The Talkies/Tough Guys
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES TOUGH GUYS by Bruce Bawer About halfway through The Untouchables, equable T-man Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), who's involved in a sanguinary war with the bootlegging empire of_ Al Capone...
...Orton—a cranky, prissy, neglected consort who cooks and answers the phone and identifies himself officially as the playwright's secretary...
...for years they were nothing more than misfits, weirdos, a couple of losers...
...River's Edge is the most frightening American film to come along in many a year—and it is frightening not because it makes us believe in an implausible tale of horror, but because it opens our eyes to a horror story that happened in our midst, and that—in a very real sense—is all around us still...
...For example, when Ness is waiting for a Capone bookkeeper to show up at Chicago's Union Station, and a woman and baby carriage appear at the foot of a nearby staircase, one knows immediately that De Palma is setting up an hornmage to the famous pram sequence in Potemkin...
...Moreover, there are half a dozen action and suspense sequences each of which is so nearly perfect of its kind that, if it were transplanted into a typical contemporary crime picture, it would without question be the film's highlight...
...For the sixties mentality, in one way or another, seems to be responsible for the character of the adults who play the most significant roles in these kids' lives...
...What is so remarkable about this film is that it makes these kids' anomie utterly believable...
...De Palma is in truth an academic sort of director, a man whose films, like the work of some academic poets, are extraordinarily contrived and extraordinarily conscious of their influences...
...As Ness's pal Malone (Sean Connery) observes, the only man Ness can really trust is Ness—and even he's not perfectly virtuous, and he knows it...
...why isn't she crying now...
...C ince The Untouchables is a Brian k...
...Rich and successful, he and Halliwell (Alfred Molina) fly to North Africa and surround themselves with scantily clad teenaged boys...
...Ness asks a cop during a stakeout, and when the cop replies that he is, Ness says—in an incredibly wholesome tone`It's good to be married, isn't it...
...In Glover's defense, however, it must be said that there are young people who behave exactly likehis Layne—who deliver lines with the same Valley-boy drawl, who indulge in the same broad gestures, who have the same dopey-eyed look...
...The film places a good deal of the blame—and convincingly so—on the values and life-styles that became, popular during, and continue to be associated with, the sixties...
...her house is a mess...
...But De Palma and Mamet want our admiration for him to be mixed with a sense that all of his heroic efforts have come to very little, that his heroism is tinged with absurdity...
...Then there's the kids' history teacher...
...In the role of the cocky, narcissistic Orton (to whom he bears a remarkable resemblance), Oldman is splendid...
...THE TALKIES TOUGH GUYS by Bruce Bawer About halfway through The Untouchables, equable T-man Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), who's involved in a sanguinary war with the bootlegging empire of_ Al Capone (Robert De Niro), erupts in unaccustomed anger when a thug refuses to drop his piece and Ness is forced to blow him away...
...The purpose of this shot may be defensible —De Palma may mean to point up these men's isolation from the world and their devotion to each other (Stanley Kramer made very effective use of such a shot for a similar purpose near the end of On the Beach, when he revolved his camera around the dancing, doomed protagonists portrayed by Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner)—but there are so many distracting camera movements of this sort in The Untouchables that after a while one wants to scream, "Enough already...
...What made these kids this way...
...Yes, Capone's finally headed for the Big House...
...For several years after they'd left RADA, the two of them, sharing a room in then-unfashionable Islington, collaborated on novels (which they couldn't get published) as well as on fake blurbs for the jackets of library books (a prank which landed them both in prison for several months...
...Worst of all is Layne, a wiry, wild-eyed pill-popper who's almost as crazy as Samson, and who is rather pleased by the murder because it seems likely to bring them all even closer to each other—in defense of their friend Samson, of course...
...It's a broad, gutsy performance (sometimes uncomfortably reminiscent of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High), and it may strike many viewers as too broad, more appropriate to a comedy than to a film like River's Edge...
...But why is it good to be married...
...De Palma film, it is not only about Eliot Ness and Al Capone but about movies and moviemaking...
...Significantly, the adult whom the kids most look up to is the scummiest of them all: Fack (Dennis Hopper), a grotesque, one-legged hermit who killed his girlfriend twenty years ago and who regularly provides the local teenagers with free dope...
...Ness's reply: "I think I'll have a drink...
...and perhaps Frears also felt that these relatively low-intensity sequences would provide necessary breathers between high-intensity sequences about Orton...
...apparently the only thing they have to live for is the next high...
...like previous De Palma films it's set not in the real world—or to be specific, in the director's version thereof, where real-world values apply—but in a movie world, a deliberate never-never land of De Palma's imagination where style is nearly everything and moral questions are largely irrelevant...
...Indeed, I don't remember ever seeing a film that disturbed me the way this one did...
...Precisely—or so, at least, the film's director, Brian De Palma, and writer, David Mamet, want us to believe...
...What's more, the law that he's dedicated himself to enforcing—the Volstead Act—is one in which he doesn't seem to believe...
...As for Orton's plays, which Lahr discusses at length (most of the second half of his book is devoted to plot summary and analysis), they are given relatively short shrift by Frears...
...But so what...
...so does the movie...
...Despite all of the outrageous antics, though, what is most interesting to watch is the series of subtle transformations in the relationship between Orton and Halliwell...
...We're not going to find out from this film...
...This the film shows us in spades...
...In the penultimate line of the movie, a reporter says to Ness, "They're going to repeal prohibition...
...wrong but legal vs...
...Suddenly Orton was the toast of London...
...Ness cries...
...Why has Stephen Frears included these sequences...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 The film develops largely through a series of confrontations between men...
...River's Edge is based on a bizarre 1981 incident in a small northern California town: a high-school boy killed his girlfriend and showed several friends her dead body—which he'd left exposed on the banks of the local river—but none of them was as outraged or horrified as one might expect them to be...
...It's Orton's murder, after all, which makes Orton'slife interesting—that, and the outrageous sexual escapades which he recorded carefully in his diaries...
...The sequences serve useful transitional purposes, too...
...as he tells a roomful of police recruits, having a drink now and then may not be a bad thing—what's important is not right vs...
...Later in the film, virtually the same line comes out of the mouth of Malone, a bachelor...
...they continued to attend school, to hang out and party, and days passed before anyone reported the crime...
...a reissue of Prick Up Your Ears stands at number six on the paperback list...
...But in tone and purpose the film—which was directed by Tim Hunter and written by Neal Jiminez—could hardly be more different from De Palma's glossy entertainment...
...What's more, like Fack, whose only friend is a plastic sex doll, none of them is really close to anybody...
...They think that they're one another's friends, but they don't even know the meaning of the word: Jamie, after all, was a "friend," and they can't even feel particularly bad about her death or get angry at her killer...
...Loot, an even bigger hit, followed...
...but his peculiar appearance, voice, and mannerisms are highly disconcerting, and make it difficult to accept him as anybody other than Wallace Shawn...
...Even as one laughs—and, perversely, one cannot help laughing loud and long—at some of the extraordinarily insensitive remarks of some of the kids, one is profoundly disturbed...
...The Orton Diaries, as I write this, is number one on the Village Voice Literary Supplement best-seller list—a reasonably good index of what's selling in literary bookstores in New York, where the film's been playing for several weeks...
...Bennett's script is based upon the 1978 book of the same title by John Lahr...
...When they first meet, Halliwell is the sophisticated older man, Orton the cocky provincial boy whom he takes under his wing...
...Leaving his mother's funeral, Orton (Gary Old-man) picks up a fat, unsavory workingman at the bus stop and loves him up in a nearby abandoned building...
...To these kids, feeling alive is a rare experience...
...I know the English are a lot classier than we are—but an agent...
...He's one of those ex-hippie teachers who try to "relate" to their students and preach "relevance" and "commitment," but who don't even try to instill in their students what the kids need most desperately—worthy ambitions, moral awareness, a respect for authority and for adulthood...
...This is why his camera never seems to sit still: he wants us to be aware constantly that there is a camera...
...The set-up—in typical De Palma fashion—is long and uneventful (remember Angie Dickinson's endless trek through the museum corridors in Dressed to Kill...
...Ironically, when Tim says, "You're gonna pay for what you did," he doesn't say it to Samson but to Matt—whose act of squealing seems more of an obscenity, according to these kids' moral.code, than the murder itself...
...Scarface) being interviewed by reporters—the camera angles call attention to themselves...
...when the two of them first meet Stone (another "untouchable"), Malone tries to provoke Stone's anger with ethnic slurs...
...Blue Velvet came closest, but one was able to remind oneself, after experiencing its emotionally devastating (and, at the same time, weirdly funny) vision of the heart of small-town darkness, that it was a fiction...
...The film, a biography of the irreverent sixties playwright Joe Orton, has been elegantly directed by Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette) from a literate script by Alan Bennett...
...Even Costner, in his magnificently minimalistic performance...
...her boyfriend lives with the family (Dad, apparently, walked out years ago...
...Are you married...
...There are, furthermore, some sequences—for example, the one in which Capone fondles a baseball bat while speechifying at a dozen or so of his tuxedoed cronies—that one can hardly avoid reading as homoerotic...
...And, one might add, so that we can be impressed by the sequence's thrilling choreography...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987...
...What is this...
...Like the book, the film is actually a dual biography, telling the story not only of Orton—a Leicester working-class boy who found the world of his parents bleak and unimaginative and fatuously conventional—but of Kenneth Halliwell, seven years his elder, whom he met at age eighteen when they were both acting students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and who became the most important person in his life...
...Wallace Shawn—who is probably best known to audiences from My Dinner with Andre, and as the "little homunculus" in Manhattan—is, I suppose, a good actor...
...For another- thing, Frears apparently wants to suggest a parallel between Lahr's wife—a devoted secretary-cook-typist whom Lahr takes for granted—and Halliwell...
...Take the • • • Like The Untouchables, River's Edge is based on a story of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 37 mother of Matt (Keann Reeves)—a boy whose conflict of conscience becomes the film's primary focus, and who eventually turns Samson in...
...Interpolated in the film are several sequences that take place years after Orton's death, and depict John Lahr's (Wallace Shawn) meetings with various survivors preparatory to the writing of his biography...
...Although Ness and his wife are hardly seen touching in the film, there are scenes aplenty which find Ness in a tight, riveting, almost erotically intense eyeto-eye two-shot with some other man...
...When Ness first meets Malone they argue...
...And she smokes dope: when Matt runs out of joints, he dips into her stash...
...Yet another story of a real-life murder—and of its bizarre background—is told in the British film Prick Up Your Ears...
...It's almost as if De Palma's playing teacher, offering us a sort of film-school anatomy lesson—a slow-motion dissection of a top-notch crime-film shoot-out...
...in the Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator 's movie reviewer and the author of The Middle Generation and The Contemporary Stylist...
...Put it this way: If anybody hired him to play me, I'd sue...
...And perhaps he was right...
...To her credit, a girl named Clarissa is at least able to recognize her own inability to feel: she notes that she cried when "that guy in Brian's Song" died...
...Sometimes," Clarissa tells Matt at one point, "I think it would be a lot easier being dead...
...John (Daniel Roebuck), and upon his circle of friends, who are unable to recognize Samson's madness or to be deeply affected by his murder of their friend Jamie...
...But I was very pleasantly surprised by the degree to which The Untouchables held up in spite of this cinemacentric sensibility...
...Nor has De Palma grown tired of perpetrating his famous hommages to great directors and films of the past...
...Sloane, Halliwell essentially takes on the role of Mrs...
...It's Fack to whom Samson describes the exhilaration he felt when he killed Jamie: "She was there dead in front of me and I felt so fucking alive...
...Even Ness and Capone —who come face to face twice, very dramatically—have between them a provocatively ambiguous chemistry...
...And he strides away from the camera, like the conventional Western hero riding off into the sunset...
...indeed, most of them, though their lives revolve around dope and acid rock, would under ordinary circumstances probably pass as relatively decent...
...judge's chambers during Capone's trial he admits, "I've broken every law I've sworn to uphold...
...Yet despite its derivativeness, this sequence is wonderfully effective—perhaps the best thing in the movie, in fact...
...He even goes so far as to claim that he's become just like the people he's been stalking...
...but after Entertaining Mr...
...As for the bald, bearlike Molina (whom fans of bad English cinema will remember as a Russian sailor in Letter to Brezhnev), he is certainly a compelling performer, but even when he is playing Halliwell as a young, relatively stable man at RADA he is already so scary and crazy-looking that one cannot for a moment understand Orton's attraction to him...
...Significantly, though he is married, Ness wants all of his "untouchables" to be bachelors...
...Matt's mom doesn't discipline her kids (even her twelve-year-old, Tim, is an earringed pothead...
...Matt argues...
...Then everything changed...
...You couldn't get stoned any more...
...T his is not, in short, The Life of Emile Zola...
...For one thing, he seems to be interested in pointing up the contrast between the low-key bourgeois life-style of John Lahr, Typical Writer, and the self-destructive, fast-lane life-style of Joe Orton, Literary Rebel (who, incidentally, started his life as John—he changed his first name, at Peggy Ramsay's suggestion, to avoid confusion with John Osborne...
...When Orton met Halliwell in 1951," Lahr writes, "he found a surrogate brother and formed the only family he would ever acknowledge...
...Then, on August 9, 1967—soon after the thirtyfour-year-old Orton had completed a play called What the Butler Saw—Halliwell took a hammer and smashed open Orton's skull, splattering his brain on the apartment's wall and ceiling...
...Given a choice between creating an original, realistic sequence and contriving a derivative one with an immediately recognizable filmic antecedent, he'll do the latter every time...
...Orton also found in Halliwell the lover with whom he would spend the rest of his short life, and the mentor who would introduce him to the classics and to writing...
...At one point, for instance, De Palma trains his camera upon a circular table at which the "untouchables" are seated, and then sends the camera spinning completely around the table, panning from face to face as it does so...
...a viewer who doesn't have much sense of what they are like will leave the theater with little more than a vague notion that Orton's work is as outrageous as he was...
...And they're supposed to: De Palma doesn't want us to forget for a second that this is a movie...
...The film focuses upon the murderer, a fat psychopath named Samson, a.k.a...
...But it is unarguably a fascinating film...
...Later he takes his mother's false teeth and hands them to an actor in Loot to use as a stage prop...
...Similarly, the musical score (by Ennio Morricone) is often excessively dramatic, and several of the performances (notably De Niro's) are almost ludicrously overdrawn—all of which is, of course, in the classic De Palma tradition...
...The Windy City's still crawling with corrupt characters—including the judge, jurors, and cops who, but for Ness's heroic efforts, would've gotten Capone off...
...Tojudge by photographs, the real Halliwell was actually quite pleasantlooking—with, by the way, a much better-looking toupee than the one that Frears has slapped on Molina...
...It might be said, in fact, that on one level The Untouchables is a study in the way men relate to each other...
...as Ness, comes dangerously close to excess—i.e., to overdoing his, underplaying...
...and the performances by Costner and Connery are truly impressive...
...On the whole, however, Prick Up Your Ears is a very impressive film, a thought-provoking contemplation—like My Beautiful Laundrette—upon the themes of love, resentment, poverty, and violence...
...but, though the Lahr segments are of interest, they don't strike me as having been worth the trouble, and certainly don't do much for the film's unity...
...her part in his life consists mostly of looking concerned when he is in trouble, of leaving town in police custody (with their young daughter) when Ness decides that her life is in danger, and of beaming proudly from her seat on the aisle when he triumphs over Capone in the courtroom...
...The Untouchables is, in short, a contrivance—but a decidedly first-rate one.violence and retribution...
...The main link between these sequences and the body of the film is Peggy Ramsay (Vanessa Redgrave), Or-ton's agent, who provides Lahr with the playwright's diaries and shares her memories of Orton...
...illegal...
...In 1963 a play Orton had written, Entertaining Mr...
...The story builds extremely well...
...It provides further evidence—if any is needed—of the extraordinary inventiveness and sensitivity of Stephen Frears's directorial imagination...
...I look forward eagerly to his next project...
...with River's Edge one has no such consolation...
...No, that's bullshit...
...For the truth is that, despite its superficiality and cynicism, this film is wonderfully entertaining...
...Lahr's book opens with the murder-suicide...
...Indeed, as he is portrayed in this film, Ness is a bit absurd—ingenuously dedicated to law and order and unquestioningly patriotic...
...In general, the young actors are very good, though one spends a good deal of ones time worrying about Crispin Glover's performance as Layne...
...Sloane, was produced in the West End and became a huge hit...
...the important interaction here is not between male and female, but between male and male...
...After accepting an award at a formal ceremony, Orton heads for a Holloway Road pissoir where he sets his statuette down on the floor and proceeds to have sex, in the dark, with half a dozen or so strangers...
...there are virtually no dead spots...
...He's not unlike Ed Harris's John Glenn in The Right Stuff —a clean-cut, gee-whiz, all-Americansquare...
...the editing and cinematography are impeccable...
...But something inside them is dead: they're unable to react to the murder with the grief and horror that normal civilized people would beexpected to experience...
...Frears seems to specialize in the sociology of offbeat homosexual couples...
...Halliwell then took twenty-two Nembutals with a grapefruit juice chaser...
...Needless to say, this tendency to devote more attention to coy allusions and camera tricks than to character development and dramatic structure has seriously weakened many of De Palma's films...
...A game...
...It's not that they're particularly scummy kids...
...What will you do then...
...He has a wife, but all we really know about her is that she is pleasant, loyal, and antiseptically attractive, and that she and Ness love each other very much...
...Yet beneath the surface of each of these encounters one senses a strong personal attraction—these men are not simply confronting one another, they're sizing each other up, engaged in a sort of male version of a mating ritual...
...Miss Redgrave handles this role quite professionally, but she is less a performer here than she is a lovely and stately presence: she seems- to spend most of her screen time stepping elegantly out of cabs, applauding elegantly at awards dinners, and sitting elegantly at her desk...
...For at the end of the film, the risks, sacrifices, and deaths (Ness loses two members of his three-man squad of "untouchables" to Capone's gunmen) are made to seem meaningless...
...From the very first scene—an overhead shot of Capone in a barber's chair (cf...
...but once the action starts, so much happens in such a brief stretch of real time that De Palma shows it to us in slow motion so that we can take it all in...
...And how outrageous was he...
Vol. 20 • August 1987 • No. 8
