And as an actor, a damn good one, too.
In watching his portrayal of the unbelievably, pathologically truth-challenged Mark Whitacre in Steven Soderbergh's latest film "The Informant", it was hard for me not to connect this performance and this character with the role he played ten years ago in "The Talented Mr. Ripley", another story of a perverse fabulist whose every blithe utterance suborns reality to his own purpose.
For me, Damon, for all of his success, is one of the most under-appreciated actors of his generation. Since acting itself is a form of lying, or "behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances", it is a mark of his craft that he has a unique ability to get under the skin of characters like Thomas Ripley and Mark Whitacre and show the humanity within the turning wheels of their elaborate artifice.
Although the tone of "The Informant" is quite different than "Ripley", with Soderbergh turning his liar's tale into a black comedy and Anthony Minghella giving his a more Hitchcockian treatment, with Damon's solid skills in common, they are companion pieces in the great American theme of reinvention through fabrication.
william
Even though Paramount Pictures started life in 1912 as Famous Players and made many famous movies over the last century, the 1941 animated gem "Mr. Bug Goes to Town" from Dave Fleischer was not very successful when first released, and in my opinion has been sorely overlooked and under appreciated ever since.
With songs by such luminaries as Hoagy Carmichael and the great Frank Loesser, and charming character design and animation, this tale of a garden of small insects uprooted by the construction of a modern skyscraper is a distant precursor of contemporary classics like A Bug's Life and even Up.
The story is a love triangle involving the screw-up grasshopper Hoppity, who gets in hot water when he convinces the group to move to a new site and is accidentally responsible for a fire which almost burns down their insect village; his love interest Honey, the ingenue bee; and the mayor and money bags of this micro-society, C. Bagley Beetle, who also wants to marry Honey and will stop at nothing to get rid of his romantic rival.
Known variously as Mr. Bug Goes to Town and Hoppity Goes to Town, it was out of release as a mainstream title for some time, and only last year surfaced as a dvd put out under the title of "Bugville".
There is an amazing night club sequence with electric colors and jazzed up drawing techniques that feel very modern.
And you'll leave humming tunes like "We're the Couple in the Castle," "Katy Did, Katy Didn't" and "I'll Dance at Your Wedding (Honey Dear)," music and lyrics by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser.
Enjoy!
william
It was an unexpectedly sunny rural plot for what I had anticipated to be a dark urban noir classic.
A wised-up guy gets a tip on a sun-dappled hillside chock-a-block with the season's first crop of Golden Delicious apples. Another guy, just-back-from-sea, and recognizing a main chance when he sees one, strikes an uneasy partnership with the wise guy. Pooling their cash and their held-together-by-spit Army surplus trucks, they drive out to the farm, strike a bargain for as much of the crop as their axles can bear, and put the pedal to the metal to deliver their precious fruit to the San Francisco farmer's market.
Could Jules Dassin's "Thieves Highway" be the only classic film noir whose narrative revolves around Apples?
Based on a novel by A.I. "Buzz" Bezzerides (who also wrote another noir classic about men and cars and driving with your brights on, Raoul Walsh's "They Drive By Night"), Dassin brings his usual flair for location shooting, great casting, and memorable performances in a film that looks at the gritty underside of the fruit and vegetable trade.
Lee J. Cobb is great as the amoral Italian produce wholesaler Mike Figlia, and Richard Conte is the sailor looking to avenge his father's crippling truck "accident" at the hands of a couple of Figlia's goons, who sees this Big Score flipping his crop of Golden Delicious as the way to kill two birds with one stone. Alternatively tough and foolish, he falls under the spell of fruit market streetwalker Valentina Cortese, who works for Figlia but sides with Conte when the going gets tough.
But character actor Millard Mitchell really steals the show as chiseling apple hustler Ed Kinney, who shows his true stuff by saving Conte's life when his truck collapses on him while trying to change a flat tire, but loses his own when his truck loses control coming down the mountains, spilling his load of apples down the hillside while his cab explodes and he goes up in flames.
It is one of those horror-in-broad-daylight moments, and Dassin talks about the shot of the accident and the tumbling apples as one of his proudest moments, as he recollects details of making the movie in an interview on this Criterion Collection dvd.
There is a wonderful moment where Dassin's waxes poetic about his interest in markets, the noises, the commerce, the behavior of the professionals who work there, and you can see how that passion translates into the loving detail and documentary quality he brings to getting it right when he shot this movie on location in San Francisco's old market. You can almost taste the first bite of that ripe Golden Delicious apple, even if the crooked fruit dealer is rotten to the core!
Check it out.
william
A killer uses his key to open the door and enter an empty fourth floor walk up apartment in Paris. In the vestibule there is a fire box hung on a wall next to the door. Taking out his gun, he places it atop the box, carefully turns around to position his back to the box, then swiftly reaches back over his head, grabs the gun and brings it down in front of him, aimed to shoot. He practices the move - reach, grab, aim - a few more times, considers, then rejects this hiding place.
Walking into the main room of this corner apartment, he surveys the simple bleak furnishings. A desk with a chair, and three mismatched chairs facing it. A credenza by the wall, windows to the street below on either side. He silently sits in each of the three chairs, and then behind the desk, trying out his perspective on the room from each vantage. We see him imagining some future event, weighing carefully the strategic advantage or disadvantage each position confers.
Gradually he goes to the credenza and repeats the ritual of hiding the gun on top and practicing the over-the-shoulder grab and draw. After a few times repeating this gesture, he seems satisfied and leaves the gun there, hidden for his future use. A last look around, the faint sound of a few passing cars, and he leaves.
We cut to later, and another, younger, man entering the same apartment. From his hat and coat we also know him to be a killer. He is one of the 3 killers that the first killer has arranged to meet in this empty, unused apartment. We admire him for the same reason we admired the first, he has come there early to scout the scene, taking every precaution to figure out the angles that may give him a later advantage. But there is something about this killer. He's cocky. Of a different generation. Without ever knowing exactly why, we don't like this guy.
We smile when we see that the first place he looks is to check on top of the fire box in the vestibule. We admire his intuition, but admire more that our first killer rejected this too easily detected hiding place. We watch him enter the same gray room, sit down in the three chairs, consider the same angles, like some black and white noir version of Goldilocks.
We are teased as he gets up to go and we are momentarily surprised and relieved that he didn't spot the hidden gun. But then he stops, looks at the credenza, and we know that he knows. He goes and finds the gun, feels its heft, pockets it, feeling good about himself. He has the advantage.
Sometime later, the first killer returns. He enters the apartment, the meeting place, to find the boss behind the desk, the two killers already sitting in the seats they have chosen, one chair left empty for him. He eyeballs the young cocky guy. Sees him for what he is. He sits, calm and cool, one against three as if that is the most customary thing in the world to him.
The conversation starts flat but heats up. They blame the killer's friend for turning rat fink. They want him dead. The killer defends his friend. He doesn't believe the stories about him ratting out. But he accepts the shared code implicit in their lives. He wants 48 hours. If he finds out his friend did what they said, he will kill him without regret. And if you don't...is the boss's only reply. They make a simple proposition to the killer. You kill your friend. Or we kill you. End of discussion.
While he's been talking we watch the killer stand up and make his way around the desk and to the window next to the credenza, as if to look outside. We quicken with anticipation of the moment as we see him work himself into his practice position, with his back to the credenza. We know the hidden gun is not there. We know that the cocky young killer knows that the gun is not there. We understand that he's letting the killer move around the room freely only because he can't wait for the moment where he reaches for the gun on the credenza and finds it is not there.
The director doesn't exaggerate the staging with the camera. Everyone's actions are real and measured. With simple eloquent shots and great non-verbal storytelling he has built his narrative to this moment of maximum suspense. We know what is going to happen and we take great pleasure in knowing.
And then what happens? The killer pulls his gun, not from behind his head atop the credenza, as he practiced, as we anticipate, as the cocky young killer anticipates, but from his pocket. A second gun. Which he uses to get the drop on all of them, leaving them helpless and impotent as he leaves.
Suddenly we realize that he planted the first gun exactly so that they could find it and would be lulled into a false sense of advantage. Suddenly we feel without even thinking it exactly what the writer and director want us to feel and constructed the scenario to allow us to appreciate, the subtle distinction between these two professional criminals.
It is a great example of the narrative art of cinema, telling stories with pictures, showing the audience the information you want them to see and understand in the sequence that will serve the story and build interest and suspense, then topping it by surprising them just at the moment where they are most sure they are ahead of the game.
It is a master class by a great filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Melville, from his movie "Le Douxieme Souffle" (Second Wind) starring Lino Ventura.
Pierre Zimmer plays Orloff, the older killer. (Coincidentally, he was also the assistant director on the original French version of The Talented Mr. Ripley known as "Plein Soliel"!)
I can't remember a better sequence in a movie in which none of the main characters are involved. It is rare, and a testament to Melville's confidence as a storyteller, that he understood the importance to giving over this much screen time to this showdown between these supporting characters.
I highly recommend this movie.
Enjoy!
william
From deep in the archives, today I wanted to share these photos with you, which were taken sometime in the early 1970's, of two filmmakers - Werner Herzog and Sam Fuller - who came to screen their work and speak at the Art Institute of Chicago.
They each became major sources of inspiration, Pied Pipers for a group of us tender young noodles who followed them, wide-eyed and innocent, down the road to a life and career in cinema.
"Mike..."
I turned my head toward the sound. The motion brought a wave of silent thunder with it like the surf crashing on a beach. I heard my name again, a little clearer this time.
"Mike..."
My eyes opened. The light hurt but I kept them open. For a minute she was just a dark blur, then the fuzzy edges went away and the blue became beautiful. "Hello, kitten" I said.
Velda's mouth parted in a slow smile that had all the happiness in the world wrapped up in it. "Glad to see you back, Mike."
With those words, hard-boiled crime writer Mickey Spillane introduced the character of Velda in his classic 1950's noir novel "Kiss Me, Deadly."
It has long been considered the best adaptation of Spillane's work on screen when Robert Aldrich turned it into one of the seminal film noirs of the post-war era, with its nuclear paranoia theme and apocalyptic ending.
I was sad to see that the real life Velda, the actress Maxine Cooper, passed away this week.
She had a short career, but her sexy presence as Mike Hammer's droll assistant was seared into the memory of anyone who caught a revival of Aldrich's 1955 film over the ensuing decades.
The movie has one of the greatest noir openings when Ralph Meeker picks up Cloris Leachman in his convertible roadster on a dark highway at night, but Maxine holds her own in this company and owns the role of Velda and her slow smile that had all the happiness in the world wrapped up in it, like no one before or since.
"Sorry to see you go, Velda," said Mike.
william
