On September 3, 1981, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas brought Bernard Sabath's The Boys of Autumn for a trial run to Marines Memorial Theatre, San Francisco. A "what-if" tale about the reunion of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn 50 years after their infamous adventures on the Mississippi, Lancaster played Henry Finnegan (Huck, of course) and Douglas his old friend Thomas Gray (Sawyer). Having retired from vaudeville, Tom Sawyer—who has been using the stage name of Thomas Gray—returns to his home in the South searching for his boyhood friend Huckleberry Finn. The play was directed by Tom Moore and ran for four weeks (some sources say six) and reunited Lancaster and Douglas for their seventh collaboration after previously starring together in six films: I Walk Alone (1948), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), The Devil's Disciple (1959), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), and the made-for-TV Victory at Entebbe (1976). They would work together one last time in Tough Guys (1986). The fate of their participation in The Boys of Autumn has been detailed by Tony Thomas in The Films of Kirk Douglas (1991:280): "They were offered a production on Broadway but both turned it down for reasons of health, neither feeling up to a long run. When The Boys of Autumn opened up in New York several years later, Tom and Huck were George C. Scott and John Cullum."
All the more reason in retrospect to be grateful for my opportunity in my mid-20s to catch their appropriately poignant Marines Memorial performance. The San Francisco Examiner opined that the play "abound[ed] in humor, some of it gentle and wry and some rambunctious." Honestly, I don't remember much about the play—it was fair to middling and somewhat cynical in its depiction of the duo's disillusionment with their elder years; a bit of a downer, really—but the play's failings didn't really matter somehow. What mattered was having a third or fourth row seat and being wholly starstruck, if not with the performances then with the performers themselves.
That's one thing I can say about both actors, neither seem capable of disappearing into their roles. Their roles, instead, drape off their statuesque star power, which seems appropriate to the era and its studio system, even as Lancaster—through his independence as a producer—contributed to the downfall of that system.
Now in a handsome sampling of nine films, the Pacific Film Archive offers a retrospective of the films of Burt Lancaster—Grin, Smile, Smirk—running Friday, November 26 through Saturday, December 11, 2010. It's an apt title for the program, as curator Steve Seid states in his introduction: "Burt Lancaster is known for his grin, but it's a grin that contains multitudes. Though Lancaster may frequently ply that beaming kisser, something takes shape around his pearly whites, a smile or smirk, that's not a routine gesture. He's got a grin that can disarm or deceive, conceal or connive. Hang that ambiguous facade on an actor first trained as a professional acrobat and you have a mercurial mug atop a lithe athleticism. When first pinched for the pictures, Lancaster didn't have that signature smile. His mid-1940s debut roles in The Killers and Brute Force were too hang-tough even for a sneer, but in time his bravado emerged. By the early 1950s, that grin came flooding forth in the swashbuckler send-up, The Crimson Pirate, showing off his physical daring, a characteristic he would trump in Trapeze, that soaring tribute to the Big Top. Sweet Smell of Success and Elmer Gantry presented larger-than-life roles that his trademark visage could barely restrain. Here, Lancaster's smile is like a seawall holding back waves of sarcasm, duplicity, and an unexpected vulnerability. The 1960s saw roles of great command in which he subdued his more uninhibited gestures to acknowledge the disturbing depths of films like Birdman of Alcatraz, A Child is Waiting, and The Swimmer. With a career that spans four decades, this series barely plumbs Burt Lancaster's forceful and committed presence. But these terrific examples—taut existential noirs, acrobatic extravaganzas, judicious social dramas—should still leave you with something to grin about."
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 26 8:00PM The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak; 1946, 103 mins)—Two big-city toughs invade a small-town diner looking for "The Swede," in this blood-pulsing noir, based on a story by Hemingway and costarring Ava Gardner and Edmond O'Brien. Lancaster's first screen role.
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 27 6:30PM Trapeze (dir. Carol Reed; 1956, 105 mins)—The first Hollywood film from the director of British classics The Third Man and Fallen Idol, this circus drama finds Lancaster (a former acrobat in real life) in a high-wire love triangle with Gina Lollabrigida and Tony Curtis.
8:40PM Brute Force (dir. Jules Dassin; 1947, 94 mins)—Famed blacklisted director Dassin (Night and the City) teamed with Lancaster for this hard-hitting noir about life inside prison walls. "Part antifascist tract, part existential allegory."—NY Times
SATURDAY DECEMBER 4 6:30PM The Crimson Pirate (dir. Robert Siodmak; 1952, 104 mins)—Lancaster and fellow real-life acrobat buddy Nick Cravat add a bounding physicality to this tongue-in-cheek tribute to the swashbucklers of old. "A slam-bang, action-filled Technicolor lampoon."—NY Times
8:40PM Sweet Smell of Success (dir. Alexander Mackendrick; 1957, 96 mins)—Burt Lancaster plays a ruthless New York City gossip columnist and Tony Curtis is a groveling press agent in this "pungent exploration of ambition and evil in the New York newspaper world.... A chilling and powerful picture."—Village Voice
SUNDAY DECEMBER 5 4:45PM Elmer Gantry (dir. Richard Brooks; 1960, 146 mins)—Burt Lancaster is the prototypical American huckster Elmer Gantry, who realizes he can sell God just as well as vacuum cleaners in this searing satire on evangelical corruption, adapted from a Sinclair Lewis novel. Photography by legendary cinematographer John Alton.
THURSDAY DECEMBER 9 7:00PM Birdman of Alcatraz (dir. John Frankenheimer; 1962, 147 mins)—In jail for life, a double murderer transforms himself from caged man to bird expert in this thoughtful prison drama starring Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, and Telly Savalas. From the director of The Manchurian Candidate.
SATURDAY DECEMBER 11 6:30PM A Child is Waiting (dir. John Cassavetes; 1963, 102 mins)—Cassavetes's second studio production is a hard-hitting drama about the social reforms needed to care for mentally disabled children, with Burt Lancaster as a headstrong psychologist, and Judy Garland as a concerned music instructor.
8:40PM The Swimmer (dir. Frank Perry; 1968, 94 mins)—A tanned Burt Lancaster plays a middle-aged suburbanite slowly reaching the deep end, one highball at a time, in this riveting drama. "Has the shape of an open-ended hallucination ... a grim, disturbing and sometimes funny view of upper-middle-class American life."—Vincent Canby, NY Times
Burt Lancaster hardly requires introduction; but, for those wishing to amplify their experience of the PFA retrospective, here's John Frankenheimer's TCM profile on Burt Lancaster:
Several career profiles are likewise available online, among which I might recommend the following: Geoffrey Macnab for The Independent; Richard Corliss for TIME; Jason Ankeny for AMC; Rick Marin for The New York Times; and Philip Kemp for Sight & Sound.
Should you prefer to crack open a book for an expanded understanding of Lancaster, there are no less than a dozen volumes available, including:
Ed Andreychuk. Burt Lancaster: A Filmography and Biography. McFarland & Company. 2000. 288pp.
Kate Buford. Burt Lancaster: An American Life. New York: Knopf. 2000. 968pp.
Minty Clinch. Burt Lancaster. London: Arthur Barker. 1984. 184pp.
Bruce Crowther. Burt Lancaster: A Life in Films. London: Robert Hale. 1991. 192pp.
Gary Fishgall. Against Type: The Biography of Burt Lancaster. New York: Scribner's. 1995. 484pp.
David Fury. Cinema History of Burt Lancaster. Minneapolis, MN: Artists Press. 1989. 301pp.
Allan Hunter. Burt Lancaster: The Man and His Movies. Edinburgh, Scotland: Paul Harris. 1984. 160pp.
Michael Munn. Burt Lancaster: The Terrible-Tempered Charmer. London: Robson Books. 1995. 278pp.
Tony Thomas. Burt Lancaster. New York: Pyramid Publications. 1975. 160pp.
Jerry Vermilye. Burt Lancaster: Hollywood's Magic People: A Pictorial Treasury of His Films. New York: Falcon Enterprises. 1971. 159pp.
Robert Windeler. Burt Lancaster. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1984.
For visuals, I recommend Rancid Popcorn for its collection of German film posters for Lancaster's films, several of which I've used to illustrate this entry. Also there's a great collection of half sheets for Lancaster's films at Filmsondisc.com. Galleries of photos and videos can be found at Ace Photos and Fanpix.
Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berkeley For information call: 510-642-1412
My first conscious exposure to the films of Joseph Losey was with regard to the Film Noir Foundation's successful efforts to strike a restored print of Losey's 1951 eerie noir The Prowler. I say "conscious" because—though I had seen The Boy With Green Hair (1948), M (1951), The Servant (1963), and Boom! (1968)—I didn't connect the author to his work. And isn't that an oddity? That a director's auteurial legibility evades ready identification? That grievous oversight is currently being corrected by Joseph Losey: Pictures of Provocation, co-curated by Steve Seid and Peter Conheim, screening at the Pacific Film Archive through April 16 (when the series ends with The Prowler). As different as Losey's films are from each other, this series has intelligently culled out their connective tissue and common concerns.
Reinvigorated commentary on The Prowler has surfaced in association, no doubt, with its recent Film Forum revival. At The L Magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz offers a video essay on The Prowler (transcript here) and Justin Stewart reviews same. At The Auteurs, Daniel Kasman identifies The Prowler's ill-fated lovers—Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) and Webb Gardner (Van Heflin)—as "ciphers" ("you can't call them characters"). While at The Village Voice, J. Hoberman credits Losey's "sordid nocturne" as "the creepiest of film noirs."
Also of note is Brecht Andersch's analysis for SFMOMA's Open Space of Losey's Eve (1962) and Accident (1967), which proved instrumental in my catching both films at their PFA screenings, if only to honor the goddess Venus in and out of furs. Pre-empted by covering the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, I'm only now joining the Losey retrospective in process, with hopes of catching the bulk of the program's second half in the next couple of weeks.
Peter was kind enough to respond to a few email questions.
* * *
Michael Guillén: To start with, let's get some background. Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and your education and how you came to collaborate on PFA's Losey retrospective? How did you and Steve work together to shape this program? Did you divvy up films and, thereby, the research? Was this program affiliated in any way with the recent Film Forum Losey retrospective? In other words, is this a traveling program you and Steve expanded upon? Or did the two of you work from scratch?
Peter Conheim: I'm pretty much a life-long film buff who used to write capsule reviews—complete with one-to-four-star ratings, a system I now despise—when I was about eight years old. My film education has come mainly from mentors at the shops and institutions I worked at in my youth, mostly independent video stores, now deceased.
From 2004-2009 I co-owned and operated a small cinema in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Guild Cinema. My former business partner has continued to run it. And when I left the theater, I began looking in earnest for ways to apply the various arcane knowledge I've been storing up, and those ways have generally been as an independent curator and film collector, and ersatz preservationist. I'm currently working mostly in the latter arena and hope to produce some restoration projects over the next few years.
I've worked on and off at PFA since 1997 on a clerical level, though not on a formal curatorial level by any means, and my friendship with Steve Seid goes back to my early video store days in the early 1990s. He's brought me on board several times to work on screenings; we co-curated several outdoor shows in the PFA sculpture garden, and he's consulted with me now and again on his regular shows.
I had been hoping to at least co-curate a Joseph Losey retrospective for several years, and was heartened by the 2008 series at Harvard Film Archive, which was actually 100% complete. Once I knew they had had success with it, and had located some of the trickier prints, I decided to push harder for such a series at PFA. I dropped enough hints that eventually the idea was put forward, though I can't really be credited with instigating it—they probably would have gotten around to it ... Losey has been sort of "in the air" of late.
We began by drawing up a complete filmography, and once Steve presented me with the various restrictions we had to work with, I pretty much did the first go-round of red-lining titles, passing over certain things in order to be able to show something else (i.e., being able to import Mr. Klein, which is costly, and so only showing one of the two Elizabeth Taylor collaborations—Boom! instead of Secret Ceremony, or choosing Time Without Pity over The Criminal, etc.). We simply weren't able to do it all for many entirely expected reasons. The major omission which was not our doing is The Go-Between, which we were unable to secure a print of. There is only one apparently un-faded color print in existence in the U.S., and it was not available to us for some frustrating reasons best not to go into. So, rather than show a basically worthless print which had faded entirely to red, we chose to omit it. We hope that down the road, Sony—which is the U.S. rights holder—will see fit to do a preservation on this wonderful film, which isn't even available on DVD in the U.S.
Steve did the majority of the research of the prints, and several are from my own collection: Blind Date and King and Country. In those cases, the distributors no longer had any prints and, indeed, Blind Date is arguably the rarest film in the series in terms of availability. I am aware of two extant prints, both 16mm—and that is literally it.
I've begun making inquiries to see if some other venues around the country might want to pick up on the series. The issue for venues is, and will continue to be, the importation of prints from Europe, Assassination of Trotsky, La Truite, Roads to the South, Stranger on the Prowl and nearly all the British films among them. We've not located prints in the U.S. of any of those titles. And Losey's final film, Steaming, apparently does not exist in print form at all—only Betacam video. Which seems crazy, given that it was only made in 1985, but there you are.
Guillén: In your introduction to the Losey doublebill of Eve and Time Without Pity, you made a point of emphasizing how different these films were from each other. And they were. And these two, in turn, differ very much from other films of Losey's I've seen. Can Losey be read, then, for his auteurial legibility? Do you consider him an "auteur" and—if so—can you describe what you perceive to be his creative signature?
Conheim: I would argue that Time Without Pity fits very well alongside his other noir-ish titles, such as The Big Night in particular, as well as The Prowler and Blind Date. I would also argue that Eve fits nicely alongside The Servant and Accident, to a certain degree, but I think it can also be viewed as an anomaly because he was consciously in the grip of Antonioni, Resnais, et al., admittedly so, and I think it's safe to say he was positing himself as making a "serious art film" with Eve. If you read interviews with him, he admits to a certain amount of self-consciousness and excess with the film, and indeed, it's almost hard to believe something as economical as King and Country was made by the same person.
I find the whole auteur concept to be slippery. When you are a filmmaker working with the "system", the products which emerge were and are inevitably born of collaboration (and compromise), so I think there are genuinely few true auteurs in the real sense of the word; I think of Russ Meyer when I think of the word, not Losey. I think of someone completely on the fringes, in total control of their product, who every once in a while pulled the wool down over the eyes of studio execs and accomplished something truly auteurial, such as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Whereas Losey took the jobs that were offered to him for the majority of his life. Some of his best pictures he came onto after they had already been originated, sometimes with other directors in mind—Godard was initially slated to direct Eve, for instance.
But Steve did, I think, nail the recurrent themes which run through Losey's work which, I suppose, could be considered the marks of an auteur: characters up against an unfair system, or deeply flawed, being forced to reckon with their flaws. Certainly he filtered his 1950s work through his experiences as an exile—it's pretty hard to separate the work from his life during that period.
There are certainly different ways to approach an overview of a director with as varied a resumé as Losey; from the standpoint of an easily digestible evening at the cinema, we could have put The Big Night and Time Without Pity together, or The Servant and Accident together, but I think Steve was wise in mixing them up, effectively discarding an easy definition of "auteur" for Losey.
Because I am a sick and cruel person, I would have put Boy With Green Hair and King and Country together, myself. On Easter!
So much has been written about Otto Preminger that it seems foolish to reiterate what's already been stated many times over. Within immediate parameters, however, Steve Seid has synopsized: "As legend would have it, Otto Preminger was a bald-headed baddy scolding helpless actors about flaws in their performance—the tyrant on the set. But Preminger's films, some thirty-seven in all, bear no sign of this heated temperament, instead sharing a muted detachment that ironically excites our own engagement with his complex characters. …Preminger promoted a cool take on human nature that simultaneously savored cinema's expansive visual spaces; over time his eloquent way with the camera grew complex and sensuous. The willful director's insistence on artistic autonomy compelled him to become one of the first champions of independent film."
There are, of course, the career overviews offered by James Quandt, Thomas Gale, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Tag Gallagher and Chris Fujiwara. James Quandt cleverly finesses the alphabet to review Preminger's career from autocrat to Zanuck at the Cinémathèque Ontario website; Thomas Gale's entry on Preminger for The Encyclopedia of World Biography can be accessed at Highbeam Research Library; Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay "The Preminger Enigma" is at The Chicago Reader website; Tag Gallagher's Film International essay on Preminger's "heroic" films can also be accessed at Highbeam Research Library; and Chris Fujiwara's nuanced profile for the Great Directors database can be found at Senses of Cinema.
Fujiwara, in fact, has provided the most recent biography on Preminger: The World and Its Double (Faber & Faber, 2008), published close on the heels of Foster Hirsch's own notable study Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King (Knopf/Random House, 2007). Earlier, in his Film International DVD review "4 x Otto Preminger" (May 2004, Vol. 2, Issue 3), Fujiwara convincingly contested the oft-stated ascription of "film noir" to the suite of Preminger films that include Laura, Fallen Angel, Where The Sidewalk Ends, Whirlpool (1950), The Thirteenth Letter (1951), and Angel Face (1952). Fujiwara argued against this received wisdom: "It is pertinent to remember that Preminger repudiated this term, as far as his own work was concerned. Seeing these films as 'films noirs' is no more illuminating and no less destructive of any understanding of what the films are doing than seeing River of No Return (1954) as a Western; Carmen Jones (1954) as a musical; or In Harms Way (1965) as a war film. Preminger's films are absolutely heedless of genre, and Preminger never makes the slightest effort to adapt his style to generic norms."
Fujiwara further pointed out that films like Laura, Fallen Angel, and Whirlpool "depart radically from the 'film noir' pattern … characterized by scheming femmes fatales, trapped and desperate male protagonists, and unhappy endings."
Laura (1944)
Dana Andrews—a popular leading man in the 1940s—has never been one of my favorite actors, though his brooding performance as the smitten detective Mark McPherson is unquestionably one of his best. In her profile of Andrews at Bright Lights Film Journal, Imogen Sarah Smith has written: "Dana Andrews, with his naturally tamped-down style and his gift for ambivalence, was an ideal leading man for Preminger. Apart from The Best Years of Our Lives, Andrews' four films with Preminger … were the peak of his career, and they gave him his most complex and compelling roles."
In "Acting Like Children", his 1958 interview with the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Andrews admitted: "People very often say to me that Laura was my first picture. Well, it's the first one they saw, which is why they think that." His recollections of the behind-the-scenes intrigues that shaped Laura—specifically his characterization of Detective McPherson—details how then-producer Preminger deviously wrested directorial control away from Rouben Mamoulian (the film's original director) by strategically aligning himself with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. Andrews opines: "I think Mr. Preminger wanted to be a producer-director." Andrews also recounts how he and Preminger disagreed on a point of direction and stared each other down in stony silence for hours, "acting like children."
Allegedly, Zanuck's dissatisfaction with Rouben Mamoulian's interpretation of Detective McPherson as an Ivy-league criminologist clashed with Zanuck's preference for a tough "right-down-the-alley type of detective" more familiar to audiences. Preminger's willingness to cater to Zanuck's vision on such a major issue distracted the studio head from his noted objection to the casting of Clifton Webb in the role of Waldo Lydecker. Andrews recollected that Laura was Webb's first motion picture. "He'd been under contract to MGM for 18 months and never done a foot of film—never had seen himself on the screen." According to David Boxwell at Bright Lights Film Journal, the homophobic Zanuck was initially displeased with Webb's portrayal of Lydecker as an effete and waspish socialite; however, Preminger convinced Zanuck that such effeminacy suited the character and provided comic contrast to the traditionally masculine Andrews.
Originally, as Eddie Muller intimated in his Noir City introduction of Hangover Square (1945), Mamoulian had wanted Laird Cregar for the role of Lydecker; but, Preminger worried that Cregar—who had gained notoriety playing the sinister role of Jack the Ripper in The Lodger (1944)—would lead the audience to become suspicious of Lydecker earlier than necessary. When Cregar died of a heart attack after a drastic attempt to lose weight for the role, Preminger brought in Clifton Webb. It's now nearly inconceivable that anyone else could deliver Lydecker's vicious bon mots more stingingly, which to this day delight audiences with their unfettered bitchiness. "The voice alone would have carried the performance: the tone of a courtly buzz saw, the razor diction dining on consonants as if they were truffled squab," Richard Barrios has written in Screened Out: Playing Gay In Hollywood From Edison to Stonewall (Routledge, 2003:202).
Despite Lydecker's homosexuality having been removed from the script early on (though, as Barrios continues, "the rewritten character's bouts of hetero-jealousy [sit] oddly upon Webb's epicene deportment"), Clifton Webb's performance of Waldo Lydecker has gone down in cinema history as one of the great gay characters on film; the epitome of the "mannered, high-gloss style" that David Thomson pointedly identifies in his recent book The Moment of Psycho (Perseus Books 2009, p. 43) as a "code for homosexuality" in American films of the '30s, '40s and '50s.
In retrospect, Preminger's direction of both Andrews and Webb—and the characterizations they finally settled upon—served to manifest a tension essential to Laura's suspense. As Imogen Sarah Smith has correctly perceived in her Bright Lights Film Journal profile: "Preminger was right about McPherson. Not playing him as hard-boiled not only destroys the comedy in his interactions with Laura's friends, it eliminates the tension within Mark's character as he begins to feel and behave in ways no one would expect of a standard-issue tough cop. Laura introduces the essential Dana Andrews character: the Average Joe with unexpected complications. It also demonstrates the Preminger Paradox: the director was a notorious tyrant, prone to tantrums and sadism often directed at the most vulnerable of his actors, yet the keynote of his films was tolerance for ambiguity. Ensembles in shades of gray, full of subtle, tamped-down performances, his films never turn on a simple axis of good and evil but listen to many voices and allow each some degree of persuasiveness."
Smith evokes the "long, wordless sequence, followed by Preminger's fluidly tracking camera" wherein "McPherson prowls around Laura's apartment, ostensibly looking for clues but really indulging his insatiable desire for communion with the dead woman. Reading her letters and her private journal isn't enough; he opens her closets, fingers her silky handkerchiefs (obvious Hays Code stand-ins for her unmentionables), and sniffs her perfume. He doesn't linger over things sensually; he fidgets brusquely, irritated by his own romantic yearning. He heads for the liquor cabinet and gulps Scotch while gazing at Laura's portrait. He snarls at Waldo Lydecker, who hits the nail on the head when he sneers, 'I wonder you don't come here like a suitor with flowers and a box of candy.' Mark couldn't, or wouldn't, openly admit his own feelings: cops just don't find themselves in the grip of morbid, perfumed obsession with dames who have been bumped off. But he knows that Waldo is right, hence his seething, brooding restlessness. Alone again, he plants himself in front of the portrait and nurses a drink until he falls into a stupor."
This pivotal scene—underscored by David Raskin's haunting theme (with belated lyrics by Johnny Mercer)—is seductive in its gravitational allure. It's one of my favorite scenes in Laura and one of my favorite scenes in film altogether. Rarely has desire for what is absent been so sensuously embodied in an imagined presence, save perhaps Portrait of Jennie (1948). It reminds me of what poet Mark Doty once wrote in his equally haunting study Still Life With Oysters and Lemon (Beacon Press 2001:3-4): "I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn't seem to suffice, not really—[rather, it's] that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, having allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and the life of the painting's will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness towards experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world."
When I consider the term "eccentric", I think of the orbits of comets, irregularly-shaped pearls, and the conversation I had with my ex-employer when our relationship began to deteriorate and she complained that my "eccentricity credits had run out." Four years later, I have to ask: "Can eccentricity credits ever really run out?" Or more importantly, should they? I think not! And I consider it highly irregular of her to think so.
Now—due to the programming efforts of Pacific Film Archive's Steve Seid—to the term "eccentric" I associate cinema. "Eccentric Cinema: Overlooked Oddities and Ecstasies, 1963–82", currently running at PFA through August 27, 2009, states Seid's case: "Eccentric cinema thrives on pictorial surplus, the indulgent storyline, and a contempt for the customary, all resting upon the sagging shoulders of extravagant skill. This is no trash cinema, with its cheesy topics, uninvited camp, and joyful ineptitude. Instead, eccentricity might show itself as a dizzy disregard for the stuff of genre and style, or in the pursuit of ungainly ideas that consign a filmmaker to the status of outsider. Often the eccentric surfaces early in a career, before the artist has lost the exuberance of youth or succumbed to the timidity of the marketplace."
With "trashy" cinema now popularized and relegated to the academic footnote, eccentric cinema comes along to stake a claim on the side margins, clinging fiercely to that empty space for fear of slipping down to the bottom of the page for enumerated consideration. Steve Seid has constructed a veritable "Noah's Ark of oddities", shepherding two of each kind of subgenre into his confabulated series: "a pair of Westerns in which heroism has gone south; two postapocalyptic tales where virility prevails; dual vampiric accounts that suck, differently; a brace of psychological breakdowns involving mawkish men with issues; a duet of rock musicals that strike discord with their delivery; and a twosome of fantasies about that elusive thing called love, one with a mermaid, the other with a monomaniac." Seid concludes: "Genre meltdowns, faulty parables, self-detonating critiques: these films may not be trash cinema, but they are definitely worth recycling."
I caught the series' first installment Coming Apart (1969) where Rip Torn—in his first starring role as one of the "mawkish men with issues"—"earns his moniker." As Seid writes: "He's ripped and torn and on the way to a big, bawdy breakdown in [Milton Moses] Ginsberg's voyeuristic sex romp. Torn plays Joe Glazer, a psychiatrist whose pent-up proclivities find him moving into a studio apartment in the building where his former mistress (Viveca Lindfors) lives. Once there, he begins a seduction 'experiment' that involves a one-way mirror, a couch, and a procession of sexually apt young women. Succumbing to his own predatory appetite, Joe becomes horrified by the emptiness of his conquests. His comeuppance arrives in the person of a former patient, played by a desperately determined Sally Kirkland, who deflates his fragile fantasy. Scorned at the time of its release, this prodding pic may have captured the painful collapse of sixties counterculture with too much provocation. Filmed entirely from behind the mirror, Ginsberg's frisky fete makes us voyeurs at our own love-in. The eyes have it."
Coming Apart strips away the pleasure of voyeurism to reveal its addictive implication. Seid confirmed this in an email when I complimented him on his introduction: "What I was getting at but never managed to articulate about Coming Apart has to do with the reception of the film. I was referring to the voyeurism as an important theme. What I think riled many critics is not the sometimes gratuitous sexuality, nor its parade of neurotic nudes, but the fact that the film continually implicated the viewer. It seems to me that taboo things fare better when they just appeal to our base instincts. Everyone agrees that we have base instincts and base instincts indulged act as social release valves. But if you somehow complicate the use of base instincts, if you turn the impulse into a critique of abuse or power, then those instincts no longer function as release valves, but as subterfuge. In this context, the baser things critique their own source in culture. They become subversive. Coming Apart continually turns the mechanism of Rip Torn's voyeurism back on the audience. There is that great moment when he is remorseful that he can't turn off the machine even though he knows he must, that he's being self-destructive. But his compulsion is greater (at that moment) than his despair. And we as viewers can't stop watching him and his exploitation. That's just part of the film's intent, but it's pretty good stuff."
When Coming Apart was first released in 1969, Time characterized Joe's "experiment" as "a voyeur's version of Candid Camera. The analyst analyzed, the schizoid psyche caught flagrante delicto—it is a notion worthy of Pirandello or Antonioni. And totally beyond Milton Moses Ginsberg…."
When Time complained that the transvestite character was "presumably added to assure the widest possible audience appeal", they were being condescending of course, though time lends a piquant reading to Joe's latent homosexual impulses, suspected by his peers. Is Coming Apart a misogynistic film? Probably not, though the demarcation is slight. Is Joe a misogynist? Perhaps a self-loathing misogynist: "I hate men, they degrade you for being a female." Is Coming Apart a homophobic film for the way Joe treats the transvestite when his anatomical secret is revealed? Perhaps only in the sense that misogyny has long been credited as the seat of homophobia. Contrary to Time's smarmy insinuation, there is appeal in recovering this transvestite character in '60s cinema for no other reason than it reinforces the project of archiving representation. He's a character consigned to the ranks of some of the minor players in Midnight Cowboy. M.M. Ginsberg has left a time capsule that—no matter how you judge the container—contains some far out stuff from the sixties; perhaps most notably an uncomfortable record of its capsized idealism.
At The New York Times, Vincent Canby noted that—though Rip Torn's character moves the camera several times—"for most of Coming Apart the camera remains focused on the couch and the mirror. As a result, almost every image is half real, half the reverse of reality, which is, I suppose, a legitimate cinematic equivalent of the way one automatically supplements reality with fantasy in conscious experience."
Canby assessed fairly: "The autobiographical film form is ambitious and offers lots of opportunities for fancy effects that try to tell us we're watching captured reality. There are blackouts, when the sound is on and the camera is not; 'whiteouts,' and representations of film leaders, when the camera seems to be running out of film; 'flash frames,' or subliminal shots, when Joe flicks the camera on and off. From time to time, Joe also talks to the camera, but his musings on reality ('All I wanted to do was see, to encounter myself in the midst of my being ...') are as open-ended as the sight of an image receding into the infinity provided by two mirrors.
"Instead, Coming Apart compels attention as an anthology of various types of sexual endeavor, all photographed from the fixed position that in stag films is a matter of economic necessity (each new camera set-up adds more money to the budget) but here is a matter of conscious style." In fact, Canby suggested, "Coming Apart is an unequivocably entertaining movie only if you cherish the rigorous ceremonies enacted by participants in stag movies, photographed with the kind of frontal, skin-blemished candor that shrivels all desire. As an attempt to elevate pornography (or what we thought was pornography until all the points of reference came unstuck) into art, it is often witty and funny but it fails for several reasons, including Ginsberg's self-imposed limitations on form (to which he's not completely faithful)."
Locally, when Coming Apart had a one-week revival run at the Lumiere 10 years ago, Edward Guthmann from the San Francisco Chronicle complained: "The claustrophobic intimacy of Coming Apart is supposed to bring us inside Joe's head to share his agony and self-loathing, one supposes. Instead, the whole set-up of the hidden camera and the mirror—and the implied correlation between psychiatry and voyeurism—feels like a gimmick, an arty pose." (Time likewise criticized that Ginsberg's manifest intent to make his film "a set of X rays" comes off instead as "only a suite of poses.") Guthmann, further contextualizing that 1969 was the year of such films as Easy Rider, Medium Cool and Midnight Cowboy, suggested that—though cultural forms and sexual behavior were being turned inside out and Coming Apart probably had some relevance for some people—"today it looks phony and self-important. It's meant to be unvarnished and truthful but the situation it portrays—of Torn lying back while a series of desperate women throw themselves at him—is pure fantasy, the silly wish fulfillment of a Playboy subscriber."
Meanwhile at The Examiner, Wesley Morris added: "Bizarre, irritating, self-indulgent to the point of narcissism, Coming Apart is a stark, necessary reminder of what kind of actor Torn was when the nature of the work he was doing allowed him to fold a psyche into his particular brand of menace."
More recent critics have found much to recommend the film, though acknowledging it remains very much a product of its time. IndieWIRE crowns it "One of the most challenging, visionary, important films of independent cinema." At A.V. Club Nathan Rabin observes: "Coming Apart's secret-camera gimmick proves tremendously limiting, but it's also an audacious stylistic choice that lends the film a harrowing, claustrophobic intensity that can be almost unbearable." He concludes the film is "disconcertingly original, if self-indulgent and formless. A noble, if not entirely successful, experiment that promises more than it can deliver, it's a fascinating, frustrating time capsule that too often lapses into tedium."
PFA's "Eccentric Cinema: Overlooked Oddities and Ecstasies, 1963–82" continues this evening with a new print of L.Q. Jones' A Boy and His Dog (1975).
In April 2007, the Pacific Film Archive (PFA) programmed two Cannes award-winning films by Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul—Blissfully Yours (Sud senaeha, 2002) and Tropical Malady (Sud pralad, 2007)—in the second installment of their "Closely Watched" film series wherein directors are invited to provide shot-by-shot analysis of their own films. I was delighted that my favorite Weerasethakul film Tropical Malady was chosen for the shot-by-shot. As PFA video curator Steve Seid synopsized: "If ever a film called for close contemplation, it would be Tropical Malady, with its extraordinary fable in which the commonplace and the mystical mesh. Mystery, too, is at its core—in the journey from civilized space to jungle haunt, in the mercurial nature of the characters, in the veracity that underlies the two-part parable. With the insights only a director could possess, Apichatpong Weerasethakul will help us see the forest for the trees."
My thanks to PFA publicist Shelley Diekman for arranging a conversation with Apichatpong Weerasethakul earlier in the afternoon before his shot-by-shot presentation.
* * *
Michael Guillén: First and foremost, welcome back to San Francisco! We're always so delighted when you accompany your films here.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul ("Joe"): Thank you.
Guillén: We gain so much insight by your returning with your films. I participated in your Yerba Buena residency when you were here before. It was wonderful. Also, I wanted to thank you personally. I was the fellow that you comped a ticket to at the Toronto International Film Festival….
Joe: Oh really?!
Guillén: Yeah, I was really poor at the time and $15 a ticket was a real hardship so I really appreciate that you did that. It would have broken my heart not to see Syndromes and A Century (2006) when it premiered at TIFF. And it worked out well because I was then asked to write the program capsule for the Asian American International Film Festival.
Joe: Okay.
Guillén: So much has been written about Syndromes, Tropical Malady, Blissfully Yours and Mysterious Object At Noon (Dokfa nai meuman, 2000) that I prefer to explore first what I don't know anything about, namely your upcoming projects. You've announced a few at Kick the Machine and I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about Because (2007), My Mother's Garden (2007) and Unknown Forces (2007)?
Joe: Because is a music video I've done for a Thai singer. He's an art collector so he's commissioned artists—me, and other artists [including] Rirkrit—to do all his songs and he's going to put them in a show, hopefully in a gallery or museum somewhere. There are many media artists who are working on this [proposed exhibition]. I made a three-screen installation for this music video.
My Mother's Garden is a short film I made for Dior. It's an impression of the jewelry they have in their collection. It's very special because the designer is inspired by [carnivorous] plants. The designer really liked Tropical Malady so we talked about it and we developed a short film from my seeing the designs. I made an eight-minute film from [personal] experiences. I focused on my mother's orchid garden when I was young.
Guillén: Did her garden include carnivorous plants?!
Joe: Not really. [Laughs.] I wish. Unknown Forces is the new installation I'm opening in L.A. on April 18, in two weeks, at the Redcat Gallery. It's a four-screen installation.
Guillén: Between your video installations and your film work, is there a major difference between working in the two mediums?
Joe: Yes and no. I work with the same idea of starting with concept, use the same crew and cast sometimes, but video is more like sketches of ideas and it allows me a lot of trial and error to really express something that is sometimes very abstract that I cannot do with feature films yet. Something that is purely feeling. That I don't have to explain why—specifically or concretely—the reason behind it. It's more a visual and aural reaction. Video allows me this freedom. Usually when there's a commission for an installation, it's very free. There are no t.v. station producers sitting behind you, consulting. For me, it's personal business.
Guillén: Speaking of the feeling of your work, I recently was talking with Hong Sang-soo about his films and how—though they're not quite as cryptic as yours—they often repeat imagery or themes to such an extent that they invite facile equations of certain images with symbolic interpretations. This especially came up at his public appearances during a retrospective held by the Asian American International where he fielded questions from his audiences. I noticed he became very resistant to confirming or—for that matter—denying any exact equations or interpretations of his films. Later we were sharing soju together and I gathered that Director Hong suffered from all this cerebral analysis because he was in essence an emotional filmmaker. The intelligence of his films is emotional. He was trying to capture feelings more than ideas. I sometimes sense that from your films as well, especially now as you talk about the freedom to feel when you're creating your video installations. There's a lot of feeling in your films and I was wondering how you use your camera to—not so much depict emotion—but to evoke emotion?
I'll give you a case in point: in the scene in Blissfully Yours where the young couple leave the village to spend the day in the countryside, you film from the back of the vehicle, showing the village receding. I could feel the torque of that departure as the car turned corners and that feeling of getting away was quite palpable for me. Can you talk a little bit about how you use your camera to physicalize emotional states?
Joe: It's for me, personally, because making films is a way to express certain things I cannot through words. I'm not really good at speaking. I think nobody's good at speaking about these things directly. [Laughs.] It's as simple as showing the places I like, the people I admire, the landscape, architecture, sound. This is the root of filmmaking. I simply present those and that's why I think the movie is very open. When you see the shot from the back of the car, and if you are moved, it is because of you; your experience of certain things—I don't know—in your life relating to these kinds of movements, certain colors or whatever. For me too. But I don't really aim at others like you; I aim for myself. Does this shot have a certain relevance to my experience? Most of the shots have to have a certain meaning and that's why it's very difficult maybe for Hong Sang-soo to explain why. [Laughs.]
Guillén: And it was almost unfair to ask that of him, I thought.
Joe: Well, yes. And I'm quite curious about tonight how this shot-by-shot will turn out because everything is personal. For my film Syndromes and A Century, when it played at festivals, people were trying to pinpoint, "What is this? And does this mean this and this?" For me that's quite useless in a way because we each have our own subjective experience.
Guillén: Interestingly enough, that's another thing that Hong Sang-soo mentioned to me that I felt was amazingly similar to things you've been quoted as saying in other interviews: that there is no reality in film. For anyone to try to pinpoint specific meanings in one of your films proves to be a fruitless enterprise because each audience member invests their own subjective experience into the film.
Joe: Yes. Film is illusion. Once you cut the film, it's subjective already, or how you frame it is the subjective point of view of approaching it from many ways.
Guillén: When they announced that you were going to be doing this shot by shot analysis of your own film, after having seen you at the Yerba Buena residency, I thought, "Oh this poor guy. They're going to grill him!!" [Joe's eyes widen and he chuckles.] I wish you luck with all that.
Joe: I'm okay.
Guillén: I'm sure. I recently read an interview Kong Rithdee conducted with Pen-ek Ratanaruang wherein Pen-ek stated that he started making movies because he was curious, not because he had a fixed idea of what he wanted to do; unlike yourself, he added, who he considers a visionary of Thai film and someone who has a clear vision and knows exactly what you want to do with cinema. Is that true? And if so, what is it exactly that you want to do with cinema?
Joe: It's a tool. It's an extension of myself. I try to merge my life with movies because how I live and how I make film are inseparable. When I go to places I like, I think, "Oh, I wish I could show this to people. I wish I could convey this feeling." I don't know if I have a clear vision; making films is more about trying to have it be a part of my life. How I live is such an integration.
Guillén: So creativity, artistry, is your life? It's not like you make objects of art that are separate from your life? It's the creative process that is your life?
Joe: Yes. It's not working when I make a film. It's an integration of things I have written down. It's like meditation in a way when you breathe in and out. Every moment is important. Film is the same. It's parallel. [Joe gestures his hands alongside each other, as if praying.] Making films influences how I live and how I live influences my films.
Guillén: So it's symbiosis?
Joe: Yes. I've just started making films. It's still early. I don't know how making films will be like for me in 10 years. But for now it's like a diary.
Guillén: I'm glad you reference meditation because that leads to something I wanted to ask you. When you had your residency at Yerba Buena, you said things that have lingered with me since then, that I've thought about again and again, so I appreciate the opportunity to ask you directly about them. You stated that Blissfully Yours was Buddhism 101 for Straight people and that Tropical Malady was Buddhism 101 for Gay people.
Joe: I said that?
Guillén: You sure did. Syndromes and A Century seems to be Buddhism for everybody; no one's left out! But your comment made me consider that one of the problems Western audiences have with processing your films is that we're not Buddhist, most of us. What is essentially Buddhist about your films?
Joe: The idea of living itself, I think, of watching movies. My films encourage the idea of self-awareness. To be conscious of yourself but, at the same time, try to get rid of the self. It's in conflict but it's not. You're aware of yourself, but at the same time you're just part of the universe; you're nothing. [Laughs.] To be able to be aware of this. When making a film, my films always encourage the audience to explore the movie but also themselves. Most of my films are talking about film watching. When you watch the film, you're aware of watching the film. Whereas in Hollywood films—and this is generalizing—you get into the story and you forget yourself. You get hypnotized by the story.
Guillén: So watching a film, then, would be like sitting meditation?
Joe: I would hope so.
Guillén: Like watching the process of thought itself?
Joe: Right. And you're aware of yourself. Like in the second part of Tropical Malady, once it shifts and you're five or ten minutes into it, you realize, "This is a movie." You realize about film. Suddenly you're not lost in the stream of narrative, you're aware of sitting and watching and your environment. This is the idea of awareness. Also, in the film Syndromes and A Century as well there is the basic idea of reincarnation, about the assimilation of life, and recycling. I recycled the script from Tropical Malady to put into the new film. Film making and living is the same recycle.
Guillén: That's reminding me of when I was in Toronto and got to speak with Tsai Ming-liang. He said something comparable. He said he was upset with the narrative intrusion of story when there were so many stories just to watch. Which reminds me of what you're saying right now. We've become so accustomed to having the story put inbetween us and the screen, making us passive. Your films, on the other hand, and Tsai's filmmaking, demands an audience pay attention, to watch, to be aware, to be engaged.
Joe: To be aware of oneself and one experience. Because you can approach the film in many ways. Sometimes it's a little thing, like memories, and though they're my memories I present, you can approach them from your own point of view and how you make up this material.
Guillén: Your films are very personal and I know that you are not, by agenda, political. Yet there are political resonances in your films. What amazes me is how well-received your films are for being as experimental as they are. Brett Farmer at Senses of Cinema described you as "transnationally cosmopolitan." [Joe laughs.] And Michael Koresky at Reverse Shot was saying that there is what he called a "metatextual European film consciousness" to your films. [Joe laughs more.] What I'm trying to say is that—you're being very personal—but somehow that's universal and that's why audiences can relate to your films. Has it surprised you that your films have been so well-received internationally?
Joe: A bit. A bit. I'm happy of course that they're well-received, but at the same time it's a confirmation that when you really say something frankly, it will come across. Film is universal; it has no boundaries. A film is like a personality. You're this kind of person or that kind of person and—when you get to know someone—they have sides, many sides. I'm always cautious about someone who is very popular. I wouldn't say my films are super well-received. There's a super big attack as well against them. I would say the film has its own personality. Either you like it or hate it. It's like a person that takes time to get to know. It's in this way that my kind of film or European films operate, not to please everyone but to just be myself.
Guillén: Another thing you said at the Yerba Buena residency that has stuck with me for a long time was when you asked your audience, "Do you think Tropical Malady is a Gay film?" I didn't know whether you were joking with us?
Joe: No, no.
Guillén: At the time I responded, "No. This is not a Gay film." This ties in somewhat with the Buddhist themes. One of my main concerns as a self-identified Gay male is the American appropriation of foreign expressions of gender variance. What I find so radical about the "Gay" elements of your films are that they are actually speaking about reincarnation. Your erotics are chance manifestations and not so much the lifestyle choice that I associate with the commodified definition of "gayness" in the United States. Do you understand what I'm saying? How do you think about that? Do you think your films have this Gay element?
Joe: That's interesting. I've never thought about that. I think what I was trying to say is that it's not by choice. It's by design and the pattern of life.
Guillén: Exactly. And though it really isn't, that idea comes off as radical.
Joe: Is it?
Guillén: I think so. I resent this a lot by American queer film reviewers who try to appropriate these things and shove them into lifestyle choice. You're not talking about lifestyle choice.
Joe: No.
Guillén: You're talking about this chance encounter between souls, which could be between male-female, it could be male-male, female-female, human-animal. It varies according to how the souls manifest. In my opinion, within this culture, that is a radical concept because it eschews choice.
Joe: I think it's less so in Asian belief. It's just the way it is. It's past cause and effect. It's past some origin. It's just there to manifest itself in the world and then it transforms into something else. This is not just in Tropical Malady. I have other films where it's just the way it is.
Guillén: Moving on then. Like yourself, I am fascinated with the rainforest. For nearly two decades when I was training as a Mayanist and leading tours in Central America, I spent countless hours sitting in the dark watching the rainforest with dilated perception, which is what I felt informed my love for Tropical Malady—admittedly my favorite of your films. Again because the film gave me a visceral feeling when it shifted from the first to the second part. There was that brief moment of feeling unmoored, lost, as people mumbled, "What happened? Did the projectionist fall asleep?" Whereas I was sitting there thrumming with anticipation, telling myself, "It's time to watch to see what comes out of this tropical darkness." Your capturing of night in Tropical Malady is the most accurate depiction of night I have ever seen in a film.
Joe: Thank you.
Guillén: Much ink has been spilled on your tendency to bifurcate your films. I see your bifurcations as the process of recursive transformation. It's like going from one room into the next with the memory of the room you have come from affecting your impression of the room you are going into; one section of the film informing the next section of the film. And what's so effective about the transformation is that—as an audience member—you can feel it. Much like I could feel my pupils dialate adjusting to the darkness. I know you've been trained in architecture so that you have a spatial sensibility. Can you talk about bifurcation as an architectural principle in your films?
Joe: Oh. That's very difficult.
Guillén: I'm sure. That's why I exist.
Joe: [Laughs.] I wasn't conscious of using architectural ideas. I was more focused on the idea of realizing memory's possibilities. When you go from one space to the other, looking at the same story but from a different point of view, that's more how I was looking at the film, not from an architectural point of view.
Guillén: But are you creating parallel spaces?
Joe: Yes. But it's not only two. It could be many layers. [Joe makes a gesture of stacking one flat hand on top of the next, again and again.] To evoke that in the film, made me realize there are other layers going on, including a spiritual layer. It's also about the history of watching him as well. When you go to the second part, the first part becomes history, the history of living.
Guillén: In Syndromes, let's say, the first part was—if I understand correctly—moreorless a faithful depiction of your mother and father before you were born; but, the second part was more an amplification with your sensibility in a present context laminated onto those memories? Would that be accurate to say?
Joe: [Hesistating.] For me, there's nothing right or wrong, but both parts are a mixture of this thing that you mentioned about the inspiration from their lives and my personal life, my personal appreciation of people and space, so on both planes it operates that way. In the second part it's more about looking at the first part. I wrote the second part later when we finished shooting the first part. We had quite a long break and I started to write the second part. It was more a contemplation of what I had done with the history of the first part. Much of my filmmaking process is improvisational and instinctive.
Guillén: Well, it works! And that's why I used the term "recursive" because the perceptual sensibility of the second part of the film is informed by and contingent upon the first part of the film. Could it stand on its own? Sure. Does it have more resonance by being partnered with the other? Absolutely.
Yesterday I was speaking with Susan Weeks Coulter at the Global Film Initiative. I'm aware that you're an advisory member of their film board. We're collaborating on youth outreach and we wondered who you thought was the youngest Thai film maker working today who shows great promise?
Joe: Youngest? I would say two people because there are several; but, from the circle that I know, I would say Thunska [Pansittivorakul]. He has a Thaiindie website. He has his own Kick the Machine but it's different. And the other guy is [Sompot] Chidgasornpongse. He's studying at CalArts right now. [Sompot has a Thaiindie profile as well.]
On September 3, 1981, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas brought Bernard Sabath's The Boys of Autumn for a trial run to Marines Memorial Theatre, San Francisco. A "what-if" tale about the reunion of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn 50 years after their infamous adventures on the Mississippi, Lancaster played Henry Finnegan (Huck, of course) and Douglas his old friend Thomas Gray (Sawyer). Having retired from vaudeville, Tom Sawyer—who has been using the stage name of Thomas Gray—returns to his home in the South searching for his boyhood friend Huckleberry Finn. The play was directed by Tom Moore and ran for four weeks (some sources say six) and reunited Lancaster and Douglas for their seventh collaboration after previously starring together in six films: I Walk Alone (1948), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), The Devil's Disciple (1959), The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), and the made-for-TV Victory at Entebbe (1976). They would work together one last time in Tough Guys (1986). The fate of their participation in The Boys of Autumn has been detailed by Tony Thomas in The Films of Kirk Douglas (1991:280): "They were offered a production on Broadway but both turned it down for reasons of health, neither feeling up to a long run. When The Boys of Autumn opened up in New York several years later, Tom and Huck were George C. Scott and John Cullum."
That's one thing I can say about both actors, neither seem capable of disappearing into their roles. Their roles, instead, drape off their statuesque star power, which seems appropriate to the era and its studio system, even as Lancaster—through his independence as a producer—contributed to the downfall of that system.
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 26
SATURDAY DECEMBER 4
THURSDAY DECEMBER 9
Should you prefer to crack open a book for an expanded understanding of Lancaster, there are no less than a dozen volumes available, including:
