Talking Late Style: a 2005 Discussion from a_film_by

In memory of Bill Krohn (1945-2026), a film critic/journalist whose work has meant a lot to me over the first decade plus of my cinephilia, I present here a conversation from the old internet film discussion group a_film_by which Krohn participates in on the subject of late films. You’ll probably recognize some of the other names that are a part of the conversation, and perhaps mourn the loss of these kind of spaces where serious in-depth conversations about movies etc. had, well, just a little more room to breathe. I first came across this conversation a couple years ago as I began the journey towards writing my book about late style in film and found it rewarding enough to read that I had the idea of excerpting it here on my blog to get more eyes on it, and in an easier-to-read format. Something prevented me at the time, but I thought with Krohn’s passing now would be as good a time as any to dust it off and share. I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning it up a bit, italicizing film titles, adding orienting dates in brackets, fixing typos, and giving the real names of the participants where necessary (Krohn’s contributions are given under the username “hotlove666”, for example), but the beginning of the original conversation can be found at this link.

From: Maxime Renaudin  Date: January 8, 2005, 12:23 a.m.

I'm not that obsessed by the last work of great directors. As if something exceptional had to be expected from a film that nothing, in most of cases, predestined to be the very last. But... I was a little excited in reading the new program of the Cinematheque: "Leur dernier film.” For the last program before a long closing (reopening in a new location in several months), they decided to show the last film made by about fifty famous directors. To name only a few of them, among my true favorites: Street of Shame [1956], The Cavern [1964], Most Dangerous Man Alive [1961], All the Marbles... [1981]. A program I dreamed about, I guess. There is actually some obsession here, which I cannot explain. Incidentally, I discovered both Ulmer and Dwan trough these very last films, and, moreover, during the same week... I barely exaggerate in telling that these movies really left their mark on me. I don't know if it is the recollection of a story that had to be read backward. I don't know if it is this strange atmosphere of ending worlds (also a genesis in Ulmer's), when every sentence reaches us as the ultimate cry, when the walls and stones seem to be burning before collapsing. But this program is a celebration for me.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 8, 2005, 7:15 p.m.

Lyons did a "last films" retrospective, and there was an interesting catalogue of articles. I'll send it along if I can find it. For me, arriving late, the first films I saw of great directors were often the last ones, or the late ones. I bought my first TV set to see The Amazing Transparent Man [1960], based on what Sarris had written about Ulmer in The American Cinema.

I had become a "buff" by seeing Red Line 7000 [1965] in its first release and then, after catching up with Rio Bravo [1959] on Times Square, watching the amazing "end game" of Hawks' last works as they appeared: El Dorado [1966], Rio Lobo [1970] (seen on psilocybin). My subsequent discovery of the rest of Hawks (working backwards by seeing other recent works at my college film society: Man’s Favorite Sport? [1964], Hatari! [1962]) was very much affected by this wrong-end-of-the-telescope approach—when I looked at the earlier works I had the endgame in mind, and Daney's “Rio Lobo: Viellese du Meme” in hand.

There is simply no doubt that late works are very, very different, and my genre film cinephilia has been marked by that difference (whereas my discovery of arthouse films was more or less contemporary with the first films of the NV [Nouvelle vague]. The other thing you may have been reacting to, as I was, is the fact that in the late ‘50s, (The Cavern, Rio Bravo were made that year, as I recall) classical cinema itself was coming to an end.

You mention Aldrich: In a sense, all his ‘60s and ‘70s work was one long Farewell Symphony, with films like Ulzana's Raid [1972] or The Grissom Gang [1971] self-consciously posited as The Last Western or The Last Gangster Film. That can certainly be felt in All the Marbles...—but after all, what does one expect from a man who started his career as assistant director on Limelight [1952]? The same remarks apply to the last—and best—period of Billy Wilder's work. Some directors did not do well during this period at all—I was never enamored of the monumentally self-conscious The Shootist [1976], for example, or of most late Seigel.

Often a last film is notable for reversing the premises of the oeuvre: Seven Women [1966] with its all-woman ensemble, Family Plot [1976] being made "against its own storyboards" as I have written elsewhere, with Hitchcock working out the blocking with the actors and then filming it. Ford had one more last film up his sleeve—about a black cavalryman who becomes an Indian—and so did Hitchcock and Hawks ("a peculiar little western," as he described it to CdC [Cahiers du cinéma])—these works and the ones before them were conceived in the shadow of death, and each is the negative image of the oeuvre that preceded it.

Another historical feature of these works is that they were much misunderstood by mainstream critics at the time, and passionately defended by us.

 

From: Adrian Martin        Date: January 8, 2005, 10:39 p.m.

I find this thread begun by Maxime and continued by Bill to be fascinating, Quite simply, I wonder whether the “wrong end of the telescope” entry into cinephilia is not an almost universal experience? One that has a particularly “ritual” intensity, too, in that one often encounters these strange, charged last works already “primed” on whatever auteurist writing one has read—and so you get—and partly no doubt hallucinate!—in one almighty hit, the vision/sensibility of that director in its compacted, “testament” form. (For how long has the trope of the “testament film” reigned in film criticism, I wonder?)

I think this process tends always to be the same but simply “shifts along” in time. Bill mentioned how in the early-to-mid ‘70s the last Hawks and Ford fascinated him, but not Siegel. However, I can tell you—even though I am not a Siegel aficionado now—to be a budding teen cinephile in 1975 in Australia meant getting the first significant “hit” from Charley Varrick [1973] and The Black Windmill [1974] in glorious 35 mill at the cinema, and The Beguiled [1971], Madigan [1968] and Coogan’s Bluff [1968] on TV... I remember in 1980, when I was 19, attending my first academic film conference: Rick Thompson (of the Farber-Patterson interview fame) led a group of us eager young-un's on a slightly transgressive “afternoon off” to see and then earnestly dissect back in our scummy rented dorm rooms Rough Cut [1980], a film nobody remembers today !!!! ... and a lot of the local Clint Eastwood/Burt Reynolds cultism to follow came from those “initiatory” experiences... Same for Aldrich (as Bill mentions); Emperor of the North [1973], Twilight’s Last Gleaming [1977], All the Marbles... (shown here as California Dolls) at the cinema doubled on TV by The Legend of Lylah Clare [1968], Ulzana’s Raid, Grissom Gang: well, the intellectual fruit of all that came much later in the Screening the Past issue devoted to Aldrich (co-edited by Rick T—where Bill also appears!)... and one of my first long texts was on The Big Red One [1980]! I even vividly recall discovering Corman through Gas! [1970] and Von Richthofen and Brown [1971] (later celebrated by Chris Marker!!), with a copy of Paul Willemen's zany early ‘70s Edinburgh Film Festival book—just about my first film book purchase, for $1—virtually glued to my hand!!! (In there, David Wills was already talking passionately about “testament” works, as he would right up to his discussion of Once Upon a Time in America [1984] in the pages of Framework.) So for me proto-Screen-magazine structuralism came in that first “hit'” too, just as Daney and others accompanied Bill's explorations.

I am sure many members will have stories like this, but fixed on different “twilight” works and directors (and theories) “of their time.”

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 8, 2005, 7:38 p.m.

As far as I can remember, seeing the Rick Schmidlin “reconstruction” of Touch of Evil [1958] in theatres was my first experience with Welles, followed in close succession by Chimes at Midnight [1965]. This has certainly influenced how I rank Welles's films, I think! I, too, remember seeing three late Hawks films—Red Line 7000, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo—near the beginning of my discovery of his work. I remain partial to all three (while another late Hawks, Hatari!, has supplanted them as my favorite Hawks.) They All Laughed [1981] was one of my first Bogdanovich films seen, while The Searchers [1956] was my very first Ford, I'm almost certain. I could think of other examples. In fact, it just occurs to me that I saw Topaz [1969] and Frenzy [1972] during my first wave of appreciation for Hitchcock! I remember being astounded by the ceramics sequence in Topaz and thinking that this was a definitive Hitchcock sequence.

But it's important to note that in my case, I pursued late films consciously; it wasn't by accident, in most cases, that I sought them out. I guess somewhere along the line I got the idea that they were often greater than the early stuff and I knew from seeing them that I enjoyed their self-consciousness (or whatever you want to call it) and other "late period" attributes, much discussed by our group's members over the almost-two-years of our existence.

 

From: Jean-Pierre Coursodon    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:52 a.m.

Each one of us may have a different experience based on age (both age of the viewer and age of the filmmaker) as well as on place (where you lived was important). I saw all of Aldrich in chronological order. Saw his three early masterpieces—Apache [1954], Vera Cruz [1954] and Kiss Me Deadly [1955]—over a period of less than a year, in Paris in 1955-56. (Only his first two films—the minor World for Ransom [1954] and Big Leaguer [1953], which was not released in France—I saw much later).

On the other hand I largely "discovered" Hawks with his late ‘40s and ‘50s films—Scarface [1932] was legendary but impossible to see, his thirties films were largely unknown in France except for Bringing Up Baby [1938] and Only Angels Have Wings [1939] and no one seemed to have seen His Girl Friday [1940] (Rivette doesn't even mention it in his famous "Genie de Howard Hawks" Cahiers article). Of course all the Paris cinephiles had seen A Girl in Every Port [1928] at the Cinematheque, but that was the extent of our knowledge of "early" Hawks. The auteurist glorifying of Hawks in France was largely based on The Big Sky [1952], Monkey Business [1952], Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1953], Land of the Pharaohs [1955] and Rio Bravo.

With Ford it was worse because there was very little cinephilic interest in him in the ‘50s and ‘60s, his only ‘30s film circulating in French cine-clubs was Stagecoach [1939] and most of his late ‘40s-‘50s films were neglected or underrated (except The Quiet Man [1952] which was probably overrated—but not by cinephiles). I even missed The Searchers when it came out (wasn't it panned by Truffaut in Cahiers?) Practically all of Ford's ‘30s films I saw in New York (MOMA, New School and other venues) in the ‘70s.

 

From: Aaron Graham       Date: January 9, 2005, 12:53 a.m.

I find this a fascinating thread. Bill and Adrian's posts have gotten me to think of my own roots of cinephilia. Being born in 1983 (and nowhere near any repertory theatres when I was old enough to attend) prohibited me from experiencing director's final films theatrically firsthand. But these final films were always the ones readily available on video, laserdisc and DVD and so they were always the films I'd catch up with first in a director's career.

I'd seen Aldrich's The Longest Yard [1974] and Hustle [1975] before getting a chance to develop my appreciation with Kiss Me Deadly and Attack! [1956]. This also happened with Hawks, Ford, Minnelli and others. Certainly with Ulmer: I attribute seeing The Cavern during a rare television broadcast when I was sixteen as one of the more important developments in becoming an auteurist. On the surface, this was just an ordinary picture, but below that surface, I could sense a real style or "voice" coming from the director of the piece. I quickly read everything I could find on Ulmer (very little, but Bogdanovich's interview in Who The Devil Made It was crucial) and seeing all of the films of his that I could find.

What I see in these final films is a talent fully formed and refined. The filmmaker at the top of his/her game.

 

From: Jean-Pierre Coursodon    Date: January 9, 2005, 1:06 a.m.

[Responding to Peter’s recollections of his first experiences of Welles:] This is a perfect exemple of what I was saying in my previous post about age. My first Welles was The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] followed by Citizen Kane [1941] and The Lady from Shanghai [1947]—but I saw Chimes 25 or 30 years later!

Unlike Peter I must say I have never had the auteurist fetishism of the late work, of the “testament” film. Yes, 7 Women is a great movie, but I really don't care for late Hawks (which probably disqualifies me as a true auteurist). And I dislike Frenzy and
Family Plot.

[Responding to Peter’s conscious pursuing of late films:] It would be interesting to know why/where/how you got the idea that the late films had to be "greater"—was it the influence of auteurist writings or just a personal instinct?

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 1:50 a.m.

I discovered Ford through his last film, 7 Women—which I saw on 42nd street when it premiered in 1966. It was the subject of my first lengthy article, published in December the following year. I was primed for it due to my exposure in 1965 to Dreyer's Gertrud [1964]—the locus classicus of "Last" films.

Other "Last" films of note:

The Saga of Anatahan [1953]

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse [1960]

A Countess From Hong Kong [1967] (a classic "film maudit")

L'Argent [1983] (with its great 3-D finale)

Romance of a Horsethief [1971]

Un flic [1972]

Eyes Wide Shut [1999]

Parade [1974]

The Boy Who Turned Yellow [1972] (TV film by Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger)

The Honey Pot [1967] (more than Sleuth [1972])

The Voice of the Moon [1990]

Three Seats for the 26th [1988]

Blue [1993] (The film Derek Jarman made after he went
blind)

 

From: Craig Keller Date: January 9, 2005, 2:00 a.m.

This is the first positive something I've heard for this film [The Voice of the Moon] outside of the I, Fellini book. I've never seen it, but have always looked forward to it—but only after I've caught up with Casanova [1976],  I clowns [1970], and Ginger and Fred [1986]. BTW, another tremendously underrated Fellini, Intervista [1987], is getting a new disc release in the US next month or March from Koch Lorber. A nice Italian disc of this was recently released, with a pristine image and English and Italian subs... unfortunately, due to an authoring error, every other subtitle is missing if you have set the subtitles to English (sentences are never finished, or begin halfway through)—with all missing subs cropping up in the Italian subtitles—which in turn are missing all the lines that appear in English!!

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:09 a.m.

[Answering the question Jean-Pierre posed to Peter about late films being “greater”:] Both, but "greater" is the wrong word. Only a madman would call Rio Lobo "greater" than Rio Bravo. Here we enter the realm of personal expression valued as such—the late work expresses the last "thoughts," to put it too succinctly, of great artists.

Needless to say, such "fetishism" exists in other artforms. Shakespeare's late plays, Beethoven's late work, van Gogh's last painting, etc. Nothing specifically cinephilic about it.

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 2:12 a.m.

It's [The Voice of the Moon] a very strange work in that it stars Roberto Benigni. But it isn't a Begnini vehicle as such (and in this it's close to Ferreri's Seeking Asylum [1979] also with Begnini.) It's a rather close adaptation of Ermanno Cavazzoni's novel and as such is part of a school of "Magic Realism" that connects Italy with Latin America. It was Fellini striking out in something of a new direction in that there is less distinction between "real" and "dream" than even in City of Women [1980] (a very important late Fellini.)

I first saw Voice of the Moon at a special screening Mazursky arranged at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was open to the public and jam-packed.

At the time I thought Fellini had beat Beniex at his own game vis-a-vis The Moon in the Gutter [1983].

I also saw The Lovers on the Bridge [1991] right around that time. Just got it on DVD the other day. Great, great film.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:19 a.m.

[Responding to Adrian’s Siegel talk:] Well now that you list those films, with the excepetion of Black Windmill, and Rough Cut, which you mention later, I still love them! Charley Varrick, Madigan and Coogan's Bluff in particular. I guess The Shootist left a bad taste, and I was influenced by P[ascal] Kane's attack on The Beguiled. I recently picked up Jinxed! [1982]—I was on the set and talked to DS afterward—to see if the parts without Bette Midler are as great as I remember. I'll let you know, Adrian.

[Again responding to Adrian:] It does give you a concetrated "hit"—I was dazed after Red Line 7000, my first Hawks—and virtually demands critical theorizing—which I found in the CdC issue, my first ever, with Red Line on the cover. The three reviews of the film (Comolli, Narboni and one other) talked about repetition, abstraction, mathematics, irony... everything I had seen in the film but was unable to believe I had seen!

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:24 a.m.

[Responding to Jean-Pierre’s note on no one in France seeming to have seen His Girl Friday:] When I first met Olivier Assayas he told me The Front Page [1931] was the funniest movie he ever saw. I considered The Front Page [1974] (the Wilder-Diamond) a tragedy. Then I realized he'd never seen His Girl Friday...

[Noting the list of ‘50s Hawks films Jean-Pierre said the auteurist glorifying of Hawks in France was based on:] Except for Rio Bravo, those are films Hawks considered failures! He took four years off after Pharaohs to figure out what he had been doing wrong!

[To Jean-Pierre’s question of if The Searchers was panned by Truffaut:] It was panned by the CdC critics cited in the Conseil des dix—I wouldn't be surprised if Truffaut panned it.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:31 a.m.

[On Roberto Benigni being in The Voices of the Moon:] And survives that casting decision.

[Replying to David saying where he saw Voices of the Moon:] Me too. People were perplexed. I've grown to love it. It starts off very "lunar" and poetic, and morphs into a series of increasingly frightening visions having to do with death. It ends with an all-out attack on commercials and TV. It is one of the great last works.

No one has mentioned one of my favorites: That Obscure Object of Desire [1977].
What a joy that film is!

 

From: Jean-Pierre Coursodon    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:36 a.m.

[Responding to Bill’s responding to his question for Peter:] Thanks for answering for Peter, Bill! By the way I hope I have used the term "fetishism" enough here and there for everybody to realize that I am not using it pejoratively. And for the record I admire Beethoven's late string quartets above most anything else he produced.

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 2:50 a.m.

There’s also Losey’s La truite [1982] and Steaming [1985]. Much prefer the former.

 

From: Richard Modiano    Date: January 9, 2005, 2:51 a.m.

"Here we enter the realm of personal expression valued as such—the late work expresses the last ‘thoughts,’ to put it too succinctly, of great artists."

A lot of last films weren't intentional: Ford's next MGM picture was cancelled because 7 Women flopped, and he had three or four other projects he wanted to do (Bogdanovich and McBride contend that he was pysically capable of directing until about 1970, and until 7 Women he was making one picture a year), Hitchcock worked on Pursuit [The Short Night], Hawks planned another picture, Sternberg optioned a Southern gothic novel after Anatahan, Lang wanted to make Death of a Career Girl, Mizoguchi completed preperation on Osaka Mongatari before entering the hospital (the studio made it from his plan after he died), and Welles died at the typewriter working up scenes for the next day's shoot. No doubt there are other examples.

In fact, I can only think of a few artists who've declared a given work their last: Hayden Carruth said his contribution to the anthology Poets Against the War was to be his last poem; Shinoda Masahiro said Spy Sorge [2003] is his final film. And most famously Mishima finished his last novel hours before his suicide.

I think you've accurately described these last films as late works rather than "final statements" embodying the last thoughts of their makers, thoughts that they apparently intended to work out in other pictures had they lived long enough or been allowed to make them when still strong enough to do so.

 

From: Matthew Clayfield           Date: January 9, 2005, 3:18 a.m.

Although he didn't openly "declare it," Cassavetes had an inkling (while making it) that, given his health, Love Streams [1984] would be his last film.

 

From: Adrian Martin        Date: January 9, 2005, 3:49 a.m.

Bill mentioned late Wilder. It is amazing for me to remember this now—as Wilder doesn't occupy my mind much these days—but in 1975, at the age of 15, my first powerful shot of understanding of what mise-en-scène was (i.e., bodies in space, framing, camera movement, etc.) came from seeing in 35mm at the biggest popular cinema... Wilder's The Front Page. And discovering Wilder through his late works in the ‘70s was a special thing: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes [1970], Avanti! [1972] (still probably my favourite Wilder) and Fedora [1978] put me in touch with that tender/melancholic side of the cinephilic sensibility (all three films are rather sad, and dwell on ageing and/or death)—and definitively put me on a different, warring planet to all those non-cinephile film fans who worshipped Wilder only for Sunset Boulevard [1950] and Some Like It Hot [1959]!!!

Another special passion born in that period—which I still cultivate—is Blake Edwards. Again, The Return of the Pink Panther [1975] on the big, wide, loud screen in 1975 was a “plastic” revelation in terms of the mise-en-scène/gag nexus (which cinephiles discover also, variously, through Keaton and J. Lewis... or today, Stephen Chow). It's salutary to remember in those days how little critical attention Edwards got; he really was “maudit.” Sight and Sound or Film Comment published virtually nothing on the guy in that period; neither did Cahiers, if I am not mistaken. I did not yet know, in '75, about how Positif and (even earlier) Présence du cinéma had championed him. Nor did I know a certain Coursodon/Tavernier tome yet!! How incredible and satisfying it was then—believing as I did that “no one” valued this director—as I was reaching 20, that Edwards hit his “royal road” with 10 [1979], S.O.B. [1981] and Victor/Victoria [1982]—which to my mind was a string of masterpieces on par with Hitchcock in the ‘50s or Fuller in the ‘60s! “Late” Edwards continued to be full of gems, not in an “unbroken” line of course: and there too the death-driven melancholia of The Man Who Loved Women [1983] (I still have yet to see Truffaut's original!), Skin Deep [1989], etc...

 

From: Saul Symonds        Date: January 9, 2005, 4:07 a.m.

In a similar vein to Last Films, is Longest Films... that film when a director was able to indulge every passion and desire to the nth degree, when all his or her excessive tendancies reach full fruition—and they often provide rich thematic and formal bases from which to explore the rest of a director's ouevre. Hence: Bertolucci's 1900 [1976], Bergman's Fanny and Alexander [1982], Visconti's Ludwig [1973], etc.

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 4:55 a.m.

And with that nobody beats Warhol.

**** (Four Stars) [1967]—25 hours long. And every minute counts.

Cast of thousands (Allen Midgette, International Velvet, Patrick Tilden Close, Ondine, Nico, Brigid Berlin, Edie Sedgwick, Dorothy Dean, Ivy Nicholson, Henry Geldzahler, Mary Woronov, et. al.) dozens of stories—and stories within stories.

Shown in its entirety only once in the Winter of 1967, then dismantled.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 4:59 a.m.

There was always going to be another picture, but no one on the set of Family Plot was under any illusions: the writer who was there described the crane shot to the diamond, ending on Blanche, as the last shot of the oeuvre. Hitchcock called a break for lunch, and when the writer was gone, he called everyone back and filmed the wink! So it's we—and death—who write The End. No artist ever felt he or she had said the last word when saying it. Hitchcock loved making films—he didn't want that to be his last shot, so he came up with a better one. But the one he came up with was also a farewell to his audience.

Buñuel knew he was making his last film when he did Obscure Object—he had announced his retirement for the second time, his diabetes was pretty bad, and Silberman and Carrière had to fly to Mexico to convince him to give it one last shot. The last sequence of the film is such a studied compilation of motifs from An Andalusian Dog [1929]—Wagner, La Dentelliere, the cut being sewn back up—that it's hard to see it otherwise. He actually went back two weeks later and reshot it to get it just right—expressing again the desire to sign the testament with a flawless flourish, and the desire not to stop.

And of course he kept thinking—he started work on Agon, about the dreams of a female terrorist in prison. And he kept revising: he undid his ending by denying its obvious meaning—Don Lope has finally depucelated Conchita, as in the book, but now he wants her sewn up so they can start over—by telling Colina and Turrent that if they got that out of it, he had botched the ending! Nevertheless, the ending says everything that can be said: like Don Lope, Buñuel would love to sew up the eyeball and start over from scratch. We all will at that point.

The garden fragment is Welles' last film, but thru no intention of his. We talked a couple of days after he shot it, and he was rarin' to go on King Lear. The producer, Jacques Lang's brother-in-law, per Oja, screwed him out of his last creative years, then an inept American producer screwed him out of Cradle (abetted by Spielberg, who could have restarted the project at Universal but was afraid Amy would cuckold him if she spent two months at Cinecittà playing Virginia—I'm sure she cuckolded him right here anyway). Mercedes, the script he wrote not long before he died and was rewriting as Mercy to set it in the American South (it had been set in Spain), is pretty much the testament, as far as I'm concerned: it's actually about a testament—a contested one. And a poltergeist.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 5:01 a.m.

[Responding to Matthew about Cassavetes and Love Streams:] He even waves goodbye to us. But then he wrote and staged Woman of Mystery, and would have tried to film it, I imagine, if the cancer hadn't written The End.

All these examples are making me think that testament films are real, but that any testaments is a deeply ambivalent act.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 5:10 a.m.

[Responding to Adrian about late Wilder:] Exactly—and CdC were right on top of this. The first sign of thaw in the magazine after the Maoist interlude was a piece by Kane on Avanti!.

[And then again about Edwards:] He was highly prized by LA cinephiles, and a few in NY, if I’m not mistaken. I wrote a very long piece on Skin Deep for CdC called “Ars Poetica.” It actually got me laid.

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 5:11 a.m.

[Responding about Cassavetes:] I was lucky enough to have seen A Woman of Mystery. I sat between Lelia Goldoni and Seymour Cassel so it was a 3-D experience. Cassavetes was there with an edema that puffed his stomach out in way that made him look pregnant.

He was in excellent spirits.

 

From: Craig Keller      Date: January 9, 2005, 5:15 a.m.

Then how does Big Trouble [1986] figure in to the "final film" equation, with regard to the Cassavetes oeuvre?

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:19 a.m.

I like Frenzy very much (the dolly shot down the staircase and out of the apartment building is one of the most haunting things in Hitchcock), but I don't like how critics at the time over-praised it as a "comeback" film for Hitchcock. I think the films which preceded it—especially Marnie [1964] and Torn Curtain [1966], but also the best segments of Topaz [1969]—are better.

Family Plot, however, I love, mainly for the reasons laid out by Bill in his chapter on it. The mise-en-scène is really something to behold. For a long time, I flirted with selecting it as my favorite Hitchcock, but then I saw Vertigo [1958] in 35mm...

[Responding to Jean-Pierre’s question about getting the idea of late films being “greater” from auteurist writings or personal instinct:] Undoubtedly it was some combination of the two. Sarris was an influence, as were the writings of Fred and Jonathan [Camper and Rosenbaum, presumably] which I found online, but I also very early on identified, I think on my own, what Aaron termed as the "fully formed" quality of the late works I saw. Or to put it another way: given my auteurist inclinations (clearly formed partly due to the books and articles I'd been reading), late films usually gave me the most to chew on. I'm sure many here can relate to this or would say the same thing in so many words.

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:23 a.m.

[Responding to Bill’s “only a madman would call Rio Lobo ‘greater’ than Rio Bravo...” remark:] Then I think I may have been a madman around age 15 or so! I was really, really high on Rio Lobo in those days. Jonathan's comment in his capsule review comparing it to King Lear (albeit Jonathan qualified this by saying that one could only compare the two if Hawks's film were "better and more substantial") really resonated with me.

These days, I see it clearly as a flawed work, much inferior to the masterpiece Rio Bravo, but it's still a film I admire and cherish.

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 5:23 a.m.

[Responding to Craig’s question of how Big Trouble figures in Cassavete’s ouvre:] The same way Steaming does for Losey—an "extra." He only did Big Trouble because Peter Falk wanted him to. It's not a Cassavetes film in any real way.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 5:24 a.m.

It was a job of work he took over because Falk was in it. He still spent months working on it, and it's a wonderful film. In my CdC obit, “The Two Endings,” I praised it lavishly as the film that stands in for all the H'wd genre stuff—and all the comedies!—he never got to make, describing the production David and I saw of Woman of Mystery the real goodbye (despite the wave at the end of Love Streams). So call it three farewells. The one at the end of Love Streams feels awfully final to me, somehow. But works also change with time and exceed their author's intentions.

Hey, I'm the lunatic who thinks “The Star” [1985 episode of the The Twilight Zone] was Gerd Oswald's eulogy for his own blighted career. I'm sure it was an assignment he was thrilled to get. And if there's another TZ, which I haven't seen, I'm fully prepared for it to be even better than “The Star”! I hope it is—I love his work.

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:25 a.m.

[Responding to David’s list of last films:] I like or love all of the films you name which I've seen, though the two late films I tirelessly push these days—even as recently as our group's New Year's Day chat session—are Preminger's The Human Factor [1979] and Mulligan's The Man in the Moon [1991]. They both have fairly secure places on my evolving top films list.

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:30 a.m.

Don't forget that 7 Women isn't Ford's last film, only his last narrative feature. After it, there's Vietnam, Vietnam [1971] (which I've not seen) and Chesty: Tribute to a Legend [1970/1976] (which I have). The latter is a great film in many ways; mostly when the footage Ford shot is on screen (as opposed to stock footage). When Chesty Puller (the Marine general the film is paying homage to) visits the tomb of Robert E. Lee, you know you're witnessing a great Ford moment. Also, Joseph McBride has compared the ending to the amazing conclusion of The Long Gray Line [1955] (and with great justification, too).

 

From: Peter Tonguette    Date: January 9, 2005, 12:33 a.m.

[Responding to Bill re: Gerd Oswald:] You mean you haven't seen Oswald's "The Beacon" [1985], Bill? It's absolutely superb! In cinematic terms (if not personal ones), I was more impressed by it than "The Star." The first season of the '80s Twilight Zone is now available on DVD (which is how I saw the two Oswalds being discussed), so you might want to look into getting a copy.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 5:39 a.m.

[Responding to Peter about Rio Lobo:] I wasn't just high ON it—I was high IN it. Those guitar strings.... You should track down “Shootout at Rio Lobo,” George Plimpton's delightful TV doc about being an extra in that film. And read, if you haven't, "Mostly About Rio Lobo," Greg Ford's article on the "Rio Trio," in Focus on Hawks.

Frenzy is a superb film, but it was much less than Kaleidoscope would've been, and Mary Rose, of course. It is above all a remarkably INFLUENTIAL film—it really opened the floodgates for films like Chainsaw Massacre, and even for the LOOK of those films, which all came about in the ‘70s. There were Psycho ripoffs in the ‘60s, but nothing like what came after Frenzy, which coincided with the lifting of the Motion Picture Code restrictions. By all indications, Short Night would have kept pushing that envelope.

 

From: Dan Sallitt   Date: January 9, 2005, 6:19 a.m.

[Correcting Bill’s dating of The Cavern to the late ‘50s:] Is The Cavern as early as that? The IMDb has it as a 1964 film.

 

From: Bill Krohn    Date: January 9, 2005, 6:36 a.m.

Or later—right again Dan. I was thinking of when the project started, 1957. It took him a long time to get it made.

 

From: Damien Bona         Date: January 9, 2005, 7:58 a.m.

No one has mentioned Minnelli's A Matter Of Time (1976). Even though it was butchered by AIP, it's nonetheless a beautiful film and very Minnellian both in its style, mise-en-scène and its focus on the vulnerable dreams of the artistic temperament. A wonderful sidenote is that Minnelli's last film played at Radio City Music Hall, where he holds the record for most films shown.

 

From: Damien Bona         Date: January 9, 2005, 8:07 a.m.

[Responding to Bill re: Family Plot:] In Family Plot, Hitchcock's "appearance" was as a silhouette seen through the frosted glass of a door. When I saw the film the night it opened, the friend I was with—who was not a cinephile (although he is Dustin Hoffman's nephew)—commented, "Hitchcock's only letting us see his shadow. It's as if he feels this is his last film and he's already moved on, leaving only his spectre behind."

 

From: Damien Bona         Date: January 9, 2005, 8:24 a.m.

[Responding to Adrian re: Blake Edwards:] My passion for Edwards also first came about with Return of the Pink Panther. (I was 20.) Bill Paul wrote a rave in the Village Voice, where Sarris was still a major supporter of Edwards (The Carey Treatment was on his 1972 Ten Best list). As was Stuart Byron, although I don't quite remember if he was still at the Boston Phoenix in the mid-‘70s, or was at the Voice. Janet Maslin, of all people, wrote a rave review of The Tamarind Seed [1974], for the Phoenix (or was it the other Beantown alternative weekly, the name of which escapes me?). Myron Meisel and Dave Kehr were both major, and eloquent, advocates for Edwards, although I'm not sure what their venues were during the time of Carey, Tamarind, and the re-established Pink Panther series.

 

From: Adrian Martin        Date: January 9, 2005, 10:12 a.m.

re: Edwards and his critical reception, as per Bill and Damien's listings: it was really only through this group that I have learnt of the more cinephilic-cultish appreciations of Edwards (and Minnelli) among critics in the American press during the '70s. What I was saying that, as a kid sitting in a public library in Melbourne in 1975, I had no access to stuff like Village Voice—but I did have access to Sight and Sound and Film Comment, and a while later I could find Cahiers in a University library. And it did seem to me reading that sort of stuff that Edwards was a kind of invisible, maudit figure—and many mainstream critics (I imagine in many countries, certainly Australia) really did deride him, regarding him as the guy who once made maybe one good film, The Party [1968], and had since declined to the deepest trash. Remember, 10 received an awful amount of mainstream abuse in its day. Later, of course, I did read Bill on Skin Deep, Gilbert Adair on Man Who Loved Women, the Luhr-Lehman books, and various other positive takes on Edwards. And he did eventually get that honourary Oscar or whatever the heck it was! But I still think there is a slightly maudit aura around Edwards among a certain sector of middlebrow moviegoers and commentators—all that low comedy, plus Julie Andrews too! Proclaiming that something like Tamarind Seed is a masterpiece can still draw snorts of cultured derision, let me assure you!!

 

From: David Ehrenstein   Date: January 9, 2005, 3:30 p.m.

[Responding to Damien’s mention of A Matter in Time:] The best, and most Minnellian thing in it is the scene where Liza sings “Do It Again.” Bergman and Boyer are quite good in it as is Maria Montez’s daughter, Tina Aumont.

A trio of shot last films that no one has mentioned yet: Sirk’s Talk to Me Like the Rain [1976], New Year’s Eve [1978], and Bourbon Street Blues [1979].