Somewhat in anticipation of Jim Jarmusch, Brian De Palma (appropriately) directs on the downbeat Jordan Crittenden’s very funny original script for Get to Know Your Rabbit, a satire of the egotistical American mantra of “living life at the gut level”—a slick, twisted philosophy some associate with the paranoid nut-case who at the time of the film was the U.S. president. (Hysterically, Nixon had described as a gut-level one his decision to choose as his running-mate Spiro T. Agnew, who would resign his office in disgrace sooner than Nixon would resign his.) Donald Beeman shares a first name with one of Nixon’s brothers, a Nixon confidante whose phone was tapped, the president (post-De Palma’s film) memorably explained, for undisclosed security reasons. (The name Beeman perhaps alludes to President Nixon’s best friend, banker Charles “Bebe” Rebozo.) Anyhow, this fine Crittenden-De Palma comedy resonates as a well-earned bashing of Tricky Dickery.
Beautifully played by Tom Smothers (whose brother is named Dick), Donald Beeman resigns as marketing analyst for a Los Angeles firm and pursues what his gut tells him will bring him happiness: a new career as a tap-dancing magician. (“You’re holding your rabbit all wrong,” instructor Delasandro, played by Orson Welles, tells him in dismay.) Donald has more trouble than his ineptitude as a club magician. His old boss, Turnbull (John Astin, Sean’s dad), has sunk into a deep funk and a perpetual five o’clock-shadow, quitting his esteemed position to pursue his gut-desire of becoming a self-pitying derelict. Pitying him, Donald anoints Turnbull his manager, but Turnbull greedily transforms Donald’s mantra into a springboard for his own business venture, which he runs out of Donald’s flea-bag hotel room.
Things do not end happily, but there are lots of laughs along the way.
Posts Tagged ‘Welles/Grunes’
GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT (Brian De Palma, 1972)
May 4, 2010F FOR FAKE (Orson Welles, 1975)
November 6, 2009F for Fake, also known as Vérités et mensonges (Truths and Lies), is Orson Welles’s exquisite documentary about trickery and fraud—something the world’s most famous amateur magician should know something about. Indeed, the film nearly begins with a cloaked Welles delighting two children with a magic trick at a train depot. It exactly begins with just the sound of his voice beginning this trick against a blank screen, a reminder of how Welles convinced countless Americans during the Depression of a Martian invasion through the simulated news bulletins in his radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. All’s Wells that ends Welles.
Welles uses the form of a film about the shooting of a film. Deceptively, we will find out, he assures us at the outset, that his film is entirely true. This is one of his most playful films.
Among the “practitioners” of fakery it documents are Elmyr de Hory, the art forger, Hory’s biographer, Clifford Irving, who also wrote a fraudulent biography of recluse Howard Hughes, and Welles himself, whose sleight of artful hand, besides juggling old and new documentary elements and sly reenactments, creates a structure of Chinese boxes among which Welles cuts back and forth with dizzying, delightful rapidity.
Eventually, the film pulls its Persian rug out from under us, exposing how it has succeeded in fooling us. This isn’t errant manipulation because it clarifies Welles’s thematic intent: a bravura demonstration of our inclination to cede to seemingly authoritative information and to authority itself. F for Fake is, ultimately, an anti-fascist work. This serious purpose, then, accounts for its complex tone, which includes notes of profound melancholy. Too often we have been fooled by dangerous political ideas and leaders.
The film comes from France, Iran and West Germany.
THREE CASES OF MURDER (Wendy Toye, David Eady, George More O’Ferrall, Orson Welles(?), 1954)
September 26, 2009Orson Welles stars as MP Lord Mountdrago in the final part of the British mystery anthology Three Cases of Murder, and he is rumored to have largely directed the segment as well—and its intensity, riveting suspense and brilliant wit all lend credence to the rumor. George More O’Ferrall, the credited director, worked almost entirely in television.
Mountdrago and Owen are political adversaries in the House of Commons; Mountdrago devastates the young man with a swiping speech, provoking his threat of certain revenge: “I can crush your proud spirit, and I will.” Mountdrago begins having anxiety dreams involving Owen’s mockery of him, and in Mountdrago’s waking reality Owen himself seems aware of these dreams, to which he mockingly alludes, eventually unhinging Mountdrago, who sees a psychiatrist. Mountdrago denies feeling any guilt for having earlier struck down Owen’s idealism and career. Mountdrago determines to murder Owen in his next dream in order to “escape” his taunts. Will this do the trick?
W. Somerset Maugham wrote the story upon which the Poe-like segment is based. Welles is superb as Mountdrago; Alan Badel, a limited actor with little presence, in addition to playing Owen plays a different character in each of the other segments. In “In the Picture,” directed by Wendy Toye,* Badel is the anonymous painter of a blustery period landscape, including a house, that hangs in a museum. This “Mr. X” lives in that house; he is constantly breaking the painting’s glass cover in order to leave the painting and check out the effect of each new change he has made to it in his pursuit of perfection. He is also in the habit of guiding individuals into the house in the painting, where a mad taxidermist adds these to his ghoulish collection. Badel plays a bartender in the middle segment, the whodunit “You Killed Elizabeth,” directed by David Eady. Like the first segment, it is good (although disappointingly resolved); but the third one is what makes the show.
* Dance critic Mindy Aloff has written me the following:
Wendy Toye—a lifelong friend of the dancer Frederic Franklin (still performing mime parts with American Ballet Theatre in his 96th year)—was a professional choreographer at age 16.
A real prodigy.
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FOUR MEN ON A RAFT (Orson Welles, 1942)
June 28, 2009Four Men on a Raft was part of the ill-fated, never completed Orson Welles documentary about Brazilian culture and politics, It’s All True. It is a reconstruction of the voyage on a sailing raft that four impoverished fishermen had made eight months earlier from Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital, to present in person their grievances to President Getúlio Vargas. In the “feudal system” in place, owners of the rafts—jagandas—appropriated from such fishermen half of their catch, imposing poverty on the latter no matter how hard they worked, while at the same time, by law, these workers were denied the social service benefits available to other poor, union workers. Vargas initially renegged on his promise to remedy the situation but, perhaps pressured by Welles’s filming, extended by law all normal benefits to jangadeiros, including housing, and medical and retirement benefits. During filming, the leader of the four men, Manoel Olimpio Meira, nicknamed Jacaré (Alligator), died. Welles’s postscript haunts: “Jacaré and the others made their voyage by jaganda exactly as it is here filmed. They were sixty-one days in the open sea, without compass, and guided only by the stars. . . .”
The film is silent (given the equipment that RKO provided, it could not have been otherwise), although sound effects and music were later added. This punctuation only deepens the dreamy effect of the silence. The four men’s voyage is epic; they stop at various points along the way, mostly to interact with others (although in one scene they pray by themselves), affording the black-and-white cinematographer, George Fanto, opportunities to collaborate with Welles on gorgeously mysterious extreme long-shots of the four men walking across sandy land, on the horizon or towards the camera, which is to say, us. The film, of course, is just as mysterious on water; a man will suddenly appear as a shade behind the sail.
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ME AND ORSON WELLES (Richard Linklater, 2008)
October 26, 2011Seventeen-year-old Richard Samuels may be daydreaming, hoping for release from the stultifying high school English class that’s now taking up Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It must be a dream, but the Jewish boy finds himself, on a Manhattan street, hired by Orson Welles to play Lucius, Brutus’s page, in the actual 1937 Mercury Theatre production of the play, scheduled to open in a week. Richard is replacing an actor whom Welles fired for contesting his authority. As Joe Cotten, a member of the company, will later explain, “Orson must always be right.”
The same-titled novel on which Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles is based was written by Robert Kaplow, a New Jersey high school film and English teacher. In the film, there’s no possibility that Richard is daydreaming; indeed, everything in it is exceedingly literal. As a result, the whole thing ends vaguely, with the self-importance of an outdoors overhead long-shot, with people the size of ants way below, masking this vagueness. Nor does the circular dream-possibility weigh in that the boy whom Richard replaces as Lucius is somehow himself. Vincent Palmo Jr. and Holly Gent Palmo wrote the script.
Otherwise, Linklater has directed well, with a montage of scenes vividly conveying the anti-fascist air of the legendary modern-dress, 90-minute Julius Caesar, which Welles relocated from ancient Rome to Mussolini’s Italy. After the opening-night audience rises to its feet in thunderous applause following the performance, Welles wonders aloud: “How am I going to top this?” On radio, with War of the Worlds perhaps? In cinema, with Citizen Kane?
Zac Efron is close to sensational as Richard, whom Welles calls “Junior,” partly to keep himself from dwelling anxiously on his own youth. (Welles was 22 at the time.) For most of the film Efron strikes one note; but how wonderful a note! When Richard’s breezy confidence takes a darker turn, deeper colors come sprinkling in—especially regarding Richard’s opposing Welles on the matter of Welles’s on-the-make production assistant, Sonja Jones, whom Richard mistakes for his girlfriend after a single night of sex (his first, it seems). Ben Chaplin is also good, as George Coulouris, who, according to this fantasy, desperately needs Welles’s reassurance backstage on opening night—perhaps to tweak the seeming self-certainty of Coulouris’s most brilliant roles (in Citizen Kane, Watch on the Rhine, None But the Lonely Heart). Overall, much of the film is indeed funny.
And no one is funnier than Christian McKay’s egomaniacal Welles; although McKay is a dozen years too old to play this early incarnation of Welles, the Brit had fine-tuned his convincing impersonation onstage in his 2004 one-man show, Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles. Moreover, McKay achieves late in the film a haunting moment suggesting Welles’s tragic self-awareness. The San Francisco critics named McKay the year’s best supporting actor.
Still, be prepared: Welles had not yet become the Orson Welles we all dearly love.
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Tags:Welles/Grunes
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