, though, might still say that the woman had been deluded, I guess.


Which is where we come on to what distinction a self-delusion makes. Can one really, as the phrase has it, delude oneself ? It sounds as though it is something that the person has set out to do, whereas, if we say that X deluded Y, it sounds more deliberate still - what about considering Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine (2013) ?

Does Alec Baldwin delude Cate Blanchett, or does he believe in what he is doing, and it is just infectious ? If he deceives her about other women (he says that he is doing something, when he is really with one of them), is he not, maybe, deceiving her about the stability of her lifestyle ?

Has he, then, created in his own head a world that is not supported by reality with regard to his finances, and to his and their vulnerability ? Would that amount to a self-delusion, a conviction built on an earlier conviction, but essentially no more stable than a house of cards - or is it just a delusion, because it may not mean anything to say that Blanchett has a delusion, when she may just be gullible, overly trusting, turning a blind eye to what seems crooked ?

What if her delusion consists in choosing to believe that she can live the life that Baldwin offers - has he deluded her, and is the delusion of the same kind or character as the semi-fantasy world that she occupies in the non-flashback part of the world ? That behaviour seems more like delusion : what characterizes it is that she drifts into recollection involuntarily, her notion to become designer does not seem either founded on a rational plan (the fixed idea about learning via the Internet, although the Internet is not something with which she is at all familiar) or capable of listening to objections, and she verges on being uncontrollably grandiose.

For all of this, we can see a psychological mechanism, i.e. that she has been built up to think herself worthy of good things, but lacks the insight either to address the past and come to terms with it (which flashing back into it cannot do - it merely paralyses the present), or, because of that paralysis, to operate outside the inherited preconceptions about the world and her place and that of Sally Hawkins in it. There has, as we come to see, been trauma, but it is hard to say that the delusions that Blanchett now has about where she fits in were put there by Baldwin - he wanted her to believe in his illusion, or even share in it with him, but it can hardly be said that he wanted, as such, her to be delusional as we see her.


On my view, maybe she was (willingly) deluded about Baldwin's and her wealth and its fixity, and it allowed her to have and / or accord herself the position of a moneyed woman of leisure and cultivation. The delusional aspects of her thinking and the psychological make-up resulting from realizing the truth are contingent on what happened - after the trauma and initial treatment, she is no longer fully functional, but that was not a delusional state that Baldwin sought or directly caused. I cannot see her as having deluded herself in the life that she tries to lead with Hawkins, only that she is wracked by the past, and is motivationally and functionally unable to adjust to her straitened surroundings.

In the end, I am left feeling, by this analysis, that ascribing a motive of deluding another, or oneself, lacks credibility - a true delusional state in another might be very hard to engineer (although films from Hitchcock's to The Ipcress File (1965) purport to show us how), and to try to bring about a delusion for and in oneself might be self defeating.

It could be that we are better off forgetting agency or causation (unless we are therapists), and just recognizing rooted delusions when we see them, as against conditions of fear, phobia or mistrust that they will respond to logical analysis and reasoning...


End-notes

* As if words do not matter outside of their context ?


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No scope for error

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27 July


* Contains spoilers *


Which film combines elements of all these others ? :

* Love and Death (1975)

* Match Point (2005)

* Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

* Broadway Danny Rose (1984)


Films from four decades that have influenced Scoop (2006), from the ending of the first to the patter and character of Danny Rose in the last. It’s a conceit that could easily have come from Woody Allen’s short prose (or the works of Henry James ?) that a respected journalist, hearing of a juicy story when he has died, fights his way back from death to make sure that it is followed up and told : equally, though Hamlet senior has more of an interest in what he tells to Hamlet junior than Joe Strombel (Ian McShane) does in what he says to Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), there is obviously a long history of crimes being told of from beyond the grave.

Combining that impulse with Allen’s boyhood interest in magic – as portrayed in films such as Radio Days (1987) and Stardust Memories (1980) – through a meeting in a magic cabinet, and one is close to the world of Alice (1990). The intrigue, the tension, come from the middle two films, though, and this almost seems like a re-make of Match Point, with more aristocratic families, plotted killing, and a woman who has become a nuisance with her demands set against a pattern of murder.

Not such a great pair as Allen and Diane Keaton (some of those scenes from Sleeper and Manhattan Murder have me smiling as I think of them and the pair’s bunglingly lucky work), Johansson and he do well enough as sleuths, with Allen not trying very hard to keep himself out of it. He has written himself into the film as Splendini (alias Sidney Waterman), an illusionist, washing his clothes in a launderette whilst he stays who knows where to be in London to do his show – a hilarious come-down for a man passed off, for investigative purposes, at swanky parties as a successful businessman in property or oil.

The bamboozling that we know from Danny and Larry Lipton (or, for that matter, C. W. Briggs in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)) is to the fore, and, just as Midnight in Paris (2011) has us take as read that Gil somehow goes back in the past, so Allen casually has us entertain the possibility that Death, with his scythe, may not give all due attention to his charges and that Strombel gets away from him. (The set-up also provides us with a neat closing joke.)

Looked at in Allen's career, from a man with an obviously fake ginger beard taking over a Latin American country to Leonard Zelig, The Human Chameleon, to an actor descending from the silver screen, an element of the fantastical has long been part of his film-making. Here, it adds a jaunty edge of Death being cheated that lightens a story-line that could be that of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant with the secret in the basement in Notorious - even if that was not a deliberate outright steal, the sense of homage is there, the eternal feel of a woman snooping whilst she hopes that a man sleeps, but what if he catches her, what of the danger that she is in ?

Here, that sense of danger passes itself to Sid when Sondra has been persuaded all too easily of Peter Lyman's (Hugh Jackman's)innocence (not how I imagined it spelt (Leimann), but what's in a name ?) - echoes of Manhattan Murder, where Diane Keaton (as Carol Lipton) will not let go of teasing away at the contradictions in Paul House (Jerry Adler) and frustrating her husband's (Allen's) desire to let things lie.

And all of this pulls pretty much in the right direction, with romance, intrigue, a murderer on the loose, and Johannson at risk. We even have a slight echo, right at the end, of the indestructible Alex Forrest, dripping water as she proves her continued existence. Waterman gives us a light ending, just as with Love and Death, and there are just a few niggles. One, choosing to drive to where Johannson is with Jackman, is explicable by a district of police and of authority, otherwise they could simply have been summoned and arrived more promptly.

Another is less clear : if one knew that a sensitive room with coded entry had already been entered, would one not have changed the combination, and, in removing one incriminating set of papers, have left another item in its place ? Finally, would one really be on solid ground in thinking that people would appear unrelated when they had posed as father and daughter as guests at several parties ?

Those minor quibbles can themselves be addressed by thinking of the character and self-belief of Lyman, who really had no reason to think that Waterman would talk his way into Lyman's home in his absence and could easily have persuaded himself that - however the woman whom he thought of as Jade had gained access - she had wholly fallen for him and that she posed no threat.

After all, he acts as he does at the end because he has believed a lie about rescuing her from drowning, whereas he thinks that he is exploiting a weakness, and he has dared to seek to blame his act of self-liberation on someone else. That is very much as Chris Wilton does in Match Point by staging a burglary, and, despite cocking up the plan, getting away with it (albeit in a sub-Raskolnikovian sort of way, haunted by ghosts) - departing from that model, Allen has him caught out, and his arrogant belief in his evil ways out of being discovered proving misconceived.

The better thought-out script, the mixture of themes, of light and darkness, makes this a better film than that earlier one, for all its box-office success. Allen in the film gives some great moments, although one can already see how the style of almost improvisatory delivery that is to the fore in To Rome with Love (2012) has become heightened to the stage where, for example, he seems to take forever, after the last murder, to claim to be a newspaperman man on the search for information : I wonder whether Allen, perhaps not just wanting to deliver one-liners, is too much conveying the sense not just of a man looking for the right words (as a contrast to Sidney with the assurance and vocabulary of schmoozing the volunteers and audience in his act), but of one with whom we might find ourselves getting frustrated, wishing that he would spit it out.


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