The Insanity of Roman Polanski

Let me start off by saying if you are hoping for a blog post about Roman Polanski's personal life, I will be a huge disappointment to you. I apologize ahead of time, and assure you it is not the first time I have disappointed someone... ask some of my exes.

What I want to talk about instead is Polanski's cinematic triptych about decaying sanity called his "Apartment Trilogy": Repulsion (1965), Rosemary's Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976). Although made a little over ten years apart, and based on different source material, these three movies have very similar elements that make watching them together a trip down a bizarre rabbit hole of Polanski's twisted design.

Let's start with Repulsion. This dark little number was Polanski's first English-language, full-length film. Set in London, it follows young manicurist Carol (a luminous Catherine Deneuve) who has a case of man trouble. The trouble is, she doesn't want them around. She blows off (not literally) a date and is grossed-out by her sister's boyfriend's razor being left in her toothbrush glass.

When the noise of her sister screwing wafts through the wall of her bedroom, it's all she can do to keep from pounding on it and telling her to knock it off. So when her sister takes a vacation to the leaning Tower of Pisa, you would think it is a good opportunity for Carol to get some alone time. The problem is, Carol's not alone.

Carol hears noises outside her bedroom door, and the walls start to crack. Soon men are appearing in her room, raping her. She can no longer concentrate at work, mutilating rich, white cuticles as she stares into space.

Polanski films these episodes so that we know Carol is hallucinating- but it is so skillfully done that we can't help but join Carol in her first-person madness. The problem intensifies when real men show up in the apartment and Carol is assaulted. The imagined men are joined by the corpses of real ones.

Polanski uses Carol's homespace as a representation of Carol's headspace. The claustrophobia of the apartment mirrors Carol's stifling fears of men. The gaping cracks in the wall are cracks in reality. The decaying food a symbol of the rotting away of Carol's mind.

What is so interesting about Repulsion is that the focus is less about explaining why Carol goes off the tracks, and more about the visualization of madness- the creating of an atmosphere that makes us experience Carol's downward spiral rather than explain it. The film closes with a close-up of a picture of Carol as a child creepily standing out from a family portrait. Apparently she was just born that way.

Repulsion was a very successful independent import, and it turned out to be an excellent dry-run for Polanski's first high-profile Hollywood project, the controversial Rosemary's Baby. Based on the popular Ira Levin best-seller, Rosemary is the story of young New York City newlyweds Guy (John Cassavetes married to Gena Rowlands at the time) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow getting divorced from Frank Sinatra at the time) who move into a new apartment to start their lives together. After a visit  from their kooky next-door neighbors (Sidney Blackmer and Oscar-winning cutie patootie Ruth Gordon) Guy's acting career takes off, and Rosemary gets a bun in her oven.

The American dream sours, however, when Rosemary sickens and suspects that there's something not right with the bundle of joy growing inside her. Add to that she fears her neighbors are more than just herbal supplement enthusiasts. And why is Guy always defending them? Are they in cahoots?

As with Repulsion, Rosemary focuses on the question of sanity. Are Rosemary's wild suspicions about Satan worshipers and visions of being raped by the Devil real, or is she losing her mind?

The questions of sanity go from affecting a single woman as the target of men's advances (poor Carol's dilemma) to a young wife bearing the burdens of motherhood both physical and social. Polanski's surreal shooting and editing styles create absorbing, visual madness, making us doubt Rosemary and what we ourselves have seen.

Here too, the apartment is a centerpiece for depicting this internal conflict. The apartment is isolated by the dark, decrepit hallway, and Rosemary hears strange, unintelligible whispering from the other side of her bedroom wall. It's as if the apartment is set aside from reality. Rosemary has to try and discern what's going on outside the walls of her own perception.

In the end, Rosemary discovers the truth by finding a secret passageway that leads her from what she thinks she knows in her apartment to the secrets enshrined in the world next door.

Rosemary was a huge hit and made Polanski a hot director in Hollywood. But a year later, he would experience his own real-life horror movie when his wife and unborn child were murdered by the Manson Clan in their home. (I guess it's hard to avoid Polanski's f-ed up personal life.)

In 1976 after getting an Oscar nom for Chinatown (1974), Polanski returned to the theme of apartment insanity with The Tenant. In this film Polanski cast himself as Trelkovsky, a man who snags an apartment in Paris because the former occupant, Simone, jumped out the window. Feeling guilty for getting an apartment because of someone else's misfortune, Trelkovsky visits Simone in the hospital, only to find her encased in a body cast unable to speak.

She lets out a big scream and croaks, though, when Stella (Isabelle Adjani) arrives. This doesn't prevent Trelkovsky and Stella from going to the movies and fondling each other.

Trelkovsky's stroke of real estate luck goes south as his neighbors and the concierge (the eternal Shelley Winters) begin to nag him about the noise from his apartment. He begins watching his neighbors through windows- seeing their forms and their shadows- a voyeur of the outside world instead of a part of it.

He is absorbed in the grungy apartment, finding a hole in the wall that contains a tooth, and Simone's dress stuffed in a cupboard. Paranoia morphs into personality incoherence as Trelkovsky begins to believe he is Simone- dressing up like a woman; gushing over shoes and realizing, "I think I'm pregnant,"; and finally jumping from his window mimicking Simone's fate.

The film's spiral into weirdness is only heightened by the fact that Polanski is the main character. He is the director of two previous films about women going insane who then directs himself as a man who turns into a woman who goes insane. The final scene with all of the neighbors watching his meltdown as if he is on a stage leaves us with the feeling that Polanski was struggling with the very public exposure of his work and tragic private life.

His life had become a must-watch horror movie, so he blurred the lines between his life and his art- by literally inserting himself  into the surreal visions that he had depicted in his earlier films. It's one of the strangest descents into madness by a character (and perhaps a director) in film.

I've Written a Letter to Ryan...

Dear Ryan Murphy,

I wanted to write and congratulate you on your new FX Series, Feud which was just announced in industry news sources around the country. How exciting that you are going to start your anthology series off with a story about the filming of the Joan Crawford/Bette Davis classic film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962)!

Any show that celebrates Classic Hollywood and educates a new generation about the wonderful performers of Hollywood's Golden Era is alright by me. And with such talented stars as Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon attached, how can you go wrong? Wait- Sarandon is playing Davis and Lange is playing Crawford? That must be a mis-print.

And I'm sure that this series will be a truthful examination of these two complicated- yet thrilling actresses, not a campy send-up of the baseless PR bunk about a feud between the two- a feud that both actresses later said was blown entirely out of proportion by the press. I mean you aren't going to go "over-the-top" with this thing, right? You never overdramatize and embellish to the point that you make a story a circus, do you? Of course not. That would be a terrible idea. I don't want to talk about it! Everytime I think about something nice, you remind me of bad things. I only want to talk about the nice things.

Yours,

Lance "Werthwhile Movies" Werth

Where Have All the Bad Guys Gone...?

As I spent this week in London with my beloved, we toured some Tudor mansions, ate meat pies in a pub, and curled up on a couch together to watch a movie from the vastly superior European Netflix catalogue. I usually let my partner choose the flicks we watch because his taste is much more specific than mine, so while it wouldn't have been my first pick, we cuddled together and watched Disney's villainess prequel, Maleficent (2014).



Maleficent isn't my cup of tea- and my reviewing it would only make me sound like an annoying film snob, but the movie did make me think about a bigger cinematic issue: Why do movies keep un-villainizing our most cherished villains?

The character of the wicked fairy Maleficent in Walt Disney's original animated classic Sleeping Beauty (1959) is a wonder to behold. Silkily voiced by the superb Eleanor Audley (who also did the voice of the wicked stepmother in Cinderella (1950) and was Oli-vah's snooty mother in TV's Green Acres) and animated with a rich fluidity, Maleficent slid onto the screen amidst a sickly green cloud with her chin held high and her disdain for all the princess-normative nonsense on full display.

Maleficent was left off the guest list for the christening of little Princess Aurora... on purpose. So she shows up to the blessed event anyway and curses the baby to die on her sixteenth birthday- in her eyes, a perfectly reasonable response to such a public slight. Emily Post would have suggested nothing less. Maleficent was evil and unrepentant about it. And it made her glorious. So much so, that I felt bad when she got a sword in the heart at the end.

But these days, you can't have someone just be evil. Maleficent in 2014 (played with high-cheekbone realness by Angelina Jolie) has to be a wild fairy who was wronged by a duplicitous lover, so she holds a grudge and curses his kid. That grudge gets all complicated, however, when she spends some time with dazzling Aurora (properly blond Elle Fanning) and regrets cursing her, ultimately risking her life to save her. What? Maleficent lives happily ever after with Sleeping Beauty? Whatever happened to the grim in Grimm's Fairy Tales?

And it's not just this movie. Other iconic baddies have had prequels made about their sad beginnings in the attempt to explain how come they are so nasty. Darth Vader isn't a pitiless, power-hungry Sith Lord. In the tedious Star Wars prequels he's an annoying young man who throws a tantrum because the Jedis won't let him marry his sweetheart and who loses his shit over not being able to save his mom.

This doesn't make him embrace the fragility of life and cherish every moment. Nope. He goes and kills a bunch of kids and then all of his Jedi pals before burning to a crisp and being turned into the wheezing, metal monster we all know and love.

What about Oz's Wicked Witch of the West? It wasn't enough that she should be a green, vengeful witch who wants to get the pig-tailed girl (and her little dog too) who crushed her sister under a house. In the disastrous Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), Theodora (Mila Kunis playing her That 70's Show character in a pointy hat), jealous of Oscar's (the horribly miscast James Franco) attention to other women, is tricked into biting an apple to lose her feelings for him- but instead is turned into the broom-flying green baddie we are more familiar with.

Once again, being hurt and rejected by a man doesn't result in nights spent in front of the TV with a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Romantic disappointment for women equals murderous personality change.

This is just the tip of the villain origin story iceberg. Snow White's Wicked Queen, Hannibal Lecter, and Norman Bates have all gotten modern makeovers that delve into their pasts to explain the evil characters that previously appeared on the screen.

What's wrong with someone just being evil? Do we really have to be spoon fed an origin story to confirm why our big screen meanies are so mean? Maybe it's our attempt to explain evil in our fictional worlds, when we can't in the real one. Maybe we think if we can get a grasp on why Darth Vader used his death grip without a care, we'll understand the likes of Osama Bin Laden, ISIS, and Boko Haram. Or maybe studio execs just like to squeeze every dime they can out of film franchises. Either way, I am comfortable with Maleficent cursing newborns while wearing fabulous cloaks just cause she wants to.

For this classic film lover, it's good enough to just be bad

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Top 5 London Pics!

Next week I'm off to London to see my beau, and since you can't cross the Pond with me- I'm giving you some English realness by listing my Top 5 Films set in London:






1.) Mary Poppins (1964)

For a kid who used to dream of being British (I answered the phone in an English accent) Mary Poppins was sheer heaven. I was enchanted by the flowering tree-lined streets, the houses shaped like ships, the seemingly endless rooftop horizon, and the kite-filled sky of London. I wanted to move in with the Banks family on Cherry Tree Lane and jump into chalk sidewalk paintings, dance with chimney sweeps, and have a tea party on the ceiling. No Kansas wheatfields for me. I wanted sooty London.

As I grew up and realized that I was not a long-lost Windsor prince, I also figured out that the London of Mary Poppins wasn't real. The film was shot on all four of Disney's soundstages a half a world- and fifty years away from the London of 1910 that the film idealizes. But the fantastical world of Mary Poppins was real in a sense, because it was based on actual Edwardian/Georgian neighborhoods, parks, and buildings- the most obvious being grand old St. Paul's Cathedral.

In order to teach Jane and Michael Banks a lesson in charity, Mary (the "Ha-Ha in your face Audrey Hepburn!" Oscar-winner of 1965, Julie Andrews) produces a snowglobe that contains St. Paul's Cathedral- but instead of snow, small white angles recreate the birds that flock around the domed structure.

As she sings "Feed the Birds" we are magically transported inside the globe to see a withered old woman (Jane Darwell) who sells bags of breadcrumbs to passersby for "tuppence a bag." The animation mixed with the physical set gives the sensation of a dream, and one can't help but feel that you are standing at the steps of the great cathedral looking up at the arches and statues, surrounded by flying birds. That cinematic moment is so memorable that even today, the website for Saint Paul's has a page with a video clip from the movie. Chokes me up every time.

When I finally made my first trip to London, I didn't see any chimney sweeps, but I did hang out with a couple builders and see some colorful auras while on ecstasy. Saint Paul's was beautiful- and even if I did avoid the flocks of birds (pigeons and I don't get along), I looked for the little old lady to give some tuppence to.




2.) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

From 1960's Disney animation to CGI-generated scenery we go. I know I'm going to get some flack from theater-folk who HATED this movie, but I thoroughly enjoyed Tim Burton's take on Stephen Sondheim's classic musical. The titular Sweeney (Johnny Depp) returns to London with revenge on his mind after being wrongly imprisoned at the hands of wicked Judge Turpin (the terribly missed Alan Rickman).

With the help of former neighbor and meatpie shop owner Mrs. Lovett (the queen of odd, Helena Bonham Carter), he opens up a barbershop whose customers leave with much more than a shave and a haircut. The scenery is mostly computer-generated, but the view of a dark, and grimy Victorian London is darkly lush and seductive, and won an Oscar for Best Art Direction.

I know, I know. Burton cut the opening song from the musical "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd"- but rather than sing the backstory up front, Burton let it unfold throughout the film. Yes, I know Johnny Depp does not have the  pipes of stage Sweeney Len Cariou. He has at best a rock-styled voice from a garage band that performs at local proms. But Depp broods and simmers pretty well. And of course Helena is no Angela Landsbury. But nobody is- and Angie's too old to do the movie- so I think Helena does a fine job playing the deceitful Mrs. Lovett.

I think what really matters about Sweeney Todd is its grisly, dark humor, and the cutting lyrics to Sondheim's brilliant score. And who better to do macabre humor than Tim Burton? The montage of Sweeney at the height of his barbering career cleverly follows the rhythm of the song with bone-crunches adding a sick musical punctuation as each customer exits the chair.

Perhaps the most fun comes from the performance of "A Little Priest" where Sondheim's brilliant lyrics take centerstage amidst the overindulgent film edits, crusty pies, and cleavers.



Perhaps I'll do a Sweeney Todd tour of London while I'm there...

3.) Sabotage (1936)

Before he came to Hollywood, a thinner Alfred Hitchcock made some exciting films for independent British film companies. One of the most interesting is this gem about a plot to blow-up London. Scotland Yard detective Sergeant Ted Spencer (John Loder) goes undercover to investigate an act of sabotage that left London without power.

He befriends the lovely Mrs. Verloc (the gal with the glorious eyes, Sylvia Sidney) and her young brother Stevie (Desmond Tester) in order to keep tabs on her husband Karl (Oscar Homolka) who Spencer suspects of being involved with the English/German terrorist group. Will Spence find out what the next plot is and stop it in time? I'm not going to say.

The film is a smorgasbord of Hitchock's signature obsessions: birds, Germans, the wife married to someone she doesn't really know, and the movies. The film is also taut with the suspense that was Hitchcock's stock in trade. The famous bus scene where little Stevie is unknowingly transporting a bomb in a film can is unforgettable, the tension building to an unendurable level.

Loosely based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, the film is tight and suspenseful with Sidney giving a performance that makes you wonder why she's not well-known today- you may remember her best as the always smoking Juno in Beetlejuice (1988). She is captivating on screen  but reportedly did not get along with Hitchcock, so she never appeared in his films again. Of course, Hitch moved on to blond leading ladies by the time he went to Hollywood anyway. And if you're looking for the famous Hitchcock cameo on the streets of London, don't bother. For some reason, he didn't pop into this film. Maybe he didn't like riding the London bus.

4.) Konga (1961)

We've seen King Kong climb the Empire State Building. We watched giant ants tear up the sewers of Los Angeles. Godzilla has trampled all over Tokyo and New York City. London felt a little ignored by giant movie monsters, so in 1961, they made Konga

Producer Herman Cohen was the successful B-Horror Movie schlockmeister behind such classics as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). In 1959 for reasons I can't unearth, the Detroit native moved to England and continued churning out the very best in terrible horror movies, including two with Joan Crawford: Berserk (1967) and the not-to-be-forgotten Trog (1970). 

So Cohen's resume made him the perfect producer to make the story of a mad scientist who develops a growth serum and injects it into his favorite lab chimp- who soon grows from little monkey to man in a monkey suit. As Dr. Decker's (Michael Gough) ambitions and paranoia grow, so does his monkey and soon Konga is breaking through the roofs of houses and doing his master's will... until he doesn't. Konga grabs ahold of Dr. Decker and makes Big Ben his own personal stripper pole. But as Kong could tell Konga, it never turns out well when a monkey climbs a national landmark.

The monster movie is a beloved genre- and like its kin, Konga questions unfettered Atomic Age science and the reckless act of mucking around with nature. Cohen sluts it up a little by adding a blond lab assistant, but essentially he follows the mad scientist/monster paradigm, creating laughable acting, dialogue, and effects along the way.

Frequent Cohen collaborator Michael Gough snarls his was through the picture making Dr. Decker as unlikable as possible. Funny to think that at the end of his career Gough would star as the beloved Alfred in the Tim Burton Batman (1989). From monkeys to bats. That's showbiz!

5.) Beautiful Thing (1996)

Ah, gay London! I'll never forget the night at Heaven danceclub when I went home with a gent who told me he was Prince Andrew only to find out we weren't going to Windsor Castle and I was not about to make it with a member of the royal family. Gay princes aside, being gay in London has the same pitfalls as anywhere else, and that's why Hettie Macdonald's Beautiful Things is so universal.

Jamie (Glen Berry) is the product of Thamesmead, a South London working class project where the square concrete apartments are so close together, there is little to hide. And Jamie has lots to hide. He has a crush on his studly schoolmate Ste (Scott Neal). Ste's family life is abusive and after one particularly rough beating, he winds up at Jamie's house under the care of Jamie's wacky ma (EastEnders regular Linda Henry.)

As Ste lies in Jamie's bed, open and vulnerable, Jamie opens up too, and exposes his feelings for Ste by giving him a kiss. As any gay teen knows, this sort of thing can go horribly wrong, and Ste overwhelmed with guilt and shame, runs for the hills. But Beautiful Thing doesn't leave it there. Like the Mama Cass soundtrack that wafts from the neighbor's record player, this film embraces difference and hope. Rather than tell another gay tragedy, Beautiful Thing finds a happy ending for these two young men.

When the film came out it caused quite a stir- but not just because it was a gay romance. Beautiful Thing emerges from the dark AIDS era with an optimistic sense of  the joy and possibility of gay love. And if the scene of Jamie and Ste slowdancing in the courtyard to "Dream a Little Dream of Me" doesn't make your eyes moist, you need to get Restasis.

That's all for me London post, mates. I'll be back quicker than you can say, "Churchill's knickers!"

Chin-chin and all that rot!