A pretty amazing life, living out one's dream of working in Africa with animals... (work in progress)

This is a short review of Jane (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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29 January

This is a short review of Jane (2017)

For some reason, I thought that I was en route to @Saffronscreen for 8.00 to enliven my scant recall of a book about Marie and Pierre Curie (where they refined pitchblende by hand in a garret) :https://t.co/1C81ybgEGh

Jane (2017) will do just as well ! :) pic.twitter.com/4KuYtmxBDa

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 29, 2018

For once, no more Tweets in this review – as they actually lengthen the process – and even a vague attempt at a nod in @everyfilmneil's style of reviewing in the approach here...

* Disambiguated by IMDb (@IMDb) as Jane (II) (2017), the film is first and foremost about Jane Goodall's work (and life).

* A little in the way, say, that Iris (2015) treats of Iris Apfel* (though she is very much less likeable, quite apart from the question what she has to offer the world), Jane gives us Jane Goodall as a woman who made her way in the world - in her own words (however chosen - please see below), it is she who narrates her own path to the chimpanzees of Gombe (in Tanzania).

* There is much to value here, but, from the perspective of what a documentary that depends so heavily on archival material can and should do (i.e. given the standards of the work of the best of such film-makers*), there must be some caveats.

* Primarily, the film unnecessarily was allowed to show us so much of the rediscovered historical footage far ahead of our knowing how it came into existence [Jane's future husband, Hugo van Lawick, shot it]. As a result, because of questions of its quality, content and how it was even in being**, it ran in such a way that thoughts of gratuitously and highly posed reconstruction kept distractingly presenting themselves as to how it had come into being - which, of course and on one level, it is, but filmed with the patent fondness of a marital partner(-to-be).

* Yet, for those in the know about Jane Goodall (and maybe less bothered about how a film is made and / or a cinematic story told), this would not have been a problem... except that, particularly in the case of a documentary that goes back and, as the opening titles say, re-establishes someone's credentials (and also presents an idea of the sexist reporting that was used to undermine them), a documentary needs to stand on its own two feet, not what one is assumed to know ?

* Unfortunately, the use of high-speed animated note-books, survey-sheets and graphical presentation of data really does the significance of Goodall's work a disservice - by tokenistically demonstrating the volume of what was being done, but only really for no better reason than as a visual interlude - and so, contrary to the message, tending to appear to trivialize*** the research, with which the film (except as mediated by Jane's words, and so about her in relation to her studies) has no intention of engaging with at any real level / depth (despite The National Geographic name on the film).

* One should have guessed that, of The Rhymicisists (as these pages call practitioners in and of 'minimalism'), the irritatingly restless arpeggiation had to be that of Philip Glass - not his fault that, being too high in the mix, his score tended to drown the voice-over in the central part of Jane, but his, in not his best film-score, for sounding too often like Michael Nyman, writing indifferently, and not like himself on form. (Again, it did not help that one was on such high alert about what one was being shown that it affected how one received what was heard.)

* In various set-ups, seemingly contrived for the purposes of this film, Jane Goodall appeared and answered questions to camera. However, they did not seem to be the best questions, or, if these were the best answers so elicited, a different approach should have been taken.

* Some material (however selected – that could not be established, as each screen of the credits flicked by, but it was said to be from her writings) was read by [someone who sounded like]


[...]


End-notes :

* Or Mavis ! (2015), rather conventionally, of the career of Mavis Staples : just compare with Jeanie Finlay’s (@JeanieFinlay's) Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015), or Janis : Little Girl Blue (2015).

** In addition, other footage - as things such as picture-quality and style of filming indicated - originated from other sources.

*** Does it seem to send a patronizingly wrong message, i.e. 'Look, a woman doing all this !'


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

I made millions of people happy with my music ~ Xavier Cugat

This is a Festival preview of Sex, Maracas & Chihuahuas (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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1 October

This is a Festival preview of Sex, Maracas & Chihuahuas
(Sexo, maracas y chihuahuas) (2016) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2016)

For the generations that grew up knowing him, perhaps band-leader, actor, caricaturist and cartoonist¹ Xavier Cugat seemed as though he had always been there - here, there and everywhere ? For, as this film readily shows us, Cugat was a household name, leading his Latin orchestra – although he had come, via Cuba, to make his fortune in the States, he and his background were actually Catalan By birth - please see below) – and seen, both in films and on television, with all the glamorous stars, his violin, and, often enough, a trademark Chihuahua under his left arm, as he conducted with the other.

Right at the opening, a curated set of introductions, heard just after the logos of production partners, funders, and distributors, and over psychedelic titles, straightaway establishes for audiences now that his was a name once conjured with : the film goes on to demonstrate how and why Cugat had so many stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame², and is credited with finding and making many names that have perhaps outlived his own in the memory of intervening decades.

Though, in fact, it is best left to Cugat himself in the film to tell us who most of these stars were, he is heard to tell us, amongst other things, that this is how it happened :

Stars are not made. I was lucky enough to have a keen eye...
and be able to recognise talent. I was very lucky.

Perhaps, though, denying any more than the luck of having an ability (and also having the opportunity) cuts both ways – just as Dvořák wanted to do, by asserting the opposite : fine, Dvořák said, to think that discovering themes was what mattered, but he wanted to claim that knowing how to use and develop them was far more important (e.g. employing, or being inspired by, traditional music in his 'American' string quartet, or the so-called New World Symphony (No. 9 in E Minor, ‘From the New World’, Op. 95)). In Cugat’s case, would saying that he had made others as important as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis stars imply that he, too, had been made a star… ? If so, effectively the same argument as Dvořák’s : Talent matters, and will out.

Which is fine, since the truth is that, although just listing here what Xavier Cugat could - and did - do might not make relatively little impression on us¹, Sex, Maracas & Chihuahuas aptly demonstrates that Cugat was not merely 'taken into' the world of Hollywood, but importantly helped create it. In, for example, those expensively elaborate cinematic productions that are often described as being from its ‘Golden Days’ – as composer, arranger, film-star, and musician / band-leader alone, he was not part of Hollywood, but was Hollywood embodied.

Referring to Xavier Cugat's latter years back in Catalonia - Cugat had been born in Girona, in Catalunya (‘Catalonia’ in Catalan), and went to live in Barcelona - historian and scriptwriter Román Gubern suggests that Cugat's Catalan spirit was a last-minute opportunistic claim.

So the film is neither so reverential that the sense of a real person, with human weakness, is absent, nor is it uncovering every stone so that the overriding impression is not of truthfulness, but of disrespect. (However, it must be said that, although Gubern, as an authority in his field, is one of the film's main commentators, here (and below) he does not seem very kind to Cugat's memory, or gracious about his credentials, as if not thoroughly appreciating his many achievements - please see below.) In this, it is in the best of documentary style, as typified – for the world of (popular) music – by Jeanie Finlay’s (@JeanieFinlay’s) Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (@OrionMovie), telling us a story (a history, in both cases) with most of which we may be unfamiliar, but of men who were sought after in their time (if in such different ways as Jimmy Ellis and he… ?).

Yet maybe not in wholly different ways, as we progress, and delve back with director Diego Mas Trelles from where Cugat got to in life to how he got there – even though Jimmy Ellis, to experience what he wanted and have fame, clearly both was and felt trapped by being obliged to be a performer just known as Orion (and only permitted to be a successful singer when wearing one of Orion’s many mysterious masks [Mark Kermode's review, for The Observer, contains some copyright imagery). In due time, we learn both how Cugat came to the States, and of his skill in fabricating an image of himself – for Cugat, unlike Ellis, seems to have been quite happy in deliberately trading on his time in Cuba and being taken for Latin American : all consistent with being in the States to be a success and, not unrelatedly, his view that Hollywood itself in the 1920s was such an evocation and incarnation of fantasy (but one which, in his estimation as he looks back, had started to diminish).

In the US he was considered a latino and lived like one. He earned a living as a latino.

Román Gubern

That said, as has been commented above, Gubern may effectively be being harsh on Cugat here, in saying this in relation to Cugat's returning to Catalonia towards the end of his life, since Cugat says that the family moved from Girona when he was three. (Although Gubern says that Cugat deserves his admiration for how he gained his career, he is also hardly uncritical elsewhere.) Cugat's formative years, in terms of an education in music and imbibing its colours and contours, were thus actually spent in Cuba.

Chucho Valdés

I think that those guys took Cuban music to another level. Cugat paved the way. Later, this helped others to follow suit. But, without him, it might have taken a lot longer.

Chucho Valdés (musician)

By the time that one of the film's speakers makes the comment that Cugat liked taking credit for things, we have already heard more than a little bit of boasting from him⁴, including his claim to have foreshadowed the first 'talkie', which is not now accepted to have been The Jazz Singer (1927), 'long before' - with Cugat and his Gigolos⁵. However, it seems that Cugat did, for example, really first see the talent of Margarita Cansino - even if Harry Cohn, studio head at Columbia Pictures, and not he, probably (according to such sources as IMDb (@IMDb)) gave her the famous name that we know her by (but who she was would be telling !)... Even so, Cugat is always one to behave graciously (and to ensure doing so), and so he acknowledges I've been very lucky, my friends wrote great tunes. I didn't compose a lot.

At the same time as being open, for example, that Cugat married very young women and remained happy with their success, but only as long as his billing at least equalled theirs, the overriding feeling of the film – and how it presents facts behind Cugat’s era and his career – is to embrace all of this on the level of fantasy and fun³, as the title Sex, Maracas & Chihuahuas implies, of course :

Carmen Miranda

The film lavishly gives us animated versions of Cugat’s cartoons, which mingle with the lights of Las Vegas, the bright colours and flamboyance of his bands’ costumes (using which, he co-creates the liveliness of the rumba, the seductiveness of the beguine), and the legendary and excessively fruit-laden headdresses of the tropical oasis that was Carmen Miranda – we really do see the strength behind Cugat’s claim that Hollywood then was more of a living fantasy !

* * * * *

There are two scheduled screenings of Sexo, maracas y chihuahuas (2015) [the link is to the #CamFF web-page for the film] during Camera Catalonia :

* Monday 24 October at 10.15 p.m.

* Tuesday 25 October at 10.30 a.m.



End-notes

¹ Amongst other achievements such as composing, directing films, and running business ventures – or lending his name or self-stylized image to them.

² As laid out on the blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street :

³ Cugat even seems to have embraced a fantasy life in reality, by carefully ensuring that each one of his five wives - Rita Montaner, Carmen Castillo, Lorraine Allen, Abbe Lane, and Charo (Baeza) - had her own house (according to ??), but thereby seeming to have endangered the financial basis of his retirement.

⁴ Yet, it is charmingly done, and Cugat is a fine raconteur, so we enjoy hearing him tell us about Valentino, Clark Gable, Cole Porter, and so on...

⁵ A short, he tells us, for Warner when he was 28 : The sound wasn't recorded with the film. It was on a record that was synchronised with the film. That said, Cugat was born in 1900, also according to IMDb (@IMDb)).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Best on screen so far in 2016 (including re-watch)

Best on screen so far in 2016 (including re-watch)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 June

Best on screen so far in 2016 (including re-watch)

* Versus : The Life and Films of Ken Loach (2016)

* Ivan's Childhood (1962)

* Janis : Little Girl Blue (2015)

* Youth (2015)

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 6, 2016

* Stalker (1979)

* 'Immense Beauty' (The Great Beauty) (2013)

* Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015)

That's ten (last 2 mid-December)

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 6, 2016

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

We hate him, because he’s immortal* (work in progress)

This is a review of Let’s Get Lost (1988)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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20 November

This is a review of Let’s Get Lost (1988)

Referenced in a review of Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015) - to help to demonstrate that film's superiority (in telling a musician's life and handling the conflicts of pursuing a career) - Let’s Get Lost (1988) is a film about jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. (It appears not to have been screened in the UK until 6 June 2008 (at Cambridge Film Festival).)

It can hardly be accused of being over adulatory, in the way that Iris (2014) or Mavis ! (2015) easily appear to be, but it had the luxury of working with a subject who was no longer living, but whom it had shot in the year before his death. Yet one probably thinks too much of its possible influence, if one conceives that its portrayal of him as a bad cat could have affected people in the way that his music (or recordings of it) did and have continued to do.

For reasons that seem questionable (and in footage not obviously falsified by its context), it dished up to us images of Baker, then 58, being schmoozed by two attractive women, seemingly fans, in the back of an open-topped car, or on the dodgems. If one did not know of his life, this proved not to be candid documentary-filming of a jazzer’s celebrity life-style, but a directorially conceived treat for Baker – in reference to which, much later on, we hear him sounding unduly thankful :

It is as if ‘treating’ him in this way, when he is open that he likes getting stoned** (which may indicate a suggestible personality ?), licenses other footage where, for example, he is patently on camera with the film-makers, but is, for no very good reason, shown glamour shots of naked (or near-naked) women, and invited to comment. One feels for Baker, involved in some sort of tribute to him that does not seem very bothered about whether it even appears to be exploiting him, but he does have enough composure simply to remark nice-looking ladies : maybe, more than twenty-five years later, ethical considerations are different about one’s documentary subject, but it is not as if one does not hear the film-makers (they are good enough to allow us) talking to Baker in a way where one must reasonably doubt that they can be unaware where the balance of power lies.


In reviewing Orion, the laboured artiness of this film’s look was critiqued, but it even extends to mimicking what Hitchcock does, after Norman Bates’ (Anthony Perkins’) attack in Psycho (1960), with Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh’s) eye, taking us right up to it, and then rotating it, so that it resembles less an eye than a vulva. A victory of form over significant content ? Well, in those terms (even if that reference seems gratuitous, it is momentary), its ‘style’ is not the worst of the excesses of the film :

For no apparent reason (other than that, amongst everyone else, he eventually mentions Baker ?), screen-time is taken with a rambling interview with actor Lawrence Trimble, name-dropping in a slow way about when he was in Paris and drifting around the jazz-club Le Chat Qui Pêche, and the likes of Bud Powell. On one level, by being allowed to go on so long, Trimble hangs himself, but so could, probably, any of the others in Chet Baker’s life – and except that, unlike with them, neither the film, nor Trimble seems to trouble to establish what connection he had with Baker (except as another name). Writers have their treasured phrases / sentences, but they sooner or later refuse, however delightful they are, to find a place where they fit, and have to go : this interview, for similar reasons, should never have made this self-indulgent cut, where one did not take long to start hoping that there was less of it, not more, to see.


The discussion of this film in the review of Orion wants to point up how Let’s Get Lost also keeps ringing the changes on the message in what one interviewee has said (Diane Vavra, as one recalls ?) : You’ll never really know when Chet is being sincere. So, rather than considering, in equivalent depth, other matters such as the super footage (courtesy of Pathé) of Baker’s appearance at Cannes Film Festival in 1987 (the year before his death), it hops around - guiding you, in these juxtapositions, only by how he looks at any time – from young Baker, to much younger, to older (though, during a recording session, we do hear much of the song ‘Imagination is funny’). Just because it can (?), it interweaves these moments with critiques of him as a person, from those who want to say what , beneath a surface, he was ‘really like’.

As with the arty appearance, the film may be of its time in that it presents a male friend who tells how Baker supplanted him in his fractional absence from sexual intercourse, and, consequently, how that satisfied partner (still having thought that it was he) always wants to go to bed with him, but the story, if it even sounded plausible, is obviously of a double-edged variety : although Baker is thereby credited as a titanic lover, it is in the context of being painted as unscrupulous and opportunistic, and only fortuitously ‘benefiting’ the persons whom he had wronged (one of whom, somehow (?), remained unaware). Yet were we watching this ‘account’ to be Baker’s moral judge, or to learn something relevant to his trumpet-playing and singing ?

The review of Orion touched on the status of Jacqueline du Pré as a musician versus what we are required to concentrate on in Hilary and Jackie (1998), where Emily Watson plays her in the role of being the sister of Hilary du Pré-Finzi (Rachel Griffiths) - with all that is entailed for their relationships, both with each other, and with others : quite in tune with the story about Chet Baker jumping into bed with a woman and assuming the narrator’s place...

Rather strenuously, with what Let’s Get Lost chooses to show, almost no stone seemed to have been left unturned to say that, with Baker performing a song, the experiences that resulted from the occasion were not felt by him in that moment, but were a calculated and manipulative act. In this respect, though, when we hear ‘eager’ questions - such as asking how many wives he has had - from those surrounding him, as he is being filmed for this project, we know that they already know, and that they are just ‘acting dumb’ in the enquiry and with their responses. Or, when Bruce Weber and his editor are deciding to give us a moment that has been caught where Baker says I’m always looking for my lighter, placing it*** in such a way in the film so that it sounds ‘significant’ and noteworthy, not just banal : if Baker was pretending to feel an emotion in a song, film itself is an even bigger constructed reality.


[...]


End-notes

* What is that (song ?) reference ?

** One interviewee talks about when Baker and she ‘got lost on a sail-boat’, thereby explicating the film’s title.

*** Both at what point (how far in / in what other company) in the film, and how the scene is contextualized within itself (what came before the remark, to frame it, and how is it allowed to hang in the air)...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

They weren’t clapping for me – they were clapping for a ghost

This is a review of Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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19 December

This is a review of Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015)
(but with reference to Let’s Get Lost (1988))

On the face of it, the documentaries Let’s Get Lost (1988) and Orion : The Man Who Would Be King (2015) about, respectively, jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, and Jimmy Ellis (known, in his time, because his singing voice closely resembled that of Elvis Presley), would appear to have a lot in common : both subjects, to follow a career in music, ended up doing so despite family ties, did not see all the money that their performing and recording should have earnt them, and were confronted by problems that arise from living in the public gaze.

The earlier film, directed by Bruce Weber, was seemingly not shown in the UK until 6 June 2008 (at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest) ?), turned out to be of older origin than it seemed, and posed questions to the viewer that Jeanie Finlay’s (@JeanieFinlay’s) Orion never does : what it was for, and can we see it as a documentary (rather than barely a musing about the overlap between memory and myth - please see below) ?

What might disguise such questions is that visually, that is from scene to scene, Angelo Corrao’s cinematography in Let’s Get Lost looks good. However, what works less well is, a little unnecessarily, giving us arty shots and angles, as if to give a stylistic complement – although it may just be that it only now seems stale – to having us believe that we witness ‘the chaotic, crazy world of jazz’. (Perhaps appearing rather dull, in not being so expressionistic, Bertrand Tavernier’s ’Round Midnight (1986) gives us many of the same perceptions*.)

Seeing Bruce Weber's overlong and unnecessarily revelatory Let's Get Lost (1988) points up the great strength of @JeanieFinlay's @OrionMovie

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 20, 2015

Jeanie Finlay’s film makes visual connections that are more organic, and whose operation at the subconscious level is therefore more effective, because they do not explicitly bother us with what we are seeing, but their ‘rightness’, in alluding to relations between things, affects us – as, for example, when Jimmy Ellis feels obliged to move back to his childhood home of Orrville, Alabama :

All linked, short captions that multiply burst like fireworks, Nashville’s unreal lights, the wheeling night sky take us to rural Alabama...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 20, 2015

As a whole that wonderfully coheres, Orion : The Man Who Would Be King is story-telling by the carefully edited use of images, sparing captions / graphic-devices, and interview footage (some of it, mainly in the case of Ellis, just audio), and, where accounts diverge of what happened, intelligently presenting the juxtaposition, and letting the viewer decide what to believe. So, for example, Orion employs [the link, to give the look of the film, is to its trailer from DOXA 2015] :

* In an effect suited to the period (and to evoking, ahead of time, the atmosphere of Nashville), dates of the relevant year, coming up into view, and popping like clusters in the air

* In Alabama, tracking shots of fields and trees, and the imagery of fronds of vegetation, contrast and conflict with closing in on the rotating sky, and the dreamy effects of slow-motion and blurred, out-of-focus lights

* When coming into Nashville proper, and, as we casually run a few blocks, being exposed to the unreality of this real place, with more lights superposed on the lights

* What must have been publicity stills, with their fantasy temptation to the public : teasing back-shots of Orion, as if just he has taken off the mask that is extended in his hand

* Linked to Ellis returning to Orrville, and the tracking shots, moody guitar, with long reverberation and slight distortion

* Very compelling choices of recorded material of Jimmy singing, or talking about himself, and amongst the stills and other promotional material ~ NB most of Jeanie Finlay's Tweets in this review, as with the following one, were on the night when Orion showed live on Storyville (@bbcstoryville) on BBC Four (@BBCFOUR)

This footage of Jimmy singing in his truck came from Charlie a fan in South Africa, his voice is still incredible. #orionmovie

— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) November 16, 2015

Maggie (the sweary stage manager from @PantoFilm) just messaged that she'd watched and loved @OrionMovie. I think my heart exploded.

— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) November 18, 2015

The film fits in clearly with Finlay’s interests in previous work of hers, such as The Great Hip-Hop Hoax (2013) (@hiphophoax) and Panto ! (2014) (@PantoFilm), and it may well be that she covertly identifies an incurable part of our nature, that we are drawn to fantasy** : she lets us look at that twilight world where people end up 'living a lie', whether more of their choice (as with Hoax’s Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain), or, as Jimmy Ellis does, hoping to launch a career by initially going along with a firm requirement (of promoter Shelby Singleton). (Even so, it is not as cut and dried as that, since, in Hoax, Boyd and Bain argue that experience showed that the music business would not take them seriously as Scots, and Ellis did have some earlier success, but in a way that kept having him explicitly distance himself from Presley (and, ironically, from being taken for him).)

"I'm not trying to be like Elvis" Best name for a single EVER #orionmovie

— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) November 16, 2015

A very candid piece of audio that Finlay uses, of Jimmy Ellis saying what he did to try to have a career (and why), transcribes as :

It was basically the only direction I could go. When you’re trying to get into the music business, I kind of look at it like a fella trying to get on a fast train : there’s no easy way to get on that booger. You just gotta jump up there and grab and hold onto something, and hope that you don’t fall.


In Ellis’ case, it was what Jerry Hatfield, a friend from his home town, described in these terms (referring to Shelby Singleton, Ellis’ promoter (and President of Sun Records, Nashville), who is later heard saying The more lies we told, the more people believed them [one of the tag-lines of Hoax is 'Lies about lies']) :

Timing is everything. People were very, very emotional, and receptive to anything Elvis. Shelby Singleton came along, at the right time, with nothing more than a gimmick***, a gimmick - a despicable gimmick !

Here's the album @SSheil & I spotted at a car boot sale 12yrs ago which led to tracking down all of the Orion story pic.twitter.com/4RLA42YWu8

— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) November 16, 2015

As Finlay was to comment, in the interview about Panto !** (regarding why she had wanted to make a film that followed a cast of amateur actors in Nottingham, who were staging a production of Puss in Boots) :

I am obsessed with uncovering ‘the glimmer’ of the person underneath a portrayed persona. With actors, the potential for uncovering this is heightened, as I can explore the gap between on and off stage. The film touches on similar themes I have previously explored in my films The Great Hip-Hop Hoax and new film Orion - the desire for fame and the transformative role of the spotlight.

The film is made up of about 10 archive interviews with jimmy "orion" Ellis - from fans, & radio. Like being an archaeologist #orinmovie

— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) November 16, 2015

As well as in passages of audio where he is interviewed, we probably hear most significantly (and mainly on camera) concerning Jimmy Ellis himself (rather than the origins and adoption of the Orion persona) from his son Jim Ellis Jr, his friend Jerry Hatfield (mentioned above), and the guitarist (and member of Orion’s band) Nick Scott Petta. There is also his former girlfriend Nancy Crowson, who had to give him up, because she was not reassured, or satisfied, by being told that she was head of the line when he was on tour. (There are others who say the same, about how he was drawn to have many women around him.) However, although the film does not avoid the difficult parts of his life, it does not, unlike Let’s Get Lost, dwell on them as revelations (albeit with Chet Baker, we will know of him beforehand), and seek ways to influence our opinion of him :

Whereas much – that is to say, too much – is made, say, of how it happened that Chet Baker ended up losing his teeth from a violent incident that occurred in Paris, and whether what he claims in his account on camera is correct (for, time after time, words are spoken, similar to those of one interviewee : You’ll never really know when Chet is being sincere).

By presenting dissenting voices in such cases, the documentary does not appear to be serving anyone’s interests, except challenging Baker’s credibility : the person who had not only lately died, but who had also recently been extensively filmed for the purposes of the film (some of the time in set-ups, but not acknowledged as staged for the film till late on in it). (Even if, and not as he says, Baker had been attacked because of his ‘manipulative’ ways (and as a deliberate act to punish him), nonetheless he was attacked, and, one still gathers (whether his teeth were extracted singly, or all at once), playing the trumpet was compromised for him, such that it was unclear whether he would [be able to] do so again, because he now had dentures.)


Although a documentary about a person that is over-adulatory (perhaps Iris (2014), or Mavis ! (2015) ?) might not be very informative, at the same time one might ask of what service the feature film Hilary and Jackie (1998) was to the memory of Jacqueline du Pré as a musician. Whereas, of course, the memory that many have – of du Pré and of Baker – is largely in their recorded music (and associated photographs, or video), what survives of that of Jimmy Ellis clearly left a place for Jeanie Finlay to remind us of him.


Towards the end of his life, Ellis told one interviewer what he thought about whether he was happy :

A wise insight by the subject of @OrionMovie : I think happiness sometimes is a temporary state of mind, you know ? https://t.co/6xUeBjXVJU

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 20, 2015

Contrary to modern expectations, or what some of those might say who offer themselves as guides to what life is, Ellis went on to conclude his utterance with You’re happy to-day and sad to-morrow.

Thks for watching my masked man - there were times I couldn't believe what I was unearthing was true, but it all was https://t.co/BET7FE2WMy

— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) November 17, 2015

The interview I did with Jim Jr was the most memorable of my career. You'll see as the film goes on #orionmovie

— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) November 16, 2015

"At once comical and poignant, this offbeat, truelife showbiz tale deserves instant cult status" @orionmovie in @THR https://t.co/RN2DRFfBo3

— Jeanie Finlay (@JeanieFinlay) December 3, 2015

End-notes

* In a fictional scenario, if one credited as originating in the experiences of Bud Powell and others, where the real sax-player Dexter Gordon plays the invented one of Dale Turner.

** Though benignly in Panto !, there is still the same sense that the very charismatic actor in the production whom we come to see closely is honest that he most finds himself when, and through being, on stage. (Not unusually, the film is difficult to find, by name, on IMDb (@IMDb) : by looking at a list of Finlay’s films, one sees that it calls it Pantomime (2014) (only listing as Panto ! another film with that title from 2012).)

An interview with Finlay can be found on the BBC web-page from when the documentary screened for Storyville (on 23 December 2014, on BBC Four (@BBCFOUR)), and likewise an interview with her for when Orion first showed (16 November 2015).


*** * Contains spoilers * In time, employing that gimmick leads to the excerpts from two television interviews asking about it that we see, in the first of which Orion claims that he is from Ribbonsville, Tennessee, and says, when pressed, It’s hard to find [presumably, although the film does not choose to go into this aspect of the matter, with presenters hosting Orion who know who he is] :

Television presenter 1 : Why do you wear the mask, Orion ?

Orion (fiddling with the mask) : Good question !


Orion : I’m not hiding anything. It’s a trademark, it’s an idea that the promotional people in Nashville, Tennessee, came up with. Shelby Singleton, who is the President of Sun Records, is probably known in the music business as one of the most flamboyant promoters in the business. He will do most anything to promote a product…

Television presenter 2 (With surprise) : And you’re a product ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)