The Month in Crime
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
The Month in Crime
We used to like the idea that the main character of a Woody Allen film was Woody Allen. It took guts back in the chest-hair-and-slacks seventies to be a guy who looks like Woody Allen, and to walk around smack dab in the center of the screen with a handsome brute like Tony Roberts or a babe like Diane Keaton and to basically directly address the camera and announce yourself as the romantic lead. Once our lizardlike stem brains move from wanting to throttle him to preserve our fresh-faced blonde American cinematic resources we come to root for him fervently to get the girl: when he doesn't, it feels honest and sad. His worried face and direct address added to our list of cinematic archetypes, and it (certainly not Bergman references) became the baseline aesthetic for his movies. Our tolerance of the movies had entirely to do with our tolerance of the man. So sure, he repeated himself and recycled themes and bits from his stage act and later from the movies themselves--but we went to go see his face. We went to go see if he'd make a good movie or a bad movie with it. Then the whole stepdaughter thing happened and our lizard brains took over again. Which is to say that he should have been making movies like his latest, Match Point long ago. It's stripped down to the basics, includes a terrifying murder sequence with more emotional bite than anything Allen has done in a decade, minimal New York corn-pone philosophizing, and, most importantly, no scenes of an elderly Allen pawing over fresh feminine meat in a way that has become increasingly unseemly. In fact, no Allen at all. A blessing.
The Film Forum had a Hitchcock retrospective early in the month. Chief among the moments I remember: the twitchy, self-satisfied comb of the moustache the inspector performs at the end of Dial M for Murder; in Vertigo, the sickening green light that bathes Kim Novak as she steps out of the bathroom in her "second" twisted performance as Madeleine Elster; the mummified "body" which so often changes shape and which is refered to as both man and woman throughout the chuminess of The Lady Vanishes; the dizzying tracking shot in Notorious, which descends down, almost nervously, shakily, from the rafters of a mansion, into the spinning blacks and whites and silvers of a society party and further, right into Ingmar Bergman's hand, where a little key glistens with which she might disrupt the entire affair.
I saw James Cagney die three times this month: each time was a little dance and worth the price of admission; hopping up and down the curb in the rain in The Public Enemy; a stylized Japanese shadow on the wall in Angels With Dirty Faces; up and down the cathedral stairs in The Roaring Twenties. Cagney dies so artfully in his movies that the all-singing, all-dancing Yankee Doodle Dandy seems like the throes of some agonizing death spiral, as if he were being tommy-gunned for the full 126 minutes of the movie, leaping around like a beached mackerel.
There are very few movies which are crimes in themselves. The Triumph of the Will is one of them. After finishing the first two volumes of Richard J. Evans' history of the Third Reich I felt compelled to watch it, this time all the way through. You can say what you want about the sensuality and eroticism of Leni Riefenstahl's imagery. It's still the glorification of spitting old men from which everything erotic is meant to emanate; that is to say it's a celebration of power, and its imagery is that of politics itself. It's boring. It's like watching television in an election year.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:23 AM,
