Too fast, they go...

This is not strictly a Deceased Artiste blog, but since I coined that phrase in the mid-90s on the Funhouse TV show I’ve felt a sort of obligation to pay tribute to those who’ve kicked off whose work I’ve loved.

This week has been insanely busy in terms of dead film-folk, so I thought I’d just move through three of the recent departed quickly. Gloria Stuart means nothing to me in terms of Titanic (I got no feelin’ for that kinda stuff, though I have indeed sat through it), but she is important as a starlet in the 1930s, and also as the wife of Arthur Sheekman, a Marx Brothers writer in good standing and the only person who actually did ghost-write some of the magazine pieces credited to Groucho. Ms. Stuart can be seen to lovely advantage (read: pre-Code “scanties”) in this scene from the James Whale 1932 classic The Old Dark House, which can be found in its entirety here:



Next, I salute Arthur Penn, who was a director whom I appreciate most for his participation in the absolutely miraculous “maverick” period in American film that lasted from the late Sixties through the mid-Seventies. He made one historically important pic that I like but don’t utterly love (Bonnie and Clyde), one great hippie pic (Alice’s Restaurant), a fairly good insane Western (The Missouri Breaks), and two great “revisionist” Seventies films (Little Big Man and the terrific, low-key Night Moves).

I feel, though, that his true masterpiece is not Bonnie and Clyde, but Mickey One, his almost indescribable 1965 modernist drama featuring Warren Beatty as a standup comic on the run from crooks. It’s a film that was obviously influenced by what was going on in European cinema at the time (it resembles nothing less than Alphaville, which came out the same year). Here’s the dynamic trailer for the film, but actually the film’s opening is an even clearer look at how radically weird it was for its time (unless, of course, you’d been watching European films….).



As ridiculous as it is to consider Beatty as a stand-up comic (his finest performance will always be McCabe and Mrs. Miller), Mickey One makes everything it presents believable — or is that entirely incredible? (It also seems to heavily prefigure the astoundingly perfect TV series The Prisoner.) Penn had one really good movie after his “maverick” period, the thriller Dead of Winter. I’m not gonna talk about Penn and Teller Get Killed.

And, to finish off this little grouping, and move onward to the Fifties gents with great hair, I offer a tip of the fedora to Joe Mantell, a character actor who died at 94 and is best known for playing Ernest Borgnine’s friend in Marty, and also for playing Jake Gittes’ sidekick and uttering one of the greatest closing lines in movie history:

Pvt. Zimmerman checks out: Deceased Artiste Mickey Freeman

I know very little about Mickey Freeman, but had to pay tribute to the gent because I deeply love The Phil Silvers Show (aka You’ll Never Get Rich and, of course, Sgt. Bilko) and enjoyed his regular appearances on the “Jewish hour” on The Joey Reynolds Show, which WOR unceremoniously cancelled a few months back (and I haven’t listened to that bastion of right-wing idiocy since — thanks, Buckley family!).

Freeman was a Borscht Belt comic who was a “human joke machine” in the manner of Morey Amsterdam or the mighty Henny Youngman. He could, in others words, summon a joke for every topic, and did so on the Reynolds show. He had a few acting roles (mostly NYC-based, like the immaculate Naked City TV series), but was best known in the business as a gag-meister who appeared at numerous Friars Club events.

He was a regular on Bilko, but didn’t often have lines as the character described in various places online as “the diminutive Pvt. Fielding Zimmerman.” He did get a featured part in the fan-fave episode called “Doberman’s Sister”:



Freeman doesn’t seem to have guested on too many TV comedy shows as a standup, so his act is sadly lost to history. However, two small clips appear on Youtube. The first finds him opening a segment on the 100th anniversary of the Friars Club:



Here is the best bit of Mickey, seen guesting on Pat Cooper’s Internet comedy show. Pure shtick!:



If you’d like to hear him to best advantage (and catch a damned good NYC radio institution that is sorely, sorely missed), WOR has indeed kept up its page of Reynolds’ shows. The “Jewish hour” lives on, here.

John Cassavetes says "Television sucks!"

… and he never even saw “reality TV”! I was completely blown away in March of 2008 by the discovery of a Dick Cavett Show episode featuring John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk promoting Husbands (now sadly removed from YT), so I was very happy this week to catch the extremely rare bit of a Cassavetes interview seen below. Presumably intended to air on TV (on a local news or entertainment show?), John is in rare form as he sits with Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara in a restaurant to promote his film Opening Night (1978).

It’s great to see him here, confident that he has made a great film and clamoring to trash mainstream moviemaking and TV. What’s interesting to consider, though, is that he has total faith in Opening Night at this point, and then he proceeded to hide it from public view for years. Of the eight masterful “personal” films he made he owned five outright (all of which have now been made available). Those five were effectively out of circulation in America for several years before Cassavetes’ death, since the only way to get ahold of them was to contact his neighbor (this is documented in one of the many books on JC by Ray Carney) or to borrow/view the library copies owned by MOMA (which Cassavetes had donated).

It’s never been fully explained why the films remained out of distribution and were so hard to obtain in the U.S., but were readily accessible (at least to rep theaters and museums) in Europe. One can only assume that the passionate, perfectionist Cassavetes had some misgivings about the pictures; he had in fact retooled each of them, and variant versions with different running times existed for four of the five titles.

The issue of whether Cassavetes would’ve wanted people to see the variant versions has been answered by Rowlands and other representatives of the family — they say that only the “finished” versions should be seen (but in fact, there were actually two finished versions of Killing of a Chinese Bookie both edited by the man, and thus those are out on Criterion together). Strangely, though, he donated a print of the original version of Shadows to a college library, and, although he edited Faces down to 130 minutes, he made sure to allow a transcript of the full three-and-a-half version to be released as a mass-market paperback when the film was released. (I have the book, and it counterpoints the longer version with the released version by having the script of one on the right hand pages, and the other on the left.)

I actually have my own misgivings about Opening Night, which is the only one of the eight JC “personal films” that I don’t think is a perfect work in its own way (it centers around a play that appears to never have been fully conceptualized by Cassavetes, and thus we're never sure what the characters are fretting over). Its strongest suit (besides the obviously brilliant lead performance by Rowlands and strong supporting work by Joan Blondell, Gazzara, and JC himself) is its “fantasy” plot element, in which Rowlands is haunted by a dead fan. This kind of “magical realism” touch was done to a finer turn by Cassavetes in Love Streams (which I think is messy but wildly underrated).

In any case, this piece of interview footage is raw and brilliant and terrific, as was the man himself.



And here is another snippet from the same chat. I love his assertion that “the world is comprised of people who have opinions and lack emotion.” I wish the whole tape was available somewhere for public consumption.



Thanks to the wonderfully talented indie filmmaker Amos Poe for pointing out this clip.

G'bye, Marty Morgenstern: Deceased Artiste Harold Gould

I love to say farewell to character people who depart "this mortal coil," and Harold Gould was certainly a prime example. An urbane and sophisticated performer, he was burned into the public’s retinas playing dads, lawyers, and friendly (but often austere) authority figures.

His best-remembered role is probably Rhoda’s dad on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, but the guy was on everything, once he quit his drama teacher job in the Sixties and became a full-time performer. His movie credits include a number of memorable Seventies comedies, including The Sting and Silent Movie, and he kept going until the 2000s, appearing as the grandfather in the Jamie Lee Curtis-Lindsay Lohan remake of Freaky Friday. His TV credits included The Twilight Zone, Mr. Ed, The Untouchables, Get Smart, Green Hornet, Wild Wild West, and the always delightful Columbo. (Not forgetting flops like Needles and Pins with Louis Nye and Norman Fell, and The Feather and Father Gang with Stefanie Powers.)

But what did I think of when I heard he had died? His part as an uptight nobleman who challenges Woody to a duel in the just-perfect Love and Death. The entire film is on YouTube (as are a few other key Woody pics), and here is the segment that includes the duel with Gould. The challenge occurs at the 8:00 mark with this Marx Brothers-like exchange:

Gould: Her seconds will call on you.
Woody: Seconds, I never gave her seconds…
Gould: As her fiance, my seconds will call on your seconds.
Woody: Well, my seconds will be out, have them call on my thirds. If my thirds are out, go directly to my fourths.

God, I love Woody. And Gould was a perfect straight-man foil. The duel itself follows in Part 5:

Werner and Errol talk filmmaking... and strange images

There are few things better than listening to Werner Herzog talk, but one of them has to be him chatting with his one-time “protégé” (and the man he ate a shoe for), the great documentarian Errol Morris. Here they are last week, doing a sort of mutual interview onstage at the current Toronto Film Festival. They discuss their love of each other’s movies, unusual reading matter, “madness in the landscape” (take a guess who introduces that subject), and their friendship: