Garden of Earthly Delights: Nina Hagen, covers and duets

As I began to write this, the second of what I intend to be three posts, I realized a better title for the troika under discussion might be “Who You Callin’ a Kook?” Certainly Nina Hagen is strange and unique and, yes, very often downright weird. But she’s a helluva talented singer-rocker-stage performer and, like Sterling Hayden, is mocked at the peril of missing out on what is truly exceptional about her “weird” and fascinating work.

So, as always, context: when I was a record-buyin’ youngster, there were (I believed) three degrees of wonderfully “odd” female singers from overseas. The first level was the uncommonly pretty and sublimely talented Kate Bush; the second was my infatuation of several new-wave-obsessed years, Lene Lovich (whom I must salute soon, because she was/is awesome); and the third and by far the most daunting and “incredibly strange” (esp. for a teen who grew up on AM radio) Ms. Nina Hagen, who turned 57 this past week.

As the years go by I’ve gotten to love Nina for the ways in which her music broke the boundaries of punk, new wave, dance music, rap, etc etc. She also has always been a jarring figure to behold on television (the few times that I saw her sing or be interviewed); very few of her videos ever played on MTV (they were actually seen more on cable-access), but now with the “tool” that is YouTube, we can catch up on all the wonderful stuff that appeared on European and UK television networks.

Kate’s music was gorgeous and Lene’s was more hummable, but no woman singer did as much to disorient her audience as Nina. To update the comparison: sure, Lady Gaga’s young and talented and has a good eye for odd, jarring juxtapositions, but please don’t tell me what she’s doing is truly “weird” and unpredictable. Fraulein Hagen’s been covering that side of the strasse for several decades now.

Her voice ranges from sweet and melodious to impossibly gravelly (this was the case even when she was a very young woman). Thus she is capable of singing operatic arias as well as gritty rockers with the same intensity. Her career began in East Germany with tunes like “You forgot the color film” (a snotty comment about how drab East Germany looked); here she is at age 19 with her group “Automobil.”

Her first notable cover was this kick-ass German rewrite of the Tubes’ “White Punks on Dope” called “TV Glotzer”:

She has continued throughout the years to alternate between her own songs and covers of a wide variety of material (and I do mean a wide variety). When she was a full-blown punk, she attacked “My Way” in German:

In the same year, 1980, she did this terrific cover of “Ziggy Stardust” on Swedish TV. She definitely made even the British punk goddesses Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene look like normal girls next door:

And since I’m an incurable Monkee fan, I must include her punk cover of their biggest hit, redone in German as “Ich Bin Ein Berliner”:

By 1982, her own songs had become pretty hook-y (a good thing by me) and she started singing in English. One of the songs that showed up on “new wave” radio stations around that time was her account of the club scene of the time, the brilliantly frantic “New York, New York,” and the very catchy “Universal Radio.” This is punk meeting funk/disco with a woman occasionally lapsing into operatic singing (take that, Gaga!):

Her 1984 tune “Zarah” is perhaps the fullest flowering of her wonderfully conflicting impulses. A tribute to the Swedish film star Zarah Leander (1907-81), who was very well known in Germany for her decision to keep acting during the Nazi era. Nina’s tune comprises about five or six musical genres (add jazz and hip-hop to the mix cited above). The video is as jarring and confrontational as the song:

While all this music was being made, Nina made a name for herself as a really outlandish talk show host. Her bios make mention of a time on German TV when she discussed female masturbation on-air (with a simulation), but in the U.S. and the U.K. she was very likely to veer a discussion of her new LP into a chat about UFOs, religion (at various times she has adhered to various faiths, including Hare Krishna and Xtianity), and animal rights. I very fondly remember her bringing up a “cure” for AIDS she knew of to a drag-queen host on Manhattan access. She even interviewed herself now and again.

Speaking of her love of animals and finally moving to the subject of Nina’s duets, here is live footage from Italian TV in which Nina joins Lene Lovich to perform their 1986 single “Don’t Kill the Animals.” Sure it’s a pretty goofy white-girl rap, but the intentions are good and it’s a melding of two of the finest “weird” ladies of the Eighties (dig also the extremely serious and smoothly-sung  anthemic tune that Nina performs in English at the end):

As the punk generation has gotten older, it’s been fascinating seeing how they’ve been treated by the media. Some of these gents and ladies (I’m looking at you, John Lydon) have become lovable old cranks, whereas truly versatile talents like Nina have wound up becoming eminences grises. Check out the transgressive Ms. Hagen as cute variety-show guest, showing her mastery of yodeling:

Nina's repertoire has grown even more eclectic over the years, with her covering “Summertime,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “The Alabama Song,” “Rivers of Babylon,” “The Lady is a Tramp,”“Fever,” and “Good Vibrations” (all of which can be found on YT). Here she performs “ Let Me Entertain You” from Gypsy. Even with a “lounge”-y rendition of a Broadway standard, Nina is able to inject some of her own idiosyncratic personality:

Sticking with old show-biz (American style), here’s a privately shot video of her singing “Flat Foot Floogie”:

In March 2008 I recommended on this blog a clip that was quickly down after I touted it, the immortal meeting of Nina and Don Rickles (you read that right) on The Merv Griffin Show somewhere in the late Eighties. (Presumably Merv had the same booker who put Iggy on Dinah!)

The juxtaposition (old show biz/new show biz; America/Europe; comic character/true eccentric) is very impressive (and what talk shows used to do on a regular basis), but of course it descends into Don mocking Nina — except he can’t do much with the German-wants-to-kill-the-Jew theme, since Nina notes that her father was Jewish. Regardless, it’s a mindfuck and a joining of two worlds I enjoy very much:

I’m glad the Merv clip has been reposted (this time by someone who saved it last time), but the singlet strangest-seeming  cover I discovered that Nina has done is her acoustic folkie version of Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” (!). Woody was quite an open-minded gent, and I’m sure he would’ve enjoyed this, since she clearly believes in the lyrics (see above):

The last two clips are unions that items we in the U.S. never would’ve seen without the “sharity” the epitomizes YouTube. First, Nina’s early Nineties duet with the one and only artificial-man-made-real, king of “schlager,” Heino!!! The two perform “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” from the Leslie Caron musical Lili. Feast:

And a truly sublime pairing, which finds Nina being entirely (gasp) normal! It is her 1990 duet with a curiously eyeglass-less Nana Mouskouri on an extremely Dietrich-like rendition of “Lili Marleen.” The two women do full justice to Marlene (another Nina trib to her is here), whose take-no-prisoners spirit has lived on in both of them.

Happy Birthday to Nina and thanks to two people: friend Dave for turning me on to Nina many (many!) years ago, and to Krys O. for spurring on this blog entry by her discovery of the Nina/Nana duet.

Garden of Earthly Delights 1: Sterling Hayden on “The Tomorrow Show”

There are thousands and thousands of mindblowing clips residing on YouTube at this moment that are in fact getting a very small amount of hits. I always rush to share these items with readers of this blog, because they are very often taken down without notice and in many cases don’t ever reappear.

I’ve noticed that a blog with advertisers and an actual staff of contributors now does what I’ve been doing as a one-man band since 2007. All I can say is that I don’t have their resources, but pledge to keep shedding light on these rarities as soon as I can — and trust you know how to save them on your desktop if you’d like to.

The first item in this series is a trio of interviews that Tom Snyder conducted with the legendary Sterling Hayden on The Tomorrow Show (aka Tomorrow). A lot has been said about how John Wayne was the ultimate “man’s man” onscreen, but that was a big façade. Hayden was the real thing — a sailor who quit high school to work on a schooner, a decorated Marine who parachuted behind enemy lines in WWII, a man who betrayed his friends during the blacklist and later made repeated public statements about what a mistake he had made (in this regard he was the anti-Elia Kazan), a man who stepped into and out of show business at various times in his last two decades to live on a barge that he kept moored off of Paris.

Hayden says pointblank about his acting skill in the third of these interviews that “I ain’t really professional.” He was a terrific performer though, in both starring (Johnny Guitar, The Killing) and scene-stealing supporting roles (Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, The Long Goodbye). He totally stole the show in his interviews with Snyder, who was an erratic interviewer whose chats frequently took a left turn and never came back — which was terrific with a guest like Hayden.

The first interview of the three, from 1977, is available online as audio only, but contains some utterly mind-roasting moments (as when Snyder stops talking just to stare at Hayden). The first Hayden-Snyder conversation (as with classic Cavett, these are less interviews than really interesting conversations) covers a lot of ground: the two men’s love of old trains, Hayden’s time in the marine corps, his being a “stool pigeon” during the blacklist, and his discovery of pot at the age of 52.

Since this interview has survived (at least in the public sphere) only as audio, we are denied the sight of Hayden, but his booming voice is in fine form — no matter what amount of tobacco, pot, and liquor he put in his body, he had an incredibly commanding voice, even when talking about “tender” topics like the blacklist and his own addictions.



The second and third interviews exist as video online and they are, if possible, even more intense, since Hayden warmed immediately to Snyder’s off-the-cuff interviewing style and began to share more and more of himself with each appearance on Tomorrow. The second interview, from 1980, also finds him looking wonderfully eccentric, wearing a headband, a “forked” beard, and a odd-looking tie, as well as brandishing a very cool cane.



The conversation starts out with Snyder asking Hayden what it was like attending the funeral of Yugoslavian Marshal Tito. It is noted that Sterling was covering the event for Rolling Stone (an attempt to cast him in the mold of Hunter Thompson?), but in the third interview he sheepishly admits he never completed the article — the details of which he pretty much dictates verbally to Snyder in the second interview.

The interview turns from the funeral to the positive reaction Hayden received from his last interview with Snyder, and his seemingly uncontrollable alcoholism. The thing that strikes one watching Hayden as he descends into grim topics in this and the third interview is that here was a man who seemingly spent a lot of his life traveling, but also running away from the guilt he felt over being a “friendly witness” during the blacklist era.



The third interview occurred during the last year of Tomorrow, 1981. By this point Hayden is used to being interviewed on TV and seems to open up almost instantly, doting at length on the changes he felt in his old age, and again, on his addictions. The finale of the interview (around the 5:00 mark) finds Hayden talking about the overwhelming importance of finding an obsession in one’s life, his being “ships and the sea.”



These interviews are must-see items because they harken back to a time when late-night television could be about nothing — and everything. Hayden does have a book he’s pushing in the first interview, but not in the second and third; he’s there simply because he respected Snyder and enjoyed talking with him.

The most important reason to check these out is the sight of Hayden, the kind of gent most buttoned-down folks would call a “kook,” dispensing wisdom he acquired from living a hard, strange life. He was not the kind of a person to take the easy way out — in the second interview he notes how he broke a contract for a movie appearance and thus lost a 250K salary because the movie in question (the Peter Ustinov Charlie Chan feature) looked godawful.

Hayden’s life force was overwhelming — he is seated throughout these interviews but, dammit, the man is moving. To quote Hopper in Apocalypse: “I'm a little man, I'm a little man -- he's a great man!" Hayden was 6’5” in real life, but watching him here he seems even bigger.

My thanks to Anthony, the gent who runs this Tumblr (NSFW), for turning me onto these interviews.

“Unabideables”: The Nanny Culture meets Digi-Brat Nation

I’ve been away from blogging for a full week — but have not been laying fallow (a new and updated Funhouse website is in the works). In the meantime, I just had to once again take a few lines to bitch about NYC’s MTA and “Miguelito,” the tiny dictatorial mayor of NYC, a man for whom “quality of life” issues count more than actual quality of life (as in: rents, transportation, public services, etc.).

The subway fare going up is an atrocity, but anyone who takes the subways knows that. The service has gotten more idiosyncratic than ever. As I noted a few years back I do expect that someday soon we will turn into a dystopian landscape where the subways have stopped running entirely. For the time being, we have entire lines shut down for evening and weekend track work that never seems to be completed (and those in the outer boroughs, or who work second or third shift and need those lines to function, well, just fuck you!).

The subway fare going up penalizes the poorer folk in this city, but then again, we know that “Miguelito” doesn’t care about the poor and middle class. (By the way, I use that nickname, coined by El Diario’s Gerson Borrero, because I find it funny, not because I would ever want to confuse Mayor Bloomie with Michael Dunn's glorious Miguelito Loveless character on The Wild Wild West.) 

So NYC has become a city for tourists and rich folk during Bloomie’s reign, and we certainly are much healthier now, thanks to his edicts, ain’t we? The soda ban begins tomorrow and the speed with which that was approved by the city’s Board of Health proves that everyone wants to agree with a rich man, no matter how pointless and meddlesome his legislation.

UPDATE: In the hours after this post was uploaded an NYC judge struck down the soda ban, saying it had "too many loopholes" (ya think?). I leave up the next few paragraphs in the interest of "posterity" (and because they're still pertinent while this arrogant rich guy is mayor). Also, because they lead into my third "unabideable"....

Three-term Miguelito is an extraordinarily rich man who does not want to be held accountable for anything he does — including leaving the city on the weekend to go to his Bermuda hideaway and not ever being present in the city on weekends *unless* something disastrous is predicted ahead of time. But he does want YOU to be accountable for your terribly unhealthy behavior, be it smoking in bars or drinking big-sized sodas in public eateries.

I am an inveterate soda drinker who is well aware that the stuff isn’t a health drink, but I love it. I love it in big, huge quantities (usually diet or ginger ale) that are not making me any healthier, but are not destroying my life, any more than other people smoking around me in bars did. But the “nanny state” is in effect, and it’s an open question as to whether any future Democratic mayor would ever rescind the stupid edicts put into place by Miguelito and his heinous predecessor, Erik the Phantom of the Opera.

When asked about those who wanted to drink bigger amounts of soda, Miguelito readily volunteered that they could just buy two 16 oz. cups. Sure, tiny billionaire, that’s a possibility in your world, but again, you forget (as you have consistently in your twelve-year game of playing mayor) that there are poorer people in this city that might like spoiling themselves in tiny ways, like having a giant soda to drink. Your deciding what they should be able to drink, and what it should cost, is a function of you being a rich prick who conned “the most liberal city in America” (which has had conservative mayors for nearly my whole lifetime, except during the Dinkins administration).

Miguelito does not acknowledge the poor, nor does he care about their problems. The single best example of this? The man who wants to prevent death from obesity allowed NYC to have a "Donut Day" on the day following his announcement of the soda ban (donuts were given away free in different areas of the city AND there was a Dunkin' banner behind the folks ringing the bell at the Stock Exchange).

He loves his fellow rich guys — oh, and the tourists who come to the city and drop scads of cash on extravagant trinkets, wildly overpriced Broadway shows, and meals in “gourmet” eateries that surely wouldn’t serve anything that might be harmful to your health (we all know that haute cuisine never makes the diner fatter or screw with his/her heart or digestive processes, don’t we?).

And since I’m venting, let me add another little slice of smugness that appeared this very day in The New York Times. It links back to the subway issue and the soda ban in that it ignores the fact that some of us don’t have as much money as the REST of us — but hey, we all could do like the U.S. gov and just go into a Cloud-Cuckoo-land of debt (as many of us are already). The article in question is a noxious bit of prose in The New York Times that urges folks to forget civility on their digital devices.

Smug writer Nick Bilton’s contention in this instance — most times you can literally hear the writer’s pitch to the editor as you read “theme pieces” in the Times — is that people using digital devices do NOT want to be thanked, receive unnecessary e-mails, be asked unnecessary questions, and that everyone they communicate with should be entirely conversant with the current brand of completely discourteous digital communication (where politeness is not an issue, brevity is).

Bilton dislikes getting voicemails, since they’re a waste of time when the concept of texting exists. Nick is a busy guy, doing lots of things during his day, but a lot of us appreciate the human voice and its subtleties, subtleties that couldn’t possibly be conveyed in text form. There are also a whole bunch of us who do not communicate primarily through text — some, like me, have learned how to text and then forgotten it, realizing that the same questions and declarative statements could be made just as quickly on the phone. Plus I get to hear the voices of the people I love, respect, or admire. What the fuck would I want a “Leaving now, see U soon” text in place of that?

Bilton focuses on how boring and tiring old folk are, with their insistence on using phones strictly as phones. His insistence on texting has a very youthful glint — one might even say belligerently childlike. Texting has in fact changed the way that adults with children write e-mails to their adult friends. There is nothing odder than reading a message from one of several friends with kids who write text-y in the e-mail format: “U going 2 concert Sat?” (Prince was way ahead of his time...)

The pitch here is that thank-you notes are out of date in the digital era, that no one wants to receive an additional text or e-mail when they don’t have to. Well, I am one of those offenders — if someone is nice enough to write a complimentary letter, or answers a question I asked them, or is in any way polite to me in e-mail, I will tend to shoot off a quick thank-you note that runs a few words at most. Bilton argues that “Netiquette” requires no response, in fact the short response is a blatant irritation to “people drowning in digital communication.”

I’ll get back to that last phrase, which is a wonderful little bit of arrogant show-off-ishness, but first let me point out the single most obnoxious part of Bilton’s paean to rudeness:

My father learned this lesson last year after leaving me a dozen voice mail messages, none of which I listened to. Exasperated, he called my sister to complain that I never returned his calls. “Why are you leaving him voice mails?” my sister asked. “No one listens to voice mail anymore. Just text him.”

My mother realized this long ago. Now we communicate mostly through Twitter.

Boy, you taught them, didntcha, Nick? You put them on notice that your time is wasted when they contact you, unless they’re as terse and ADHD as you are, you busy scrivener you. I’m used to this kind of tone in blogs and on Facebook (hell, I’m doing it right now, but I focus my complaints towards those in authority and those bragging about their fucking possessions publicly). In the NYT it’s just pathetic.

The piece goes on to describe when Bilton was insulted by a friend, who is obviously even cooler than he — “ I once asked a friend something easily discovered on the Internet, and he responded with a link to lmgtfy.com, which stands for Let Me Google That For You.” Bilton’s friends are as obnoxious as he is.

A final quote comes from some other webmaster gent who doesn’t like answering people’s questions in e-mail or texts, even if a friend asks what his schedule is so they can meet up (he’s too busy! He’s important! He’s got lots of things to do with his devices and none of them involve you!). To wit (and there is none), “I have decreasing amounts of tolerance for unnecessary communication because it is a burden and a cost.”

The whole obnoxious thrust here is what I noted above in reference to no one acknowledging that the public at large has no extra money to add to the MTA’s already bulging coffers. This same attitude is manifested in Bloomberg’s exhortation to “buy another soda” — there’s an amazing obnoxious involved in declaring that since these digital devices exist, EVERYONE should have them and be using them all the time.

Bilton again refers to those “…drowning in digital communication” which is a lot of braggin’ on that boy’s part  – just as the first, block-like cellphones were a definite status symbol for busy assholes to loudly conduct personal phone calls on the street, now the most complex smartphones are the status symbols that convey a person’s degree of cool (or, the amount of debt they’re willing to accrue to “be in the loop”). And those who exist solely on the plane of short messages are the most important among us. Their times is valuable!

Back in the early Eighties, I remember James Wolcott writing in the Voice about how tired he was of celebs discussing their drug troubles on interview shows, since their quantifying their drug use was also telling us how much MONEY they’d had and shit away. Bilton and other whiny folk who complain that not all of society acts like the digitally-engaged are pursuing a similar path — showing off that they have a really nice device, and insisting that everyone including their parents has to RESPECT their possession of said item(s).

The obnoxious little screed concludes “Here’s hoping politeness never goes out of fashion, but that time-wasting forms of communication do.” Sorry to waste your time, you whiny, spoiled brat. One only wishes that Al Goldstein has kept his wits about him several years ago and was still able to deal out “Fuck You” editorials to those who get on his nerves. I stand in Al’s stead in this instance, but can’t manage the sustained vulgar nastiness of The Goldstein:

Deceased Artiste filmmakers with unforgettable first names, part 3: Ulu Grosbard

Ulu Grosbard is quite different from the other filmmakers in this unofficial troika, who are bonded by the fact that they all died in 2012 and all had great monikers. Grosbard was a perfectionist whose career was split between the stage and the screen — he made only seven feature films and his theater directing became more and more sporadic as of the Seventies, but it was noted in one of his obits that he was willing to pay the price to get the right cast and the right production (that price, he honestly confessed, was “not working”).

Grosbard received a three-second acknowledgment in the necrology that aired on the Oscars this past Sunday, but I think he’s deserving of far more than that. I never saw any of his stage productions, but four of his seven films have stuck with me for many years, thanks to their emotional honesty (he was quoted as saying the theme he sought in the works he directed was “human behavior in crisis”) and absolutely superb acting by his stars.

Born Israel Grosbard in Belgium (Ulu was a nickname his brother gave him), he moved with his family to Havana in 1942 to flee the Nazis. He worked as a diamond cutter (!) in Cuba, after which his family moved to America, where he studied at the University of Chicago and the Yale School of Drama, before joining the U.S. Army (he became a U.S. citizen in ’54).

He did his first professional work as a theater director in the early Sixties, with a play called The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker. Working on that 1962 play he met his wife Rose Gregorio (seen right, with Dustin Hoffman), who had small parts in his films, but has had a great career as a character actress in film and on television.

Grosbard’s first film credits were as an uncredited assistant director on a trio of early Sixties classic dramas, The Hustler, Splendor in the Grass, and The Miracle Worker.

His resume as a Broadway director is very impressive: the mid-Sixties off-Broadway production of View from the Bridge starring Robert Duvall, The Subject Was Roses (right), and Miller’s The Price on Broadway, and on to the original production of American Buffalo (1977) starring Duvall and Woody Allen’s The Floating Light Bulb, as well as lesser-known works by Beth Henley and Paddy Chayefsky. Mamet said about him, he was “one of three or four people I’ve ever met who has any idea how to direct a play.”

But his most accessible legacy for most of us are his films. His debut, The Subject Was Roses (1968) is a gorgeous piece that, although it is primarily a filmed play, is a marvelous reflection on father-son difficulties that features three perfect performances by Jack Albertson, Patricia Neal, and a young Martin Sheen.

His next four films all featured brilliant lead work by top-notch actors in their prime — two with Dustin Hoffman (Who is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971) and Straight Time (1978)) and two with Robert De Niro (True Confessions (1981) and Falling in Love (1984)).

Straight Time has acquired quite a cult reputation over the years, and it is a fine, grim little crime film, but the works by Grosbard that impressed me the most were Roses, Kellerman, Falling in Love (this for the simple fact that he was successful in getting those master chameleons, De Niro and Streep, seen above with Ulu, to simply play “normal people”), and Georgia (1995).

Georgia came during a very long run of absolutely exemplary performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh, and it is definitely one of her finest moments onscreen. The films was scripted by her mother, Barbara Turner, and reworks a classic dilemma — the “good” sibling vs. the “bad” one — in a very intelligent way, focusing on the fact that the wholesome sib (Mare Winningham) has a beautiful singing voice but seems to have little passion for her music, whereas her drug-addicted sister (JJL) feels music to her very core, but is not a very tuneful singer.

The Oscars are incredibly bad arbiters of what is really good in American cinema, but if there had been any justice in 1996, Leigh would’ve won Best Actress for Georgia, if only for the moment in which she sings an agonized version of Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back” onstage, crystallizing her character’s pain, her love of music, and her complete divergence from her sister’s pitch-perfect singing. (For some reason, the scene is available on YT in two parts, here and here, thereby spoiling its cumulative squirm-worthy effect; I recommend you check out the film in its entirety.)

And then there is Harry Kellerman…, a wildly underrated masterwork from the early Seventies that was out briefly on VHS, but is now “MIA” in the U.S. The film boasted the only original screenplay by the great Herb Gardner (whose other scripts were adaptations of his plays), its source being a Gardner short story that was anthologized in 1968.

The plot concerns Georgie Soloway, a reclusive wunderkind of rock (half Phil Spector, half Dylan), played by Dustin Hoffman at the very peak of his excellence. The women he dates start receiving nasty phone calls from a certain “Harry Kellerman” denouncing Georgie; in the meantime he tries to keep his sanity while meeting up with employees (his accountant, played by Dom DeLuise), friends (Gabe Dell), and his therapist (the terrific Jack Warden).

These days the film is best remembered (if at all) for its Shel Silverstein soundtrack, written for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. What makes it so unforgettable, though — besides its slips from reality to fantasy and back again — is its magnificent dialogue by Gardner. No scene better encapsulates that than the showcase moment for the absolutely perfect Barbara Harris.

I am a major fan of Ms. Harris’s work (read this tribute) and, just as Jennifer Jason Leigh deserved an Oscar for Georgia, Barbara (seen at right with Grosbard) deserved a Supporting Actress award for this tour de force scene. When I saw Herb Gardner speak before the film in the early Nineties at the Film Forum here in NYC, he noted that there were only two pristine prints of it in existence at that time — the one belonging to him and the one that Hoffman owns.

He also spoke with great fondness of the sequence below, noting that much of it is a first take for Harris — the fact that Hoffman’s head is in frame in certain shots is not an “artistic effect,” but rather Grosbard making use of her first, gorgeous rendition of the material.

Harry Kellerman… was thought of as bewildering and self-indulgent. It certainly isn’t linear, but with Gardner, Grosbard, Silverstein, and an absolutely sterling cast, it remains a must-see picture that is pretty hard to see. Thus, I offer Harris’s absolutely moving and beguiling sequence in its entirety (she appears in a few more short scenes, but is then called by “Kellerman” and her relationship with Georgie is ended):