What's so Funny? (2) - Eddie Cockrell suggests alternates for the greatest comic director of the second half of the Twentieth century

Blake Edwards

In a recent post on this blog, David Hare suggested that Blake Edwards was one of greats. Discussing the new Blu-ray of Edwards’ masterpiece Victor/Victoria, David heaped praise.”The integration of music, and the pacing, neither missing a beat or ever proceeding a step out of time are the work of one of the few great masters of American screen comedy,” In a link on my Facebook page I got a bit extravagant... “The master of American comedy in the second half of the Twentienth Century,” I said. Which lead Eddie Cockrell, the esteemed critic for Variety, and many other publications, to raise an eyebrow. When Eddie’s objection was received by email I asked him to name me fifty better comic directors. He took up the challenge….

“The master of American comedy in the second half of the Twentieth Century,” you say? I count four films that fit that description: the unassailable VICTOR/VICTORIA and S.O.B. (he loved himself some punctuation), the first PINK PANTHER film and THE PARTY.

Edwards and spouse Julie Andrews

My challenge with Edwards has always been his leaden approach to slapstick and his leering take on women and sex (his finesse of the latter is a large part of what makes VICTOR/VICTORIA work, and it is just the opposite approach that renders S.O.B. so hypnotically watchable). He’s a very self-conscious filmmaker, I think, and that has always worked against him for me. Having said that, the glow-in-the-dark condom swordfight in 1989’s SKIN DEEP is an inspired piece of business. And the less said about 10, the better.

Your challenge was to come up with a list of 50 or so directors who distinguished themselves to greater effect in that time period. Edwards certainly didn’t lack for box office successes, though his not infrequent bombs—primarily the later work done as he suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and depression—were heard round the world. A list of 50 directors is certainly do-able, but would include a phalanx of lightweight filmmakers whose directorial styles extend no further than this week’s fad. So let’s focus on those whose reputations have spanned a few decades over that period. In no particular order, here we go:

Billy Wilder

Jerry Lewis

Mel Brooks

James L. Brooks

Harold Ramis

John Hughes

The Coen Brothers

The Farrelly Brothers

John Landis

Woody Allen

Wes Anderson

Christopher Guest

Robert Altman

Mike Nichols

Richard Lester

Ted Kotcheff

Peter Bogdanovich

Pleasant if shallow box office successes have been churned out late in the previous century by Amy Heckerling, Penelope Spheeris and Betty Thomas, but if this list were expanded to embrace international talents it would certainly include Doris Dorrie. And Percy Adlon. And, last but certainly not least, Jacques Tati.

Arguably, each of these men and women have as many or more than the four successes I attribute to Edwards above. And very few of those titles are as ham-fisted and sexist as even Edwards’ best films, much less the remainder.

Sydney Film Festival (27) - Rod Bishop sends in a late entry on Alex Gibney's doco ZERO DAYS

Zero Days (Alex Gibney, 2016)      SPOILER ALERT!

It comes on like a geopolitical spy thriller from John Le Carre. Israeli on-the-ground assets (probably double agents) use a USB stick impregnated with a unique virus to contaminate the computer systems at Iran’s nuclear development facility in Natanz. Once contaminated, the untraceable virus, developed by the USA and Israel does the rest by selecting and destroying the uranium producing centrifuges and remaining undetectable from the plant’s supervisors.

All goes swimmingly until the Israelis decide the worm is not sufficiently slowing down the Iranians. The Israelis are accused of having mutated the virus and used commercial contracting companies within Iran to re-contaminate Natanz. Trouble is, these companies also do business elsewhere and those little “upgrades”, so necessary to their computing systems, unsuspectingly carry the virus around the world.

Enter the common-or-garden Norton internet security guys from Symantec Research Labs, Eric Chien and Liam O. Murchu. They can’t believe their luck – an unimaginably sophisticated and almost untraceable computer virus that could only have been coded by a nation state with the potential to disrupt not only nuclear plants, but power grids and all essential infrastructure. It’s Geek Heaven.

Director Alex Gibney has these two Symantec virus specialists take us through this discovery (they called the worm Stuxnet). They realized it specifically targeted Siemens programmable logic controllers to do whatever the Bad Guys or Good Guys might want. Gibney uses a series of talking heads from various agencies to tell us over and over again “no comment”, “next question”, “nothing to see here”.

The North Americans may have invented the term “blow-back” to describe the unintended consequences of their foreign policies in places like Vietnam, Chile, Central America, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan (to name just a few from the recent past), but they never seem to see it coming.

The Iranians promptly retaliated with their own cyber warfare, recruiting their own Cyber Army from large numbers of Iranian geeks outraged by the Stuxnet attacks. They are accused of cyber attacking American interests in Saudi Arabia and closing down the American banking system. Iran also sourced a whole lot more centrifuges from Pakistan to replace those destroyed.

Towards the end of Zero Days, Gibney runs another series of American talking heads proposing international treaties to stop destructive computer worms being used as military weapons. I could not detect a trace of irony in any of these pleas.

It’s a gripping two hours and expect it to turn up as a serious contender for Documentary of the Year.

Alex Gibney’s output these past four years has been remarkable: seven feature length documentaries We Steal Stories The Subject of WikiLeaks (2013); The Armstrong Lie (2013); Finding Fela! (2014); Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (2014); Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015), Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015), Zero Days (2016) and five episodes of various television documentary series.

On Blu-ray - David Hare rejoices at the new edition of Blake Edwards' masterpiece VICTOR/VICTORIA

I recently put on the new WB Archive Blu-ray of Blake Edwards' 1982 musical comedy Victor/Victoria wondering just how I'd feel about a movie I haven't watched with any care since it first played. Within a few seconds of Henry Mancini's elegiac, melancholy, Legrand-esque credits music the tears began to roll and there I was catapulted back to my first viewing of it in NYC at the Ziegfeld Theater way back in June 1982 during it's opening week, just after the annual Christopher St celebrations I'd attended the previous week. A debut in the year that "began" the plague.

This is Edwards' last great movie and an unassailable work of grace, beauty and meaning.  I view it as the peak of a long career. 

Victor/Victoria is a movie which is impossible to analyse in a few sentences - I would leave any more profound comments to Peter Kemp who I know adores it, but it juggles the two most difficult American film tonalities - comedy and dramatic conflict - with skill that would have knocked out Lubitsch. The integration of music, and the pacing, neither missing a beat or ever proceeding a step out of time are the work of one of the few great masters of American screen comedy, surely the most taxing form in the movies and one all too rare and precious. But the pacing and the direction always keeps a brake on the speed and the tone. In fact there is an unmistakable sense of some hint of melancholy never far away. 

Edwards' cast is simply peerless, even his wife Julie Andrews whose own limitations as an actor actually play into the limited function of the nominal character. While Victor/Victoria is the notional "star" and the reason for all this fuss, as he/she is in Reinhold's Schunzel's superb original 1933 Weimar film, Edward's movie is really concerned with everyone around her and their responses to her "game". James Garner here essays another round with the demon gay shadows which Edwards had begun with Craig Stevens in the terrific Gunn from 1967 and later, sometimes ambivalently hinted at in other pictures. In Victor, Edwards is finally ready to embed himself in gay characters, in a gay sensibility and in a gay movie.The fact the film was such a big, wider hit and has never generally been considered in any official gay canon, is itself now irrelevant and needs to be addressed to acknowledge its importance, especially for a great director like Edwards, who did so much and took so long but finally got here, in this wonderful place. 

It's a complete masterpiece. The new transfer is almost (not quite) as glowing as that stunning 35mm print at the Ziegfeld in 1982. Yesterday, as it were. Before so much more water would pass under so many bridges.

The future of film - Further discussion with contributions from David Hare, Bruce Hodsdon (and Adrian Martin and Noel Bjorndahl) for which many thanks

In a previous post which you can find here Bruce Hodson passed along some thoughts prompted by Kent Jones and the appearance of Jones feature doco on Hitchcock & Truffaut. This prompted some further commentary which I have gathered up, slightly edited, added one self-indulgent link, and now posted. Read on….this need not be the end….

David Hare Bruce you are surely not wrong to think of Jodie Foster's comments as basically promotional. Money Monster, which we saw last month with an appreciative full house in Paris, did not impress as very much more than any old style Stanley Kramer liberal message pic with the usual suspects doing their dues (Clooney in place of Spencer Tracy, etc). But it was weighted down with characterizations of such reductionist simplicity it made the old Kramer characters play like characters from Tolstoy. Even Clooney's ambivalent TV personality and semi-insider economics presenter has little depth. But the part of the "hostage taker", which did have some depth, was undermined by an embarrassingly bad Hays code morality obliging his death at the climax. A really brave independent movie would have kept him alive at the end and fighting for freedom but fighting very much against an authoritarian establishment whose immorality is even more insidious than the pro-neocon BS Clooney peddles on his show. That would have clearly been too subversive for Foster and I frankly thought the resultant picture was in fact completely "mainstream".

But maybe that's just me. The death of cinema has been coming for decades, but I feel the new miracle is the world wide web and the possibility of multiple and endless parallel universes of gigantic personal film collections (Like the ones several of us hold) going online into numerous download/streaming sites - copyright nazis allowing - into some non-profit infinite cloud very much like the way music collecting is now largely cloud/server based and completely transforming into a virtual future. The concomitant question of what if any physical media the movies will continue to be delivered in is the key one for me. Maybe 4K/HDR SUHD home video is the next wave with what is potentially the equivalent of commercial studio and cinema quality resolution and image quality, and the ongoing restoration projects of the big American studios (to take an example) of their archives into 4K or upwards data folders is the real future. Whatever, the hierarchy of production distribution exhibition seems to be breaking down which is not necessarily all bad?

Geoffrey Gardner‪ Very acute text David, and the segue to the enormous and ever-expanding personal collection, bypassing film archives and official collections such as those held by TV stations in the past at least, a development assisted by the technology of the day and fortunately by the disregard that collectors have, and have always had, for the structures of copyright and ownership. (That disregard is of course why many films survive at all over time and it opens up some very interesting areas of discussion, especially so as the death of the DVD is already predicted and that's the basic storage for huge amounts of those personal collections you refer to.)

Bruce Hodsdon Kent is not predicting "the death of cinema" (that has been predicted many times starting with the introduction of synchronous sound) but the death of 'a certain kind of cinema' - the classical cinema of the of the Hollywood studios. What he's referring to is the classical cinema of the of the Hollywood studios. What he's referring to is the split between that cinema (the 100 year merging of art and commerce) and popular screen based entertainment franchises. In cinephiliac terms it amounts to something like the death of a popular cinema that we have grown up with and immersed ourselves in. I think HD DVD is likely to survive for a specialist market. For some of the complexities of the relationship wrought by digitisation the monograph by Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion "The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten problems" challenges the prognosis that the cinema is dying and it should be read by all cinephiles. Available for purchase online from Caboose along with other essential publications including 'The New Cinephilia'.

David Hare Bruce again I think Kent is not predicting anything new, for this is surely paralleled by the effective demise of the "arthouse", and the reduction of great "cinephilic cities" to half a dozen or less - NYC, London, Berlin. Los Angeles. Even Paris can no longer make a claim as one. What is of far more concern to me is the apparent death of film culture which was passed on through generations of peers and which is now all but dead. Even French movie scholars will pin you to the wall for the night to lament the complete loss of cinephilia and ignorance amongst the new French intelligentsia. The old days of unbridled retrospectives and dozens of incomparable small revival cinemas on the left bank and elsewhere are long gone. The last time Paris had a thriving film culture outside the walls of the CInematheque of course was maybe fifteen years ago, circa anno 2000. It should not pass unnoticed that film culture of the sort we understand, as does Kent who is himself one of its outstanding spokesmen, is the parallel exponential rise in so called "Film Studies" in American so called Universities which has for the most part been a sinecure for the talent free, and cinephilically illiterate, and a haven for unbridled mediocrity. One of the tenets being, naturally, that there can be no canon nor any possible range of demonstrable excellence and superiority of one artist to another in the era of mindless PC. The great culture war of the new tertiary education sector to dumb everything down to Politically Correct non specialization ( a form of bogus "democracy") has done even more damage than the limitations of physical print or Digital distribution and mass marketing

Geoffrey Gardner (This is a contribution that wasn’t put up among the Facebook posts  here so it should be in parentheses because it’s egomaniacal but I’m not sure that David’s characterization of Paris is a bit unfair. Anyway for my impressions of that city way back in 2004 may I refer you all to my little essay A Cinephile Winter and Spring (2004) on rue des Ecoles, a memoir of a time I still recall with great fondness though it was a dozen years ago.)

Bruce Hodsdon Maybe it's only the "death" of the sort of film culture that we have grown up with - of course no longer a film culture but a screen culture. Digitisation nevertheless makes it possible for the "film'" culture to renew itself as it 'increasingly mingles with other media'.

Bruce Hodsdon   I think there is actually more arthouse exhibition in Melbourne multiplexes now than there ever was in the sixties including much expanded film festival exhibition.

David Hare I hope so Bruce. But that completely depends on us and what we do with our own collections, to say nothing of our experience and knowledge.At some point there has to be an open confrontation between the world of the copyright holders and the rest of us. This ownership factor alone is also an instrument in the savage lmiitation of what people can now see and hear. Rosenbaum seems the only film writer so far who's really recognized and analyzed this. For the moment if any of us tried to do anything with our collections openly we'd end up in prison sharing a cell with the Ukrainian gentleman from KAT who was thrown into porridge earlier this week. Obama's US FBI are extraditing him on behalf of their masters, the GIgantic Bomb Corporation/Sony/UniversalMSNBC/Vivendi, IBM, etc etc as we speak. (You can never keep an old bolshie down Bruce, especially these days!)

David Hare: Melbourne is a staggering and very fortunately driven exception. It is one of the possibly six real cinephilic cities still standing. One of the reasons is the man I am currently answering on Facebook (and many others of course.)

Bruce Hodsdon In the Oz context Melbourne still remains the FC capital. However I would have thought that the proliferation of national film fests greatly facilitated by digitisation is widespread. I was probably just repeating in my first reply above what was clear  in the Kent quotes, but what did strike me was the implication of a growing divide in cinema between 'art' and 'the popular', also becoming something of the generational divide that Kent is referring to. At the risk of being nostalgic what impacted me back in 1964 was the way Sarris merged the two so engagingly.

David Hare Amen! there's much to ponder and discuss here.

Adrian Martin This is a great discussion, and I hope FILM ALERT can give it more play. But, for the record, I don't buy the 'generational divide' line that Kent J. suggests. When I taught in Frankfurt between 2013 and 2015, the main director that the non-cinephile students always referred to with enthusiasm was Hitchcock. Everything and everyone in contemporary cinema got compared to him (and not by their teacher, may I add). You can't keep that guy's reputation down! And, to my eyes, this situation has never altered since I began teaching in the 1980s. And it takes very little good screening/teaching, in my experience, to turn students on to a wide range of other stuff: Lang, Lubitsch, Cassavetes, Ingmar Bergman, modern Austrian avant-garde, Maya Deren, etc etc.

Noel Bjorndahl Great discussion. In the last 10 years of teaching film at TAFE which ended in 2014, I had a degree of optimism about the new generation of cinephiles and budding film scholars-I was able to interest many of my students to specialise in and write about a range of key genres including the Western, Film Noir, Musicals, Sci-fi and Horror, Comedy and even Romantic Melodrama like McCarey's An Affair to To Remember. One of my youngest students in my final teaching wrote a perceptive and detailed essay on Errol Flynn and the Swashbuckler. But from the wider view, I share David's pessimism on the future of film.

Bruce Hodsdon In a way it's hard not to be Noel, but like KJ I'm not pessimistic. What I think we are seeing is not the death throes of cinema period, but only the death throes of a cinema: a system of production, distribution and exhibition that we came of age with, a hundred years of 'cinema' is being re-defined. Classical narrative is part of the dialectic.