SMIC #6: “It was you, Charlie” from Raging Bull (Martin Scorcese, 1980)

By julesallen in All posts, SMIC 1 Comment Tags: ,

The hardest thing about writing about Martin Scorsese (particularly bearing in mind the Minister’s admiration for the man) is finding something new to say about him. Since the death of Stanley Kubrick in 1999 it is difficult to think of a more respected filmmaker alive. What is more, Scorsese himself is such a scholar of Cinema that if there is anything that hasn’t been said about his work by his many admirers in the critical establishment, it has probably been said by Scorsese himself.

It struck me after selecting this SMIC that if one were to try and draw up a short list of contenders for sublime moments in Scorsese’s films, about half a dozen would have one thing in common: they would involve a soliloquy, and more often than not, it would be delivered by Robert De Niro. For a director who appears to love the use of the camera, this is perhaps surprising, but it reveals a lot about what makes Scorsese a great filmmaker.

Whether it be the edgy, childlike, improvised repartee of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), in front of his mirror (“you talkin’ to me?”), the edgy, childlike, fantasy banter of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1979) (again in front of the mirror) (“Six weeks? It’s impossible!”), or Johnny Boy’s edgy, childlike protestations in Mean Streets (1974) (“I’m gonna pay ‘im next week. I’m gonna PAY HIM!”) there is a fascination in Scorsese’s work with letting the protagonist lay himself bare through talking, uninterrupted, at length…and eventually talking himself out.

No-one has ever better captured the combination of danger and pathos of that most complex of species: Scorsese is the great director of the American male. And De Niro, like Brando before him, was its finest prototype on screen. What the “physical” tradition of male actors (Cagney, Brando, Dean, De Niro, Kinski, Depardieu) brought to Cinema, apart from the absence of any artifice whatsoever, was the sometimes painful experience of watching an actor appearing to genuinely undergo an emotional experience as he acted.

But it isn’t as simple as De Niro the actor being the mouthpiece of Scorsese the tortured male. Both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull were written by the venerable angry beast of 70s cinema, Paul Schrader, who also collaborated with Scorsese on The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) (where the prime De Niro role of Judas was taken by Harvey Keitel, presumably for fear that Willem Dafoe might be lost in the flames if De Niro were cast).

In addition, Scorsese had with him on these films the considerable talents of editor Thelma Schoonmaker and above all, director of photography Michael Chapman. Chapman had cut his teeth as Gordon Willis’s camera operator on the not insignificant The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and also held the camera for Spielberg on Jaws (1975), before lighting Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. There is no element of luck in this: Welles was lucky on Citizen Kane (1941) that RKO designated Gregg Toland to look after him, but Scorsese is ruthless and meticulous in his selection of only the finest available talent to work on his pictures, all of whom must share his scholarly cinematic sensibility.

It is the importance of this collaboration which makes Scorsese a “Hollywood” auteur – a director of great artists, like Griffith or DeMille before him, but every bit a European-style auteur like Rossellini or Bergman, whose films he had secretly admired whilst growing up in the tough New York district of Queens.

So whilst this artistry is what helps make the SMIC sublime – consider the mise-en-scene and editing of what would otherwise be a simple shot of a man in his dressing room – the icing on the cake is the substance of the scene itself: the perfect use of an apposite cinematic reference to exemplify the state of La Motta’s life, the legendary car scene in On The Watefront (Elia Kazan, 1954) where Terry Molloy (Brando) upbraids his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) for having ended his career in its prime by forcing him to take a dive.

And this is where De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull goes beyond anything else in Scorsese’s work and beyond almost anything else besides. La Motta is certainly a Terry Molloy, a washed-up boxer, firmly ensconced in ‘Palookaville’, but one who has transferred his meagre celebrity to showbusiness – delivering monologues from theatre and film to cabaret audiences. And naturally, he is a mediocre speaker. Just as to see a magnificent athlete reduced to a pathetic hulk of a man, to see one of the most demonstrative actors of his generation monotonously mumbling mistiming and misquoting classic lines of dialogue delivered by his predecessor 30 years before, piles pathos upon pathos. Ambitious, courageous, devastating filmmaking. Oh, and as Mark Kermode might say, men are permitted to cry.

And the original version of the speech from On The Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954):

SMIP #8: Walk Away Renee (Version) by Billy Bragg

By BigBrother in All posts, SMIP 4 Comments Tags: ,

Norman Whitfield and Barratt Strong
Are here to make everything right that’s wrong.
Holland and Holland and Lamont Dozier, too,
Are here to make it all OK with you.
(Billy Bragg, Levi Stubbs’ Tears)

Holland-Dozier-Holland, Whitfield-Strong, Stevenson-Gaye-Hunter, Ashford-Simpson, Brown-Sansone-Calilli: the great Motown songwriting teams. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Most of us can rattle off some Holland-Dozier-Holland and Whitfield-Strong hits. Many of us know plenty of Stevenson-Gaye-Hunter and Ashford-Simpson songs, even if we can’t necessarily list them from memory.

Brown-Sansone-Calilli, though – not so much.

Michael Brown, Tony Sansone, Bob Calilli: the names stare out from many Motown compilations – and every Four Tops compilation – but eventually it dawned on me that these familiar-to-me names made just the sole contribution to the canon of the best label in history: The Four Tops’ legendary 1968 hit Walk Away Renee.

When the hit-making genii that were Lamont Dozier and Eddie and Brian Holland fell out with Motown chief Berry Gordy and left the label in late 1967 the most nervous act on the roster must have been The Four Tops.

Since finally hitting the charts in 1964 with the H-D-H composition Baby I Need Your Loving (after an entire decade of dues-paying), the group rode a flying carpet of H-D-H gold: I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch), It’s The Same Old Song, Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, Reach Out, I’ll Be There, Standing In The Shadows Of Love, Bernadette, 7-Rooms Of Gloom… but now the magic sorcerers were gone. With no songwriters in the group, it seemed there may no longer be anywhere for The Four Tops and Levi Stubbs’ astonishing voice to turn.

Casting around for material, it seems The Four Tops chose to look outside Motown for inspiration; their first two post-H-D-H hits would prove to be reinterpretations of other people’s hits.

And so, with research, it came to pass – one of the foundation stones for my personal Tamla Motown devotion crumbled: The Four Tops’ legendary 1968 hit Walk Away Renee transpired to be a cover version.

In July 1966 The Left Banke – a so-called “baroque’n'roll” group, unafraid to wield violins, flutes and harpsichords – had scored a number five Billboard Hot 100 hit with Walk Away Renee, a song composed by Mike Brown, the band’s 16-year-old keyboard player (real name Michael Lookofsky) and Tony Sansone. Though credited as a writer, Bob Calilli wrote no part of the song.

Written in the winter of 1965, one month after Lookofsky first met Renee Fladen, it would prove the first of three paeans to Renee – the others being sophomore hit Pretty Ballerina and She May Call You Up Tonight, a track on the group’s debut album.

The Left Banke’s biography reads like a soap opera, perhaps only to be expected when its teenage prodigy songwriter was openly infatuated with and writing a series of songs inspired by the bass player’s ballerina girlfriend Renee Fladen, who would soon move on to date the band’s drummer before growing “uncomfortable” with the attention and splitting the scene.

Renee, some years ago

Such was the turmoil within the group that the vocals for Walk Away Renee, provided by Carmelo Esteban Martin Caro (credited as Steve Martin), were recorded after Lookofsky first left the band. He rejoined only after the record became a hit but hung around only for one album and the initial recording sessions for the band’s second release. The Left Banke spluttered to a halt and neither Lookofsky nor Caro would scale the heights their initial entrance suggested.

The Left Banke’s original sounds like it could have been recorded by The Mamas & The Papas – indeed, Walk Away Renee‘s flute solo (replaced with a muted trumpet by The Four Tops) was purportedly inspired by the arrangement of California Dreamin’.

Baroque it is not, but the arrangement, orchestration and Caro’s straining vocal certainly lend the song an air of youthful desolation missing from The Four Tops’ world-wearier, plaintive rendition.

I’d loved The Four Tops’ recording for as long as I can remember – not least because its lyric piqued my literary side, beginning not only a sentence but an entire story with the grammatically verboten “and” – but had not heard Bragg’s 1986 cover until I shared a student flat with a Bragg completist in my first year at university, 1991-2.

Exploring almost all my flatmate’s record collection over that academic year, I came across Levi Stubbs’ Tears, the lead single from Bragg’s third album, Talking With The Taxman About Poetry. Only his second top 40 hit, Levi Stubbs’ Tears had made number 29 in the summer of 1986; the album, recorded between March and July 1986 with the assistance of the likes of Kirsty MacColl, Hank Wangford, Johnny Marr and Bobby Valentino, became Bragg’s breakthrough release, making the UK album top ten.

Tucked away unprepossessingly on the B-side of Levi Stubbs’ Tears was a short and idiosyncratic track called Walk Away Renee (Version). While it might be considered a throwaway semi-novelty, two things cause it to stand out.

First, Johnny Marr’s gorgeous guitarwork; second, Bragg’s lyric – which might just be pop music’s most honest and self-deprecating account of first lust and the follies and embarrassments it induces.

Marr’s fourth introductory chord (0:12) sounds dissonant in comparison with what went before – much like the heady shock of first love. Bragg’s mordant estuary foghorn kicks in just a fraction of a second before that chord, disorienting the listener such that it is immediately clear that this is something different and unexpected from Britain’s foremost agitprop-rocker, something you were most unlikely to hear on the radio in 1986 unless you sought out the darker corners of John Peel’s or Andy Kershaw’s programmes.

Marr’s guitar vibrates and distorts under the weight of his fifth chord (0:17-0:18) and the strings sharply squeak between his fingers and the fretboard (0:19).

It’s only when Marr begins to pick out the melody (from 0:20) that you realise this is another interpretation of Lookofsky’s bittersweet missive to Renee, the girl of his best friend – the perfect backdrop for the nostalgic wordplay of Bragg’s lament.

It’s as lovely a melody as in any of its other incarnations, played delightfully by a briliant guitarist, but after the initial stages this SMIP is driven purely by Bragg’s lyrics and the feelings they evoke.

For even if the listener cannot directly empathise with Bragg’s boy whose nose begins to bleed just because he finally finds himself before The One (0:30), I’ve yet to find anybody who is unable to recognise within this short soliloquy an episode of youthful gaucheness that resonates deep within the memory bank of their own teenage years.

She began going out with Mr. Potato Head.
It was when I saw her in the car park
With his coat around her shoulders that I realised.
I went home and thought about the two of them together
Until the bath water went cold around me.
I thought about her eyes; and the curve of her breasts;
And about the point where their bodies met.
(1:06-1.28)

Who hasn’t, at one time or another, sat in that cooling bathtub brooding over a love slipping away? Who hasn’t, at one time or another, tortured themselves with mental images of the sexual pyrotechnics performed by their estranged inamorata and her new beau?

I said, “I’m the most illegible bachelor in town.”
And she said, “Yeah, that’s why I can never understand
Any of those silly letters you send me.”
(1:33-1:40)

Rob, one well-intentioned but not particularly gifted 14-year-old schoolfriend, diligently wrote out the entire lyric of Dire Straits’ Romeo & Juliet and sent it to Rebecca, the girl with whom he was breaking up.

Rebecca sent it on to a mutual friend with every one of Rob’s many spelling mistakes corrected in red ink. It subsequently made its way around the school.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her
And every time I switched on the radio
There was somebody else
Singing a song about the two of us.
(0:41-0:46)

Our Tune has tortured a nation for almost three full decades (it’s still, unbelievably, broadcast daily by Simon Bates on commercial radio) precisely because every relationship has a song, even if – as in the case of the Minister and The Minister’s Wife – the parties can’t agree on what it is (it’s between songs by No Doubt and Eternal).

It was just like being on a fast ride at the funfair;
The sort you want to get off because it’s scary
And then, as soon as you’re off, you wanna get straight back on again.
(0:49-0:56)

The Minister still clearly recalls the moment at which he became certain The Minister’s Wife would be sticking around for a while, as she sat recovering from the headrush of Space Mountain at Disneyland Paris and, still white from the fright, suddenly beamed, declared, “Let’s do it again!” and strode purposefully off to rejoin the back of the queue.

And, finally, the SMIP:

And then one day it happened:
She cut ‘er ‘air and I stopped lovin’ ‘er.
(1:42-1:48)

A funny punchine to a tragicomic tale but, with the benefit of hindsight and for the Minister at least, shockingly realistic.

1985 was far from a golden age for hair styling in the East Midlands, and one 14-year-old girl’s Saturday morning trip to the hairdresser’s – the result: a perm on top with a short, straight crop on the back – fair ruined the Minister’s Monday morning wait for the school bus and promptly burst a two-year-old bubble of unrequited love…

Marr’s fingers continue to spin up and down, across and around Lookofsky’s tune until the record fades, giving the listener 25 seconds to digest what has gone before, to think about those who walked away from him and those from whom he walked away, and the horror of the inexplicable hormone-fuelled antics and scrapes into which we got ourselves as kids.

Perhaps it’s not quite what the 16-year-old Michael Lookofsky intended as he longed for his Renee 40 years ago, but it’s certainly closer to reality.

Rolling Stone magazine placed Walk Away Renee at number 220 in its 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.

Renee Fladen-Kamm is a music teacher and artist living in California.

Billy Bragg’s Walk Away Renee (Version):

The Left Banke perform the original Walk Away Renee on Dick Clark’s Where The Action Is in 1966:

Levi Stubbs struts his stuff with three other blokes on US television:

Three presidents, three saints and two geniuses…

By julesallen in All posts No Comments Tags:

I won’t attempt an obituary of Charlton Heston, who died yesterday aged 84, as this should be left to proper film historians and scholars, but I will simply, if I may, make the following observations.

Heston was an actor of immense stature and gravitas who brought an effortless dignity to his roles and deserves substantial recognition for his body of work and influence.

He belonged to what we might call the ‘ancient tradition’ of the American leading man, along with the likes of John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford, who eschewed the theatrical mannerisms (Cagney) and methods (Brando) of more (justly) celebrated actors and who remained consistent in this approach throughout their careers*.

These actors did precisely nothing to move the medium on, save only to the extent that with both their popularity and skill they first enabled, then collaborated with, the greatest directors (Wyler, Ford, Capra, Welles, Leone, Hitchcock, Polanski, Eastwood, Spielberg) to make wonderful pictures. They were hired for their ability to make the films great through their acting, not to produce ‘great performances’.

What the likes of Wayne and Heston did was to capture the basic essence of screen acting and ground it, providing a historical testament and a lesson to that vast majority of aspiring film actors who don’t have the innovative genius of a Cagney, Brando or DeNiro: ‘less is more’. Some of today’s most watchable and effective leading men have clearly benefited from the Wayne-Heston tradition (think Mark Ruffalo in Zodiac (David Fincher, 2006), or Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)). They don’t draw attention to their performances, but without their performances, these superb films wouldn’t work.

If only for his influence in getting Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) made, we have a lot to be grateful to Charlton Heston for. But generations of actors will want to mark his passing, for being an actor who rose above the tide as it turned this way and that, and showed that in film acting, if you’ve got something that really works, it will always work.

Heston

 

*[The temptation to identify a strong pattern of conservative politics in the ‘ancient tradition’ is worth indulging but I think ultimately unhelpful, certainly in the case of both Eastwood, a humanist whose body of directorial work alone obliterates any attempt to associate his personal stance with that of Dirty Harry, and Heston, who loudly campaigned in support of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Wayne, Fonda and Ford are harder to defend on this ground.]

Dont know when I’ll be back again

By BigBrother in All posts 1 Comment Tags:

Two of my American colleagues had their United Airlines flight from San Francisco to London cancelled at short notice on Wednesday afternoon because inspections had revealed a problem with the aircraft.

While inconvenient to their plans, being delayed before flying for 10 hours in a pressurized metal tube attached to a massive tank of kerosene is obviously infinitely preferable to the alternative of flying for 10 hours in a pressurized metal tube attached to a massive tank of kerosene that is unsafe.

United Airlines has probably been paying particular attention to its maintenance regime of late because the Federal Aviation Administration recently ordered a check of maintenance records kept by all US airlines.

The FAA’s crackdown came after it last month fined Southwest Airlines, the world’s largest airline in 2007 in terms of the number of passengers carried, $10.2 million for failing to perform inspections on about 50 of its aircraft (10% of its fleet) – and then continuing to fly the planes with passengers on board even after the failure came to light. The fine is the largest the FAA has ever imposed on a carrier.

At the end of 2007 Southwest was flying 520 Boeing 737s: nearly 200 of them are Boeing 737-300s, an older model of the plane that is supposed to undergo extra inspections for cracks in the fuselage. Such cracks were the cause in 1988 of an Aloha Airlines plane being ripped apart in mid-air over Hawaii. The FAA finally acted when it found such a crack in a Southwest plane.

According to the FAA, at least 117 of Southwest’s planes were in violation of mandatory safety checks. In some cases, the airline flew its planes for 30 months after government inspection deadlines had passed.

After all this had been made public about a month ago, Southwest was forced to temporarily ground a further 43 planes to verify they were sound. It also announced it had suspended three employees.

However, it only became public knowledge because two FAA safety inspectors blew the whistle to the House of Representatives transport committee and claimed protection under America’s whistleblowing law.

The inspectors claimed that FAA management knew about Southwest’s safety lapses and that the airline was flying jets that were “not airworthy” but chose to turn a blind eye because taking “aircraft out of service would have disrupted Southwest Airlines’ flight schedule”.

So – to clarify – that’s a regulator bending over and lubricating itself for a rogering by one of the businesses it is there to regulate while simultaneously risking the safety of the public.

The FAA told CNN that the supervisor in charge of overseeing Southwest’s operations is “no longer in a supervisory position” and acknowledged that it should have grounded the aircraft last year.

It is important to emphasise that Southwest has been around in its current incarnation since 1971 and has never had an accident that has killed a passenger or crew member. (However, one child on the ground died in 2005 after a Southwest pilot’s error caused a crash landing.)

So what’s the big deal and why is the Minister getting his boxer shorts in a knot?

Well, Southwest Airlines is the original “no frills” airline and the inspiration for – among others – easyJet and Ryanair.

The key points of the no frills business model are high aircraft utilisation, quick turnaround times, charging for every “extra” possible and keeping operating costs low. All three airlines are fantastically profitable.

But what do you expect from regulators operating in a deregulated economy and airlines that routinely advertise tickets for less than a quid?

Technically-speaking, budget airlines do not advertise that they might not have the strictest safety regimes in the world. Instead they advertise lots of cheap flights and the opportunity to save money.

If a no frills operator advertises the same route as “traditional” airlines and its ticket prices are much, much cheaper than the others, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize in economics to deduce that its costs must be being cut somewhere along the line.

For reasons I don’t really understand I am increasingly fearful of flying and increasingly sceptical about its safety.

A commercial airliner lifts thousands of tonnes of matter off the ground and travels through the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, all the while attached to a massive tank of a highly inflammable liquid. Budget airlines’ aeroplanes do this many times a day, sometimes with less than 30 minutes between flights.

Given the slim margin for error, safety doesn’t seem to me to be the sort of incidental expense a business should seek to pare back for the sake of profit.

It strikes me that if you buy your suit from Matalan, you expect it not to last as long as a bespoke Saville Row suit: quality and craftsmanship costs money, after all.

On the other hand, the consequences of a cheaply-made garment falling apart when you are wearing it – while potentially embarrassing – are a little less drastic than if the same thing happens to your plane while you’re 30,000 feet up…..

Of course, easyJet and Ryanair are not Southwest. Let’s hope that that nice Stelios and Mr. O’Leary are a little less cavalier than their American counterparts, eh?

Eh?

Oh.

Weak In The Presence Of Beauty

By BigBrother in All posts 1 Comment Tags: , , , , ,

I had another of my surreal days yesterday. The hour between 2pm and 3pm was particularly strange.

While trying unsuccessfully to hook up his computer to a malfunctioning T-Mobile hotspot I found myself discussing American politics with a 52-year-old Californian corporate attorney who looks like Dubya and rides on private jets but is, mercifully, a registered Democrat who invests in eco-friendly businesses.

In Starbucks.

In the City.

Next to her…

…as he walked by…

“Nikki from Big Brother 7” – as I believe she used to be known – is a testament to the abilities of Photoshop (she has appalling skin), reads Jodi Picoult novels and has a picture of a nice black and white collie as the wallpaper on her Nokia N95.

Yes, it seems she really can read.

After she left, I informed my caffeine-imbibing companion that we had been graced by the presence of Celebrity.

“Who was she?”

“She was a Big Brother contestant a couple of years ago.”

“Ha! I take it she didn’t win, then?”

Touche.

Dexter Fletcher, meanwhile, was wearing a very sharp whistle. He looks old, but then he’s always had a face like one of those dogs with all the creases that look like Steven Gerrard.

All this comes four days after almost knocking over Ronald Pickup at a train station. He’s nearly 80: even I would have felt bad about that.

And so to 48 hours of completion. I suspect I’m going to miss out Thursday and Friday and come up grimacing on Saturday.

Technical difficulties

By BigBrother in All posts 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

At this point the Minister will be taking a short sabbatical as he spends the next few evenings mending his laptop and reinstalling all his software in a last desperate attempt to stave off having to buy a new one for a few more months or – worse still – having to use The Minister’s Wife’s PC.

Fortunately, Apple’s introduction of Time Machine in the latest version of the Mac operating system and the Minister’s investment in two more external hard drives means that the second draft of The Novel should not completely disappear into the ether when some hardware next goes tits up.

What did we do with all our spare time before computers meant we had no spare time?

The good news is that the next SMIP is 90% complete (it’s been quite a researching job, this one) and, therefore, almost ready to be released into the wild; it’s also safely tucked away on the flash memory drive of the Minister’s EeePC…

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