Defending Cinephilia 2020 (9) - A belated report from David Hare on a cinephile Christmas Day farewell to a year that locked us down and opened up the vaults at the same time for much reflection of what was, would be and might be next.

Having woken this morning to some fucking dirge like religious ceremony on the radio, I snapped it shut and unwrapped a new Kino Lorber disc of Frank Simon's The Queen from 1968. Religion always makes me feel the need to cleanse the palette. 

The wonderful portrait above is the legendary New York drag queen, Fabulous Sabrina (born Jack Doroshow) who died not long ago in 2017 at 74 after a lengthy career in the New York avant-garde performance scene. 

 

Sabrina's movie debut was Frank Simon's ground breaking pre-Stonewall movie 1968 The Queen which would have been awarded a major gong at 1968's Cannes Festival if it hadn't been for the May riots. The new Blu-ray disc is a pearl, with not only the 66 minute feature of the girls and their show but several more short archival and retrospective pieces with Fabulous Sabrina, and a truckload of other priceless material. 

 

The sheer guts and activism of the 60s dragsters always comes to the fore when you begin to think historically about radical queer activism. But that's not to ignore also the seminal role of so many drag performers in the evolution of NYC's radical drag/meta-camp/off-off Broadway theatre and performance arts including the great Charles Ludlum, Lypsinka, Ethel Eichelberger, and filmmakers Jack Smith and George Kuchar among so many others. 

They're all dead now, as is every last player from Jenny Livingston's superb Harlem drag ball feature, Paris is Burning, originally released in 1990 and recently reissued from a new 4K restoration by Criterion. 

 

So I'm looking forward to a big dinner with like-minded souls later today with plenty of booze, and rock and roll where we can toast the dead, and their memories at a sublimely bucolic setting on a cliffside just above the Waiohini River near Greytown (aka Gaytown to the het tourist hordes.)

 

And I hope you all have a lovely day forgetting about what a shit year we've all (mostly) been through. 

But...to cheer you up ... some more Christmas viewing...

Warner Archive's perfect new restoration of Lubitsch and Raphaelson's sublime The Shop Around the Corner (1940) which has been taken from one of MGM’s rare surviving O-negs from the nitrate era. It looks completely gobsmacking. 

 

The disc was released just before Xmas and is yet another essential purchase.

In the first screen above, Lubitsch finally directs DP Bill Daniels to cut to the picture's very first close up of anyone. Fifteen minutes in, here is the female lead, Margaret Sullavan, with co-star a devastatingly understated Jimmy Stewart just within the shot. And thus for the rest of the picture, Lubitsch never shoots them other than in medium to close two shot, all the way through this delicate ninety minute tragi-farce of their "mistaken identity" comedy within this tender, fragile piece of studio recreated prewar MitelEurop/Hungary that was in itself already in the process of disintegrating under the heel of Hitler and fascism.

Thus in Lubitsch's mise-en-scène the two shot celebrates and defines the couple not only before they're a couple but while they're far from a couple, and in the end, finally a couple.

Bill Daniels also photographed Stewart and Sullavan for Frank Borzage's greatest masterpiece at Metro, The Mortal Storm made the same year for the studio, and much against the will of that meddling bastard Louis B Mayer with an even more urgent cry to rise up to defend personal freedom from the rise of Hitler's fascists. 

In Borzage's great film, also released in a stunning new scan and transfer from original elements for Warner Archive last month, Daniels films the final shots of the now gone couple as some kind of sacred ghosts, and Borzage ends the film with a devastating montage of now deserted spaces and locations which the couple have inhabited earlier in the picture, into which the movie seems to be breathing life back into the shots. 

This magnificent coda (shots below) is one of the greatest endings in American cinema, and in ways that are even more profound than Antonioni's similar construction for the end of L'Eclisse, whose trajectory seems to be to elevate that film into a breathless post human world of photographed emptiness. Borzage's montage takes the spaces of Mortal Storm and fills them with life and blood, in the face of an overwhelming future assault on life in what is now history. The only other director to match him in this virtually supernatural level of enhanced being is surely Ophuls.

Again both of these discs are essential. 

And in a final gong for the year 2020........ I salute Warner Archive and their MPI facility and the magnificent team under George Feltenstein (above) who in my view are doing perhaps the greatest mass preservation and re-distribution job in the history of world cinema with their ongoing rescue of the huge Warner/MGM/RKO library.

Streaming and on BBC Channels - John Baxter revives THE JOHNNY WORRICKER TRILOGY (David Hare, UK, 2011-2014)

'...a kind of perfect role", Bill Nighy

 A PARFIT GENTIL SPY.

            Given its failure to anticipate 9/11 and other disasters, the international intelligence community has clearly lost the plot. The problem may be the sheer number of people involved. Efficiency in espionage appears to be inversely proportionate to the number of agents.  Why else would East Germany, where the Stasi spied on everyone, fail to envision the fall of the Wall? 

            Spying is simpler in the cinema. Hardly had Tom Hanks and his busty assistants driven Russia from Afghanistan in Charlie Wilson’s War than he changed hats to become the lawyer in Bridge of Spies who saves Soviet agent Rudolf Abel from execution. Catch Hanks spending a decade tracking down Osama bin Laden. He’d have nailed him in an afternoon, with no more help than an adoring aide to keep the Martinis flowing.

            A similar thought appears to have motivated David Hare in writing and directing his trilogy of spy dramas about MI5 analyst Johnny Worricker, played by the imperturbable Bill Nighy. 

            Produced by the BBC, Page Eight (2011), Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield (both 2014) reduce espionage to the matching of skills among a handful of dedicated individuals. As in most spy fiction, winning or losing are abstractions.  Nobody believes the recovery of “the plans”, the exposure of the mole or the outwitting of Karla, Moriarty or Smersh will change anything. To Hare, as to his predecessors John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling and John le Carré, it’s all about what Edwardians called The Great Game.

"a thuggish Ralph Fiennes"

            Like George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,  Worricker is the right-hand man of a dying boss, in this case Benedict Baron (Michael Gambon), head of MI5. Almost on his deathbed, Baron entrusts him with a report on America’s clandestine “black sites” and the practice of “rendition”.  Page eight of the document reveals in passing that British Prime Minister Alec Beasley (a thuggish Ralph Fiennes) knows and approves of their existence. 

            Worricker exploits allies, lovers and family to authenticate the report and disseminate its contents.  He’s unconcerned that this makes him a fugitive from his own department, now run by Jill Tankard (a snarling Judy Davis;).  Should we be in any doubt as to where his true loyalties lie, the vicar at Benedict’s memorial service announces that Johnny has chosen the music, then leads the congregation in the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country.

            The last shot of Page Eight shows Johnny standing at an airport, contemplating a smorgasbord of possible bolt-holes.  His story could have ended there, had the popularity of the first film not induced the BBC to fund two more. 

            Turks & Caicos finds Worricker on that particular Caribbean haven for dirty money, eavesdropping on some post-9/11 profiteers who have become rich constructing the infrastructure of illegal imprisonment.  Pausing to take up again with old flame Margot (Helena Bonham-Carter), he sabotages their consortium and the secret fund set up to guarantee Prime Minister Beasley a comfortable retirement, then slips away with Margot just before the axe falls. 

            The third film, Salting the Battlefield – a reference to the practice of victors destroying the economy of the defeated by sowing their fields with salt - might have been better called The Morning After.  Flitting between German safe houses, Worricker is induced to return to Britain with Margot, only to find that his absence has barely been noticed. Jill Tankard now runs MI5 in cahoots with a thriving American intelligence industry, for which rendition and black sites are just weapons in the arsenal of freedom. Beasley has escaped censure by blaming the Americans, then resigning to become a well-paid statesman-for-hire on the model of Tony Blair. 

            Fortunately, Johnny’s enemies are compassionate in victory. He’s allowed to come in from the cold and return to his old office where he can play the Great Game while Tankard and Co. get on with the Greater Game of fighting international terrorism. 

            In all three films, Worricker has a female companion, and sometimes two. In Page Eight, he befriends Syrian publisher Rachel Weisz, the mysterious death of whose brother at the hands of the Israeli Army he’s able to elucidate. “I don’t suppose you’d let me thank you?” she says hopefully when they find themselves alone in a hotel room, but of course nothing so carnal would cross Johnny’s mind. If he were to share her bed, it would be with a metaphorical sword laid between them, a guarantee of knightly restraint. 

Bill Nighy, Winona Ryder, Christopher Walken

            The distressed damsel of Turks & Caicos is Winona Ryder, who, in a different kind of film and another era, would have been called a “moll”. With the connivance of a CIA man, played with loose-jointed glee by Christopher Walken (an actor Nighy greatly admires – “Every move he makes is a dance”), Johnny saves her, before escaping into the dark waters of the Caribbean with Bonham-Carter. (Whistle-blowing accountant Meredith Eaton would have been a more appropriate companion, though her height, a mere four feet, might have complicated the incognito on which Salting the Battlefield depends.)

             “British actors,” said Roger Ebert, “love playing gangsters as much as American actors love playing cowboys.” This is no less true of spy stories, and clearly Nighy enjoyed himself as Worricker.  Asked to describe his character, he said “I wear a dark blue overcoat. I smoke herbal cigrettes in the rain, I stand on Battersea Bridge in the dark and you have to worry about what I’m thinking. It’s a kind of perfect role.”  

            Why would a political writer like David Hare devote three films to something so close to escapism?  Did he, by exposing the aimlessness of espionage, hope to condemn by implication the secret gathering of information and those involved in it? Alas, in the wake of Wikileaks, this is old news.  We are now all too aware that strangers can watch our every move, hear every word.  “Aren’t you worried?” attorney Tom Hanks periodically enquires of Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies.   We can only respond, like Abel, “Would it help?”   

Christopher Walken, Meredith Eaton, Bill Nighy, Winona Ryder, on set