Lenny

Film: Lenny
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Really good stand-up comedy is hard, but it’s not that uncommon. Truly great stand-up, though, is rare and wonderful to behold. When you see a great comedian, someone who is really transcendent, it’s almost always someone who is pulling from a great storehouse of pain to make that comedy. Listen to Patton Oswalt talk about his depression. Listen to Tig Notaro talk about her breast cancer. Richard Pryor’s best material came from the worst episodes of his life. Bill Hicks dug into the bedrock of his soul to create routines that are still funny and still relevant 20 year after his death. And all of them owe a huge debt to Lenny Bruce.

Bob Fosse’s film Lenny is about the brilliant but troubled and doomed comic whose meteoric career made him a massive star and equally made him a victim of the times in which he lived and performed. Bruce’s arrests and various trials on obscenity charges are fascinating in no small part because they seem so tame by current standards. Certainly some of his work is still shocking and has incredible power, but the things for which he was dragged into court are heard nightly on cable television. Still, for the time, Bruce flouted the law whenever possible. It made him a legend, and also probably killed him in the end.

Wilkommen, Stranger

Films: Cabaret, The Stranger
Format: DVDs from DeKalb Public Library on laptop


While it’s only been a couple of days since I updated this blog, it feels like weeks. Since it feels like weeks since I’ve watched a movie, jumping right into a style that is generally anathema to me seems like a strange choice. However, it’s been awhile since I’ve watched a musical, and they aren’t going away from the list, so Cabaret it is.

Our story in general centers on Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), a performer at The Kit Kat Club in Weimar-era Berlin. It’s a decadent time, in part because of rampant economic depression. Times are difficult for everyone, and to counteract this, places like the sexy, sordid Kit Kat have a booming business as people attempt to hide from their many worries and problems. Sally is a singer in the club, not one of the dancers/strippers, but her act is racy nonetheless.

A great deal of this raciness comes from the emcee (Joel Grey), who invites the patrons (and the audience) to observe the cabaret and enjoy themselves. After a couple of quick musical numbers, we get a much better introduction to our main cast. Sally, we learn, is an American in Berlin. She’d like to be a movie star, and is willing to do anything to get there. If this means she needs to sleep her way to the top, she’s more than willing to do so with anyone who even hints at being able to help her. Morality is slippery in Weimar Berlin, and that seems to suit Sally just fine.

We’re also introduced to Brian Roberts (Michael York), a poor student who has come to Berlin to give lessons in English to make enough money to finish his schooling. He ends up living in the same boarding house as Sally and the odd crew of German citizens, and while he appears to be initially attracted to Sally, he is also wary of her.

One of Brian’s first students is Fritz (Fritz Wepper), a poor gigolo who wants nothing more than to marry into money. Conveniently, another of Brian’s early clients is Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson), an heir to a great fortune. That she’s also attractive and young is bonus for Fritz, who immediately begins to woo her.

Meanwhile, Sally and Brian begin a mild (in Sally’s opinion) affair. Things change when she meets Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem), a millionaire and a Baron. In short, Maximilian is the man of Sally’s dreams. He’s young, good-looking, and wealthy as all hell. The fact that he’s married isn’t much of an impediment. He has an agreement with his wife that the two of them will stay married but will allow each other to have any sexual escapades they wish. Sally and Brian both spend a great deal of time with him until he eventually ditches them.

At this time, Sally discovers that she is pregnant, and isn’t sure of who the father might be. She considers an abortion, but is convinced out of it by Brian, who intends to marry her. At this point, the real crux of the story shows up, and would require a spoiler—and I don’t really have the wherewithal for it tonight.

I know that this film is based on a play, but I’ve never seen Cabaret staged, so I’m not sure how much of the more lurid and shocking elements in the movie are in the staged drama. We discover right around the time Sally starts considering an abortion that Brian is bisexual, having slept with Maximilian a number of times, just as Sally has. Pretty racy stuff for 1972, although right in the wheelhouse of director Bob Fosse.

At the risk of significantly troubling any Liza Minnelli fans, theater people, or flamboyant gay men in the audience, I really dislike Sally Bowles as a character. She’s annoying. She talks constantly and always about herself and is constantly extreme in her actions and opinions. She needs a good slap across the face to bring her back into a world that isn’t focused directly on her. Brian loses his patience with her at some point, and I almost cheered.

Despite this, and believe me this surprises me entirely, I found this movie extremely watchable. Sally is terribly annoying, and yet she’s also pitiable. She’s so desperate to do anything to get to where she wants to go that she’s immediately degraded. He world and life are so terrible and she is so desperate for that world and that life to be extraordinary that I feel for her despite the fact that I dislike her.

Of course the real show-stopper number is the title song, which comes at the end, and Liza belts it out with real heart. The lyrics here are worth listening to, since they give over the whole story of the film. Also of interest is the role of the emcee. We never see him off the stage, but we do see the progression of Weimar Germany’s descent into national socialism with his act on stage, and eventually the rise of the fascist party, all through what he does on stage.

Surprised that I liked it? I was. It seems to be as real a portrait of Weimar as we can hope to have, or at least as good of one as we’re likely to get with musical numbers. We know from history that Sally is doomed, that much of the world is doomed. It’s likely that Sally knows this deep in her heart as well, but there she is on stage, reaching for that elusive dream anyway.


Cabaret deals with the beginnings of the Nazi takeover in Germany; The Stranger, directed by Orson Welles, deals at least in some respects with the aftermath. Here, the premise is that Nazi war criminals have escaped from Germany and made their way in secret to the United States where they keep their secrets as close as they possibly can, fearful of detection. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) is the early version of a Nazi hunter, pursuing a man named Franz Kindler. Kindler was one of the masterminds of the Holocaust, so the capture of him is of intense interest to the American authorities.

To capture Kindler, the authorities release a man named Konrad Meinike with the hopes that he will head directly to Kindler. They arrange for him to escape confinement and he heads to Connecticut, where Kindler is hiding. Kindler lives in a small town where he has taken the name of Charles Rankin (Orson Welles). Rankin teaches at the local school and speaks English with a perfectly decent American accent. In short, his cover is nearly perfect and he is above suspicion.

That is, until Meinike shows up. Meinike has converted to Christianity, and unknown to Rankin, has stopped by the house of Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), the daughter of a Supreme Court justice and Rankin’s fiancé. Rankin, realizing that Meinike has been released to help the authorities track him down, kills Meinike and buries the body in the woods.

Wilson, however, is a much more implacable foe than the little German man. He begins to suspect Rankin almost immediately, and works to force him to implicate himself. There’s the body in the woods, of course, and Rankin’s history. Additionally, there’s a comment that Rankin makes about Germany that starts Wilson’s mind working. His problem is that he has no proof, and certainly no admission from the man himself. He recruits Mary’s brother Noah (Richard Long) to help him trap Rankin and force an admission from him. And thus is set in motion a cat-and-mouse game with a number of fascinating twists and turns.

A great deal of the plot centers on a large town clock that is several centuries old. Rankin is fascinated with such things and is working all hours at restoring it, or at least claims this. Much of his time in the clock tower isn’t really spent there at all, but covering his own tracks regarding Meinike and his own past, as well as trying to outwit Wilson. He’s lost none of his cold, calculating nature, which becomes evident about half an hour in when he poisons his wife’s dog to prevent the dog from digging up the body he’s hidden in the woods.

The Stranger is a difficult film to comment on. Of the Welles films I have seen (and I haven’t seen them all by a long shot), it’s the weakest. This isn’t to suggest that the film is not worth watching or that it doesn’t belong on the list, only that I tend to expect a lot more from Orson Welles back when his career was in bloom and he was still more than merely a good filmmaker, but was a great one, and a relevant one.

There’s also nothing specifically disappointing here. The cast is as good as one could find at the time. Edward G. Robinson is stellar in his role, as always, and since he was so easily typecast as a gangster in Little Caesar, it’s great to see him play the role of the good guy here and in other films. Welles himself is dark and brooding, a role he took to pretty naturally, it seems. The film is well-written and directed, and contains any number of memorable speeches. It’s also one of the first post-World War II films to show actual Holocaust footage, even if most of what is shown is actually off-camera.

Is it worth watching? Does it belong on the list? Sure. I think it does. Even a mediocre Welles film from the mid-1940s is as good or better than a great film from most directors. There’s a real intensity to this film that was difficult to find in war pictures of the same era. There’s a feeling throughout not only that Kindler/Rankin is a terrible man who deserves his fate, but a sense of needing to cleanse the world of him. But it’s also realistic. Few people are completely evil or have no positive character traits. Kindler/Rankin, for instance appears to genuinely love Mary and want the best for her. It certainly doesn’t redeem him, but it does humanize him in a way that would be easy to skip, since he’s also a Nazi war criminal who helped conceive of one of the greatest evils in history.

It’s worth a watch, even if Welles made other, better films.

Why to watch Cabaret: A tremendous, gutsy story.
Why not to watch: Sally Bowles is damnably annoying.

Why to watch The Stranger: Film noir at the top of the form.
Why not to watch: Welles made better movies.

A Musical Life

Films: All That Jazz, Yankee Doodle Dandy
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop (All That Jazz), DVD from Shorewood-Troy Library through interlibrary loan on little bitty bedroom television (Yankee Doodle Dandy).






















I mentioned yesterday that I’m not a big fan of musicals, and it’s true. I also said that I’ve been somewhat remiss in trying to get through the number of musicals on this list, and that’s also true. What I didn’t say was that this can cause some friction at home. Both of my daughters like being on stage. The older of my two girls is specifically a dancer, and is currently preparing for a show in a couple of weeks. It’s time for me to start plowing through some of these. I have to eventually, right? And if I don’t start now, then I’ll end up with six dozen musicals at the end.

So we’ll start with the vaguely autobiographical All That Jazz, a film by Bob Fosse about the life of Bob Fosse. It’s completely unflinching, which is what makes it worth watching. Fosse presents the life of stage director and choreographer Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), warts and all. Gideon is a drinker, a womanizer, a workaholic, and a speed freak, surviving on Dexedrine, Visine, and nicotine.

The film is not the story of Gideon’s life, but rather his death. We watch him exhaust himself, overextend himself, and push himself to the point where he can simply go on no longer. Gideon is, in the world of the film (and mirroring Fosse in many respects) wildly successful in the world of Broadway. Because of this, he has something approaching carte blanche to do what he wishes at any time he wishes. Cheat on his girlfriend who he cheated with on his wife? Sure, why not? He’s Joe Goddam Gideon, after all!

But the life takes its toll. Gideon walks around the movie with a half-burned cigarette perpetually clutched in his lips. His morning routine involves classical music, Alka-Seltzer, Visine in both eyes, a shower, prescription dexies, and a final look in the mirror with jazz hands and the phrase, “It’s showtime, folks!” We see him never stopping, moving from one project to the next, demanding that he be better, be bigger, be more. He takes what he wants with one hand regardless of who is affected by it, and beats himself silly with the other. Late in the movie, an actor tells him that he understands Joe Gideon—he’s worried that he’s not special, that underneath it all, he’s really just ordinary like everyone else. That sentence or two encapsulates the entire film.

Gideon is in constant contact with his ex-wife Audrey (Leland Palmer), his current girlfriend Kate (Ann Reinking, who is essentially playing herself from Fosse’s actual life), and his daughter Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi, in her only film role). Since he is who he is, he is badly hurt when it becomes evident that Kate isn’t faithful to him, but has no remorse for his own lack of fidelity to her. In short, Gideon is not so much a complicated dude as he is just a talented, selfish bastard.

Much of the film takes place somewhere between life and death, as Gideon talks with Angelique (Jessica Lange), who is, for lack of a better term, the angel of death. As Gideon’s health deteriorates, he spends time discussing his life with Angelique, having a few full-blown Fosse number hallucinations while lying in his hospital bed.

I don’t like musicals. I really have a problem with them in general, but All That Jazz is a wow from start to finish. The numbers are good, surreal and bizarre and beautiful (and I love Ben Vereen as the emcee of Gideon’s death trip). Even more astonishing to me is the brutal honesty with which Fosse looked at his own life. Fosse based this film off his own heart attack in 1975, he made this movie and lived another six years after baring his soul and faults to the world. That’s why it’s great. To paraphrase the narrator in Fight Club, that sort of honesty makes me go a big rubbery one.


On the other end of the biopic spectrum we have Yankee Doodle Dandy, the film autobiography of George M. Cohan. It’s the sort of film that, if you didn’t know going in that it had been significantly sweetened for an audience, you’d figure it out pretty quickly. George M. here might as well be starting his name with “Saint” for the life that’s depicted on the screen, or have had the screenplay penned for him by Horatio Alger.

We follow this rose-colored view of Cohan’s life from start to the middle of World War II, mostly in flashback. At the start, Cohan has begun a new stage play about the current occupant of the White House, and after the opening performance, he is summoned to Pennsylvania Avenue for a heart to heart with FDR. From here, Cohan (played as an adult by James Cagney) spins the tale of his life for the president, going through his family’s routine on Vaudeville, his failure to get his plays produced initially, and his eventual booming success on Broadway and just about everywhere else.

There aren’t a lot of failures to moon over, but the ones that do exist are treated like the sort of minor stumbling blocks that befell Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in a couple of dozen mid-1940s movies, with the “Hey, gang! Let’s put on a show!” mentality as a bounce back from tragedy. Can’t get someone to produce his play? Well, by golly, he’ll show them! All it takes is pluck and determination! Cohan writes a stinker? By golly, he’ll admit it in a self-effacing telegram sent to all of the newspapers!

It’s a bit overbearing, really. Cohan is a firecracker short of being a full-on fireworks display according to this film, and that’s all well and good, but at some point, I’d like to see something that approaches realism in any stretch of the imagination. Nobody is that all-fired plucky all the damn time.

This may simply be my distrust of the typical musical talking here, but I found the film to be the weakest when it excerpted scenes from some of Cohan’s plays. His ability as a dancer and actor, etc. is great, but I don’t need to see half of “Yankee Doodle Boy” to understand the play was a hit. The film is far better in the non-staged scenes, because then at least it doesn’t feel like I’m getting Americana dumped on me. This is especially true at the very end—the last five or ten minutes are a full dousing. It’s a patriotism bukkake (if this is a term you don't know...please don't Google it. If you do, don't blame me).

The saving grace of the film is James Cagney in the title role. The man goes for it, and while he’s best known for gangster films, the man could cut a rug. He’s no Astaire, and he’s no Gene Kelly, but he dances with his own distinctive stiff-legged style, and there’s not an ounce of guile in the man. He, at the very least, is a joy to watch.

Why to watch All That Jazz: The reality of what life on the stage is really like, at least from one perspective, and for those worried, it’s surprisingly non-fabulous.
Why not to watch: It’s frequently unpleasant.

Why to watch Yankee Doodle Dandy: Cagney.
Why not to watch: If you’re close to diabetic, this film will push you over that cliff.