Barry Lyndon

Another movie on my DVR that's coming up again soon on TCM is Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Barry Lyndon, which will be on overnight tonight, or early January 5 if you want to look at it that way, at 2:00 AM. (Of course, in the Pacific time zone that will still be before midnight on January 4.) With that in mind, I sat down to watch the movie so I could do a post here.

Ryan O'Neal stars as Barry, although as the movie opens he's not yet Barry Lyndon, but Redmond Barry. Redmond lives in Ireland in the late 1750s in an era when it was still a territory of England. He's hoping to marry his cousin Nora, but events conspire against him as his father is killed in a duel. Not only that, but Nora's parents want to marry her off to a British army officer. So Barry and the officer fight a duel of their own, which Redmond "wins" when he shoots the officer dead. Of course, he'll be a wanted man now, so he flees to Dublin. However, Barry gets accosted by father-and-son highwaymen on the way there, having his horse and all his money taken from him.

Barry is in a bit of luck, however, in that in the next town the British army is looking to recruit men to be soldiers, which at least will give Barry a stable income and a chance to escape his past. The bad news is that this is the time of the Seven Years' War, so he's going to have to go off to the Continent to fight. He even serves under an old friend, Grogan, at least until Grogan is killed in action. Some time later, Barry comes across an officer bathing in the river, which Barry sees as an opportunity to steal the officer's identity and cross over to the Prussian lines, the Prussians being allies of the English.

Barry's plan is to figure out a way to get to a port city, from there to Holland, and then from Holland to Ireland. Hopefully, he can also get rich along the way, as Barry's biggest desire is to live a life of luxury. Unfortunately, all of these plans are dashed when Barry runs across a platoon of Prussians led by Captain Potzdorf (Hardy Krüger). Potzdorf realizes Barry is lying and forces Barry into service with the Prussian army until the war ends. At that point, Barry, with his knowledge of languages, is asked to spy upon a Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee), who is ostensibly an Austrian envoy but believed by Prussia to be a spy of Irish origin. Barry, always willing to work himself up to try to become more wealthy, decides to work with Balibari. The two eventually go across Europe fleecing rich gamblers, until meeting Sir Charles Lyndon and his wife (Marisa Berenson). Barry and Lady Lyndon immediately fall in love, and Barry is able to drive the elderly and already sick Sir Charles to a slightly earlier grave!

Barry and Lady Lyndon go to England and get married, which allows Barry to become Barry Lyndon. He's also got access to all of Lady Lyndon's money. But there's a catch. Lady Lyndon already has a son by Sir Charles, a son now known as Lord Bullingdon, even though he's still quite young. Because Barry is not of noble birth, all of Sir Charles' holdings, which nominally became Lady Lyndon's, will become Lord Bullingdon's at such time as Lady Lyndon dies. And the young Lord Bullingdon absolutely hates his stepfather. Even more so, he hates the fact that stepdad seems hellbent on driving the family into the poorhouse.

Barry Lyndon is based on a story by Thackeray, who also wrote Vanity Fair. That was turned into the movie Becky Sharp, and while I was watching Barry Lyndon I couldn't help but think of Becky Sharp as they have common themes in main characters wanting luxury but meeting tragedy. Moviemaking technology advanced in the 40 years between the two movies, and some of that works to the advantage of Barry Lyndon, as many of the more technical aspects of it are gorgeus, from the location shooting (Ireland as not just itself but also England and Prussia) to the costumes and set design.

Unfortunately, one change in filmmaking that doesn't work is how it became more common to have longer, epic-length movies. Barry Lyndon clocks in at a shade over three hours, and with Stanley Kubrick directing, those three hours are sure to go by slowly. Also not helping is the fact that Ryan O'Neal is horribly miscast as Barry Lyndon, looking as out of place as many of MGM's stock players in the 1930s version of Romeo and Juliet.

Barry Lyndon is another of those movies that for some inexplicable reason gets ranked ridiculously high by critics and people in the industry. It's not a terrible film, but it's not without its flaws and certainly not a "Top 50 of all time" movie. But watch and judge for yourself.

Kiss Me, Kill Me

TCM celebrated its 30th anniversary back in April, and one of their spotlights that month was to bring in some of the people who work(ed) behind the scenes at TCM to present a movie or two each. One of the production designers selected an early Stanley Kubrick movie, Killer's Kiss, although to be honest I recorded it more for the synopsis than realizing it was an early Kubrick film.

The opening credits are superimposed over a man in New York City's old Penn Station. After the credits, that man, Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) delivers an opening monologue about how one can get oneself into a mess, just as he did starting a few days earlier.... Once again, this is a cue that makes it seem likely we're going to get another flashback, and sure enough we do. It also sounds as though Davey is on the run, although that turns out not to be quite true.

Davey is a boxer, as the monologue makes clear, since the flashback starts just before his latest fight, against an up-and-coming young man named Kid Rodriguez. Davey is down-and-going, to the point that his uncle out in Washington State has been suggesting that he go back west for a visit. Davey gets knocked out by Rodriguez and that just might be the impetus for him to go west to see his uncle and aunt again.

Meanwhile, Davey lives in one of those apartment buildings with a courtyard. In the apartment directly opposite his lives a taxi dancer, Gloria Price (Irene Kane). As Burt Lancaster had a tendency to do with Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City, Davey looks across from time to time at Gloria, without knowing anything more about her. Tonight, however, he has a bad dream (cleverly portrayed by the use of negative photography), from which he wakes up to discover that Gloria is having a bad time of it in her apartment with a man, who turns out to be Vinnie (Frank Silvera), her boss at the dance hall (Frank Silvera).

Davey goes over there to save Gloria, and over breakfast, she tells him her sad life story. Davey by this time has planned on going back to Washington, and has also fallen in love with Gloria, so the plan will be to bring her along. But each of them will need to pick up their final paychecks, which presents the big dramatic conflict of the movie. Gloria needs to get it from that nasty boss, with Davey waiting at the entrance to the dance hall. Vinnie is extremely jealous, and sends some goons out to rough up Gloria's companion. But in the meantime, Davey gets waylaid by somebody stealing his scarf, and his manager shows up with Davey's check from the last bout. So the henchmen rough up and kill the manager, with Davey being an obvious suspect. Worse, Gloria witnessed it, and Vinnie can't have her as a witness.

Killer's Kiss being a very early film for Kubrick, it was done on an extremely limited budget. Hence the no-name cast and a running time of only 67 minutes. And, in fact, it does have the feel of the sort of thing that might have worked better as one of those episodes in a live play of the week type anthology show that were the rage in the 1950s. That having been said, Kubrick shows that he has a great deal of talent, and also comes up with a lot of nice vintage photography of midtown Manhattan as it really would have been in the mid-1950s, the sort of stark black-and-white photography that can't be recreated by any of today's doe-eyed nostalgic looks back at the Boomer era.

Killer's Kiss certainly isn't the world's greatest movie by any means. But it's a decidedly interesting movie.

Full Metal Jacket

I've mentioned the "Blind Spot Challenge" several times in the past. In it, a movie blogger picks 12 "essential" movies that you'd think most film buffs would have seen, but that for whatever reason the blogger hasn't. Then, the blogger blogs about one of them a month over the course of a year. I've never taken part in that largely because I don't have planned out far enough in advance what movies I'm going to be watching (or finally getting around to watching) over an entire year. But one of the movies that was one of my blind spots up until now is Full Metal Jacket. TCM finally premiered it when they did their 100th anniversary salute to Warner Bros., and that gave me a chance to record and watch it.

The movie is in many ways two discrete halves, although some of the important characters are in both halves of the movie. The first half is set at Parris Island, SC, which is home to the other big US Marine Corps base, the other being Camp Pendleton which I mentioned yesterday in conjunction with The Big Caper. A new class of recruits is there, although this being 1967 and the Vietnam War, you wonder whether any of these recruits are actually draftees. One that you could be forgiven for thinking is a draftee and not there by choice is Pvt. Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio) -- but more on this in a bit.

One of the tropes of Hollywood military movies is that the drill sergeants who take the raw recruits at the beginning of the movie are notoriously tough on those recruits. In some ways, that's necessary, as you have to have unit cohesion, and you're going to be trusting those other members of the platoon (or members of similar platoons) with your life if you're going out to a war zone, which most of these men were going to be if they could make it out of basic training. Unfortunately, the DI here, Gunnery Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), isn't just tough on the men; he comes across as downright sadistic and almost sociopathic. He's particularly tough on the aforementioned Lawrence, whom he renames Pvt. Pyle after Gomer Pyle. Pyle is overweight and terminally incompetent; ultimately Hartman's plan is to issue collective punishment for each of Pyle's misdeeds, in the hope that the rest of the platoon will be able to get him to straighten up and fly right.

Given particular responsibility for that is Pvt. Davis (Matthew Modine), renamed "Joker" by Hartman because Davis tries to come up with a way to rebel against Hartmann that still stays within the very narrow rules that DIs set up. Hartman thinks Davis might have some leadership material in him, which is why he gives Davis the task of giving "extra" help to Pyle and seeing Pyle through basic training. Eventually, after all of the basic training, it's time to give the men their first assignments. Davis is sent into the journalism corps, while Pyle, well, you'll have to see the movie to see what happens to him at the end of basic.

In the second half of the movie, the Marines are sent to Vietnam, and almost the first action they see is the Tet offensive of February 1968. Joker, writing for Stars and Stripes, is given the task of putting a positive spin on the offensive, as well as writing other stories that keep of the morale of the enlisted men in uniform. But he's also a Marine, which means that he's going to need to fight if called on to do so, and you know that not only is that going to happen, but it's going to be the sort of fight that remains seared in one's memory....

I'm not the biggest fan of military movies, and certainly not a fan of Hollywood looking back on the Vietnam War, which seemed to be a thing for those Boomers who were subjected to the draft, as well as those people who weren't Boomers but also weren't old enough to fight in World War II. (Director Stanley Kubrick was born in 1928.) It's this second group that's probably more responsible for the revisionist obsession with the 1960s, since they were old enough to have real influence at the time but hadn't really had any chance to earn a high-status place in society the way the "Greatest Generation" had by fighting World War II. With that in mind, however, I still have to point out that it's easy to see why Full Metal Jacket is a high quality movie, and one that most other people would rate even higher than I would. It didn't leave me as cold as, say, Kubrick's earlier A Clockwork Orange, but it's definitely not one that I'll revisit the way I do some other movies.

Spartacus

I've got a box set of Kirk Douglas movies that has Spartacus in it. I'd been a bit reluctant to sit down and devote a good 196 minutes to the movie, sort of the same issue I had with Cleopatra a few weeks back. But Spartacus is going to be on TCM tomorrow (Mar. 12) at 4:30 PM, so I recently fired up the DVD player and finally watched Spartacus.

Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) is a slave of Thracian (roughly modern-day northern Greece) origin who at the start of the movie in the 70s BC is working in a mine in Libya, where the slave-masters drive everyone hard until they mostly die a fairly early death. Spartacus is unsurprisingly truclent about it, but there's not much way to resist when you're a slave. He's about to have a bit of luck, if you can call it that, in the form of slave trader Batiatus (Peter Ustinov). He looks at several of the slaves, and buys Spartacus.

However, it turns out that Batiatus runs a training school for gladiatorial combat, and intends to put Spartacus into combat with all the other slaves there, another occupation that has a fairly limited lifespan, since combat is generally to the death. But Spartacus is able to become romantically invoved with one of the females cooking and feeding the slaves, Varinia (Jean Simmons), to the point that she's going to become pregnant with his child. But the two of them are split up when Roman Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) buys Varinia. And after Crassus wants to see some combat, Spartacus decides to revolt.

They're able to break out of the training school, but if you think about it, it's not going to be easy to evade detection in Italy. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to go north to Gaul, but that's a pretty long journey. Instead, Spartacus contracts with a group of pirates represented by Tigranes (Herbert Lom) to take the ever-increasing group of rebel ex-slaves by boat over to the Balkans, requiring them to head down to Brindisi in the heel of Italy.

The Romans, of course, are up in arms about what's going on, and politics intrudes on what the best course of action should be. Pompey has been fighting a war in Hispania and is brought back to pursue Spartacus' army from the direction of Sicily, while another legion will attack from Brindisi. This will force Spartacus to head back north toward Rome, where Crassus has his own troops, and political reasons for driving Spartacus toward his troops.

In the meantime, there's been quite a bit of political maneuvering going on in the Roman Senate. Crassus, as we have seen, has tried to grab power for himself by becoming the hero in putting down Spartacus' revolt. Gracchus (Charles Laughton), patriarch in an old patrician family, is horrified at this, as he sees this as the first step toward tyranny. (Of course, he was ultimately right, as it would be less than 50 years until Rome became an empire.) A young Julius Caesar (John Gavin) ultimately takes Crassus' side, which I suppose was instrumental in Caesar's eventual rise to power.

The Romans also don't get to live happily ever after. Crassus loses Varinia, who runs away and joins Spartacus' army, and Gracchus is declared an enemy of the state by Crassus because Gracchus is the one person who could still challenge Crassus' power. Crassus also loses his manservant, Antonius (Tony Curtis), a slave who runs off after coming to believe he's going to be made a sex-slave.

The life of Spartacus is the sort of material that would probably work well in a miniseries, assuming that you want to cover the political situation that affects how the Romans handle the rebellion. At 196 minuts, this movie version of Spartacus is a little long, mostly because the final battle in which Spartacus is defeated but not killed comes with a good 40 minutes left in the movie. There's a lot of political ends between Crassus and Gracchus that the writers want to clean up, and a Hollywood scene at the end that's supposed to leave the viewer hopeful.

The version of Spartacus in the box set I have is the 2015 restoration which, if I had a good enough home theater to watch it, would probably look pretty darn good, although not as good as the Blu-ray release.

Lolita

Shelley Winters' turn as TCM's Star of the Month continues tonight at 8:00 PM with Lolita.

Lolita is one of those movies that starts off at the end. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) shows up at the house of Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers). Quilty is a dissolute man, at least from the looks of his house, with a table tennis table in the main room covered with all sorts of junk, and a generally slovenly look to the whole place. But Humbert is really there to shoot Quilty!

Flash back four years. Humbert Humbert is a British professor of French literature who has gotten a job at one of those small liberal arts colleges that dot Hollywood movies, this one being somewhere in Ohio. But Humbert decides he's going to spend the summer before he has to go out to Ohio working on a book, so he shows up in the town of Ramsdale, NH, looking for a place to rent a room for the summer. The one he gets is in a house owned by Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters).

Haze is a widow with a teenaged daughter, Dolores (Sue Lyon), who has the nickname Lolita. Lolita is beginning to learn about boys, and don't you think she doesn't know the power that she has over them, what with her good looks and their hormones. She even pursues Humbert, who finds himself falling prey to her charms. But Charlotte is also in need of a man, not that she's going to be as direct about it as her daughter.

One night at a dance ostensibly for the teens, Charlotte and Humbert meet Clare Quilty, a screenwriter also in Ramsdale for the summer. Humbert keeps finding that he wants to be alone with Lolita, but this is obviously not morally acceptable, so he comes up with the next best solution, which is to start up a relationshp with Charlotte as a ruse to be able to be near Lolita. Charlotte, being in need of a man and not realizing what Humbert is up to, agrees to marry Humbert.

But then she reads Humbert's diary and learns the truth, which causes her to go nuts and run out in the rain, where she gets run down by a car and killed. Lolita is off at summer camp at the time, so she doesn't know what happened. And Humbert is too stupid to tell her the truth for several days after picking Lolita up from the summer camp!

On the way back from summer camp, they run into Quilty at a hotel, Humbert not recognizing him from that dance back in Ramsdale. But Quilty certainly recognizes Humbert and Lolita, and starts plotting a way into Lolita's life, as we see when he shows up at the Humbert house in disguise claiming to be a high school psychiatrist! He's also written a play just to get Lolita cast in it and near him. Humbert tries to get away, while Quilty keeps following.

I had two big problems with Lolita. One was with the characters. None of the four main characters was particularly likeable. Humbert lies for no good reason; Lolita is nastily manipulative; Charlotte is a shrill clingy harpy; and Peter Sellers is in post-Strangelove obnoxious mode even though this one was made a year before Dr. Strangelove. The other big problem is with the director, Stanley Kubrick, who decided that the best way to handle the material is to have it drag on for over two and a half hours. It's way too slow, I think.

Interestingly, the one thing I didn't have much of a problem with is the whole idea of a much older guy with a stepdaughter who may or may not be of legal age. That idea is handled reasonably well, in part because the Production Code hadn't been completely dismantled yet (even though the movie was made in England, Kubrick was obviously going to have to conform to the Code to get the movie shown in America). So everything is handled in a somewhat more circumspect manner than it would have been half a dozen years later.

There's also a 1990s version of Lolita, which I haven't seen, so be careful if you're looking for a DVD.

What Can I Say About A Clockwork Orange That Hasn't Already Been Said?

Just in time for Christmas, I watched A Clockwork Orange off my DVR. It's available in multiple formats, so I"m OK doing a full-length post on it. Having said that, I'm not certain this is going to be quite a conventional post: I have to admit that while A Clockwork Orange is generally considered a masterpiece, I found that it left me generally cold.

Most people probably already know the basic story. Malcolm McDowell plays Alex, leader of an adolescent gang called the Droogs (which I'd guess comes from the Russian word for "friend", because a lot of badly-pronounced Russian gets used in the movie). They commit what they call "ultraviolence", which as you can guess is more violent than regular violence. Eventually Alex gets caught by the police after one of the violent acts after the rest of the gang revolts against him.

Alex gets sent ot prison, where he becomes a seemingly model prisoner because he wants to get the hell out of there. He's given a chance at parole when scientists come up with a new method of reforming violent criminals that basically involves conditioning physical violence out of people by making them violently ill at the thought of committing violence. However, this conditioning causes problems when Alex gets out of prison.

So why did A Clockwork Orange leave me cold? One thing I already mentioned, the use of badly-pronounced Russian. I happened to major in Russian in college, so I was eventually able to figure out what all of the references were supposed to be, but what I couldn't figure out was what point this proved. Apparently this was from the original Anthony Burgess novel, so I probably shouldn't be too critical of director Stanley Kubrick for using it in the movie. But there doesn't seem to be any good artistic or plot-driven reason for it.

There was a lot in the visual style of the movie that I didn't care for either. A lot of the scenes seemed almost sterile and choreographed, and highly unnatural. It was almost like watching a Busby Berkeley musical minus the music. I was reminded at times of some of the scenes and pacing from The Big Lebowski, another movie that left me cold. Kubrick I think used a similar style (at least to me) in 2001, except that the obviously futuristic nature of that movie makes it work. Even though A Clockwork Orange is supposedly set in a dystopic near-future, the dystopic nature of it probably ought to make the sets look the worse for wear. The lower classes' apartments in Soylent Green, for example, are suitably lousy; Alex and his parents' apartment is much too nice.

The third act of the story was also a problem for me, eventually resulting in an ending I found too abrupt and a final scene that didn't really fit in terms of character development.

The one thing that didn't bother me was the violence. I don't particularly care for sex scenes, of which this has a lot, but that wasn't much of a problem here since they're clearly needed to advance the plot. The violence, while brutal, was also needed to advance the plot. True, a lot of it seems choreographed, but the mere fact that it was violent didn't disturb me the way it apparently did some critics at the time.

Ultimately, I'm glad I finally got around to seeing A Clockwork Orange, but it's not the sort of movie I'm particularly interested in revisiting. Considering the critical praise the movie generally gets however, this is definitely one that other viewers should judge for themselves.