STEPHEN FURST: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Stephen Furst, immortalised as Flounder in Animal House, is up on the Guardian online. You can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper sometime in the next few months.

If you believe, as I do, that most of life's situations can be explained or solved or at least papered over by quotes from Animal House, Kent Dorfman becomes a central existential figure. I was pleased that the G left in my quotes of Flounder's dialogue, especially 'You can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes. You fucked up. You trusted us'.

Three of my favourite, less famous, Flounder moments are: when we see him and his roommate, Larry Kroger (Pinto), in Donald Sutherland's English class. Flounder appears to be taking notes: the camera looks over his shoulder and he's drawing jet fighters blasting away, like a little kid in school.  Then's there the time Flounder walks in on a card game, sidles up to the table, and asks 'you guys playing cards?'. And finally that tremendous reveal when we see his high school sweetheart who has come up for a visit, and she is lovely. It forces us to look at Kent Dorfman in a whole new way.

Otherwise, as I say, it was interesting that Furst recapitulated Flounder over and over, but also used parts of that character in his most successful roles. He rarely was given the chance to branch out, however, into villainy, which I think would have been interesting. There's a comparison to be made to Wayne Knight, who played Newman in Seinfeld after playing Numa in JFK.

Furst acted in, wrote, directed and produced an awful lot of films that were derivative from other movies. He must have had a good idea of what could sell, especially as a TV movie, and he was probably, as an actor, just big enough for roles in those B pictures and TV movies. But as I say in the piece, there were some interesting exceptions. And I have to say I've never seen Atomic Shark, though I think I might have to now.

As often happens, my closing was edited out of the piece. Here is the last graf as I wrote it. I think Mohammad, Jugdish, Sidney, Clayton and Lonny would have liked it.
 

Furst died at home in Moorpark, California, of complications from his diabetes. He is survived by his wife and sons. As tributes poured in, one actor posted the video of Flounder, in his undercover agent raincoat, watching the chaos Delta House and his marbles inflict on the college's annual parade. Furst's smile fills the screen. 'Boy is this great,' he chortles.

OUR NIXON: THE TRICKY DICK WE KNEW AND LOVED

There is a moment, watching the home movies of Tricia Nixon's wedding, when I wondered what similar Super 8 footage of Sonny Corleone's marriage might reveal. Our Nixon, which shows tomorrow at London's Open City Docs Fest, is built around home movie footage shot by H.R. 'Bob' Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin, three of President Richard Nixon's closest aides, three of his most loyal and devoted followers, all of whom would wind up in jail, cut loose by their hero on his way to becoming the only American president to quit in office.

The footage provides behind the scenes looks at some of Nixon's biggest moments, including the China visit, and his most important speeches. Context is set by clips from network newscasts, and by post-prison interviews with the three home movie makers. When I reviewed Nixon's Shadow, a book about his image (you can link to that review here), I asked whether, in Doonesbury's words, a new generation would recoil as they ought to, and now the same question holds true. But here the answer is more ambiguous.

The answer is that the footage is so infused with the adulation of the cameramen that it's almost hard to realise what is going on. Worryingly, I even found myself admiring Tricia, something I never did when I was young. My feeling was that viewers who were not there would not feel the almost visceral impact of Nixon on the times, and it is impossible for the documentary makers to summon that up from the past. Still there are surprises, the biggest one for me being a small protest by two of the Ray Conniff Singers when they performed at the White House. This was the 'square' music Nixon preferred, and the tiny banner of protest, and the heartfelt Christian plea they make for peace does more to set Nixon and Co. into context than any news reports.

Two things help make Penny Lane's carefully structured film work for an audience to whom Nixon is a blank slate, or worse, pace his posthumous re-evaluation, a statesman. One is the personality of the three aides, who are so obviously out of step with their own and our time as to exude mistrust even as they try to appear ingratiating. These are frat boys, squares themselves, Greg Marmalard and Doug Neidemeyer from Animal House gone from frat house to White House. It was Dwight Chapin's frat buddy Donald Segretti whose 'dirty tricks' on the 1972 election campaign got Chapin dumped, but also allowed the press a chance to ignore the bigger issues of government spying and malfeasance.

That took place under Ehrlichman, who was in charge of putting together the 'plumbers' unit, designed to counter White House leaks. Ehrlichman post-prison is easily the most engaging of the three: one of the real highlights of the film is a commercial he made, and which was quickly withdrawn, for ice cream. He says it's 'unbelieveably good' and then smirks 'and believe me, I'm an expert on that subject'. Stay through the credits to see it.

Haldeman was truest of true believers, cast as Martin Borman by his critics, all brush cut and Rumsfeldian arrogance. He gives an interview about his children calling his hair out of fashion, and, like his boss, admits he is. In his most telling quote, he speaks of their arriving in Washington with 'no great ideological thrust or noble ambition'. Once out of prison, he's rocking a carefully styled 70s do, but it doesn't change him at all. He still denies the truths the Watergate tapes reveal, that he as chief of staff was engineering a major cover-up, and unlike Ehrlichman, who doesn't seem surprised he never spoke with Nixon again, Haldeman seems hurt by his abandonment by the Tricky One.. You almost feel sorry for him. You feel even more sorry for his wife, who shows up in a few shots, always looking like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The second thing that helps us understand is a series of taped conversations which sometimes reflect on the footage already shown. The last of these, when an obviously drunken Nixon calls Haldeman after the speech announcing his and Ehrlichman's 'resignations', is telling. Nixon curses what he's done, but also asks Haldeman, whom he's just cut loose, to call round to get reactions to how his speech went for him. We've previously heard both his need for approval and Haldeman's unwavering willingness to provide that. And we still can't shake the feeling, as we do when we hear Alexander Butterfield explain to Nixon how the recording devices work, and Nixon saying 'there may be a day we have to have this' that Nixon, even drunkenly, was speaking for a record, double-accounting for posterity.

There's a fascinating discussion as Nixon and Ehrlichman deconstruct a TV show they can't identify, but is All In The Family, the American version of Til Death Do Us Part, and how it glorifies homosexuality. Nixon takes the lead: 'You don't glorify homosexuality on public television. You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates.' 'But he never had the influence television has,' adds Ehrlichman. 'The last six Roman emperors were fags,' Nixon begins, and Ehrlichman cuts him off with an explanation of 'fatal liberality' that Haldeman finally cuts short. Speaking of that, the discussions of Henry Kissinger, his duplicity, and his penchant for pillow talk, are fascinating. Haldeman later explains that Nixon feels it's OK for Kissinger to 'be a swinger in New York, Florida, or California, but he should not be in Washington.' He advises 'not to put him next to the most glamorous gal anymore, but to seat him next to some intelligent and interesting woman instead.' This was the White House in 1971.

Along the way there are other amusing cameos and side views. Ehrlichman's camera reveals in great detail the bidet in an ornate Paris hotel bathroom. Daniel Moynihan pops up in the foreground as Nixon's helicopter takes off. John Kerry speaks on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against The War during the March on Washington; this is the footage that the 21^st century equivalent of Nixon's frat boys, Shrub Bush and Karl Rove, would use against him relentlessly 40 years later. When Nixon complains no one's called to congratulate him on a speech, and Haldeman says Nelson Rockefeller has, Nixon says 'well, the hell with him!'. And there's celebrity TV interviewer Barbara Walters, interviewing Haldeman, and carefully grimacing when he says history will judge Nixon as one of the great presidents; the grimace, of course, filmed later as a reverse.

But most important are the glimpses of the real Nixon, whose gloating at the press reaction to his announcement of peace with North Vietnam, a peace that never arrived, is a masterpiece of hypocrisy. This is what I grew up knowing, instinctively about Nixon, and what Our Nixon allows a new generation to acquire at its own pace, and learn, as mine did, to recoil.

GODARD AND FILM NOIR

Books Discussed In This Essay:
Goddard: A Portrait Of The Artist At 70 by Colin McCabe
Bloomsbury, £25, ISBN 0747563187
The Films Of Nicholas Ray by Geoff Andrew
British Film Institute, no price listed, ISBN 1844570010
Nicholas Ray: An American Journey by Bernard Eisenschitz
Faber 1993, £12.99 ISBN 0571178308
Early Film Noir by William Hare
McFarland £29.95, ISBN 0786416297
Hardboiled Hollywood by Max Decharne
No Exit Press, £18.99, ISBN 184243070X
Val Lewton: The Reality Of Terror by Joel E Siegel
Secker & Warburg, 1972, £1.20
Fearing The Dark: The Val Lewton Career
by Edmund G Bansak
McFarland £29.95 ISBN 0786417099

I’ve always been amused at the thought of Jean-Luc Godard, the roaring lion of revolutionary film, playing out his string in Switzerland, strolling to the chocolaterie alongside the other petits bourgeoises. The implicit contradiction of Godard’s choice of a return to cuckoo-clock land (not so surprising, really, as he grew up a Swiss Protestant) is merely the last metaphor for a career more problematic, though not much less important, than Colin McCabe’s study would like to suggest. To McCabe, Godard is the ‘greatest figure’ from the last generation of cinema, both the greatest ‘essayist’ and ‘one of the greatest poets cinema has known’. That’s a lot of greatests. Those terms, poet and essayist, are, for McCabe, linked and not at all contradictory. He means poet not in the film reviewer’s standard sense of being visually lyrical, but in the more absolute sense, of someone working with a language in its purest, most refined state. And indeed, that was the theoretical point Godard the essayist insisted was most important, the language of film, and the one Godard the director was always pursuing, at least theoretically.

Whether Godard the filmmaker ever lived up to Godard the theoretician is a matter of debate. The paradox of film is that it always seems to transcend intentions, a paradox which, while eminently true of Godard's own work, consistently undermines, if not contradicts, his critical efforts. Embarrassingly, some of Godard’s best films work in ways his own theories would insist are invalid. On the other hand, some of his worst films are the most 'pure' cinema, yet even so they often venture into the didactic. There is a very specific reason for this, one which may explain why it’s so easy to think of Godard as a slim-line Orson Welles, indulging his rebelliousness.

There is a conflict in Godard which comes from his detachment from the world of humanity. His is a life overwhelmed by and subsumed in the cinema, and his films reflect a world where everything is expressed in cinematic terms. 'The art of the 19th century, the cinema,' he says toward the end of his Histoire (s) du cinema (1978), 'created the 20th century, which on its own existed only a little.' Well, that is one point of view. This is what makes him exciting as a film-maker, what makes him such a poet, but the world of film will take one only so far. I have friends with whom I will talk in lines from Animal House, our joke being that all human existence can be explained within that sensitive film. We are often unable to communicate to other people using such references. They haven't seen the film, they haven't remembered it, they haven't understood the context or its relation to whatever it is we were talking about. They are, after all, people. But for Godard, it was as if all existence could be expressed only through film, and unless our hearts and brains are made of celluloid he isn't really interested, and that just doesn’t work.

Beyond that concept, Godard also adored American films. All of them. Far more than the French. I don’t think he, or McBride, ever tackle the paradox that Godard’s view of America was of a country composed out of celluloid; like the patrons of the pub I first visited when I travelled to London in 1972, who heard my friend was from Chicago and spontaneously make tommy-gun noises.

For me, the crucial film in all Godard’s oeuvre is Made In USA. Here the lover of film noir takes a Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) novel ready-made for noir adaptation, and turns it into a literary analysis of why the USA is in Vietnam. It’s a lecture, a polemic, a didactic rant, and it expresses, more than Godard’s Marxism or his faith in film, the shattering revelation that the world of American cinema was a by-product of the same American system that created the moral cesspit of Vietnam (or, to put it even more tellingly for Godard's benefit, refined and perfected the quagmire the French left behind). Made In USA is a work of rage that marks the end, I believe of Godard’s most fertile creative period, one which produced half a dozen undisputed great films, and which was followed by a long uneven period of films that, with a few exceptions, repeated past experiments less successfully. And even some of the exceptions, like Sauve qui peut, are successful in a less-involving, more distancing way.

Colin MacCabe never really comes to grips with that, because it doesn’t fit into the picture of the world’s greatest filmmaker. If that sounds like a criticism, I have to say it is not a fault, because the book is so comprehensive that the reader familiar with the films will be able to make his own evaluations. It is comprehensive in other ways, too: MacCabe provides a history of Marxism which is a book in itself, and here, I think there is something of a misreading. Because Marxism, to Godard, was a stick with which to beat not only capitalism and, by extension, America, but also a device with which to approach humanity without having to deal with humans. It gave Goddard a template, beyond cinema, with which he could classify all his relations--and Godard’s Marxism was as soulless and potentially dangerous as Pol Pot’s.

Just as contradictory, in MacCabe’s portrait, is Godard the manipulator, the movie mini-mogul, as cruel to individuals as any capitalist and as vicious within the system as any Hollywood tycoon. One thinks of careerists on a local council, building up a socialist fortune for themselves in a sort of shadow-mirror of the world they claim to despise. One doesn’t expect a parallel morality from artists, but one can ask for it from polemicists.

Geoff Andrew quotes Godard: ‘If the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of re-inventing it, and what is more, of wanting to’. (And full props: what a superb film-critic Godard was!) This re-issue of Andrew’s excellent 1991 study of Ray, with brief materials added to bring it up to date, is welcome, particularly as the original study was followed by an excellent biography two years later, Bernard Eisenschitz’s Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. The biography was particularly enlightening on issues of Ray’s sexuality, and also his background in radio, and hence sound. Viewed together with Andrews’ study, they provide a full grounding in a film-maker whose abilities to tell a story cinematically were exactly what endeared him to the Europeans who came to idolise ‘ignored’ strands of American film in the 50s and 60s. Kudos to the BFI for bringing this book, by one of their own, back into print.

Ray is also an important director in the annals of film noir, an American genre named and more or less identified by the French, which grew out of a confluence of hard-boiled pulp fiction and German expressionist film. I have argued in these pages about the roots of film noir in the intersection of the liberated flapper and the German silent horror film; many of the most important of the film noir directors were refugees from Germany. I‘ve also worried about the dangers of conflating the terms hard-boiled, pulp, and noir. They are related, but they don’t necessary mean the same thing, and one does not automatically lead to the next.

Which is why I’m a little puzzled with Early Film Noir, which also opens up by claiming film noir received its baptism in France just after World War II, when the French recognised the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. French critics may have defined film noir, but they did it a decade later, and it didn’t take the French (or the British, as Hare further asserts) to recognise Hammett, Chandler, or, in noir terms the purest of his big three, James M Cain. They were best-sellers already: if Hammett hadn’t been a huge success both in print and through the Thin Man movies, the 1939 version of The Maltese Falcon would not have been its second remake!

There’s no real logical progression to Hare’s account of some of his favourite films, and what the British Across The Bridge, released in 1957, has to do with early film noir beats me all to hell, apart from the fact that Hare likes Ken Annakin and Annakin provided a foreword for this book. Hare’s version is very much a middle-of-the-road account of noir, no Detours allowed here, and it won’t add much to your understanding if you’ve previously considered the genre in any detail. It is, however, written with great affection, and its section on Jane Greer and Out Of The Past, which benefits from an interview with the wonderful actress, is worth the price of admission in itself.

Hare would have been better off structuring his book more like Max Decharne’s Hardboiled Hollywood. Again, there’s no systematic study of the genre, but Decharne avoids false labeling, and instead provides a series of vignettes that illuminate the origins of some great crime films. It’s not academic, but it’s a lot of fun, much like some of Woody Haut’s efforts for the same publisher. Decharne’s specific concern is linking the films to their source novels, and examining the kinds of changes the stories underwent along the way, and it also boasts some great book cover illustrations.

Making the point about German expressionism and horror as a major root of film noir ought to have been easy for William Hare, since the director of Out Of The Past, Jacques Tourneur, apprenticed on Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO, the same studio that made that Mitchum/Douglas/Greer classic. Lewton was the subject Joel E Siegel’s Val Lewton: The Reality Of Terror (1973), still one of the great film books and a remarkable study of the producer as auteur. The budget-conscious techniques of Lewton’s films would be reflected in dozens of classic film noirs, and Cat People, his first, and perhaps best, could be argued an important early noir in its own right.

Fearing The Dark credits Siegel’s book, but goes far beyond, offering a complete biography of Lewton, a fascinatingly pulpy character whose life is reflected in his approach to film-making. Lewton was a creative producer (and writer) who was able to get the best out of his directors and out of his small budgets because he didn't need to let his ego go out of control. At RKO, that probably would not have done him much good anyway. Most of the great noirs owe a lot to the ability to be creative with low budgets: when dealing with stories of failed small-timers, it became a narrative, as well as stylistic advantage. Bansak makes much of the Orson Welles connection: Robert Wise and Mark Robson were RKO editors for Welles who became directors for Lewton; further, David O Selznick tried to get Welles to take Lewton’s job as story editor at RKO. What a team that would have been! Following Siegel, Bansak doesn’t have all that much new to offer in critiquing the films themselves, but his exhaustive detailing of Lewton’s life helps explain both how he came to create a run of small masterpieces in a short period at RKO, and why he didn’t repeat the feat on a larger scale elsewhere.

And the details of his biography highlight Lewton's polyglot background; a creative life filled with a spectrum of experience. That was something many of the great Hollywood film-makers had: they learned their story-telling from many media, and they brought experience from outside the screening room and editing suite to the art of cinema. They saw the world as containing cinema, not being contained within it. It's virtually the opposite of Godard, and extremely instructive, if not corrective, it is.

THE MANY FACES OF THE GIRL CUT IN TWO

While collecting the art to accompany the review of Claude Chabrol's The Girl Cut In Two (see the previous post) I was struck by how differently the film was being marketed in different ways to different audiences. In Britain, with the title changed from 'The Girl' to 'A Girl Cut in Two', the colour is a lurid pink and Ludovine Sangier is shown from the scene where she is the most prostrated before Charles Saint-Denis (though without the peahen feathers she was wearing). It's a picture about sexuality, and a woman who appears to be seeking out exploitation, in an almost predatory pose, completely contrary to the actual scene from which its taken, and to the inner flow of the film.

The film was a German co-production, but in Germany, it's presented as a very different movie: a psychological study of 'The Split Woman', the idea of split personality emphasised by the mirror image Sangier as Gabrielle, and her looking confused, if not befuddled. The red background contrasts with the black dress to suggest the torn personality, and the two men, Charles and Paul, are posed in the bottom corners of the poster like little gremlins warring over her soul (cf the scene where Pinto's date passes out at the toga party in Animal House).

That war seems all but over in Italy, where again the movie has been retitled The Innocence of Sin, which again makes Gabrielle into a more active participant in what goes on; the idea of the woman as seducer is reinforced by the pose, in which Gabrielle becomes older, features a hairdo reminiscent of the licentiousness of the Roaring Twenties, and indeed makes her look very much like a cross between Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli in The Conformist.

Sexuality is removed from the equation in America; the US posters turn the film into a neo-noir thriller, with Sangier looking very American in the main shot, which has the diagonal line dividing her face in two, just like classic pulp magazine covers, and the shadows or blinds from noir movies. Here the two men are posed with her, not gremlins but fully part of her story, and in the same diagonal, which I like in terms of design. It makes the film look like something Brian De Palma might have directed, and, the more I think about it, the more that makes sense; DePalma's metier is objectifying women, and manipulating the audience into sharing their exploitation. His women are often femme fatales, or trying to be, which is not a part of Chabrol's film, but the sensibility, while less subtle, is not that far removed.

Finally, what about the French themselves? I confess, the marketing of the film in to its native audience is the most puzzling of all. We're back to pink, but in France we're presented with a drawing of Sangier posed somewhere between a Marseilles hooker and a Rohmer gamin transferred to the 1950s. Holly Go not so lightly. She's cut not-quite-in-two by the framing, as if she's poking her head and saucy self around a doorway, inviting you in for a good time. Which seems even farther removed from the reality of the film than any of the other countries. What is it about prophets in their own country? Or is France really, as Chabrol, via Charles, suggested, torn between puritanism and decadence? And judging from the marketing response to his film, they haven't made up their minds!